*segnalato da Raimondo Galante
What do you do when you have annoyed J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man on Wall Street? This question was very much on the mind of Nikola Tesla in January 1902.
An electrical inventor, Tesla had been born in 1856 to a Serbian family living in what is today Croatia. In 1884 Tesla had emigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison, but he soon quit in order to pursue his dream of an alternating current motor. After selling this invention to George Westinghouse, Tesla had gone on in the 1890s to be one of the first to study radio waves, prompting him to perform demonstrations where he took shocks of 250,000 volts as well as to create 100-foot lightning bolts while working in Colorado Springs in 1899. While in Colorado, Tesla convinced himself that it would be possible to send power around the world without using wires.
Tesla in his experimental station in Colorado Springs, December 1899. He is seated in his magnifying transmitter (known today as a giant Tesla coil), with an electrical discharge passing from the secondary coil to another coil. This picture was a double exposure on a single glass plate; Tesla was first photographed sitting in the chair and then the magnifying transmitter was turned on.
The challenge facing Tesla in 1902 was that, although Morgan had given him $150,000 to build a laboratory at Wardenclyffe, Long Island in order to send power and messages across the Atlantic, Guglielmo Marconi had beaten him to the punch. In December 1901, Marconi announced that the Morse code signal for the letter "S" had been transmitted from England and received in Newfoundland. Marconi, not Tesla, was the new wunderkind of radio.
So what did Tesla tell his patron Morgan?... C
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/w-bernard-carlson/did-al-gore-invent-the-internet_b_3581391.html