This picture preserves a moment few cameras ever caught — Nikola Tesla In His Laboratory, Sitting Behind His “Magnifying Transmitter”. It is the kind of image that turns a line in a history book into something you can actually see.
Nikola Tesla was one of the most photographed inventors of his era, and he understood publicity as well as engineering. His most famous portraits, made around 1899 in his Colorado Springs laboratory, used double exposure to show him calmly reading amid cascades of artificial lightning from his high-voltage experiments.
Most photography of the period chased celebrities and headlines, which makes surviving images of daily routine all the more precious. This is what the world actually looked like when nobody thought it was worth remembering.
