Who made it possible for New York to be the “City that never sleeps”?

WARNING: This article contains material with historical facts you may find disturbing but will make you think.
Reader discretion is advised.

Canadian side - American side

At Niagara Falls you can find a monument of Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor. Nikola Tesla designed the first hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls, which started producing electrical power in 1895. This was the beginning of the electrification of the United States and the rest of the world. Nikola Tesla actually allowed for people to cheaply use electricity to power appliances and light their homes.

When Tesla arrived in the United States he worked for Thomas Edison's Machine Works Company. One of his first assignments was to completely redesign the company's direct current generators. Edison reportedly agreed to pay Tesla $50,000 (modern equivalency of about one milion dollars) if his modifications were successful, but when they were, Edison reneged on his offer and Tesla resigned.

He kept selling his patents to Westinghouse, Edison and J.P. Morgan to raise money for his research on unprofitable wireless power and gravity control. He made his first million at forty, but since he was  unconcerned with material things he gave away nearly all his royalties on his invention. In his lifetime, he received over 800 different patents. Scientists continue to scour through his notes to this day. Unfortunately, many of his ideas and inventions were credited to others. Tesla held patents over a hundred years ago that were later used in the development of the Transistor, a device which makes the information age possible. Tesla is the first person who recorded radio waves from outer space. Tesla invented radio, remote control, neon lighting, the modern electric motor, wireless communications, fluorescent bulbs, the automobile speedometer, the automobile ignition system and developed the groundwork that made robotics, the electron microscope and the microwave oven possible. The "Tesla bladeless disk turbine engine" he designed, is proving today to be among the most efficient motors ever made.

Wilhelm Röntgen is credited as the discoverer of X-rays in 1895, because he was the first to systematically study them. Earlier, in  1887, Nikola Tesla began to investigate X-rays using high voltages and tubes of his own design. Tesla warned that “radiant energy of invisible kinds" (the name X-ray wasn’t used yet) could be dangerous and he refused to conduct medical experiments with them.

Tesla discovered the Resonant Frequency of the Earth in the 1890s. This is something scientists couldn’t confirm until 50 years later when technology had caught up. One time, while he was working, he discovered the resonant frequency of the Earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the 5th Avenue New York building that housed his laboratory. Tesla had to destroy this device to keep it from demolishing an entire city block. Later, he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the Earth in two.  Nobody dared him to prove it. Being aware of how dangerous his inventions could be, he didn’t put many of them on paper. He could memorize entire books and recite them at will. He could visualize devices entirely in his head and then build them. Tesla spoke eight languages: Serbian, English, Czech, German, French, Hungarian, Italian and Latin. He believed that both voice and image can be transmitted through the air (in the late 1800's), which is true  - we have wireless Internet today.

At the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago, Tesla demonstrated the safety of AC electricity by passing high frequency AC power through his body to power light bulbs. He then was able to shoot large lightning bolts from his Tesla coils to the crowd without harm.

Nikola Tesla once lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts. Being able to send this electricity out for free caused his financial backers to pull their funding, for obvious reasons, so we all still have to use the conventional plug. Why would they fund Tesla for free wireless power when they were already charging for electricity?  Also, the Earth has limited sources of energy. To this day, it still remains a mystery how it was done.

In 1909, Marconi (Italian) won a Nobel Prize together with Karl Ferdinand Braun (German) in physics for inventing the Radio, but everything they did was based on work previously done by Tesla. In fact, after years in court over patent battles, the court finally ruled in Tesla’s favor over Marconi, but the ruling was bittersweet, as Tesla had already passed away in 1943. The truth might never have been published if they both were on “the winning side” of World War I. Marconi joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923. In 1930, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him President of the Royal Academy of Italy. Braun went to the United States at the beginning of World War I to help defend the German wireless station at Sayville, New York. After the US entered the war, Braun was only able to move freely within Brooklyn, New York.

In August 1917, Tesla established the principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive radar units. Robert Watson was credited with the invention of radar in 1935, but Tesla came up with the idea much earlier. He pitched it to the US Navy at the beginning of World War I , but they “cleverly” decided that it had no practical application in war.

Tesla electric car today

Nikola Tesla in 1932 converted a combustion car to electric. After running the car on this mysterious source of power for four hundred miles he declared the car  could continue until it wore out and fell apart. The power was limitless, and free. There is some conjecture that the power was from one of Tesla's magnifying transmitters delivering wireless power ( an invention for which investors were not interested).

Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest inventors and scientists of all time. The work he did would go on to change the entire way we communicate and operate globally, and yet many people have never even heard of him. His inventions were so far ahead of the times in which he lived,  many people thought that he was just a very clever and dangerous magician. Some of his inventions have been put into practice long after his death, just when modern science caught up with his futuristic ideas and research. Much of his unfinished research that is still written is waiting for a scientist to be born with the  capacity to understand and develop Tesla’s ideas.