In 1899, Nikola Tesla conducted a series of extraordinary electrical experiments at a purpose-built laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Using a massive Tesla coil and a 200-foot-tall mast, Tesla generated artificial lightning bolts up to 135 feet long and attempted to demonstrate wireless transmission of electrical power through the Earth itself. The Colorado Springs experiments, conducted on the high plains of Colorado, produced some of the most dramatic electrical displays ever created by human beings and attracted worldwide attention.

Tesla's Colorado Springs laboratory, with its man-made lightning and visionary claims of wireless power, became a powerful symbol in American literature of the solitary genius pursuing forbidden knowledge at the edge of civilization. The image of electrical storms summoned by a single man on the western frontier resonated with themes of Promethean ambition and the American mythology of the individual conquering nature. Contemporary American poets including Susan Howe and James Merrill have drawn on Tesla's Colorado experiments as metaphors for the poet's own attempt to channel invisible forces into visible form.