Hey, it’s Nikola.
So you know how last time I told you I was digging ditches? It got better. And then it got so much worse.
A couple of weeks into the ditch work, my foreman overheard me talking to another worker about electrical engineering. I have no idea why — maybe he felt bad for me, maybe he was just curious why a guy who talks like a professor is waist-deep in mud — but he introduced me to two businessmen looking to start an electrical company.
I pitched them my Alternating Current motor, explained everything — how Edison’s system can barely push power a couple of miles, how my design could carry electricity across entire states. They nodded along, seemed genuinely excited, and offered to fund an entire company with my name on it. Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing.
My name. On a company. I almost cried in the meeting. After months of shoveling dirt and eating stale bread, someone was actually giving me a chance.
So I threw myself into the work. Built new designs, filed patents, the whole thing. I was finally doing what I came to this country to do. Then one morning I showed up and the locks were changed.
They didn’t want Alternating Current. They never did. They wanted me to design a simple arc lighting system — basically a fancy street lamp — so they could collect the patents and the city contracts. Once they had what they needed, they cut me out of my own company. Took my patents, kept the name, and told me I was no longer needed.
I stood outside the building I’d been working in for months and genuinely didn’t know what to do. Two different men in this country have now looked me in the face, promised me the world, and taken everything once I delivered.
I went back to digging ditches.
This time was harder. The first time I was digging with a head full of ideas and fire in my chest. This time I was just tired. I started wondering if maybe the problem wasn’t Edison or the businessmen. Maybe this country simply eats people like me — people who show up with nothing but ideas and trust too easily.
I was in a trench somewhere in lower Manhattan, miserable, aching everywhere, when something bizarre happened. I’d been turning over this motor problem in my head for months — how to build a machine that actually runs on Alternating Current. Every engineer says it’s impossible. And I’m standing there covered in mud and the entire design just... appeared. Fully built, every piece in place, like a picture someone slid in front of my eyes. I made some embarrassing noise because the guy next to me stopped digging and asked if I’d been bitten by something.
I told him I was fine. I didn’t tell him that I’d just solved the problem that would end Thomas Edison’s career while standing in a hole making two dollars a day.
Now I just need to not get robbed a third time.
I’ll write again soon.
— Nikola
