Edison was upset, and tried to block Westinghouse by denying the Fair permission to use his light bulb, as it was still under patent to him. So Westinghouse went out and invented a different kind of light bulb, one that used two filaments, not one, to light the bulb.
The Fair was known as the "White City" due to a budget shortfall which required all buildings to be coated at the last minute with a white plaster-like material. The fortunate accident made the buildings look like classical Greek temples.
President Grover Cleveland pressed a lever to light the Fair on opening night, and the sight was so beautiful that reporters noted men threw hats in the air and women wept openly at the sight. The White City was the first all-electric city anywhere on the planet.
The Niagara Falls commission members were very impressed, and ultimately chose to go forward with an alternating current plan, due in no small part to its successful use at the Fair.
Wireless Energy
The one thing, however, that Edison and Morgan won was the concession to carry the generated power away from the falls. This angered Tesla on a number of levels, not the least of which was the fact that he had become obsessed with the notion that there should be a way to transfer energy wirelessly.
He'd already sent signals wirelessly, in a demonstration that caused the Supreme Court to later rule that Tesla, not Marconi, was the father of radio. But sending power was different than sending a signal.
Still, Tesla had been struck from childhood by the sight of the sky sending power to the ground in the form of lightning. If nature could do it, could not man, as well?
Tesla was offered the use of unlimited power by a friend if he moved to Colorado Springs. So Tesla left New York and set up a lab not far from Pike's Peak. There, Tesla reportedly found a way to transmit energy wirelessly across a distance of several yards, from a device inside his lab to a small set of light bulbs outside the lab.
Tesla at one point had tried to convince Morgan to invest in his wireless efforts, but Morgan was worried that if you sent energy through the air, there'd be no way to meter it, no way to pull profits from it. Tesla wasn't concerned about that. He figured if he could get the technology working, that someone would surely devise a way to meter it.
After a year in Colorado, Tesla returned to New York. He bought property on Long Island at Wardenclyffe and began construction of a large tower.
He convinced Morgan that he was building the tower to transmit signals across the Atlantic, the first step in what Tesla envisioned as a worldwide network that could send images and data from any point on the planet to any other point, without wires. In other words, Tesla had envisioned the Internet of today over 100 years before we had it.
When an Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi sent a signal across the Atlantic first, Morgan was upset, and wanted to know why Tesla hadn't been the first. Tesla then told Morgan he was planning a far grander experiment -- transmitting energy.
Morgan was furious at Tesla for having misled him, and promised he'd never get another cent from him. While that wasn't entirely true, Morgan never gave Tesla enough to complete his plans.
Having overextended himself for too many years, living in a hotel and having enjoyed a lifestyle beyond his means, Tesla eventually declared bankruptcy.
George Westinghouse had long since died, but his son was appalled that the man who had made the company's success possible was now penniless. He arranged for the Westinghouse company to pick up Tesla's hotel bills for the rest of his life.
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