Only months later, in 1904, the U.S. Patent Office stripped Tesla of his radio patents and awarded them to the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, instead. Marconi had used radio technology pioneered by Tesla 11 years earlier to transmit the letter “s” in morse code over 2,000 miles, which gave him no claim to the patents, of course. What did give him claim, though? He had the financial backing of Morgan, Edison, and steel baron Andrew Carnegie, all of whom held sway in every level of government.
