On the morning of July 4, 1917, a demolition crew arrived at the foot of the Wardenclyffe Tower. The 187-foot lattice structure was Nikola Tesla’s most ambitious and most ruinous project—the first node in a global wireless power network, funded by pitching J.P. Morgan the more digestible promise of a transatlantic communications station. When Morgan grasped the strangeness of what Tesla really intended, he pulled his money. No one else would touch it. The tower stood unfinished, the lab went dark, and Tesla slid into decades of debt and isolation.
The difficulty was that Wardenclyffe had never really belonged to the world of engineering. It was a creature of conviction. When the press demanded proof of concept, Tesla offered them instead a kind of gospel, writing that civilization’s highest calling was to harness the earth’s energy and beam it, free of charge, to every corner of the globe. Wardenclyffe was meant to be that dream’s first physical expression. But the useful irony of Tesla’s predicament was that several of his most valuable inventions—high-frequency alternating current and early wireless signaling—were developed as intermediate steps toward a goal whose premise was, even in his own time, understood to be dubious.
