Nikola Tesla at Colorado Springs

Colorado Springs, the autumn of 1899. Nikola Tesla works alone in his experimental laboratory on a high plateau beneath the Rocky Mountains. The nights are cold, vast, and silent. Inside the wooden building, his magnifying transmitter generates lightning bolts thirty meters long, and the air smells of ozone. By the dim glow of oil lamps and the soft hiss of his receiving instruments, Tesla sits at his workbench in shirtsleeves, listening through headphones to faint rhythmic signals he believes may come from another world. The mountains outside hold the silence. His laboratory windows glow against the dark plateau, a single point of light in an immense night. He writes in his notebook, adjusts coils, watches the gauges, and listens. The hours pass in deep solitude, the boundary between scientific instrument and human ear dissolving into the cold mountain air.