July 10: The Prestige
On July 10, 1856, Nikola Tesla, pioneer of alternating current electricity, is born. Tonight's film: The Prestige (2006).
There’s a statue at Niagara Falls, on the American side, and most tourists walk past it without reading the name. It’s Nikola Tesla, and without him the lights in the hotel behind you would not work the way they do.
Born on the night of July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, a Serbian village in the Austrian Empire that is now Croatia, Tesla arrived, by his own account, in the middle of a lightning storm. He trained as an engineer in Graz, crossed the Atlantic in 1884 with four cents and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison, and within a few years was fighting the so-called War of Currents against the man who hired him. Edison pushed direct current, which dropped dead after about a mile of wire. Tesla’s alternating current could be stepped up to high voltage, shipped long distances, and stepped back down. The system that runs your wall socket today is Tesla’s. He built the AC motor, lit the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, designed the first large-scale hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, and ran experiments in Colorado Springs in 1899 that produced artificial lightning 40 metres long. He died alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel on January 7, 1943, in debt, with a pigeon as his closest companion. That is the outline. The feeling is harder to put into words.
I keep coming back to him because he is the patron saint of a thing I know from software work. You can see a problem clearly, build the working version, and still lose the room to whoever sells louder. Tesla had the patent and the math. Edison and Westinghouse owned the deal. So when The Prestige (2006) puts Tesla on screen, played by David Bowie, it lands for me.
Christopher Nolan’s film is not really about Tesla. It’s about two London stage magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), eating each other alive over a trick. Tesla shows up roughly in the back third, when Angier travels to Colorado Springs and commissions a machine that is supposed to transport a man and instead duplicates him. Bowie plays him quiet, half-bored, as if the machine were a small favor. Released October 20, 2006, on a $40 million budget, it grossed $109.7 million worldwide and was overshadowed at the time by Nolan’s own Batman films. On rewatch it holds up because the obsession reads as honest. Two men destroy their families to be the better magician, and the film never winks at that. It just shows the cost. Scarlett Johansson and Michael Caine fill out the cast, but the engine is the Bale-Jackman hatred, cold and mutual.
What I like about it, as sci-fi, is that the impossible gadget sits inside a story about something ordinary. Jealousy. Ambition. The fear of being second. Tesla’s machine is the only speculative element, and the film earns it by keeping everything else grounded in sawdust and gaslight.
So that’s tonight. A real inventor, born in a lightning storm 170 years ago, and a film that borrows him to tell a story about how badly people want to win. Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
Six years after Sputnik, on the same July 10, the sky got noisier. NASA launched Telstar 1 from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, aboard a Thor-Delta rocket. AT&T and Bell Labs built it; it was the first active communications satellite, meaning it amplified and retransmitted signals rather than just bouncing them. Thirteen days later, on July 23, 1962, it carried the first live transatlantic television broadcast. If that thread, the idea that the first thing we beam across the void might get an answer, pulls at you, watch Contact (1997). Robert Zemeckis directed. The lead is Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer who catches a signal from Vega that turns out to be a blueprint for a machine. Carl Sagan wrote the 1985 novel it adapts. The film grossed about $171 million worldwide and ages well, partly because it treats faith and evidence as a real argument rather than a punchline.
Also on July 10, in 1940, the Luftwaffe went after British shipping in the English Channel. That convoy attack is now counted as the opening day of the Battle of Britain, which ran officially from July 10 to October 31, 1940. RAF Fighter Command fielded roughly 746 serviceable fighters against about 2,550 Luftwaffe aircraft, and the contest was close enough that Hugh Dowding, the air marshal running the defense, is still studied for it. For a film that captures what it feels like when something vast and indifferent descends from the sky, try Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005). Tom Cruise plays a divorced dockworker trying to get his kids, Dakota Fanning among them, out of the path of the alien tripods. It cost around $132 million, grossed $603.9 million worldwide, and earns its dread in the first half hour. The second half sags. Watch it for the panic, not the ending.
Sources
Main event (Tesla):
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikola-Tesla (birth date and place, AC contributions)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla (life dates, War of Currents, Colorado Springs)
https://teslasciencecenter.org/about-nikola-tesla/ (lightning-storm birth, July 9/10 1856)
Film (The Prestige):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige (Nolan, cast, David Bowie as Tesla)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/prestige-review-movie-christopher-nolan-christian-bale-2006-1236405407/ (2006 release context)
Side events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar_1 (launched July 10 1962, first active comms satellite)
https://www.nasa.gov/history/telstar-opened-era-of-global-satellite-television/ (first transatlantic TV, July 23 1962)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) (Zemeckis, lead actress, Vega signal, Sagan novel)
https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Britain-European-history-1940 (July 10 1940 opening, Channel convoys)
https://www.raf.mod.uk/what-we-do/our-history/anniversaries/battle-of-britain/ (RAF vs Luftwaffe aircraft counts)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2005_film) (Spielberg, Cruise, budget and gross)