# The Wardenclyffe Tower *A Biography of Nikola Tesla* — Legendary Biographies No. 196 - **Subject:** Nikola Tesla - **Written by:** Ailsa Rennie - **Shelf:** Science / Science - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 212 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-511-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-613-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/196-the-wardenclyffe-tower.html ## About this book January 7, 1943, Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel on West 34th Street, Manhattan. A maid finds Nikola Tesla, eighty-six, dead in his bed. The Serbian-American inventor of the polyphase alternating-current motor, the Tesla coil, and the wireless-power-transmission Wardenclyffe Tower has been living at the New Yorker on the courtesy account of Westinghouse Electric for nine years. He has been alone with his pigeons. The FBI seizes his papers within hours of his death. Ailsa Rennie's biography opens earlier — in Smiljan in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire (now Croatia), where Nikola was born to a Serbian Orthodox priest and a mother who had built her own household tools without ever having learned to read — and follows the arc through the Graz Polytechnic and the Prague years, the 1884 New York arrival with a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison from Charles Batchelor ("I know two great men, and you are one of them; the other is this young man"), the long Edison-Tesla split, the 1888 polyphase-AC patents that Westinghouse bought for $60,000, the long 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition demonstration that lit the fairgrounds with AC, the long Colorado Springs experiments of 1899-1900, the 1901-1906 Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island, the long financial decline, the New Yorker Hotel years, and the January 7, 1943 death. What emerges is a portrait of the Serbian-American inventor whose polyphase alternating-current system the modern electrical grid runs on — and the financial-and-personal-life arc that has, in the century since his death, become the subject of one of the most active twentieth-century scientific cults. ## Contents 1. Smiljan, July 1856 2. Dane 3. Karlovac and Graz 4. Budapest, 1882: The Rotating Field 5. The Edison Episode 6. The Polyphase Patents 7. The War of the Currents 8. Colorado Springs 9. Wardenclyffe 10. The Long Decline 11. The New Yorker Hotel 12. The Pigeons 13. Teleforce and the War 14. January 7, 1943 15. The Radio Priority Dispute 16. The Resurrection 17. The Brand ## Questions **Who is The Wardenclyffe Tower about?** Nikola Tesla. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Wardenclyffe Tower — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 2,529 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 65,000 words, 17 chapters, 212 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Ailsa Rennie writes biography out of Edinburgh, with a focus on women in twentieth-century science, art, and letters whose work was historically credited to the men in the rooms beside them. Her writing uncovers forgotten archival papers to reconstruct the lived realities of intellectual collaboration. Through works like Compound S, The Fossil Hunter, and The Birkbeck Years, she examines the institutional structures that obscured female achievement. She also explores these themes of lost legacy and ownership in The Paris Radium Institute and The Letter from Madras. She lives in the Edinburgh suburbs, where she spends her weekends restoring antique bookbindings and volunteering at a local community orchard.