STRANGE BUT TRUE…THE UNTOLD STORY…

Shortly before he died, Edison announced that his biggest mistake was trying to develop direct current instead of embracing Nikola Tesla’s alternating current system from the beginning. Nikola Tesla developed a polyphase alternating current system of generators, motors and transformers and held 40 basic U.S. patents on the system, which George Westinghouse bought. Westinghouse was determined to supply America with the Tesla system, and licensed Tesla’s patents for $60,000 in stocks and cash and royalties based on how much electricity Westinghouse could sell.

However, what most people don’t realize, is that the Edison and Westinghouse deal nearly went bankrupt. In 1987 Tesla’s royalties were running into the millions because Westinghouse’s contract agreed to pay Tesla royalties of $2.50 per horsepower of AC. But, in an act of madness, or at least one of the poorest business decision ever made, Tesla ripped up his Westinghouse contract! A act that eliminated his chance to be the world’s first billionaire. This had to be of the most generous acts ever recorded in human history, because when Tesla tore up his lucrative royalty contract with George Westinghouse he saved his company from bankruptcy and the AC system from destruction all in the name of idealism.

We all know the that no good deed goes unpunished and Nikola Tesla – one of the greatest geniuses of any age – was no exception. By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room where he died of heart failure, alone and destitute in his shabby hotel room, penniless and with significant debts, in 1943.