June 9, 2009 • 26 mins
Many people associate Edison with the invention of electricity, but Nikola Tesla heavily shaped the electrical system we still use today. Get the dirt on the electricity wars between Edison and Tesla in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant, Chuck, Chuck. That's going.
(00:22):
You can just call me Nikola really okay? How about
your Chuck? Yes, all right, Chuck? Good God, I'm good.
I'm good. I'm I'm much better than how you asked
me twenty nights ago when I'm recorded, Yes podcast, No,
that was that was two days three two days from
now right. Yeah, it's magic. It is magic. We'll have
(00:44):
to reveal our secret one day like some sort of
we could dress up like Siegfried and Roy I get
there and tell everybody. Yeah, okay, I owe it to Jerry.
Jerry is always just the white Tiger. Yeah, yeah, nice
and Jerry. Chuck. I have a trivia question for you, beautiful, Okay,
hit me. Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers named the
(01:08):
Los Angeles Dodgers? Okay, Chuck, I know the answer. Do
you want me to say? What do you want to say?
I want you to say. I just asked you a
question because when they were in Brooklyn the original spot.
There were a lot of train trolley cars in Brooklyn
at the time that had really dangerous electrical wiring that
operated them, and people would dodge these electrical lines and
(01:31):
these train cars, and so they called them the Brooklyn
Trolley Dodgers initially, and then that shortened to the Brooklyn Dodgers,
and then they o' mount the O'Malley family broke the
hearts of Brooklyn and moved them too. L A, I
can't believe that still, I know who does that? H
Did you see a documentary HBO about the Brooklyn Dodgers
so good? No, it was it. Yeah, I mean there
(01:51):
are people in Brooklyn today that have not watched the
baseball game since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved their their hearts
were broken so badly. Yeah wow, and uh wow, rip
the heart out of Brooklyn. But actually it wasn't. People
might right in and there's been some follow up and
O'Malley really tried as hardest to keep the team there,
and there were some politics involved that greedy Sandy kofax Y. Yeah,
(02:13):
but off topic a little bit, but not really not really,
because you can make a case that it was um
Thomas Alva Edison, who gave the Brooklyn Dodgers their name.
Bring it Home, Baby, Okay, I will so. By the
time the Dodgers were formed in the eighteen eighties, right, um,
Edison had basically lit up parts of New York with
(02:37):
his incandescent light bulb. Big, big innovation. It was huge, man.
I mean imagine going from like gaslight to electricity. Yeah,
I mean I bet it blew people's minds back then.
I imagine so, especially when they touched one of those
trolley lines. Sure so, okay. Edison was a visionary, a genius,
(02:58):
one can make the case um, and an innovator, and
he came up with what we know of as the
modern harnessing of electricity, which I should probably point out
electricity is not energy, it's an energy carrier. Direct current
is what he was his big thing, right. Direct current
is basically it is, well not basically, it's where electricity.
(03:20):
The electric charge is constant. It never changes. So if
you look directional, it is, and if you look at
it it's like a line. It's just a straight line.
And Edison was pretty happy with his direct current inventions.
The problem is is that you lose a lot of
it to waste heat over long distances. Yeah. Well basically
(03:41):
you can't really transport it over super long distances they
found out, right, Okay, So that was kind of the
drawback to it. Other than that it was enormous. He
lit up New York and arguably created um what we
know of today is light. Right, But there was another
way of looking at things, and that is the alternating current.
(04:04):
So Edison was super, super super married to direct current.
He just saw it. I think I read a quote
of a river flowing gently to the sea. That's how
we characterized direct current. That will kill you if you
touch it, yeah, big time. Uh. And alternating current is
if you instead of that straight line of a charge
um or flow of electricity from one pole to the other,
(04:27):
I think negative, depositive, all always. Alternating current looks like
a sign wave, right, So it has a wavelength and
it actually goes back and forth from one pole to another,
which is why it's called alternating. And these days it
does so at about sixty cycles per second, so it
changes direction sixty times in a second, and it's very
(04:47):
steady and reliable. And actually in those days too, I
think it's the same yeah, which is one of the
cool things. Right. So here's the thing we're talking about
electricity here. I think a lot of people overlook is
that Edison was also quite a showman and great businessman,
very very much so, as much as much of a
(05:07):
great businessman as a genius, right, But he was also
very stubborn, and he didn't he didn't he didn't think
there was any way to improve or any need to
improve upon direct current. There's another guy whose name people
might be familiar with. His name is Nicola Tesla. Not
a great businessman, in fact, a very poor businessman. Evidently
he was. Actually he spent some time after he became
(05:28):
a great inventor digging ditches just to try to make
ends meet. Apparently he didn't. He did file for a
lot of patents, but apparently he didn't do that nearly
enough because a lot of his stuff was kind of
stolen and kind of you know, nicked from. So, Chuck,
we've got Edison on one side with d C, and
we have Tesla on the other side with a C.
(05:50):
That sounds like, you know, a couple of a couple
of nerds going at it, but really these two guys
engaged in this very very public rumble and based gleet
stake was the infrastructure of the United States and the
in the world exactly, this huge, huge, massive um competition. Sure,
(06:14):
that just took place, and there was some crazy stuff
that went that that came out of it, Lots of electrocutions,
lots of nefariousness, And we're not going to tell you
who won yet because a lot of people don't necessarily
know what kind of electricity we use more than the
other d C or a C. So we're just gonna
pay this out. Baby. This is just interesting. So yeah,
(06:34):
Nicola Tesla he was Austrian born and uh he arrived
in the United States in four when he was just
a young lad of twenty eight and a merror. Three
years later, after being in the United States, he filed
for a series of patents that basically outlined what you
would need to make the alternating current work. So he
(06:55):
made pretty quick work when he came over here to
the States, right he did. Did you ever see the
Prestige movie? I've heard David Bowie played Tesla in that movie? Nice? Yeah,
very cool. Did he do a good job like Labyrinth
quality job? Oh? Better? I thought so? All right, but um,
just a little sidebar if you're interested in that kind
of thing. Um. But yeah, you know, after reading this
(07:16):
and then finding out that Tesla actually may have sort
of invented the radio, even though Marconi gets credit for that,
there's a lot of things that Tesla did. He's sort
of the unsung inventor when you kind of look at
all these little things. Yeah, and again, like you made
the point, I think you have to be a really
good self promoter time as much an innovator, Especially if
you are an innovator, you need to be a self promoter.
(07:37):
You get lost out in the in the annals of history,
especially back then. Right, So, Chuck, let's talk about this.
She said that he came to the States from Austria
at the age of twenty eight and filed some really
important patents early on. Uh and they were for his
alternating current system. Right. Here's the huge advantage of alternating current.
We were talking about how d C is a constant,
(08:00):
steady output of electricity. Uh. An alternating current is all
over the place, but it's still it's also a steady
output of power. The thing is is because the because
DC doesn't alternate, UH, it loses a lot of energy
to heat and so it's not good for transporting it
long distances. Right, So Tesla came up with these, uh,
these patents for the generation of an alternating current and
(08:24):
a transformer. Right, you've heard of these and you probably
don't know what they are. Well, here this is the
key to alternating current. Absolutely. What what you do is
you generate this electricity and you run it through a
transformer and with very little power loss. Right, you can
step it up to a tremendous voltage. We'll step it
down in this case. Well, no, you step it up
(08:45):
first for a long distance travel, so you're using you're
using less power to generate it, right, But then you
run it through this transformer and all of a sudden,
say a thousand volts goes to like five hundred thousand volts.
So you can shoot that thing amazingly long distances, uh,
without losing very much of the electricity involved in it.
(09:06):
And then when it gets to say a neighborhood, after
passing through you know, the desert or nowhere very dangerously,
when it gets to a neighborhood, it goes through another
transformer and then it gets stepped down. That's what I
was thinking about. And so since you've lost very little
and it's being stepped down easily without much powerless to
this transformer, you can supply tons of homes with a
(09:28):
single line like a d volts I think is what
you end up using out of let's say a million volts.
It's on the line right sure, And it can also
be when it's stepped up voltage wise, it can be
stepped down or it is inevitably stepped down in amplitude,
which means that it requires less of a physically smaller
(09:49):
line of copper, which also says on costs because you know,
you remember when the economic fallout was going on and
people are steeling copper out of other people's cars and
air conditioners because it was valuable. It's expensive stuff, especially
if you're talking about creating the infrastructure of an entire country.
So Tesla comes up with these patents and uh, pretty
(10:10):
much right then, and there changes everything again except for
the self promotion part, right right, he did, But he
did his best work when he was able to hook
up with people that were very good businessman. Who did
you back him? Who did he hook up with? That
really changed everything? So Josh, you're talking about George Westinghouse yes,
And I know you've heard of the Westinghouse company, which
is probably means he did a pretty good job if
(10:31):
you still know that name. Uh. He had an electric company,
George did, and it was struggling to work out some
details of a successful A C system, And then he
heard about this famous lecture that Tesla gave in so
he said, you know, we should get this guy. And
Tesla had a couple of financial backers named Peck and Brown,
so they approached Westinghouse about commercializing Tesla's work. And at
(10:56):
the time he said, all right, sounds like a great idea.
I'm gonna give you guys rand and cash and another
fifty thousand in notes, and some royalties for the electricity
that we create, right well, two and fifty cents for
every horsepower that was sold through his invention by Westinghouse. Well,
I have a little modern conversion for you. Let's hear
(11:19):
that seventy five dollars back then would be one point
eight million dollars today. Holy count. And that's not even
counting the royalties. So this is a lot of dough,
it is. So thankfully, with Peck and Brown's help hooked
him up with Westinghouse. Now Tesla has a viable situation
going on here, and you can actually compete with Edison,
(11:39):
his nemesis. He worked for Edison. He did that was awesome.
He he went and worked for Edison. And there's a
there's legend that he went to Edison and said, look,
I've got this alternating current ideas together and Edison did
not want to hear it. Yeah, he was very, like
you said, very stubborn. He was like, no DC, buddy,
go make the DC better, which he you know, he
worked on that, right. So actually, yeah, the the apparently
(12:03):
Tesla eventually got um so tired of Edison and his
um mule headedness. Uh that he just said, you know what,
I'm going off on my own. And I think that's
when he started digging ditches, right, That's when he struggled
before he eventually hooked up with Peck and Brown to
give him some backing. Right, So that brings us back
up to the current time. Well not current is in now,
(12:24):
but current back then and uh, they he battled. You know,
Tesla sounds kind of a little stubborn guy too. Exeused
to battle with the Westinghouse guys on the best way
to do this and eventually they settled on what we
said before, which is a three phase sixty cycle current
that we still used today. And you talked about that
lecture that attracted um, some adherence to TESLA, including Westinghouse, right, Yeah, uh,
(12:50):
well it's he started to get more and more publicity
just because he had such a good idea despite his
terrible self promotion, right and showmanship was lot of that involved.
He his idea was so good and it was just
so clearly superior to d C in the minds of
some people that um, he couldn't help but get publicity.
(13:11):
So as this started to develop, Uh, Edison engaged in
an all out public war. Well, he got a little nervous,
which is why he engaged in the war. In when
this thing was kind of picking up steam and they
were getting the sixty cycle thing worked out, That's when
Edison was like, So, what Edison decided to do was
to proved everybody the alternating current is just dangerous. Yeah,
(13:32):
that was his main focus, and he did sope by
performing publicly executions on dogs, horses, and eventually he crescendoed
by electrocuting to death an elephant named Topsy in public.
He did that's pretty funny. There's nothing funnier than publicly
(13:55):
electrocuting an elephant. Right, but um it gets it turns
a little grim. All right? Have you heard of William Kemmler? Well,
I thought it was already Graham. But did you you
got it tough enough, Nancy um Way. William Kemler was
a convicted acts murderer. I looked him up, actually as
a convicted hatchet murderer, um who killed his girlfriend and
(14:18):
then very calmly went next door and said, I just
killed my girlfriend. But a boom about it being not
much of a trial. Later he was sentenced to death.
The thing about Kemmler was he was a going to
be the first person in New York and, as far
as I can tell, the first person in the United
States who would be electrocuted to death rather than hung.
This is news to me. They I did some extra research.
(14:41):
I heard electrocution. I'm like, oh, I gotta look more
into this. Um. So Kemmler is going to be the
first person in the electric chair, and he has on
August six, ninety has this date with destiny and um
Tesla's invention. Apparently they hadn't decided which way to go.
Should it be decent, he should be a C. And
this guy who also used to publicly electrocute animals on
(15:04):
behalf of Edison, managed to finagle a used old Westinghouse
a C generator uh to be used to get rid
of Kembler. And the execution was very public and it
was very horrible. Apparently there were twenty five witnesses. Most
of them vomited. At least one fainted. I think one
(15:27):
of the physicians that were attending that was attending to
the guy ran out of the room couldn't watch. They
put two thousand volts of juice to the guy for
I think like ten twelve seconds. He just turned totally rigid,
apparently punctured his finger with his fingernails. It was bad, right,
And then they stopped and the doctors went over and
(15:50):
looked at him, and he started breathing again, and they
shouted to throw the juice back on, and they had
to kill this guy because he was obviously in excruciating pain.
So he did it again, and they left it on
for a minute, and apparently the generator didn't stop generating
more and more voltage, so they have no idea how
much they passed through this guy apparently sweat came out
(16:11):
of his pores or um, blood came out of his
pores like sweat. Uh. He started to burn and then finally,
after a minute they turned it off. The long shot
of this is that it came out that this was
an a c generator I'll be an old beat up
one that shouldn't have been used in the first place.
And William Kemmler was a an actual casualty, very brutal
(16:31):
casualty in the war between Edison and um Tesla. Well,
he should have thought about that before he took the
hatchet to the co frience. You know, I'll bet he
would have thought twice had he known what his fate
was going to be. This would have had the opposite
effect on me. Edison was saying, look how dangerous this is.
If I would have seen that, I always said, Wow,
that's the electricity that I want supplying power to my house,
(16:51):
the kind that makes blood come out of your ports. Yeah,
because I mean, if you can do that, I can
probably you know, light up your room. Right. Well, it's
certainly lit up William Kemmler. So during the public war,
a very public war. Now Edison is uh is sweating
it and then in uh Westinghouse won the bid to
light up the Chicago World's Fair, which was the Colombian Exposition,
(17:13):
a big, big deal and a big blow to Edison.
He did, and you know how we how we won
the bid. He under key undercut g E had put
in a bid for a million dollars, which if seventy
five thousand was one point eight million, imagine how much
a million dollars was back then. That was ge s
bid And by this time ge he G had assumed
um Edison's company, Edison General Electric I think is what
(17:37):
it was called, so he was with G. Now they
put in a million dollar bid. Most of it was
to cover the copper wire because remember to get copper
to get electricity over long distances using d C, the
copper wire has to be big. You have to keep
the amps up to keep the voltage up, so you
lose less up the far end. Right. So just by
using less copper that alone, Um Wessing else was able
(18:00):
to put in a bit of half a million, undercut
him by half. So they got the rights of the
Colombian Exposition, which was big. This was the turning point
right here, Yeah, I mean the rest literally, as they say,
is history because that uh, you know, Grover Cleveland flipped
the switch and a hundred thousand lightbulbs lit up, and
everyone said, boy, a C might be the way to
go here. That was it. Yeah, it was cheaper, it worked,
(18:23):
and also apparently all over the fair were Tesla's inventions
on display. So I think twenty seven million people visited
the Chicago World's Fair that year, and every single one
of them got to witness alternating current, which ultimately won.
And even without the World's Fair, I mean that really
punctuated it. But just because it was efficient and economical,
(18:44):
I mean, do you know how much you pay for
a kilowatt hour of electricity? Now? Not much, No, it's
like ten cents tops uh and there's no telling how
much it would be with DC uh plus. Also I
was thinking about this, it's you could make the argument
that uh, Tesla has saved tons of lives from electrical
(19:05):
accidents that never took place, because if you have DC,
you're not using transformers, you're not stepping it up or down. Yeah,
that's a lot of heat and you can't just send
five thousand volts into your electrical outlet, you know how
many people die. If we've just gone with d C,
it would have never happened. Maybe maybe not, would have
never happened. So a few years after that, Westinghouse built
(19:26):
a hydro electric plant at Niagara Falls, and all of
a sudden, buffalo had power. And then that when in
New York, New York City were just showing off by
this time, Yeah, and then dude, it was all over.
But don't don't feel too bad for Edison, because we
still use d C. We use both. We use DC
in car batteries and uh, locomotives, some types of motors
(19:47):
use d C, so it's not I would call those
consolation prizes. Yeah, sort of the booby prize. And you
put a C in DC together and you have one
of the best rock bands in history. So, Chuck Um,
you want to talk a little more about Tesla. Did
you know that he also had a vision He never
managed to do it, but he had a vision of
um wireless. Yeah, the wireless that we enjoyed now he
(20:10):
was thinking about in like eighteen ninety. Yeah, Josh, he
he met with JP Morgan, who was, as you know,
one of the most powerful men on earth at the time,
and uh, he said basically envision a world system of
wireless communications to relate telephone messages across the ocean. Not
just telephone, I think music as well, broadcast news, music
and stock market reports and private messages, exactly what we're
(20:32):
doing now. Tesla, Yeah, he was where it's at. Sure,
he he basically just didn't have enough money. I think
he he probably could have done it had he had
enough money. He was working on a tower, and uh,
it was very clear that he needed a lot more
than the hundred and fifty thousand. Morgan kicked him, and
Morgan kind of lost interest. And it was Marconi actually
(20:53):
who put the nail in that wireless coffin, because he
came up with the telegraph. It's like telegraph and the radio,
which we already said. Tesla kind of did a lot
of work on the radio too. Yeah, Apparently Tesla pointed
out that um marc Coni used no less than fifteen
um Tesla patents to create that wireless transmission of the
s that made him so famous. Right. My impression of
(21:16):
Tesla is, uh that he was just this uber genius
who was so much into his own genius work that
he didn't understand that it required self promotion and business
savvy and showmanship. And he didn't care about that stuff.
So that's why he died alone in New York, said stuff, Chuck.
(21:38):
It is not quite as sad as the fate of
Topsy the Elephant or William Kemmler, but still very sad.
So yeah, that was our awkward walk through the life
of Nikola Tesla. Did we ever say, um, well, yeah
he went out. Well I guess we implied it. But
yet today, even still the power stations that generate power
(21:58):
do them on the sixty cycle process. But everyone, if
you ask your comment person on the street who invented electricity,
they would say, oh, Edison. And did you also know
that the light bulbs, the incandescent light bulbs that he created,
were inefficient? I know, I know what a heck? Al right,
so that's a Tesla and Edison can rock? We have
(22:20):
speaking of rock, the band Tesla rock. If we really
didn't want to go there, remember them? Yeah they didn't rose? Okay,
so Chuck, we just did that. Do you think it's
time for a listener mail? Please? God, yea, please, indeed,
thank you, So Josh, I'm just gonna call this dreamy
listener mail and it's another dream. And uh, just let
(22:42):
me tell folks, I'm not getting into this. Please don't
start sending me all your dreams, and certainly don't send
him in haikou form. But this is this is a
good one. This is sent to us from Ruth from England.
And Ruth was backpacking around the United States in two
thousand eight. Oh I know where Ruth changed close and
she said, can grats on your country, by the way,
which was kind of funny. We're very proud of it.
(23:03):
We're going to take your country as well. And she
actually came through Atlanta with her friends and she this
is kind of funny. She mistakenly thought they were going
to Atlantic City. And so if you happen to see
three very confused English girls in mid September carrying backpacks
looking for casinos, that was us. They ended up at
the video poker machines in the Big h G. Right,
(23:24):
we should introduce Ruth to the Internet, where she could
have found out that she was about a thousand miles
off course. So Ruth writes in and says, uh, she
had this dream when she was in her mid twenties,
and here it is. Um I was a woman in
my mid twenties with a very maternal and passive attitude
on the holiday on some kind of island resort as
a dream war on the atmosphere, and this resort began
(23:46):
to change. The reps became increasingly belligerent and some of
the holiday goers became edgy. Then followed a very detailed
and structured experience of the island becoming a prison state.
Apparent to my mind is a microcosm of an apoca
liptic world. She became involved in a secret resistance movement
led by a group of African Americans and they were
(24:07):
There were many interpersonal stories which I won't bore you
with now, so she wrote it down in her travel diary.
This is where it gets interested. She wrote it down
in her diary and she told about you know, told
this to a lot of different people because it's such
a cool dream over the years, and when she returned
to England, I guess over her travels. She returned to England,
she picked up a newspaper, flipped to the art section
(24:28):
and there was a Books of the Past column space
devoted to rediscovering books that have gone out of publication,
and there was an exact synopsis of her dream, So
she jumped about a book she'd read before. Now she
had never read it. She uh, this was the book
was written by an Australian woman eighty years ago, was
out of publication for decades. It was not even popular
(24:49):
at a time, and she had never read it. So
she dreamt about an eighty year old, unpopular novel she
had never read. Pretty cool. It was pretty cool. So
that is from Ruth. She says. You don't have to
read this out, but it's a little late for that, Ruth.
We did anyway. And what you're talking about with her
changing clothes, she says that when she went to the
Atlanta aquarium, she said, please say thank you to the
troop of schoolgirls who had to see us wash, brush
(25:12):
our teeth and change our clothes in the bathroom and
the aquariums. So Ruth thinks that Atlanta's Atlantic City, Chuck
and I founded America, and that we know the girl
scouts that saw her change in the bathroom, right, And
I like yeah, And that guess she's possessed by the
some eighty year old off demon of an eighty year
old listroain rights. Ruth, hats off to you if you're
ever in town again. Look us up, we'll go out
(25:34):
and get a plank together. You're buying Ruth If you
want to buy Chucking Me a pint. Yeah, you can
send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want
(25:55):
more house stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. H brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant, Chuck, Chuck. That's going.
(00:22):
You can just call me Nikola really okay? How about
your Chuck? Yes, all right, Chuck? Good God, I'm good.
I'm good. I'm I'm much better than how you asked
me twenty nights ago when I'm recorded, Yes podcast, No,
that was that was two days three two days from
now right. Yeah, it's magic. It is magic. We'll have
(00:44):
to reveal our secret one day like some sort of
we could dress up like Siegfried and Roy I get
there and tell everybody. Yeah, okay, I owe it to Jerry.
Jerry is always just the white Tiger. Yeah, yeah, nice
and Jerry. Chuck. I have a trivia question for you, beautiful, Okay,
hit me. Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers named the
(01:08):
Los Angeles Dodgers? Okay, Chuck, I know the answer. Do
you want me to say? What do you want to say?
I want you to say. I just asked you a
question because when they were in Brooklyn the original spot.
There were a lot of train trolley cars in Brooklyn
at the time that had really dangerous electrical wiring that
operated them, and people would dodge these electrical lines and
(01:31):
these train cars, and so they called them the Brooklyn
Trolley Dodgers initially, and then that shortened to the Brooklyn Dodgers,
and then they o' mount the O'Malley family broke the
hearts of Brooklyn and moved them too. L A, I
can't believe that still, I know who does that? H
Did you see a documentary HBO about the Brooklyn Dodgers
so good? No, it was it. Yeah, I mean there
(01:51):
are people in Brooklyn today that have not watched the
baseball game since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved their their hearts
were broken so badly. Yeah wow, and uh wow, rip
the heart out of Brooklyn. But actually it wasn't. People
might right in and there's been some follow up and
O'Malley really tried as hardest to keep the team there,
and there were some politics involved that greedy Sandy kofax Y. Yeah,
(02:13):
but off topic a little bit, but not really not really,
because you can make a case that it was um
Thomas Alva Edison, who gave the Brooklyn Dodgers their name.
Bring it Home, Baby, Okay, I will so. By the
time the Dodgers were formed in the eighteen eighties, right, um,
Edison had basically lit up parts of New York with
(02:37):
his incandescent light bulb. Big, big innovation. It was huge, man.
I mean imagine going from like gaslight to electricity. Yeah,
I mean I bet it blew people's minds back then.
I imagine so, especially when they touched one of those
trolley lines. Sure so, okay. Edison was a visionary, a genius,
(02:58):
one can make the case um, and an innovator, and
he came up with what we know of as the
modern harnessing of electricity, which I should probably point out
electricity is not energy, it's an energy carrier. Direct current
is what he was his big thing, right. Direct current
is basically it is, well not basically, it's where electricity.
(03:20):
The electric charge is constant. It never changes. So if
you look directional, it is, and if you look at
it it's like a line. It's just a straight line.
And Edison was pretty happy with his direct current inventions.
The problem is is that you lose a lot of
it to waste heat over long distances. Yeah. Well basically
(03:41):
you can't really transport it over super long distances they
found out, right, Okay, So that was kind of the
drawback to it. Other than that it was enormous. He
lit up New York and arguably created um what we
know of today is light. Right, But there was another
way of looking at things, and that is the alternating current.
(04:04):
So Edison was super, super super married to direct current.
He just saw it. I think I read a quote
of a river flowing gently to the sea. That's how
we characterized direct current. That will kill you if you
touch it, yeah, big time. Uh. And alternating current is
if you instead of that straight line of a charge
um or flow of electricity from one pole to the other,
(04:27):
I think negative, depositive, all always. Alternating current looks like
a sign wave, right, So it has a wavelength and
it actually goes back and forth from one pole to another,
which is why it's called alternating. And these days it
does so at about sixty cycles per second, so it
changes direction sixty times in a second, and it's very
(04:47):
steady and reliable. And actually in those days too, I
think it's the same yeah, which is one of the
cool things. Right. So here's the thing we're talking about
electricity here. I think a lot of people overlook is
that Edison was also quite a showman and great businessman,
very very much so, as much as much of a
(05:07):
great businessman as a genius, right, But he was also
very stubborn, and he didn't he didn't he didn't think
there was any way to improve or any need to
improve upon direct current. There's another guy whose name people
might be familiar with. His name is Nicola Tesla. Not
a great businessman, in fact, a very poor businessman. Evidently
he was. Actually he spent some time after he became
(05:28):
a great inventor digging ditches just to try to make
ends meet. Apparently he didn't. He did file for a
lot of patents, but apparently he didn't do that nearly
enough because a lot of his stuff was kind of
stolen and kind of you know, nicked from. So, Chuck,
we've got Edison on one side with d C, and
we have Tesla on the other side with a C.
(05:50):
That sounds like, you know, a couple of a couple
of nerds going at it, but really these two guys
engaged in this very very public rumble and based gleet
stake was the infrastructure of the United States and the
in the world exactly, this huge, huge, massive um competition. Sure,
(06:14):
that just took place, and there was some crazy stuff
that went that that came out of it, Lots of electrocutions,
lots of nefariousness, And we're not going to tell you
who won yet because a lot of people don't necessarily
know what kind of electricity we use more than the
other d C or a C. So we're just gonna
pay this out. Baby. This is just interesting. So yeah,
(06:34):
Nicola Tesla he was Austrian born and uh he arrived
in the United States in four when he was just
a young lad of twenty eight and a merror. Three
years later, after being in the United States, he filed
for a series of patents that basically outlined what you
would need to make the alternating current work. So he
(06:55):
made pretty quick work when he came over here to
the States, right he did. Did you ever see the
Prestige movie? I've heard David Bowie played Tesla in that movie? Nice? Yeah,
very cool. Did he do a good job like Labyrinth
quality job? Oh? Better? I thought so? All right, but um,
just a little sidebar if you're interested in that kind
of thing. Um. But yeah, you know, after reading this
(07:16):
and then finding out that Tesla actually may have sort
of invented the radio, even though Marconi gets credit for that,
there's a lot of things that Tesla did. He's sort
of the unsung inventor when you kind of look at
all these little things. Yeah, and again, like you made
the point, I think you have to be a really
good self promoter time as much an innovator, Especially if
you are an innovator, you need to be a self promoter.
(07:37):
You get lost out in the in the annals of history,
especially back then. Right, So, Chuck, let's talk about this.
She said that he came to the States from Austria
at the age of twenty eight and filed some really
important patents early on. Uh and they were for his
alternating current system. Right. Here's the huge advantage of alternating current.
We were talking about how d C is a constant,
(08:00):
steady output of electricity. Uh. An alternating current is all
over the place, but it's still it's also a steady
output of power. The thing is is because the because
DC doesn't alternate, UH, it loses a lot of energy
to heat and so it's not good for transporting it
long distances. Right, So Tesla came up with these, uh,
these patents for the generation of an alternating current and
(08:24):
a transformer. Right, you've heard of these and you probably
don't know what they are. Well, here this is the
key to alternating current. Absolutely. What what you do is
you generate this electricity and you run it through a
transformer and with very little power loss. Right, you can
step it up to a tremendous voltage. We'll step it
down in this case. Well, no, you step it up
(08:45):
first for a long distance travel, so you're using you're
using less power to generate it, right, But then you
run it through this transformer and all of a sudden,
say a thousand volts goes to like five hundred thousand volts.
So you can shoot that thing amazingly long distances, uh,
without losing very much of the electricity involved in it.
(09:06):
And then when it gets to say a neighborhood, after
passing through you know, the desert or nowhere very dangerously,
when it gets to a neighborhood, it goes through another
transformer and then it gets stepped down. That's what I
was thinking about. And so since you've lost very little
and it's being stepped down easily without much powerless to
this transformer, you can supply tons of homes with a
(09:28):
single line like a d volts I think is what
you end up using out of let's say a million volts.
It's on the line right sure, And it can also
be when it's stepped up voltage wise, it can be
stepped down or it is inevitably stepped down in amplitude,
which means that it requires less of a physically smaller
(09:49):
line of copper, which also says on costs because you know,
you remember when the economic fallout was going on and
people are steeling copper out of other people's cars and
air conditioners because it was valuable. It's expensive stuff, especially
if you're talking about creating the infrastructure of an entire country.
So Tesla comes up with these patents and uh, pretty
(10:10):
much right then, and there changes everything again except for
the self promotion part, right right, he did, But he
did his best work when he was able to hook
up with people that were very good businessman. Who did
you back him? Who did he hook up with? That
really changed everything? So Josh, you're talking about George Westinghouse yes,
And I know you've heard of the Westinghouse company, which
is probably means he did a pretty good job if
(10:31):
you still know that name. Uh. He had an electric company,
George did, and it was struggling to work out some
details of a successful A C system, And then he
heard about this famous lecture that Tesla gave in so
he said, you know, we should get this guy. And
Tesla had a couple of financial backers named Peck and Brown,
so they approached Westinghouse about commercializing Tesla's work. And at
(10:56):
the time he said, all right, sounds like a great idea.
I'm gonna give you guys rand and cash and another
fifty thousand in notes, and some royalties for the electricity
that we create, right well, two and fifty cents for
every horsepower that was sold through his invention by Westinghouse. Well,
I have a little modern conversion for you. Let's hear
(11:19):
that seventy five dollars back then would be one point
eight million dollars today. Holy count. And that's not even
counting the royalties. So this is a lot of dough,
it is. So thankfully, with Peck and Brown's help hooked
him up with Westinghouse. Now Tesla has a viable situation
going on here, and you can actually compete with Edison,
(11:39):
his nemesis. He worked for Edison. He did that was awesome.
He he went and worked for Edison. And there's a
there's legend that he went to Edison and said, look,
I've got this alternating current ideas together and Edison did
not want to hear it. Yeah, he was very, like
you said, very stubborn. He was like, no DC, buddy,
go make the DC better, which he you know, he
worked on that, right. So actually, yeah, the the apparently
(12:03):
Tesla eventually got um so tired of Edison and his
um mule headedness. Uh that he just said, you know what,
I'm going off on my own. And I think that's
when he started digging ditches, right, That's when he struggled
before he eventually hooked up with Peck and Brown to
give him some backing. Right, So that brings us back
up to the current time. Well not current is in now,
(12:24):
but current back then and uh, they he battled. You know,
Tesla sounds kind of a little stubborn guy too. Exeused
to battle with the Westinghouse guys on the best way
to do this and eventually they settled on what we
said before, which is a three phase sixty cycle current
that we still used today. And you talked about that
lecture that attracted um, some adherence to TESLA, including Westinghouse, right, Yeah, uh,
(12:50):
well it's he started to get more and more publicity
just because he had such a good idea despite his
terrible self promotion, right and showmanship was lot of that involved.
He his idea was so good and it was just
so clearly superior to d C in the minds of
some people that um, he couldn't help but get publicity.
(13:11):
So as this started to develop, Uh, Edison engaged in
an all out public war. Well, he got a little nervous,
which is why he engaged in the war. In when
this thing was kind of picking up steam and they
were getting the sixty cycle thing worked out, That's when
Edison was like, So, what Edison decided to do was
to proved everybody the alternating current is just dangerous. Yeah,
(13:32):
that was his main focus, and he did sope by
performing publicly executions on dogs, horses, and eventually he crescendoed
by electrocuting to death an elephant named Topsy in public.
He did that's pretty funny. There's nothing funnier than publicly
(13:55):
electrocuting an elephant. Right, but um it gets it turns
a little grim. All right? Have you heard of William Kemmler? Well,
I thought it was already Graham. But did you you
got it tough enough, Nancy um Way. William Kemler was
a convicted acts murderer. I looked him up, actually as
a convicted hatchet murderer, um who killed his girlfriend and
(14:18):
then very calmly went next door and said, I just
killed my girlfriend. But a boom about it being not
much of a trial. Later he was sentenced to death.
The thing about Kemmler was he was a going to
be the first person in New York and, as far
as I can tell, the first person in the United
States who would be electrocuted to death rather than hung.
This is news to me. They I did some extra research.
(14:41):
I heard electrocution. I'm like, oh, I gotta look more
into this. Um. So Kemmler is going to be the
first person in the electric chair, and he has on
August six, ninety has this date with destiny and um
Tesla's invention. Apparently they hadn't decided which way to go.
Should it be decent, he should be a C. And
this guy who also used to publicly electrocute animals on
(15:04):
behalf of Edison, managed to finagle a used old Westinghouse
a C generator uh to be used to get rid
of Kembler. And the execution was very public and it
was very horrible. Apparently there were twenty five witnesses. Most
of them vomited. At least one fainted. I think one
(15:27):
of the physicians that were attending that was attending to
the guy ran out of the room couldn't watch. They
put two thousand volts of juice to the guy for
I think like ten twelve seconds. He just turned totally rigid,
apparently punctured his finger with his fingernails. It was bad, right,
And then they stopped and the doctors went over and
(15:50):
looked at him, and he started breathing again, and they
shouted to throw the juice back on, and they had
to kill this guy because he was obviously in excruciating pain.
So he did it again, and they left it on
for a minute, and apparently the generator didn't stop generating
more and more voltage, so they have no idea how
much they passed through this guy apparently sweat came out
(16:11):
of his pores or um, blood came out of his
pores like sweat. Uh. He started to burn and then finally,
after a minute they turned it off. The long shot
of this is that it came out that this was
an a c generator I'll be an old beat up
one that shouldn't have been used in the first place.
And William Kemmler was a an actual casualty, very brutal
(16:31):
casualty in the war between Edison and um Tesla. Well,
he should have thought about that before he took the
hatchet to the co frience. You know, I'll bet he
would have thought twice had he known what his fate
was going to be. This would have had the opposite
effect on me. Edison was saying, look how dangerous this is.
If I would have seen that, I always said, Wow,
that's the electricity that I want supplying power to my house,
(16:51):
the kind that makes blood come out of your ports. Yeah,
because I mean, if you can do that, I can
probably you know, light up your room. Right. Well, it's
certainly lit up William Kemmler. So during the public war,
a very public war. Now Edison is uh is sweating
it and then in uh Westinghouse won the bid to
light up the Chicago World's Fair, which was the Colombian Exposition,
(17:13):
a big, big deal and a big blow to Edison.
He did, and you know how we how we won
the bid. He under key undercut g E had put
in a bid for a million dollars, which if seventy
five thousand was one point eight million, imagine how much
a million dollars was back then. That was ge s
bid And by this time ge he G had assumed
um Edison's company, Edison General Electric I think is what
(17:37):
it was called, so he was with G. Now they
put in a million dollar bid. Most of it was
to cover the copper wire because remember to get copper
to get electricity over long distances using d C, the
copper wire has to be big. You have to keep
the amps up to keep the voltage up, so you
lose less up the far end. Right. So just by
using less copper that alone, Um Wessing else was able
(18:00):
to put in a bit of half a million, undercut
him by half. So they got the rights of the
Colombian Exposition, which was big. This was the turning point
right here, Yeah, I mean the rest literally, as they say,
is history because that uh, you know, Grover Cleveland flipped
the switch and a hundred thousand lightbulbs lit up, and
everyone said, boy, a C might be the way to
go here. That was it. Yeah, it was cheaper, it worked,
(18:23):
and also apparently all over the fair were Tesla's inventions
on display. So I think twenty seven million people visited
the Chicago World's Fair that year, and every single one
of them got to witness alternating current, which ultimately won.
And even without the World's Fair, I mean that really
punctuated it. But just because it was efficient and economical,
(18:44):
I mean, do you know how much you pay for
a kilowatt hour of electricity? Now? Not much, No, it's
like ten cents tops uh and there's no telling how
much it would be with DC uh plus. Also I
was thinking about this, it's you could make the argument
that uh, Tesla has saved tons of lives from electrical
(19:05):
accidents that never took place, because if you have DC,
you're not using transformers, you're not stepping it up or down. Yeah,
that's a lot of heat and you can't just send
five thousand volts into your electrical outlet, you know how
many people die. If we've just gone with d C,
it would have never happened. Maybe maybe not, would have
never happened. So a few years after that, Westinghouse built
(19:26):
a hydro electric plant at Niagara Falls, and all of
a sudden, buffalo had power. And then that when in
New York, New York City were just showing off by
this time, Yeah, and then dude, it was all over.
But don't don't feel too bad for Edison, because we
still use d C. We use both. We use DC
in car batteries and uh, locomotives, some types of motors
(19:47):
use d C, so it's not I would call those
consolation prizes. Yeah, sort of the booby prize. And you
put a C in DC together and you have one
of the best rock bands in history. So, Chuck Um,
you want to talk a little more about Tesla. Did
you know that he also had a vision He never
managed to do it, but he had a vision of
um wireless. Yeah, the wireless that we enjoyed now he
(20:10):
was thinking about in like eighteen ninety. Yeah, Josh, he
he met with JP Morgan, who was, as you know,
one of the most powerful men on earth at the time,
and uh, he said basically envision a world system of
wireless communications to relate telephone messages across the ocean. Not
just telephone, I think music as well, broadcast news, music
and stock market reports and private messages, exactly what we're
(20:32):
doing now. Tesla, Yeah, he was where it's at. Sure,
he he basically just didn't have enough money. I think
he he probably could have done it had he had
enough money. He was working on a tower, and uh,
it was very clear that he needed a lot more
than the hundred and fifty thousand. Morgan kicked him, and
Morgan kind of lost interest. And it was Marconi actually
(20:53):
who put the nail in that wireless coffin, because he
came up with the telegraph. It's like telegraph and the radio,
which we already said. Tesla kind of did a lot
of work on the radio too. Yeah, Apparently Tesla pointed
out that um marc Coni used no less than fifteen
um Tesla patents to create that wireless transmission of the
s that made him so famous. Right. My impression of
(21:16):
Tesla is, uh that he was just this uber genius
who was so much into his own genius work that
he didn't understand that it required self promotion and business
savvy and showmanship. And he didn't care about that stuff.
So that's why he died alone in New York, said stuff, Chuck.
(21:38):
It is not quite as sad as the fate of
Topsy the Elephant or William Kemmler, but still very sad.
So yeah, that was our awkward walk through the life
of Nikola Tesla. Did we ever say, um, well, yeah
he went out. Well I guess we implied it. But
yet today, even still the power stations that generate power
(21:58):
do them on the sixty cycle process. But everyone, if
you ask your comment person on the street who invented electricity,
they would say, oh, Edison. And did you also know
that the light bulbs, the incandescent light bulbs that he created,
were inefficient? I know, I know what a heck? Al right,
so that's a Tesla and Edison can rock? We have
(22:20):
speaking of rock, the band Tesla rock. If we really
didn't want to go there, remember them? Yeah they didn't rose? Okay,
so Chuck, we just did that. Do you think it's
time for a listener mail? Please? God, yea, please, indeed,
thank you, So Josh, I'm just gonna call this dreamy
listener mail and it's another dream. And uh, just let
(22:42):
me tell folks, I'm not getting into this. Please don't
start sending me all your dreams, and certainly don't send
him in haikou form. But this is this is a
good one. This is sent to us from Ruth from England.
And Ruth was backpacking around the United States in two
thousand eight. Oh I know where Ruth changed close and
she said, can grats on your country, by the way,
which was kind of funny. We're very proud of it.
(23:03):
We're going to take your country as well. And she
actually came through Atlanta with her friends and she this
is kind of funny. She mistakenly thought they were going
to Atlantic City. And so if you happen to see
three very confused English girls in mid September carrying backpacks
looking for casinos, that was us. They ended up at
the video poker machines in the Big h G. Right,
(23:24):
we should introduce Ruth to the Internet, where she could
have found out that she was about a thousand miles
off course. So Ruth writes in and says, uh, she
had this dream when she was in her mid twenties,
and here it is. Um I was a woman in
my mid twenties with a very maternal and passive attitude
on the holiday on some kind of island resort as
a dream war on the atmosphere, and this resort began
(23:46):
to change. The reps became increasingly belligerent and some of
the holiday goers became edgy. Then followed a very detailed
and structured experience of the island becoming a prison state.
Apparent to my mind is a microcosm of an apoca
liptic world. She became involved in a secret resistance movement
led by a group of African Americans and they were
(24:07):
There were many interpersonal stories which I won't bore you
with now, so she wrote it down in her travel diary.
This is where it gets interested. She wrote it down
in her diary and she told about you know, told
this to a lot of different people because it's such
a cool dream over the years, and when she returned
to England, I guess over her travels. She returned to England,
she picked up a newspaper, flipped to the art section
(24:28):
and there was a Books of the Past column space
devoted to rediscovering books that have gone out of publication,
and there was an exact synopsis of her dream, So
she jumped about a book she'd read before. Now she
had never read it. She uh, this was the book
was written by an Australian woman eighty years ago, was
out of publication for decades. It was not even popular
(24:49):
at a time, and she had never read it. So
she dreamt about an eighty year old, unpopular novel she
had never read. Pretty cool. It was pretty cool. So
that is from Ruth. She says. You don't have to
read this out, but it's a little late for that, Ruth.
We did anyway. And what you're talking about with her
changing clothes, she says that when she went to the
Atlanta aquarium, she said, please say thank you to the
troop of schoolgirls who had to see us wash, brush
(25:12):
our teeth and change our clothes in the bathroom and
the aquariums. So Ruth thinks that Atlanta's Atlantic City, Chuck
and I founded America, and that we know the girl
scouts that saw her change in the bathroom, right, And
I like yeah, And that guess she's possessed by the
some eighty year old off demon of an eighty year
old listroain rights. Ruth, hats off to you if you're
ever in town again. Look us up, we'll go out
(25:34):
and get a plank together. You're buying Ruth If you
want to buy Chucking Me a pint. Yeah, you can
send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want
(25:55):
more house stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. H brought to
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