EPISODE 12: LEGACY ## PART ONE: THE FORGOTTEN YEARS ### CHAPTER 1: THE FADE For decades after his death, Nikola Tesla was largely forgotten. The man whose inventions powered the world became a footnote. Textbooks credited Edison for electrical progress, Marconi for wireless communication. Tesla appeared, if at all, as an eccentric genius who had promising ideas but failed to realize them. Part of this erasure was deliberate. The corporations that had profited from Tesla's work had no interest in honoring him. Westinghouse promoted its own brand, not the inventor who had made it possible. General Electric, Edison's corporate heir, certainly had no desire to celebrate Edison's greatest rival. Part was accidental. Tesla had died alone, without family to tend his memory, without institution to preserve his papers. His work was scattered across patents, articles, and notes that few bothered to compile. The result was historical amnesia. Two generations grew up knowing nothing of Tesla beyond the unit of magnetic flux density that bore his name. --- ### CHAPTER 2: THE PAPERS Tesla's papers had their own strange journey. After the FBI seized them in 1943, they were examined by John G. Trump, an MIT professor and uncle of a future president. Trump concluded that there was nothing of national security significance—no working death rays, no revolutionary weapons systems....