Tesla's Tower of Tomorrow

“It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can own and operate his own apparatus,” the inventor Nikola Tesla told the New York Times in 1904. Whether it was an accurate prediction of the smartphone depends on what you think the meaning of “soon” is. For Tesla, soon meant, “I’m building it right now; I just need more funding.” Read more about his Wardenclyffe Tower and the reasons it failed, then discuss with your team: what if it had succeeded?

Key concepts

Right Too Early: Holding a correct vision before the money, the components or the customers exist. In a market it is indistinguishable from being wrong: the project fails, the founder is remembered as a crank, and somebody else gets the credit a generation later for the same idea.

Every work — at a glance

Wardenclyffe Tower — Nikola Tesla (structure)

The 187-foot Long Island tower (1901-05) meant to broadcast messages and power worldwide; never finished, scrapped in 1917.

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What to know

01
Why the Wardenclyffe Tower failed: it was funded as a telegraph competitor and revealed as a giveaway. J.P. Morgan put money into a system for sending transatlantic messages, which could be billed; when Tesla explained that he also intended to supply free power to the world, the funding stopped. The physics was doubtful and the finance was fatal, and Tesla never separated the two in his own accounts.

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Across subjects

Literature named this condition three thousand years ago. Cassandra, in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, is given true prophecy and the curse that nobody will believe

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Was Tesla a visionary or a warning? One case says foresight is the rare thing and deserves the honour, whoever finishes the job. The other says a description is not an invention: the world runs on what gets funded, built and maintained, and a man who dies broke with an unfinished tower has changed nothing yet.

Practice — a sample

SPCTesla said Morgan's withdrawal, not the science, killed Wardenclyffe. The WEAKEST objection to that is that he —

A Brought it on himself
B Ran out of money
C Assumed the scheme worked
D Misjudged what it needed
E Ignored the rival method

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