Tesla's Lightning Factory

In May of eighteen ninety-nine, Nikola Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs with a plan that only he fully believed in. He had convinced John Jacob Astor the Fourth to invest one hundred thousand dollars, secured a vacant lot on the eastern edge of town, and brought a team of assistants to build the largest experimental station of his life. What Tesla wanted to test was whether the earth itself could be used as a conductor.

If he generated electricity at high enough voltage and the right frequency, he believed the planet's electromagnetic field would carry power wirelessly across any distance. He chose Colorado Springs for two reasons: the elevation of more than six thousand feet thinned the air in ways useful for high-voltage work, and the region's frequent lightning storms gave him a laboratory of natural electricity he could study directly. His team built a massive wooden structure on the east side of town housing a Tesla coil nearly fifty feet in diameter, the largest ever constructed at that point.

When he powered it up, the effects extended well beyond the building. Artificial lightning crackled from the apparatus and could be heard fifteen miles away. Sparks appeared on pipes and on horses' hooves in the streets.

Electrified butterflies were reported in a meadow near the station. The city's power company complained that he had burned out their generator; he had pulled so much current from the local grid that he tripped the station's dynamo. Tesla worked at the site for about one year and believed he had achieved transmission of power through the earth.

He left Colorado Springs in January of nineteen hundred, returned to New York, and spent years trying to build a full-scale wireless transmission tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. That tower was never completed. The Colorado Springs laboratory was demolished in nineteen oh four to pay his outstanding debts.