Violinist Zlatko Baloković

(WNYC Archive Collections)

Nikola Tesla, the father of alternating current and one of the greatest inventors of all time, died on January 7, 1943, at the New Yorker Hotel. Three days later, WNYC broadcast this memorial to him.  The Croatian-born violinist Zlatko Baloković performed Ave Maria live in the studio, as well as a piece known to be a favorite of Tesla's, identified as Therefore Beyond the Hills is My Village, My Native Land.  Mayor F. H. La Guardia read a moving tribute to Tesla written by Slovenian-American author Louis Adamic. Announcer Joe Fishler concluded the program this way:

Fishler: "Nikola Tesla was a man of the future. Always thinking ahead of his time. He predicted interplanetary communication and death rays that would make America impregnable from land, sea, and air and war impossible. Not many years ago he announced that he was working on a new tube that would produce radium for as little as one dollar a pound."

Other voice: "That's fantastic!"

Fishler: "Fantastic, unbelievable, impossible! That's what they said when Nikola Tesla predicted the advent of the radio many years before Marconi actually devised a workable radio. Tesla prophesized:

[Other voice] 'Someday we shall be as familiar with transmission of intelligence without wires and someday we shall transmit power without using wires'."

Tesla's inventions numbered more than 700 and included a telephone repeater, a polyphase alternating-current system, the induction motor, the Tesla coil transformer, and fluorescent lights. The prolific inventor wrote in 1919, "The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means, the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories drove thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land...'' For the complete quote and more about Tesla's life, we recommend Professor Bogdan R. Kosanovic's Tesla site.

With special thanks to NYPR Senior Archivist Marcos Sueiro, the above audio is courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives and its transfer was part of an NEH-funded preservation project with NYPR archivists Haley Richardson and Emily Vinson. Check out their project blog, Annotations.