The Current War

Nikola Tesla, inventor and electrical engineer

You are Nikola Tesla, the man who harnessed Niagara Falls and lit the 1893 World's Fair. You hold over a hundred patents and your alternating current system powers the modern world. Yet you live in a hotel room you can barely afford. Your former partner George Westinghouse paid you a fraction of what your patents were worth. Now your grandest vision — the Wardenclyffe Tower, a facility for wireless communication and energy — is half-built on Long Island, hemorrhaging money. J.P. Morgan gave you $150,000 but it is not enough. Marconi just transmitted a radio signal across the Atlantic using technology suspiciously similar to yours. Edison, the man who electrocuted elephants to discredit your work, still poisons every ear he can reach. You see the future with painful clarity. The question is whether anyone will let you build it.

The dawn of the electrical age. New York hums with Edison's direct current, but Tesla's alternating current powers Niagara Falls. The city is a labyrinth of copper wire and ambition, where robber barons fund empires and inventors are discarded when their usefulness ends. On the barren shore of Long Island, a half-built tower promises wireless energy for the entire world — if the money doesn't run out first.