Nikola Tesla: Last Room at the New Yorker

On January seventh, nineteen forty-three, Nikola Tesla died alone in Room three three two seven of the Hotel New Yorker on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. He was eighty-six years old. The man who had transformed the world with alternating current electricity, whose alternating current ideas helped power the Niagara Falls hydroelectric project in the eighteen nineties, died nearly penniless, a forgotten eccentric in a cluttered hotel room. Two thousand people paid their respects at his funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, with Nobel Prize winners as pallbearers. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called him a great humanist, a distinguished scientific genius, and a poet of science in a eulogy broadcast on New York radio, and telegrams arrived from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace.

Tesla had invented the AC induction motor, the Tesla coil, and fundamental radio technology, and his work formed the backbone of the modern electrical grid. But battles with Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan had cost him much of his funding and his standing.

This marker honors his memory. In the decades since, Tesla's legacy has undergone a remarkable revival. His name now graces an electric car company, a unit of magnetic flux, and a global movement of technological admirers. He deserved better than he got.