Hey, it’s Nikola.
A few months ago I moved to New York from Europe. Showed up with four cents in my pocket and a letter of recommendation to work for a man named Thomas Edison. Edison is probably the most famous inventor alive right now — he built the phonograph, the first machine that records and plays back a human voice. He’s the reason parts of New York have electric lights instead of gas lamps. Newspapers call him “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” Very big deal.
I was thrilled. I thought I was going to work alongside a genius. Instead I learned that Thomas Edison’s method of invention is to just try every possible option, one after another, until something accidentally works. No theory. No mathematics. Just throwing things at the wall with an enormous budget and an army of engineers who do the actual work while he signs his name on the result. I once watched this man test thousands of materials for a single filament. Thousands. I could have calculated the answer in an afternoon. He spent months and then celebrated like he’d achieved something.
But fine. He’s rich, I’m not, and I needed the work.
Then his generators started failing — the massive machines that actually produce the electricity his whole company sells. He was panicking. He pulled me aside and said, very seriously: “Tesla, there’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you if you can fix this.” A good engineer here makes about eighteen dollars a week. Fifty thousand dollars is more than I’d earn in fifty years. That’s “rent a laboratory and never answer to another man again” money.
So I stopped sleeping. For six months I worked from 10:30 in the morning until 5:00 the following morning. Every single day. I redesigned twenty-four of his machines. I didn’t just fix them — I made his company dramatically more profitable.
Last week I walked into his office, showed him the results, and asked for my money.
He looked at me, smiled, and said:
“Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.”
A joke. The entire thing was a joke. He wanted to see how hard a desperate immigrant would work if you waved an impossible number in front of him. And honestly? It worked perfectly. He got six months of my life for nothing.
I quit immediately. I have no savings, no job, and no connections in this country. Tomorrow I’ll probably be digging ditches in the street because that’s the only work available to someone in my position.
But while I was inside his broken machines all those months, I figured something out. His entire system — the thing his empire is built on — can’t send power more than a couple of miles before it dies. That’s why he needs a power station on practically every street. It’s clumsy, expensive, and it’ll never work beyond a single city.
I’ve already designed something better. A system that can carry electricity across enormous distances without losing power. If I can find a single person willing to fund it, everything Edison has built becomes worthless overnight.
He thinks this ended with him keeping his fifty thousand dollars and me holding a shovel. He has no idea what’s coming.
I’ll write you again soon.
— Nikola
