Thanks in large part to Elon Musk naming his line of electric cars after him, the public profile of the Serbian-born inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla prompted perhaps millions of people who had never heard of him to investigate further.
AC/DC
For the majority of those largely unfamiliar with him, Tesla’s best-known creation was his invention of AC (alternate current). Although it is the induction motor delivery system that powers practically the entire planet, there was a time when it appeared that the far less efficient and more costly DC (direct current), invented by Thomas Edison, was considered to be the front-runner. This was the principal plot point in “The Current War.”Although Mr. Sikorski dedicates sufficient time to the Tesla/Edison rivalry, he wisely devotes the bulk of the narrative to what was at the time Tesla’s greatest invention—something several wealthy, powerful, and short-sighted people made sure would never be fully completed.
After emigrating from Austria to New York City in the 1880s, Tesla briefly worked at Edison’s Machine Works before striking out on his own. He ultimately sold the AC patent rights to George Westinghouse, then relocated to Colorado Springs, Colorado to begin work on the most ambitious project of his career.
In 1893, after coming up with the basic framework for wireless power transmission and intercontinental communication, Tesla moved back to New York and set up shop in Shoreham, located on the easternmost point of Long Island, New York.
Ahead of His Time
It was Tesla’s ultimate goal to provide wireless electrical power and communications at no charge to the entire planet. Much of what Tesla designed would be implemented over a century later in what we now know as the Internet. It was also during this time that Tesla designed the facsimile machine, aka “fax.” To say Tesla was a man far ahead of his time would be a gross understatement.Christened “Wardenclyffe,” Tesla’s transmission tower facility, as one might expect, came with an astronomic price tag, requiring the kind of working capital far beyond his means.
After getting nowhere with financiers John Jacob Astor, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and Henry O. Havemeyer, Tesla was able to secure $150,000 (equal to just under $5.5 million in 2023 dollars) from none other than J.P. Morgan, one of the wealthiest men in the world.
For the first 45 or so minutes, Mr. Sikorski is able to juggle the more technical aspects of Tesla’s works (visuals showing the differences between AC and DC, for example) along with the human-interest components of the story.
The ‘What’ But Not the ‘Why’
While Mr. Sikorski includes the “what” regarding the forces against Tesla, including but not limited to the fierce rivalries that he had developed with Edison and Guglielmo Marconi, the man credited with inventing terrestrial radio, but not much “why.”The particulars of why Morgan chose to cease communications with Tesla after initially giving him so much money are provided, but his reasons are not, unless you consider hypothesizing and conjecture to be sufficient reasons.
Also left out is Tesla’s probable invention of the X-ray machine years before it was credited to Wilhelm Röntgen, who was rewarded with the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics.
The final half-hour of the film is dedicated solely to the modern-day efforts to save the long-dormant Wardenclyffe facility from being sold to developers and its subsequent restoration and conversion into a museum. Initiated by “The Oatmeal” website founder Matthew Inman, the required funds were generated by private donations, mostly through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo.
While certainly heartwarming, touching, and beyond well-intended, spending so much of the total 103 minutes on what is effectively an infomercial could have been time better spent.
