He invented the entire electrical grid of the western world, and then died too poor to pay his own light bill. He was cheated by the robber barons of his day: Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, and George Westinghouse.
We open this story in Europe when Tesla is 18 and has his first significant vision, the likes of which will then mark his inventive genius for the rest of his long life. We see him conceive of the power of a rotating magnetic field while he is still in Europe. Bold colors and realistic portraiture mixed with the fabulous surreal vistas of Tesla’s imagination give this story its signature look and tone. We then follow him as a young man emigrating to America, where he spent the rest of his life and became a citizen.
We witness him subjected to constant harassment by Thomas Edison in the “War of the Currents” when Edison fought to make the world use his D.C. power (requiring a booster station for every mile of cable).
We inhabit the world through Nikola Tesla’s eyes, meaning that at the same time we witness his successful invention of our entire western world’s electrical grid, we are also acquainting ourselves with the inner working of the mind of an eccentric genus. Tesla visualizes his inventive gift as a beautiful young “Muse” who follows him through life and appears at most inopportune and ill-timed moments.
We watch Tesla design and build the world’s first water electrical generating station at Niagara Falls, and illuminate the entire eastern seaboard, even while he is befriended by author Mark Twain and awarded dozens and dozens of patents on his experimental work in all manner of electrical high-power research. Only his thoughts and dialogue are fiction – all of the action in this story is real.
We see him invent a working model of the system that would broadcast electrical power wirelessly to any point in the world, and because it would be free for the taking, we witness Nikola Tesla destroyed by withdrawn funding and assaults on his reputation by J.P. Morgan. The powers that be marginalize him and he grows old alone and eventually in complete poverty, alone in his cheap hotel room with his visions of his Muse.
We watch the Secret Service invade his room as soon as he dies (as they did in fact) and clean out all of his research papers.
We leave with a tantalizing HINT as to what has happened to his famous design for the wireless transmission of electrical power, and why it has not surfaced… Yet.