Nikola Tesla never let go of the question: if music rides the air, why not power? The story traces his early experiments at Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe and shows how that vision echoes today in wireless charging, inductive transfer, and cautious power-beam trials
In Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor who gave the world alternating current, radio experiments, and the dazzling Tesla coil, filled his notebooks with one final obsession.
Could electricity leap across the globe without wires, the way music now leapt from the radio?
When he died there in January 1943, he was a forgotten old man (despite once rivalling Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse his fortune had vanished, his grand projects had failed to secure backing, and his eccentric habits had made him easy to dismiss). Officials quietly packed away his papers and theories, leaving behind whispers of hidden discoveries and secret inventions that lingered for decades.
Only years later, when portions of his work were released, could the world begin to separate the man from the myth and trace what he had truly built.
In this article, we revisit one of his most fascinating experiments, 'wireless electricity' and ask whether the future he imagined is finally within reach.
Tesla first conceived of wireless power in the 1890s, imagining a world where energy could be broadcast through the air as freely as radio waves.
To test his theory, he went looking for proof at altitude. Colorado Springs, perched over 6,000 feet above sea level, offered thin air, vast open land, and clear skies for his high-voltage experiments. The elevation reduced electrical breakdown in the atmosphere, letting him push voltages higher and study how his machines interacted with the Earth itself.
At the heart of these experiments was the Tesla coil, a resonant transformer he had designed to generate extremely high voltages and create powerful electromagnetic fields. Unlike ordinary electrical devices, the coil was not built to deliver steady current to a lightbulb or motor. Its purpose was to 'shout' electricity into space, producing long arcs, glowing discharges, and invisible fields that could energize objects at a distance.
In 1899 he built his Colorado open-air laboratory, raising coils taller than a man and tuning them for resonance. At the right frequencies he believed the Earth could act like a gigantic conductor, with the ground carrying currents and the atmosphere acting as a return path. If true, energy and signals might ripple through this natural circuit to distant receivers.
To Tesla, the results seemed to confirm his thesis... Lamps glowed without wires, sparks leapt astonishing distances, and delicate instruments sang in response to invisible fields. Colorado had shown him that wireless power was not just a spectacle but, in principle, possible.
It gave him conviction and a direction to delve further into wireless electrification.
Back in New York, the question became how to turn his experiment into a repeatable effect via usable infrastructure. That required capital, architecture, and a site where the whole stack could be built at once.
J. P. Morgan supplied funding, Stanford White drew the structure, and the village of Shoreham on Long Island’s north shore offered land and a rail spur. The tower that rose there made of wood, copper, a broad domed top and deep earth connections, was not a monument but a tuned instrument. Wardenclyffe was meant to be the first node in a “World Wireless System,” carrying messages first, then images, and, if the platform held, usable power by persuading planet and sky to act as shared conductors.
In Tesla’s plan, communication would prove reach and reliability while buying time for the harder climb to power.
As the Wardenclyffe site took shape, another narrative captured headlines. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the Morse code letter “S”, three simple dots across the Atlantic by radio. It was the first proof that wireless signals could leap an ocean, overturning scientific doubts and showing investors a fast, cheap path to global communication, while Tesla’s vast Wardenclyffe tower still loomed unfinished, its more ambitious promise looking slower and far riskier by comparison.
Tesla tried to scale his more ambitious design to compete, yet the path demanded patience and precision that capital rarely grants. By 1906 work at the station had stalled. A decade later, with debts to settle and a war on, the tower was dynamited for scrap. The brick laboratory remained as a reliquary for a project that never got the full test its creator imagined.
Tesla kept the idea alive even as the tower disappeared. He wrote, refined circuits, and returned to the same central aim: make distribution lighter, less tethered to trenches and poles, and capable of carrying information and power on the same backbone. When he died at 86, his belongings were taken into government custody, which fed rumors for years. Later releases and files reduced the mystery to its essentials: the death was natural; the papers were not a hidden superweapon. The myth was dramatic. The truth was more instructive.
A century on, the physics that captured Tesla still works where scale and economics agree. Wireless charging pads use induction and resonance to move energy across small gaps with friendly efficiency. That is the same family of effects that lit his lamps.
Over longer distances, engineers have beamed power by microwave or laser with striking success in controlled trials. Safety, line of sight, and cost keep these approaches in special roles for now, while copper continues to carry the bulk of everyday power because it wins the long race against loss.
Tesla did not light the world with a single tower. He did something subtler and, in the long run, just as valuable. He stretched the field of what electrical systems might be and left future engineers a question worth chasing. From a phone that hums alive on a pad to a drone catching a beam in a lab, the line back to Wardenclyffe is easy to draw. The story endures because the ambition still matters. Electricity moving freely through space remains both poetry and blueprint. Tesla supplied the poetry; the blueprint is still being drafted.
By day, Matt Wapples helps utilities and customers unlock the power of distributed energy resources. By night, he blends curiosity, logic, and a touch of chaos to make sense of technology, markets, and the future of power.
His perspective is built on deep experience across the energy and technology sector. He has worked for a utility, advised through consultancy, and helped scale distributed energy platforms internationally. Alongside this, he completed an Executive MBA at Imperial College London, adding a strategic and global lens to hands-on industry knowledge.
Beyond energy, Matt has always kept one foot in exploration and entrepreneurship. He taught scuba diving in Thailand during a year out, and ran Feiyue sneakers into Europe, securing partnerships with major retailers including Urban Outfitters.
Life and work have taken him across London, Germany, Thailand, Singapore, Tokyo, and now Atlanta. That journey has shaped a global perspective and a restless curiosity. Conscious Intelligence (CI) is his way of connecting those dots — exploring how culture, technology, finance, energy, and intelligence collide to shape the systems we all live in.
Follow his work on LinkedIn
AI can write, plan, and predict but can it run the grid? This piece explores where it’s already adding value, where it still fails, and why the future of a “self-healing” grid will depend as much on people and infrastructure as on algorithms.
A drawer once full of tangled cables gave way to a single universal connector. The piece looks at how USB-C reduced friction, sped up charging, and what its success teaches about the value of standards, from consumer tech to home energy.
Smarter meters on paper, stubborn results in practice. We explain what AMI is, what ‘2.0’ promises, and why those expectations clash with reality. We unpack where advanced meters trip in real homes and why a partner-first approach works better than cramming everything into one box
