Chapter 1:
Revenant

People ask me if there is a ghost. If the Wizard has discovered a frequency or some hidden tunnel to make his way back to us. And I smile. No, there is no ghost in Tesla’s cottage. Instead, the house in which he lived while he experimented with his great transmission tower, the house itself has become a ghost. Although the building still stands, its past has been forgotten. For here, Tesla led a private life quite apart from what is widely known about him. Here he spent some of the happiest moments of his life. And here, too, he suffered his hardest blows. The personal drama of this most important and pivotal time of his life, is obscure, eclipsed by his astounding career. As if there was no private person, no Nikola, no Niko. Only the inventor, Tesla. In some ways the very heart and soul of the man has been deleted. I feel this acutely because I live here. Tesla’s cottage is also myhome.

Today, the cottage is just another house in Shoreham Village, a tiny community on the North Shore of Long Island. Neighbors have a vague knowledge of its history, but that’s hardly more than a bit of trivia. When they pass by, it’s me they greet. They stop and we talk about gardening, or we take a few minutes to let our dogs play, and then we go on with our lives, ignoring the cottage’s history – except for the brass lettering on the plaque beside the front door which, for a few moments a day, catches the sun and flashes its message:Nikola Tesla livedhere.

When you say the name Nikola Tesla, people think of a scientist and inventor, a visionary genius. They don’t know the person, not as I do. How can they? They don’t walk every day in his footsteps, breathe the same sea air, gaze across the bluff to the same rock-strewn beach and the soul-piercing sweep of Earth’s horizon. I warm myself by the same fireplace, enter the house through the same doorway, sit on the porch watching the gulls as he must have done. I walk through the village on a parallel plane to his era, re-creating in my mind the rustic bridge that once led to the cottage, the inn where Nikola dined, the general store that for a time was also the post office – the sights Tesla saw as he walked to his lab. For me, Nikola iseverywhere.

He first arrived at Wardenclyffe in 1901 at the age of forty-five. By then, he had already proven the existence of radio waves, invented a range of electrical devices. While still in his thirties, he registered a series of history-making patents. In 1891 he gave a lecture at Columbia University so stunningly innovative it was likened to the invention of the wheel. It