Original subtitles

[Narrator] 1.3 billion people streaming music.

18.7 billion texts sent every day.

And over 3 trillion hours

spent on mobile devices every year.

We can broadcast to the world from the palm of our hand.

But the heart of all that technology

dates back 130 years to one thing,

the radio.

At the turn of the 20th century,

two rival inventors an ocean apart

race to be the first to connect the world wirelessly.

This is the power of electromagnetic waves.

The idea that a signal could leap

across the air, this felt like magic.

There it is.

The competition between Tesla and Marconi

is one of the great stories

in the history of technology.

[Narrator] Their quest will drive one to fame and fortune.

It works.

He's considered the father of the radio.

[Narrator] The other, to ruin.

(man yelling)

[Man] Here's a man skating right on the edge of sanity.

[Narrator] And transform the way the world communicates.

Radio is at the heart

of our entire culture and civilization.

[Narrator] This is Tesla versus Marconi.

(engine buzzing)

(dramatic music)

(midtempo music)

It's 1893, and a revolution is transforming America.

Electric power.

If you can just flip a switch and the light goes on,

all of a sudden your life has changed.

Factories can operate around the clock if they want to now.

Literally no aspect of American life is left untouched.

And what we'll see is this rapid transformation of America

in a 50 year period, the likes of which

human society had never seen before.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] Thanks to electricity,

the economy is booming.

But with it comes the need for faster, cheaper,

and more reliable ways to communicate

than sending a telegram.

Telegraphy was point to point by land.

And that was the great challenge.

You can only send a message to where the wires go.

It was hard to string these wires,

particularly over hills, or swamps, or jungles.

And you also couldn't send it to,

you know, moving vehicles like boats.

[Narrator] But one man is obsessed

with ridding the world of wires entirely.

Alternating current produced by my oscillator

and transformed into hundreds of volts

by a high power transformer.

[Narrator] His name is Nikola Tesla, a mercurial genius.

He's one of the world's most famous inventors.

Nikola Tesla was a super inventor.

I mean, he gave us long distance electricity transmission

and electric motor robots, remote control.

On the other hand, he was a little weird.

I mean, he was eccentric to say the least.

He got nervous whenever he saw jewelry.

He'd get a fever if he saw a peach.

Tesla was an obsessive,

and that was part of his genius, right?

He focused on an idea and focused and focused

and took it to the next level,

was able to push the art of the possible

because of the way his mind worked.

[Narrator] Fascinated by electricity since childhood,

Tesla was born in what's now Croatia.

He's already worked briefly for Edison

and created patents for alternating electric current

that have earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now he's pushing electricity

far beyond people's imagination.

[Nikola] Ladies and gentlemen,

behold the power of electricity.

[Audience] Ooh.

[Narrator] Tesla's sending electricity through thin air.

You might call it magic,

but this is the power of electromagnetic waves.

Tesla always looked for an image, or a dream,

or a wish that people could connect with

and get excited about, so that they then

would invest in his technology.

They are traveling through the air, lighting this bulb.

No wires.

[Narrator] At the heart of his mindblowing invention

is the Tesla coil, a device that can amp up

a small amount of electric power into a large amount.

A Tesla coil is basically a transformer.

It's a big coil of lots of copper wire in there

many, many, many thousands of tines

in order to step this power up the way it does that.

And Tesla was hoping to use this Tesla coil

to broadcast power wirelessly.

[Narrator] Scientists call these transmissions

radio waves, and Tesla believes they can carry

more than just electricity through the air.

He's convinced they can also carry information.

Tesla was truly so far ahead

of the curve on this technology.

And people had to think, wow, this is a true wizard.

The secret of electricity is the secret of life.

(audience applauding)

[Narrator] Motivated by the dream

of wireless communication, Tesla patents his new invention.

But if he's going to revolutionize anything,

he has to send and receive radio waves

much farther than a few feet.

We're so used to radio waves,

we don't think twice about it.

The idea that a signal could leap across the air,

this felt like magic.

[Narrator] In 1894, Tesla takes to a rooftop,

tying a receiving antenna to a balloon.

He hopes to hear the hum of a radio signal

coming from a Tesla coil at his lab over a mile away.

(slow suspenseful music)

(radio humming)

(slow dramatic music)

This is just amazing.

For the first time, energy is being transmitted

from point A to point B with no mechanical

or electrical connections.

The energy is basically traveling through space.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] One day his breakthrough

will launch a global communications industry

that can beam music and news to 1.4 billion moving cars

and control a Rover on Mars from 144 million miles away.

But he needs to hurry.

Tesla doesn't know it yet,

but he's not the only one trying to figure this out.

4,000 miles away in Bologna, Italy,

a 19yearold aristocrat is struggling

to reach the same goal.

Like Tesla, he's intensely interested in electricity.

His name is Guglielmo Marconi.

I always sort of think of Marconi as something like a,

you know, 19th century Mark Zuckerberg.

He certainly didn't go to college.

But he became intrigued with what scientists

were learning about radio waves.

(slow music)

Marconi grows up in this

extremely wealthy family in Italy.

They're the heirs to the Jameson whiskey fortune.

And because he grows up so well off, he has time to tinker.

[Narrator] Unlike Tesla, Marconi's interest

goes beyond science.

He knows that the telegraph business is worth billions.

(birds chirping)

If he can replace that technology

with something better,

that fortune could be his.

(slow music)

He wanted to invent a widget and get paid for it.

That was more of a driving factor for Marconi

than was for Tesla.

You now what to do?

[Man] Yes, sir.

I will tap out a Morse code S.

If you hear three clicks on the receiver,

fire the gun three times, okay?

[Narrator] Marconi is also trying to send

a wireless radio signal,

about a half mile further than Tesla.

Though he's unaware that the famed scientist

is working on the same thing.

(birds chirping)

Tesla's secret is his powerful coil.

Marconi tries something else.

He adds the telegraph key so that he can use radio waves

to send Morse code messages wirelessly.

(transmitter buzzing)

[Narrator] Sending a message almost two miles away

without wires would be a game changer.

(transmitter buzzing)

But it doesn't work.

(crickets chirping)

Back in his lab, Nikola Tesla is far ahead of Marconi.

In fact, he hasn't even heard of him yet.

Tesla now believes he can send a message 50 miles

by increasing the power of his Tesla coil.

And on March 13th, 1895, he leaves his lab

ready to put his theory to the test.

(dramatic music)

It was about 2:30 in the morning.

Tesla had gone home, but the downstairs store room

was covered with oily rags.

And a careless nightwatchman flicked a stilllit cigarette,

and the place just went up in flames.

(fire crackling)

(Nikola coughing)

[Narrator] His entire lab, his models,

his notes, his experiments are all destroyed.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

Okay, ready? Ready.

[Narrator] By August 1895, Guglielmo Marconi

has spent months working relentlessly

trying to send a radio signal, with no luck.

Marconi is not a scientist

in the purest sense of the word.

He is more of a trial and error,

let me see what happen if I do this.

[Narrator] All of his hopes are riding

on a new antenna design,

40 feet of wire suspended from a single pole.

(slow dramatic music)

If he can get it to work, he could make a fortune.

Marconi again sends one of the family servants

back to the far side of the estate saying,

"If you hear the signal on the receiver, fire the gun."

(transmitter buzzing)

[Narrator] The range, almost two miles.

(transmitter buzzing) (birds chirping)

(slow dramatic music)

Almost half a mile longer

than Tesla's rooftop test a year earlier.

After countless failed attempts, Marconi's dream is fading.

(gunshot)

(gunshot)

(gunshot)

(dramatic music)

It works.

One of the things that Marconi discovers

is that he is able to get more distance

by raising the antenna.

And he starts to think, if you could get high enough,

how far could you send the signal?

[Narrator] Believing he's on the verge of a breakthrough,

Marconi heads to the best potential market

for what he hopes is a communications revolution.

(bells tolling)

(upbeat rock music)

London had been the intellectual capital

of the Englishspeaking world.

And in those days that meant the scientific capital as well.

If you want to make it big in the world of science,

London is the place for you to go.

As the dominant sea power in this period,

Great Britain in particular was interested in developing

the capacity for ship to shore communication.

(slow dramatic music)

[Narrator] If Marconi can create a market

to communicate with ships at sea, it could make his fortune.

(door clicking)

He uses his mother's connections to get a foot in the door

with the most powerful engineer

in the country, Sir William Preece.

Preece was the chief engineer for the post office.

It may not sound like much,

but this was the British government monopoly

over not only the mail, the telegraph,

it would control the telephone.

How far can you transmit?

With your help, maybe 14 miles.

Possibly more.

(slow dramatic music)

[Narrator] Preece sees Marconi's invention

as a potential boon to Britain's navy

and puts his full resources behind him.

But there's a problem.

So far Marconi's transmitter

can only send a message two miles,

not nearly enough to reach most ships.

Marconi in London starts to do more testing.

And one of the things that becomes pretty clear

is the amount of power makes a difference.

So if you can increase the power,

you can increase the distance of the signal.

[Narrator] Preece offers a solution, but it's a shady one.

(dramatic music)

When Tesla came and gave his lecture in London,

Preece had long discussions with Tesla.

[Narrator] Preece shares with Marconi

not only Tesla's ideas, but some designs,

including the intel Marconi needs

to build his own Tesla coil.

With that added power boost,

Marconi now sends his signal four miles,

more than twice the distance he could before.

It's corporate espionage 1890s style.

But Marconi keeps it under wraps.

He doesn't want Tesla to know he has a rival.

Tesla's a big fish and Marconi is kind of unknown.

Very often that the David in the case of innovation

has more of an advantage over the Goliath,

because he can take bigger risks.

He's an unknown.

If it doesn't work, so what?

(midtempo music)

[Narrator] Across the Atlantic, unaware of Marconi,

Nikola Tesla is back on track after fire gutted his lab.

One of the amazing things about Tesla's mind

is he had a photographic memory.

And he literally rebuilt everything

that he had in the old place,

including all the notes he had taken.

He rewrote them.

(slow dramatic music)

[Narrator] Tesla resumes his work

on his radio experiments.

This time he's pushing the power of his coil to its limits.

Tesla decides to have his transmitter

operating in his laboratory in downtown New York.

And as he takes a steamboat up the Hudson River,

he keeps getting a signal all the way up to West Point,

a distance of about 30 miles.

[Narrator] But for Tesla, it's still not far enough.

So instead of building on his breakthrough,

he returns to his lab to work

on an even more audacious idea.

Tesla gives a speech in which he talks about the concept

of using the earth itself as the transmitter.

He thought we would just send radio waves

through the earth and they could

be picked up in other places.

[Narrator] He calls his unprecedented idea

world telegraphy.

When published, Tesla's articles cause a sensation.

Although few understand his theories,

many are convinced he's a genius,

and he attracts new investors.

He came up with stories and scientific articles

about how there was going to be wireless communication

in the future and how people would have devices

that had all the information

in the world at their fingertips.

He saw our modern world.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] Across the Atlantic,

Marconi is getting ready

to receive a radio signal through the air

sent from an island 10 miles away.

He's using an even more powerful transmitter

that he built by stealing Tesla's patented design.

Marconi just really thought it didn't matter

if Tesla had patented it because he was going to do it,

and the one who does it first

is the one that gets the credit for it.

He thinks of himself as being

an important innovator, a genius,

somebody who really sees things in the world

that other people don't see.

Somebody who is a great inventor

has a sense of entitlement,

that no, I am put here to do this.

I can do this.

I can go where nobody's gone before.

And I'm going to bring this to the world

and screw anybody that gets in my way.

[Narrator] But sending a Morse code message

over a large body of water using radio waves

has never been attempted.

Every other scientist was saying at the time,

you could not possibly send a message

across the English Channel

because these waves go in straight lines

and they would just dissipate out into outer space.

[Narrator] But Marconi doesn't care

about conventional wisdom.

He's invested five years and the equivalent

of more than $4 million today into his dream.

And he's willing to bet it all

on a belief that the science is wrong.

(upbeat music)

(waves crashing)

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] It's 1897,

and Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi

is attempting something scientists say is impossible,

send a Morse code message 10 miles over the open sea.

It was very difficult to make it work

over more than a few miles.

Marconi's idea wasn't just miles,

but it was tens of miles because he wanted

to help people communicate with ships at sea.

(slow dramatic music)

[Narrator] Marconi and his team spend two agonizing days

desperate to receive a message,

with no success.

The tenacious Marconi makes one last move.

He uses a 150 foot pole

to increase the height of his antenna.

If he's right, that could improve

its ability to receive a signal.

(receiver clicking)

(dramatic music)

There it is.

Congratulations.

On May 13th, 1897, Marconi achieves the impossible.

Marconi's innovation was figuring out

that he needed to use extremely large antennas

in order to transmit signals

across these larger distances.

And it was really a revolution.

[Narrator] Marconi is determined

to quickly capitalize on his success,

but he doesn't want to share the profits.

I supported you before anybody knew your name.

True, but we never had a contract.

[Narrator] Marconi cuts ties with William Preece

and prepares to take his technology to America.

(dramatic music)

News of Marconi's remarkable achievement

is reported in newspapers across the globe,

alerting Tesla to a new reality.

He has a rival.

I think competition creates hunger.

If you're like in the arena,

you want to be the best and do the best.

And so having other people out there makes you drive faster,

drive quicker, drive better.

[Narrator] Tesla is ready to take on Marconi.

He wants to build a tower powerful enough

to send electromagnetic signals

through the earth and around the world.

Tesla was a genius and a kook.

He was one of the most profound thinkers

about what you can do with electricity,

but he often went off the deep end

in terms of whether it would be practical.

[Narrator] He'll need a huge influx of cash.

Everything rides on convincing

one of the world's richest men.

J. P. Morgan is the nation's banker,

but he also has controlling interest

in numerous copper mines and railroads

and a whole array of industries.

He is the ultimate robber baron

that controls money in this country.

You need that seed capital.

You need resources to get going.

And so someone's got to believe in you.

You know, you have to have enough passion

to convince someone to believe an idea

that might not have exist yet.

(slow dramatic music)

I've read about Marconi.

Why wouldn't I back him?

He's using equipment designed by others.

His waves travel through the air,

so they break down in bad weather.

And my electrical waves can transmit more information

with greater security anywhere on Earth.

So let me be clear.

This is a oneoff investment.

(dramatic music)

There'll be no more.

Your terms are mine.

Tesla is a kind of person

that people who have deep pockets love to hear talk.

Because he has these big ideas,

a world powered by radio waves.

Who wouldn't love that idea?

[Narrator] Morgan gives Tesla $150,000,

the equivalent of almost $5 million today.

Marconi takes a different tactic to raise funds, publicity.

By the end of the 19th century,

a half dozen wellknown press barons

are competing for newspaper sales.

None is better known than the head

of the New York Herald, Gordon Bennett.

Marconi's shown that radio waves

can travel long distances over water.

Now he has an ambitious and risky plan

to demonstrate its potential uses

and plant his flag in the American market.

[Narrator] He wants to entice investors by reporting live

from one of the era's great sporting events,

the America's Cup yacht race.

That is a risky endeavor,

but one that could have big, big results

if folks loved it and they can't stop talking about it.

[Narrator] The future of his fledgling company

will depend on sending up to the minute reports

from a boat that's miles out on the water.

(transmitter clicking)

The America Cup race for Marconi was his launch event.

So many entrepreneurs use launch events

to like, kick off their new thing they've built.

I'm sure that he was incredibly nervous

about putting so much on the line.

So there was Marconi out in the boat

sending off messages, and within like,

30 seconds or a minute,

there were these plaster boards outside the Herald.

It caused a sensation because you had never been able

to deliver news with that timeliness.

People see him as both a dynamic and exciting inventor,

but also a credible inventor.

He says what he's going to do

and then he goes off and he does it.

(slow dramatic music)

[Narrator] Despite the publicity surrounding

Marconi's live yacht race transmission,

Tesla still doesn't see Marconi as a threat.

He's moved on from sending a radio signal through the air,

believing that using the Earth's core as a transmitter

is a far superior technology.

But while reading a scientific journal,

Tesla comes across an article

written by Marconi with a stunning admission.

[Nikola] I first constructed an arrangement

which included what may be called a Tesla coil conductor.

[Narrator] He now knows Marconi's success

comes from stealing Tesla's patented design.

Damn, that is cold.

Marconi just said, yeah, I'm going to do it,

and I'm going to do it in your face.

What are you going to do about it?

[Narrator] Angry, Tesla's determined

to meet his rival face to face.

(slow dramatic music)

Nikola Tesla is about to meet rival

Guglielmo Marconi for the first time.

That rivalry between Marconi and Tesla

was so, so important to the invention of radio.

There's so many different things

that drive entrepreneurs, that drive inventors.

Sometimes that rivalry, whether it's vitriolic

or whether it's friendly is a very key component of that.

[Narrator] Though he's furious that Marconi

stole his patented wireless technology,

Tesla's confident he's now discovered a better way.

You're now claiming you can send a message

around the world using the Earth's core?

Using electromagnetic waves,

sending them through the Earth's core.

It's a giant conductor, just like copper wire.

You still don't understand.

I understand it is impossible, even if you don't.

Tesla and Marconi, they didn't get along.

And in fact, they were in direct conflict.

[Narrator] Tesla is anxious to prove Marconi wrong.

He buys a tract of land in Long Island

on a property called Wardenclyffe

and begins designing the site's key component.

Tesla had the idea of building a tower

where the top of the tower would connect to the air.

He also had the tower go equally distant

under the ground by driving huge metal rods into the ground.

And his idea was to create a completed circuit

where the air acted as one wire

and then the other wire would be the earth itself

that would come back to the power source.

[Narrator] It's an incredible gamble,

but if Tesla is right, Marconi will soon be irrelevant.

But Marconi has other plans.

(dramatic music)

In September of 1901, Marconi attempts

the greatest radio experiment the world has ever seen,

sending and receiving a message across the Atlantic.

The whole thing about radio waves

is to be able to fend them over longer and longer distances.

(midtempo music)

Across the sea in England,

Marconi's team has built a transmitter capable

of generating a 150,000 volt spark.

Enough power, the inventor hopes,

to send a radio signal over 2,100 miles across the expanse.

Experts of the time believed that radio waves

can travel infinite distances, but only in a straight line,

and that they will not bend to the curvature of the earth.

Marconi is banking that they will.

The showman in him says, I'm going to do this,

without real proof that he can do it.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] Every day in 10 minute increments

between three and 7:00 p. m.

Marconi's transmitter in England

sends out a Morse code S, three dots.

To capture the signal back in Newfoundland,

Marconi believes he must fly an antenna high over the coast,

an incredible challenge in Newfoundland's notorious winds.

(dramatic music)

[Guglielmo] December 11, got balloon up in a strong breeze

and lost it at 3.9 meters when it blew away.

[Narrator] After multiple attempts

to get his antenna airborne with a balloon,

Marconi switches to a kite,

believing it can better weather the strong coastal winds.

[Guglielmo] Thursday, December 12th.

Lost first kite after being up for one hour.

Then got up another kite.

[Narrator] But that too was lost.

So you can imagine with Marconi,

how does he have that conviction?

How does he stay through it when he's testing stuff

and doesn't know if it's actually going to work?

[Narrator] Day after day

Marconi and his team hear nothing.

(upbeat music)

(slow dramatic music)

[Narrator] It's 1901.

The stock market crashes in May, resulting in huge losses.

During moments of economic calamity

it's incredibly hard for investors

to invest in new industries and new technologies.

They become very conservative and risk adverse.

And they're certainly less willing

to invest in risky, untested blue sky technology

where it isn't really clear

how you're going to make money on this.

[Narrator] In financial trouble,

Tesla returns to JP Morgan for help.

You will earn 12 times as much.

Get out, Mr. Tesla.

But, sir. Get out.

(door slamming)

Morgan not only didn't give him money himself,

but also went so far as to tell some people

that they should not invest in Tesla

because he went off on wild tangents

instead of delivering the things that he had promised.

There's one skill in coming up with an invention.

There's another skill

in understanding the market opportunity.

And then there's another skill,

being able to sell it to the money people.

And that's critical.

You know, you kind of need all three

of those skillsets to make magic happen.

[Narrator] But Tesla isn't giving up.

He still believes in his vision

and that Marconi will soon fail.

In December of 1901, Guglielmo Marconi

is still in frigid St. John's

desperately trying to receive

a radio message from across the Atlantic.

If it happens, he's going to beat Tesla to the punch.

This would be a game changer and a history changer.

[Narrator] Brutal winds prevent Marconi

from raising his antenna.

(dramatic music)

Finally, after days of failure,

Marconi is able to keep the kite in the air.

He's elated and relieved.

But will the message come through?

(suspenseful music)

You can imagine the pins and needles he sat on

as he waits days to see, hey, did this work?

[Guglielmo] Do you hear anything, Mr. Kemp?

(receiver buzzing)

It's faint.

(dramatic music)

So imagine his excitement when it actually came back

and it actually did work.

Marconi achieves something

everyone told him was impossible.

How could you find a way to send signals across the ocean,

across this vast and scary expanse?

We forget how impossible it sounded.

It was almost like the moon landing.

Marconi doesn't fully understand how these waves

are getting across the ocean.

He has an idea, but even he is stumped by the fact

that the waves shouldn't be crossing

the curvature of the Earth, and yet somehow they are.

Now we know the radio waves

were bouncing up off the ionosphere

back down to the other side.

[Narrator] Over the next few years

Marconi sets up transmitters all over the globe,

opening the world to wireless communication.

It's faster, more efficient, costs less,

and provides coverage to more people with greater ease.

Wireless technology allows the world

to be more mobile and flexible than ever before.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] For Nikola Tesla,

Marconi's success is more

than the unstable genius can handle.

Marconi and Tesla wanted the same thing.

They were looking for a way

to transmit radio waves across the world.

And they had different visions for how to do it.

But Marconi was in the lead.

[Narrator] Tesla still believes he can build his tower

and use the earth as a giant conductor

to send signals around the world.

But he needs more money to complete it,

and his efforts to raise the funds have failed.

He's running out of cash and running out of options.

This is where you start to see Tesla

become untethered to reality a little bit.

Sometimes, unfortunately, the nature of the beast

with inventors is that they're that intense

about making it happen, and then when that dies,

it literally is as if someone, like their baby is gone.

(dramatic music) (Nikola yelling)

(slow dramatic music) (crickets chirping)

[Narrator] By 1912, after two decades

trying to invent wireless technology,

famed inventor Nikola Tesla is headed toward financial ruin

and spiraling out of control.

(coil buzzing)

(slow music)

Throughout his life

Tesla struggles with bouts of depression.

He discovers that if he takes a fairly powerful shock

from his Tesla coil, it will change his mood.

There's always this undercurrent with Tesla.

Here's a man skating right on the edge of sanity.

And he's going to skate off one day.

(dramatic music)

[Narrator] The ones legendary innovator

is now known for an incomplete tower

rusting away in Long Island.

The ideas were far more advanced

than the actual technology to achieve them

had reached at the time.

[Narrator] His rival, Marconi

is trying to get his wireless radio systems onto ships,

both military and commercial.

One of those is the Titanic.

It's late at night that the ship actually hits an iceberg.

And the captain tells the radio operator,

"Just start sending out the distress signal,"

which other ships hear and come to rescue

the passengers that are in lifeboats.

(slow dramatic music)

All of a sudden this very mysterious thing

that isn't very well known by the public,

the radio's role in that builds

this broader awareness of its potential.

The Titanic disaster woke the American population

and the American government to the importance

of having rules for radio.

They said every ship has to have a radio operator.

[Narrator] The new rules

are a boon for Marconi's business, and for Marconi.

He becomes the first entrepreneur

to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

By 1920, advancements to Marconi's transmitter

allow for commercial broadcasts of voices and music,

what we think of as radio today.

Folks like Marconi, some folks out there

might not think they're the classic inventor

'cause they took something that was already in existence

and wrapped it into a package that was commercializable.

But I think that couldn't be further from the truth.

I feel like Marconi should be seen as an inventor

and folks like Marconi are actually

very important inventors for the world.

To remotely broadcast from ships at sea to land,

across continents, to take a symphony

and broadcast it to thousands listening on their radio sets,

this is another extraordinary novelty

in an era that is full of them.

(upbeat music)

[Narrator] Celebrated and wealthy, Marconi is eventually

worth over 400 million in today's dollars.

He's considered the father of the radio

and people really look up to him and respect him

for the work that he does, the empire that he built.

[Narrator] In the decade after the First World War,

Marconi's company is bought by General Electric

and rebranded as RCA, the Radio Corporation of America.

It will become one of the most recognized

brand names in the world.

In 1929, RCA sells $366 million in radios,

over 5.5 billion today.

[Announcer] Hello friends in radioland,

this is station...

With radio, you actually had the creation

of a national culture, a true popular culture

that would spread all over the country.

[Narrator] By 1930, Nikola Tesla

has given up his dreams of connecting the world wirelessly

and lives his remaining years in near isolation.

(slow dramatic music)

He has to keep moving from hotel to hotel

because he can't pay the bills.

He also becomes more and more of a recluse.

His favorite pastime is feeding the pigeons

in New York City.

When we look at him now, you know,

if Tesla were in the world today,

he might've been diagnosed and treated quite differently

and maybe his life would've turned out

and ended in different ways.

[Narrator] 14 years after Marconi admits

to stealing the Tesla coil technology,

Tesla sues him for violating his patents.

Tesla realizes that more and more people

are recognizing Marconi

as the developer of these innovations,

unaware of Tesla's role in it.

And he begins to become a little bit bitter.

[Narrator] It isn't until 1943

that the Supreme Court will rule on the case.

Tesla wins, but it's too late.

He died just six months earlier.

Tesla was a brilliant scientific failure.

And the other guy, Marconi is this sort of showman

who risks it all and succeeds.

And it's kind of a tragic irony.

Had both of them not been there,

there wouldn't have been this competition

and rivalry to generate the technology.

And we might not have

the same kinds of technology that we have today.

(upbeat music)

[Narrator] Radio would become the backbone

of modern communication and entertainment.

Television, internet, smartphones,

all born from the idea of messages

being transmitted through the air.

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