What if Tesla invented free energy?

Nikola Tesla has become a kind of internet saint. A misunderstood genius, robbed by Edison, ignored by history, whose greatest invention was hidden from us. The car company named itself after him. There are memes, T-shirts and videos with millions of views claiming that Tesla invented free energy, and that powerful people made sure we'd never have it.

As someone who loves technology, I really wanted to know: how much of that is true?

The genius part is real

Let's start with what's not in doubt. Tesla was brilliant. His work on alternating current, AC, and the induction motor helped create the electrical system the whole world still uses. In the famous "war of the currents" in the late 1880s, Tesla's AC, backed by George Westinghouse, beat Thomas Edison's direct current. In 1895, AC power from a new plant at Niagara Falls began lighting up the region. Every time you plug something into a wall socket, you're using an idea Tesla helped make possible.

He also did pioneering work on radio. In 1943, the US Supreme Court ruled on a long patent battle and invalidated a key radio patent held by Guglielmo Marconi, partly because Tesla and others had got there first.

The tower

The free energy story centres on one place: Wardenclyffe, on Long Island, New York. In 1901, with funding from the banker J.P. Morgan, Tesla began building a huge tower, about 57 metres tall, with a giant mushroom-shaped dome on top.

The plan started as wireless communication across the Atlantic. But Tesla's real dream was bigger: to transmit electrical power without wires, using the Earth itself as part of the circuit. Power for everyone, everywhere.

Then the money ran out. Morgan stopped funding the project. A popular story says Morgan pulled out because he asked, "Where do we put the meter?" There's no evidence he ever said that. More likely, he simply saw that Marconi was already sending radio signals across the Atlantic with much cheaper equipment, and Tesla kept asking for more money for a vision that kept growing. The tower was never finished. It was torn down in 1917 and sold for scrap to pay debts.

Tesla's tower wasn't buried by conspiracy. It was buried by a budget.

The missing papers

When Tesla died in a New York hotel room in 1943, broke and living alone, the US government seized his papers. That sounds sinister, and it fuels a lot of the theory. It was the middle of World War II, and Tesla had talked publicly about a "death ray".

The government asked an MIT engineer, John G. Trump, to examine the papers. His conclusion was that they were mostly speculative and philosophical, and contained nothing that could be built into a dangerous weapon. Trivia I couldn't resist: John Trump was the uncle of a future US president. The FBI has since released its files on Tesla.

The physics problem

This is where the "free energy" idea really falls apart, and where I think the myth does Tesla a disservice.

Tesla never claimed to create energy from nothing. His idea was to transmit energy, generated somewhere like a power station at Niagara, through the air and the ground. It still needed a power plant. Someone still had to pay for that.

And broadcasting power over long distances runs into a basic problem: it spreads out and gets lost. Send it in every direction, and almost all of it never reaches the device that needs it. That's why wires, boring as they are, are still the most efficient way to move electricity across a country.

A true "free energy" machine, one that produces more energy than it uses, would break the law of conservation of energy, one of the most tested rules in all of physics. Nobody has ever built one that works, and many have tried.

Tesla's dream, today

Here's the nice ending. Part of Tesla's dream did come true. The phone on your desk probably charges wirelessly. Electric toothbrushes, smartwatches and some electric cars use wireless charging. It works using electromagnetic induction, the same physics Tesla played with. It just works over centimetres, not continents.

Researchers are also experimenting with beaming power using lasers and microwaves, even from solar panels in space. It's early, it's expensive, and it's far from free. But Tesla would have loved it.

Where I land

I don't think Tesla's genius was suppressed. I think it was misunderstood, underfunded and sometimes over-promised by the man himself. He was a visionary who was often right about the future, and sometimes very wrong about the details.

And honestly, the real Tesla, a brilliant immigrant engineer who changed the world, died poor and was nearly forgotten, is a much more powerful story than any secret machine.

Verdict: a real genius with a real dream. No free energy, no secret cover-up. Just physics, and a very expensive tower.

— Desly