I am a fan of New York Social Diary.
I can't tell you how many times I almost linked to one of their posts but refrained.
Today though, today we hit "publish."
From New York Social Diary, September 22, 2017:
Nikola Tesla: A SoHo story
Now here’s a different sort of SoHo story. Tesla. Not the car company. Not the heavy metal band. The inventor Nikola Tesla.
Back in the 1880’s and ‘90s when SoHo was descending from its prosperous heights, a young man from a village in Croatia, in his mid-20s, had three laboratories located in the SoHo: one at 175 Grand, one at 33-35 South Fifth Avenue (now called LaGuardia Place), and another at 46 East Houston Street.
Nikola Tesla was obsessed with electricity. He came to the New York in 1884 to work with Thomas Edison at Edison’s laboratory on the Lower East Side.
The two men did not get on well. They did not see eye-to-eye despite their mutual interests. At the center of their disagreements was their separate views about what the standard of electrical distribution should be. Mr. Edison had already put his money on a direct current system (DC). Young Tesla — Edison was in his late 30s; a mature man in those days — believed a system of alternating current (AC) was dangerous. [sic]
Edison was evidently unaware that his direct current system was not only dangerous but even deadly. All household electricity today is delivered via AC.
Tesla was a visionary. After his experience with Edison, he moved on to his own laboratory on Grand Street. He became known in the community for his vision when he developed the high-voltage, high-frequency transformer known as the Tesla Coil. In his lab on South Fifth Avenue he also experimented with wireless lighting. Presenting demonstrations brought him more attention including close friendships with Stanford White and with Mark Twain.
There was another Tesla innovation that resulted in his friendship with Twain who became a close friend. Twain had chronic constipation and Tesla provided a cure for it by having Twain stand on an electric plate while Tesla ran an electric charge through his body.
Tesla also came up with an “X-ray”. He and Twain were said to have taken turns aiming Tesla’s X-ray “gun” at each other, making enormous x-rays of each other’s bodies and skulls in sheets of undeveloped film taped to the wall.
In 1895 a fire gutted Tesla’s lab which left him deeply depressed. He used his coils to give himself electro-shock treatments to overcome the depression. Friends raised funds for him to open a new lab on Houston Street, where he began developing a wireless system for transmitting power around the world....MUCH MORE, including the famous pic of his Tesla coil going off.
