# Tesla's Death Ray

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/tesla-s-death-ray
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/tesla-s-death-ray.md
Podcast: [Disturbing History](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005)
Published: 2026-03-15T18:40:02+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/tesla-s-death-ray--70648142
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/70648142/dhteslafinal.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/tesla-s-death-ray
Duration seconds: 4635

## Resource

In the early nineteen thirties, an aging inventor living alone in a New York City hotel room told the world he'd built a weapon capable of destroying ten thousand enemy aircraft at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. The press called it a death ray. He called it a peace beam. And the man making the claim wasn't some fringe eccentric chasing headlines. It was Nikola Tesla, the same mind behind the alternating current electrical system that powers the modern world, the same inventor who held over three hundred patents and whose work laid the foundation for radio, radar, robotics, and remote control. When Tesla said he'd built something, history suggested you take him seriously. We trace the full arc of Tesla's extraordinary and tragic life, beginning with his birth in eighteen fifty-six in the village of Smiljan in what is now Croatia. Born into a Serbian Orthodox household, Tesla exhibited vivid sensory experiences from childhood, describing flashes of light and mental images so detailed he could design and test entire machines in his mind without ever touching pencil to paper. The death of his older brother Dane in a riding accident left a lasting mark, fueling a relentless drive to prove himself that would define everything that followed. We follow Tesla through his education at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, his pivotal breakthrough in Budapest in eighteen eighty-two when he conceived the rotating magnetic field while walking through a park, and his arrival in New York in eighteen eighty-four with virtually nothing to his name. His brief and bitter employment under Thomas Edison ended with a broken promise and a fury that set the stage for the War of Currents, one of the ugliest chapters in the history of American industry. Edison's campaign to discredit al…

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## Transcript

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