The day following his demonstration, the Buffalo Courier heralded Nikola Tesla as the “weird electric genius.” The Serbian-born, visionary scientist endured a lifetime of being misunderstood and even ridiculed. He spoke eight languages, possessed a photographic memory, was a lover of poetry and arrived by steamship to the United States from Europe in the spring of 1884 with four cents in his pocket. Seven years later, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States, but died penniless in New York City at age 86, his legacy usurped for decades by his direct-current rival, one Thomas A. Edison.

Perhaps ironically, when he arrived in the United States Tesla actually began by working for Thomas Edison, offering him his diligence and talents. However, he failed to interest the “Wizard of Menlo Park” in his induction motor and other inventions in the field of polyphase alternating currents. After a year, Tesla resigned.

While he searched for backers who would support his research into alternating current, Tesla took a job digging ditches for two dollars a day to make ends meet. Ironically, at this low point in his life, the ditches he was digging would be used to bury cables for the Edison Electric Company. The foreman, however, was intrigued by Tesla’s supremely optimistic stories of how his AC system would change electricity generation for all mankind. He introduced his enthusiastic employee to engineer Albert Brown and lawyer Charles Peck. Together, the three men created the Tesla Electric Company, filing the first of many patents in the spring of 1887. 

Following this hookup, Tesla quickly moved to patent his entire alternating current system. The patent office balked at the idea, however, and insisted that he break the system down into its component parts. In the end, the system comprised seven separate inventions covering his single and polyphase motors, his distribution system and the transformers. A year later, in 1888, he was granted five more patents covering various versions of his three-phase system. Eighteen more patents followed the next year.

Unlike Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake for trains, was a firm believer in AC power. He founded the Westinghouse Electric Company in 1886 to strategically challenge the DC system promoted by Edison. This set in motion what became known as the “War of the Currents.” Westinghouse, like Edison, was a savvy businessman who knew how to market his inventions. Without him, it is likely Tesla would never have made any money at all. 

Westinghouse had been working on an AC system of his own when he approached Tesla, convinced that the inventor’s patents were the missing pieces he needed. After some tough bargaining by Brown and Peck, Tesla’s partners and investors, Westinghouse succeeded in buying up the patents for a tidy sum. A significant part of the deal included a $2.50 royalty per horsepower on every Tesla motor. Once the AC system prevailed over Edison’s DC system, Tesla would have become immensely rich from the royalty payments. But when Westinghouse was on the verge of bankruptcy as a result of his constant battle with Edison, the story goes that Tesla tore up the contract. It cost Tesla a massive fortune, but he saved Westinghouse from financial ruin. The Westinghouse Corporation returned the favor decades later by paying off the impoverished scientist’s living expenses.

In 1893, a golden opportunity to advance the Westinghouse-Tesla AC system presented itself. The City of Chicago had been planning a world’s fair on their lakefront for some years, the highlight of which was to be the electrification of the main site. The plan was to create the greatest display of electric lights anyone had ever seen. Not surprisingly, the competition to provide the display was fierce. The newly formed General Electric Company (created by the merger of the Edison Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric companies) assumed they would win the contract. In the end, the Westinghouse Company prevailed in an AC versus DC, David and Goliath match-up. In an effort to sabotage Westinghouse and Tesla, a vengeful Edison refused to let them use his patented lightbulbs. This forced Westinghouse and his engineers to hastily produce 250,000 modified Sawyer-Man “stopper lamps” as an inferior but sufficient substitute.

In the schoolroom there were a few mechanical models which interested me and turned my attention to water turbines. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

The dream of harnessing the power of the mighty cataract dates back at least as far as 1853 and the founding of the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power Company. In 1886, Thomas Evershed, a veteran civil engineer who worked on the Erie Canal, proposed digging a series of canals and tunnels to carry water from Niagara Falls to waterwheels that would be used to power nearby mills and factories. Prominent businessman Jacob Schoellkopf sought to expand the efforts to utilize hydraulic power. In 1882, he installed a small DC generation station, but the power could only be transmitted a few miles. In 1889, Edison proposed a plan to electrify the City of Buffalo 20 miles away. Again, however, his DC-based transmission was only capable of one or two miles. Following the successful demonstration of the Westinghouse-Tesla alternating current system at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, the writing was on the wall for Edison’s system.

In 1891, the International Niagara Commission, headed by Lord Kelvin, offered $20,000 for the best plan to harness the power of the Falls. Kelvin had favored DC until he saw the Westinghouse-Tesla AC system in action at the Chicago fair, after which he became an enthusiastic convert. Westinghouse, however, was hesitant to enter the competition for fear his extensive advice would be utilized with no compensation. 

Enter Edward Dean Adams, a New York City banker and president of the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company. He had begun constructing a central power station before the problem of long-distance transmission of electricity was solved. Adams, like many others by the early 1890s, began to realize that alternating current was the way to go and turned to Tesla for his proven expertise. Visiting Tesla at his New York City laboratory, Adams offered $100,000 for a controlling interest in 14 U.S. and foreign patents, along with any of the scientific wizard’s future inventions. Tesla accepted, advising Adams that a two-phased system would be the most reliable. He also added that there was a Westinghouse system to light incandescent bulbs using two-phase alternating current. Thus, in October 1893, the Westinghouse Company was awarded the contract to provide the generators. In a “War of the Currents” compromise deal, General Electric was given the contract for building transmission and distribution lines from Niagara Falls to Buffalo.

Construction of the first power station took five years, with investors growing worried as the project wore on. The cost of the project was immense, and no one was sure it would work, as the big picture existed, for the most part, in Tesla’s three-dimensional imagination. The Adams transformer house (still standing) was designed by the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. One of the firm’s architects, Stanford White, also designed important buildings such as the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Power house number one was designed for 21 generators, supplied by a 7,000-foot tunnel that channeled the gravity-fed water. The 16-million-brick tunnel measured 18 feet by 21 feet and took three extremely laborious years to build. Westinghouse, relying on a dozen Tesla patents, tested the enormous generator on April 15, 1895. It was run at full speed, 250 revolutions per minute. A month earlier, a disastrous fire had burned Tesla’s Fifth Avenue laboratory to the ground, along with all his equipment, experiments and notebooks. After a year of dealing with the trauma, he finally visited Niagara Falls in July.

Fast forward 16 months. The switch was finally thrown and the first power reached Buffalo at midnight on November 16, 1896. The Niagara Gazette reported: “The turning of a switch in the big powerhouse at Niagara completed a circuit which caused the Niagara River to flow upward.” The streetcars received the first 1,000 horsepower and rolled down the city streets in a glorious procession. In a few years, 10 generators were operational, providing clean energy from Niagara Falls to New Yok City. The AC power grid grew and eventually powered the entire world.

A profoundly beneficial offshoot of the Niagara power project was realizing a world’s fair for the City of Buffalo. Many of the same civic leaders and investors associated with what was taking place in Niagara Falls became involved with planning the fair shortly after the celebratory banquet in January 1897. The recent, world-wide acclaim for the region’s technological achievement and the new availability of abundant power, along with the city’s rapid growth as a major industrial center, were major considerations in selecting Buffalo as the site of the fair.

At separate times, both Tesla and Edison visited the “City of Light” and its magnificent Pan American Exposition. Despite Tesla’s accomplishments and significant contributions to the electrifying event, however, the local press singled out Edison as the greatest electrician of the age.

To this man, who has made a life study of electricity, and who is regarded the world over as the greatest electrician of the age, the grand display appeared as the most successful construction of the kind ever attempted by man. It thrilled him. He was charmed with the effect of the illumination. 

At this stage of his career, Tesla was widely known for his research on wireless technology, another of his major breakthroughs. Concurrently, the planet Mars had been a hot topic since 1895. That year, astronomer Percival Lowell detailed canals on the planet’s surface, which he believed were created by its inhabitants. Lowell’s theories influenced the young English writer H.G. Wells who, in 1898, published War of the Worlds, launching a whole new genre of alien science fiction.

On the day Tesla visited Buffalo, the Buffalo Times reported that he delighted the hotel staff by experimenting with the hotel’s corridor lights and telephone system. His stop at the Pan Am came following a visit to Pittsburgh, where he bought equipment to use in his radio wave experiments for transatlantic and then alien planet communication. “As he strolled around the expo grounds,” the Times reported, “Tesla used the word ‘grand’ several times. He expects to be able to send a wireless message across the Atlantic in the near future. After that, he will endeavor to make good his promise to communicate with the planet Mars.”  When asked when he expected to be able to reach the red planet, the electrician replied, “I shall first send a wireless message across the Atlantic.”

As the years passed, Edison's story appeared over and over, in every history book and textbook the world over. Meanwhile, Nikola Tesla has been largely relegated to a sidebar or anecdote – if he is even mentioned at all.

Today, however, a dedicated group of Tesla followers is determined to rewrite history and restore Tesla's name to the annals of electric power. Since 2018, the Buffalo Niagara Nikola Tesla Council, Inc. (BNNTC) has sought to raise awareness about the world-changing scientific and humanitarian contributions of its namesake. One of the first goals for this non-profit organization was to honor the legacy of the Serbian-born, naturalized American inventor in the City of Buffalo, where no recognition had existed. Thus, a plan emerged to erect a statue of Tesla in downtown Buffalo as a companion to the one gifted by the government of Yugoslavia, which was erected on Goat Island at Niagara Falls in 1976.  This pair of statues would mark Buffalo-Niagara’s historic significance as the site of the world’s first long-distance AC power transmission on November 15, 1896. A triangular green space at the corner of Main and North Division streets was identified as an ideal location, being located across the street from the Ellicott Square Building where Tesla gave the keynote address at "The Electric Banquet" on January 12, 1897. 

Retired Buffalo State College physics professor and current BNNTC president Francis S. Lestingi generously offered to design and fund the proposed statue and gift it to the city’s public art collection. Additional support came from Concept Construction, Inc., who supplied the concrete base, and Trautman & Associates, who handled the requisite engineering.  The elegant, seven-foot statue was unveiled on September 18, 2020, along with an information panel about Nikola Tesla’s life, particularly his Buffalo story.  In October 2020, the Buffalo Common Council voted to officially designate the site of the statue as "Nikola Tesla Park," the first park in the United States named in his honor.

Other BNNTC projects have included an information panel for the Goat Island Tesla statue, erected in June 2021, and a monumental, 16-foot, stylized art structure, Tesla Coil in the Park, for Gratwick-Riverside Park in North Tonwanda, which is scheduled to be unveiled later this year. Collectively, it is hoped that these projects will serve to enhance the “Nikola Tesla Legacy Corridor” along the original route of the AC power system.