February 6, 2013 • 27 mins
By 1887, Nikola Tesla secured seven patents for components of his alternating current system. In 1888, George Westinghouse offered to hire Tesla to develop the AC system, and that's when the Current War really got underway.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from house
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bling the Druk reboarding and I'm fared out, and
we're picking back up here again with our discussion of
one of our most requested subjects, Nicola Tesla, an engineer
(00:23):
and an inventor. Tesla's perhaps best known for creating a
system for delivering electricity using alternating current, a method that
is still used today. And we talked a little bit
about the difference between alternating current and direct current and
their advantages and disadvantages in part one of this podcast.
And Tesla's preferred alternating current was capable of distributing electricity
(00:45):
across greater distances than direct current, and he believed that
it had the potential to be used for more than
just lighting. But he had some trouble getting support, both
financial and otherwise for his ideas, at least at first. Yeah,
and so in the last episode we talked about how
he came to America, how he approached Edison, armed with
a recommendation letter from his old boss, Charles Bachelor. The
(01:07):
letter just said, quote, my dear Edison, I know two
great men, and you are one of them. The other
is this young man. It's a pretty great recommendation. Uh.
Even though Edison, who was a firm believer that direct
current was not the way to go, shot Tesla down
on his alternating current ideas on that front, he must
have agreed with Bachelor's assessment to some degree because he
(01:30):
did hire Tesla to work for his power company when
we left off with the story, though Tesla had quit
working for Edison after just a few months because of
their personal differences and a little disagreement over money. Tesla
wanted to strike out on his own at this point
and develop his own ideas, but when we saw him last,
his first attempt to do so hadn't worked out so well,
(01:51):
and he was stuck doing manual labor to survive. So
Tesla may have been down in the dumps, but he
stuck fast to his ideas about alternating current and kept
on trying to get financial backing to make them a reality,
And in eighteen eighty seven he did manage to attract
the attention of two investors, Alfred Brown of the Western
Union Company and Charles Peck, who was an attorney. But
(02:13):
according to that American Heritage article by Bernard Carlson that
we mentioned in the Laugh podcast. All Tesla had to
show them initially was this really crude version of the
motor he had designed back when he was in Europe,
and it was basically a shoe polished him that would
spin around in a big donut shaped coil. So Brown impact,
they come and look at this creation of of Tesla's
(02:36):
and they were kind of skeptical of the whole thing. Yeah,
So to make believers of them, Tesla devised a little
electrical spectacle which was based on an old legend about
Christopher Columbus. So, as the story goes, Columbus scott Queen
Isabella to finance his journey by challenging members of her
court to balance an egg on one end, And of
(02:56):
course several people tried and they couldn't do it. So
then Columbus up and he made the egg stand up
by gently cracking the shell on one end. Queen Isabella
was so impressed by his resourceful solution that she gave
him the funds that he needed. So Tesla asked Brown
and Peck, who knew of this legend, He said, if
I can make an egg stand on end without cracking
(03:17):
the shell will you support these experiments again? According to
Carlson's article, Peck basically said, yeah, we might. We might
help you to some extent. We might help you a
little bit if that were to happen. So Tesla came
back with a copper plated egg and his donut coil
attached to the underside of a wooden table. When Tesla
applied alternating current to that coil, the egg not only
(03:38):
stood on end, but it started spinning. Then it flipped
up and started rotating on its axis. I mean it
looks like a magic trick. So better than a shoe
polished tin. Right, much better than a shoe polished tin.
And Brown and Peck were so impressed that they agreed
to back his work. So with their help, Tesla was
able to set up a laboratory in Lower Manhattan and
(03:59):
perf all the components of his alternating current system, and
that same year he built the prototype for his polyphase
induction motor. And the problem with alternating current systems before
this had been that there wasn't really a workable motor
that alternating current could power. So Tesla's motor solved that
issue at least and then again with the help of
(04:20):
Peck and Brown. In late he was able to secure
seven more patents for a complete alternating current system based
on this induction motor, including patents for generators, transformers, transmission lines,
and lighting. So he had the whole set. Finally, there
was still that little detail of getting these breakthrough ideas
(04:43):
introduced commercially though. I mean, you have the technology, great,
you have the patents, that's great, but how are you
going to actually make money off of it? So that
process started to take off the next year after Tesla
demonstrated his alternating current motor at the meeting of the
American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and that demonstration caught the
(05:04):
eye of George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's company, which was based in Pittsburgh,
had successfully developed some safety components for rail transportation, including
the air brake, and by eight eight or so, he'd
become interested in getting in on the electricity transmission game.
According to the article by Ronald Bailey in American History,
which we referenced in the last podcast, Westinghouse had already
(05:26):
set up a limited alternating current system, but it was
confined to downtown Buffalo, New York, and he was attracted
to that potential of Tesla system to distribute power over
longer distances, so Westinghouse made a move. He offered to
buy Tesla's patents, and again Pack and Brown helped Tesla
negotiate this deal, and the deal is slightly different depending
(05:47):
on what stores you look at, but it basically amounted
to Westinghouse paying about sixty thousand to seventy thousand dollars
and anywhere from five thousand to twenty thousand dollars if
that was paid in cash. He also agreed to pay
Tesla two dollars and fifty cents in royalties for each
horsepower of developed electrical capacity, so according to Bailey's article,
(06:09):
Westinghouse also agreed to a minimum of thirty thousand in
royalties to be paid over the next three years, and
according to PBS dot Org, Tesla got one hundred fifty
years of Westinghouse stock in the deal, so there was
a lot covering um. I don't know depending on how
successful the implementation of the ideas was how much Tesla
(06:31):
would benefit from that. When the deal was done, Tesla
went off to work as a Westinghouse consultant and helped
develop the Alternating Current system for commercial use. So not
only did he get some money out of the deal
and potential for more money, but he also got to
still work with his invention Westinghouse engineers, though just as
an aside, a little side note here, they didn't really
(06:52):
love working with Tesla though. He didn't make real blueprints.
He just had these sketches that he made in a
tiny notebook and they were really hard to follow. And
Tesla himself said, well, I can just give you the
measurements and they will be exactly what you need to
build this. But as you might imagine, these engineers, yeah,
I mean interestingly, also, Tesla had always said that he
(07:17):
just created this induction motor from like as he had
envisioned it in Europe before he came to America, is
exactly how he built it. Like, he didn't develop it.
You might imagine this going through like many revisions and
many changes, but with a prototype or something, yes, exactly,
But he said that he just made it as soon
as he saw it in his mind. He knew that
(07:38):
that was like composers who say that they just heard
it in their head and wrote it down exactly. He
claimed that exactly as he saw it is how he
built it, and it was meant to work. But these engineers,
they also disagreed with Tesla over what the motors frequency
should be, but Tesla one out with the sixty cycles
per second, so Tesla had the final say in that regard.
(07:58):
But this was where the full on current war really
started to take off, and it was a battle between
Westinghouses alternating current and Edison's direct current. And what was
really at stake here was whose system was going to
become the standard and fuel the development of electricity in
the future. Edison, though, of course, had a bit of
an edge going in since he already had about one
(08:21):
power stations in operation compared to Westinghouses nine stations. But
as we've mentioned a few times, Testla's alternating current system
showed more promise for carrying electricity over long distances, whereas
Edison's direct current had a range of only about a mile,
so it seemed like it was going to have more
limited applications. Also, alternating current was a lot cheaper because
(08:43):
direct current required the use of these expensive copper wires,
and alternating current systems used copper as well, but only
about a third of the amount that direct current used,
so it looked like Westinghouse and alternating Current might provide
some serious competition for Edison, and Edison stepped up his
game at that point by starting a propaganda campaign against
(09:06):
alternating Current. He focused in this campaign on his own
belief that alternating current was unsafe, so he started to
spread around the idea that alternating current and its high
voltages could actually kill you. The most direct Current could do,
he said, was just give you a little shock. Edison
even hired a professor named Harold Brown to go around
(09:26):
and lecture on the dangers of alternating current, and these
talks included things like public electrocution of animals, including dogs, cats, horses,
and cows. Edison even had an elephant named Topsy electrocuted
once to previous point, We've had a tragic run for
elephant from the podcast between this and P. T. Barnum.
(09:46):
But Edison made his biggest point August six when Brown
helped New York's Auburn State Prison perform the first execution
by electric chair. And according to PBS, Brown had obtained
Westinghouse technolog illegally to build the chair. I mean, you
can imagine Westinghouse would not have wanted his work associated
with that. The man who was executed was the convicted
(10:09):
murderer William Kemmler. His death was described as quote an
awful spectacle, worse than hanging, and thereafter electrocution was known
as Westinghouse being through really bad pr for alternating current Yeah.
Despite these negative associations, though, team Westinghouse and Tesla started
to come up with some wins. They were picked to
(10:32):
illuminate the Chicago World's Fair, for example, which was also
of course known as the Columbian Exposition, something we discussed
a little in the H. H. Holmes podcast indeed, and
if you pick up Eric Larson's book Double in the
White City, you'll learn a little bit more about kind
of some of the things we're about to talk about.
But this was the first all electric World's Fair in history,
(10:54):
and Westinghouse has bid ended up winning out here just
because it was so much cheaper. It was about half
as much as the competition Shian And in Bailey's article
he talks about how the fair became this grand showcase
for alternating currents and electricity in general. So it turned
out to be a really good win for them, and
Tesla system lit up something like one D eighty thousand bulbs,
and it was used to power a lot of exhibits,
(11:17):
and there was even a great Hall of Electricity where
his system was displayed, and Tesla was even on display
to some degree. He did a demonstration in which he
sent two hundred thousand volts through his body while wearing
corks old shoes for protection. So don't get too worried,
but he sent these volts through his body to prove
basically that alternating current was indeed safe. And I can
(11:39):
see how that would be more compelling combined with the
glowing white city too, then seeing an elephant electrocuted or
somebody put in an electric chair, somebody surviving this, the
demonstrating it really is okay if it's handled properly. Yeah,
if you're willing to do it on yourself, then you
must have some faith in it. But after the fair
according to pb quote, of all the electrical devices ordered
(12:03):
in the United States were for alternating current, And this,
of course at the stage for another big win in
the current war, which was a contract with the Niagara
Falls Commission, and the mission wanted the Westinghouse Company to
use alternating current to harness the power of the falls
to generate electricity. And this was the realization of a
(12:25):
long time dream for Tesla. As we mentioned in part one,
he had started dreaming about converting the power of water
to electricity when he was only about five years old,
and he had specifically thought about Niagara Falls at some point.
And it did take several years to get the project completed,
which was a situation that made investors pretty nervous. But
on the night of November they flipped a switch and
(12:49):
by midnight the Niagara Systems were providing power to the
city of Buffalo, which was twenty six miles away. The
Buffalo Enquirer wrote, quote, it was the journey of God's
own lightning to the employee of man. In a few years,
there were ten enormous generators at Niagara Falls, and according
to Bailey's article, of all the electricity in the United
(13:11):
States came from there, including all the power that lit
up in New York City and Broadway and all of that.
And even the Edison systems converted to alternating current after that.
So with that about face on Edison's part, it seemed
that Tesla and Westinghouse had won the war of the currents.
But the inventor had made some significant sacrifices along the
(13:32):
way too, though, and during the financial panic of the
eight nineties, Westinghouse and Edison's company were both in trouble,
and on top of this, seeing the money making potential
of hydroelectric power, some Wall Street forces like JP Morrigan
he's been popping up in podcast lately, tried to take
over Westinghouse. So Westinghouse the Man asked Tesla to release
(13:55):
him from the initial contract that gave Tesla those generous royalties,
and HeLa generously agreed to give up future royalties and
supposedly even tore up the contract. Um. He might wonder,
considering the problems he had had making money off of
his work earlier, why he would do that, But according
to PBS, he was very grateful to this one man
(14:17):
who had believed in his invention, and this was his
way of showing how grateful he was. He also just
probably wanted them to keep going, I would imagine instead
of going under. Must save the Westinghouse Electric Company while
Edison's own company was taken over by General Electric. Tesla, though,
had trouble with finances for pretty much the rest of
(14:37):
his life, so it's could have used the royalty. Yeah,
that's sort of a poignant thinking about those royalties gone
away and and how much money he could have made
down the line. But it wasn't for lack of trying, though.
Tesla did keep on experimenting, and he was convinced that
there were more amazing inventions on the horizon, And so
we want to talk about some of the other things
(14:59):
that he did even while the so called current war
was going on. Of course, we can't cover everything. There
are just so many inventions and patents to to cover,
and so many ideas to cover that you know, maybe
didn't get patents or didn't um immediately inspire inventions. But
we're just going to go over a few of those.
He had invented what we now know as the Tesla
(15:20):
coil in eightee, and this basically allowed him to take
the ordinary sixty cycle per second household current and kind
of kick it up a few notches into the hundreds
of thousands of cycles per second, so maybe more than
a few notches. So this let him experiment with high
frequency electricity, which was a big interest of his for
a while, and that in turn allowed him to create
(15:42):
the first meat lights and the first fluorescent lights, and
he also took the first X ray photographs, another obsession
of his which really stuck with him to the end
with the wireless transmission of energy, and he discovered in
the early eighteen nineties that he could use his Tesla
coils to send and receive radio signals, but a lab
fire in eighteen destroyed his work before he could truly
(16:06):
test this, and that was just the little bit of
delay that really messed him up here. Yes, Tesla did
end up filing for radio patents in eighteen ninety seven,
but by this time he had a competitor across the pond,
Guielmo Marconi. Marconi had been granted a wireless communication patent
in England in eighteen ninety six, and he tried to
(16:26):
file for a patent in American nineteen hundred, but it
was turned down at that point because of Tesla's existing patent.
But in late nineteen o one, Marconi became the first
to transmit and receive signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Jesla
did take that turn pretty well. Um Otis Pond, who
was an engineer working for Tesla at the time, said
to him a quote, looks as if Marconi got the
(16:47):
jump on you to which Tesla replied, quote, Marconi is
a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen
of my patents. No one could accuse him of lack
of confidence. But he was singing a different tune in
nineteen o four, when inexplicably the U. S. Patent Office
changed its mind and gave Marconi the patent for inventing
(17:08):
the radio. Marconi also ended up winning the Nobel Prize
in nineteen o nine, and Tesla was really unhappy about this.
I mean, he was angry, but he didn't have the
cash to get involved in a patent infringement case. He
wanted to, He wanted to sue, but then he was like,
I don't really have the ability to carry this out.
Tesla continued to experiment with the wireless transmission of energy,
(17:30):
and in eight he made a demonstration of the world's
first radio controlled vessel at an electrical exhibition in Madison
Square Garden. It was basically a toy boat that was
manipulated by remote control. Yeah, and as a side note here,
many people think of this as the birth of robotics.
Tesla hoped that it would eventually lighten the workload of humans.
I mean, it was a toy boat for now, but
(17:52):
it could be something more in the future. So in
the late eighteen nineties, Tesla also began to experiment with
the transmission of a let trical power without wires, and
in order to conduct these experiments, he went out to
Colorado Springs for a while and set up a lab there,
and he created man made lightning to test his ideas
(18:13):
while he was there. The first experiment was successful in
a way, but also fairly disastrous. He did create man
made lightning, but it burned out the dynamo at the
El Paso Electric Company and the entire city lost power,
and Tesla was made to pay for the damage of
causing this outage. Yeah be at the head of the
(18:33):
power station wasn't very happy with him at that point.
But it was in Colorado that Tesla also noticed a
signal being picked up on his transmitter that he later
said was a signal from outer space, or he believed
it to be a signal from outer space. According to
PBS dot org, it's quite possible that he was the
first to actually detect radio signals from space, but people
(18:54):
just dismissed this. They just thought that he was crazy
suggesting these things. But ultimately this time in Colorado. It's
it's really interesting. It could probably be you know, a
separate episode or a blog post or something, but it's
a very shrouded in mystery. A lot of people still
really don't have a handle on exactly everything he was
working on there. It just reminds me a lot of
(19:15):
his role in that movie The Prestige, where um, I
think he might have been in Colorado at the time
that maybe it's been a long time since I've seen that,
but with just sort of the experiments that we're going
on there and the mystery surrounding that as well, so
we could go on and on. Like I said about
toughless ideas and patents and inventions, he continued to come
(19:35):
up with ambitious concepts for pretty much the rest of
his life, though not much that really inspired immediate practical applications.
During his lifetime, he experimented with a new type of
turbine n engine, for example, and at age seventy eight,
he announced that he was working on a death ray
that could send a concentrated beam of particles through the
(19:56):
air and bring down up to ten thousand enemy planes,
and this was intended by him to help prevent war,
which he really hated. I think that could be the
title of an article in his later career, to toy
Boats to Death rays Tesla's later life. So his ideas
definitely had taken on a kind of mad scientist type
edge as he aged, especially, but Tesla was really known
(20:19):
almost as much for his eccentricities as he was for
his inventions as the years went on, and he did
have friends. He have friends like Mark Twain, for instance,
but he never married, even though he was linked to
several heiresses at various times, and he said quote, I
did not believe an inventor should marry, because he has
so intense a nature, with so much of it of
(20:40):
wild passionate quality, that in giving himself to a woman
he might love, he would give everything and so take
everything from his chosen field. So he was really in
love with his work, I guess, is what he was
trying to say in part there. But according to Bailey,
he had a lot of phobias that probably prevented him
from having a relationship as well. So it wasn't just
(21:00):
that he wanted to give all of his intention and
focus to his work. There were some personal issues that
he had that maybe kept him from connecting with people.
For example, one of his phobias was throughout his lifetime
he sort of was a germophobe, but he also didn't
like to touch people's hair. Specifically, he didn't like the
site of smooth round surfaces, which gave him an aversion
(21:23):
to women's earrings. He couldn't stand to see peaches the fruit.
He also had quote strange numerical fixation, so, for example,
the number of his hotel room always had to be
divisible by three, And strangely enough, Tesla did end up
living in a hotel, the Hotel New Yorker at the
end of his life, and he didn't have that much
(21:44):
money at that point, and by then some of his
closest companions were pigeons who were hanging out around the hotel.
He would actually take thick birds to his room and
nurse them back to help. He even had the hotel
make a special mixture of food for them, and he
clearly became very attached to these pets. So when one
of Tesla's favorite pigeons died, he told a newspaper writer,
(22:07):
John O'Neil, quote, I loved that pigeon. Yes, I loved
her as a man loved the woman. When that pigeon died,
something went out of my life. Up to that time,
I knew his certainty that I would complete my work.
But when that something went out of my life, I
knew my life's work was finished. Tesla died January seventh,
nineteen forty three. He'd gotten his last patent in nine
(22:30):
at the age of seventy two, and it was for
a quote apparatus for aerial transportation, which is said to
have inspired today as a vertical short take off and
landing plane, but he never had the money to actually
build a prototype of this. He never won the Nobel Prize,
though there were rumors that he and Edison might share
it in nineteen fifteen, which he was kind of unhappy about.
(22:51):
They didn't. Neither of them really wanted to share it
with each other, considering their relationship, but Tesla did, ironicly
when the Edison Medal in nineteen seventeen, which was the
highest honor of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. According
to Encyclopedia Britannica, he almost didn't accept this award though
because of the name, because of the Edison Association. He
(23:14):
said this would basically be something that was honoring Yeah,
not honoring me. So he sat outside where the awards
ceremony was being held, feeding the pigeons for a little
while and had to be convinced to come inside, which
he finally did come inside and accept the award. Who
really won the war between Tesla and Edison? You know,
(23:34):
you have Tesla winning the Edison Award, but it's called
the Edison Award. I mean that really illustrates that point.
And people still debate who went out in the end.
Some say Tesla because we still use the A C
system today. I mean that system clearly one. Others, though,
say Edison because he did have more patents, he made
more money, and let's face it, he just became more famous.
(23:56):
Tesla has a lot of people who are clearly very
devoted to his memory. We can tell that by the
number of people who have suggested him. But I would
say Thomas Edison is probably still the more famous name. Yeah, definitely.
I think more school students learn about Edison growing up
than Tesla in their classroom. Even though Tesla is the
one in our recording studio. That is true, he's on
(24:17):
our wall. Interesting side note here too, in just A
few months after Tesla's death, the U s. Supreme Court
upheld Tesla's radio patent over Marconi's. According to PBS dot org,
the court had a selfish reason for doing this, though.
The Marconi Company was suing the US government for use
of its patents in World War One, and so to
(24:40):
just kind of make that problem go away, they restored
the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi's. So a slight
win for Tesla in the end, regardless of the reasons.
But um, still kind of a sad end to a
very interesting and inventive Yeah. Okay, let's see what we
have our listener mail today. So there's so much more
(25:06):
that we could say about Tesla, but we really did
want to focus on the current war here again. Um,
if anyone has any favorite Tesla stories or inventions or
patents that we didn't mention that you want to share
with us and and maybe the other listeners stuffinitely miss
in history class, you can feel free to write to us.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you
(25:27):
can also look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter.
In mist in History before we find off that we
wanted to include a little real male listener mail that
we got. Um. Some of you might remember we've been
getting postcards from Hillary from her European adventures and actually
went from Monticello to from a stop in the state.
But um she sent she must be in Germany right now,
(25:47):
because she sent us several several postcards from their Munich
and Baden Baden. And um, I love this postcard of
the market in Munich. It just looks so good. It's
got like jams and fresh vegetables, and it makes me
feel like going out and enjoying our local bounty this
weekend or something if I'll stop by. Yeah, tis the season.
(26:09):
Tis the season. Well, thank you Hillary for sending us those.
And like I said, if you want to, I already
gave you guys all our contact info. But you know
how to reach you know how to reach us. If
you have some cool postcards like that, we love to
get them, and we do decorate our cubes with them
and look longing and sometimes put them on our social
media accounts. Do you say you guys can see them?
Very true, So definitely send us those if you have them. Also,
(26:33):
if you want to learn a little bit more about
some of the ideas we talked about in today's podcast.
We have an article called how did Nicola Tesla Change
the Way We Use Energy on our website and you
can look that up by visiting our homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, it how stuff works dot com.
(27:01):
He was named the Day that was named This Day
in
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from house
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bling the Druk reboarding and I'm fared out, and
we're picking back up here again with our discussion of
one of our most requested subjects, Nicola Tesla, an engineer
(00:23):
and an inventor. Tesla's perhaps best known for creating a
system for delivering electricity using alternating current, a method that
is still used today. And we talked a little bit
about the difference between alternating current and direct current and
their advantages and disadvantages in part one of this podcast.
And Tesla's preferred alternating current was capable of distributing electricity
(00:45):
across greater distances than direct current, and he believed that
it had the potential to be used for more than
just lighting. But he had some trouble getting support, both
financial and otherwise for his ideas, at least at first. Yeah,
and so in the last episode we talked about how
he came to America, how he approached Edison, armed with
a recommendation letter from his old boss, Charles Bachelor. The
(01:07):
letter just said, quote, my dear Edison, I know two
great men, and you are one of them. The other
is this young man. It's a pretty great recommendation. Uh.
Even though Edison, who was a firm believer that direct
current was not the way to go, shot Tesla down
on his alternating current ideas on that front, he must
have agreed with Bachelor's assessment to some degree because he
(01:30):
did hire Tesla to work for his power company when
we left off with the story, though Tesla had quit
working for Edison after just a few months because of
their personal differences and a little disagreement over money. Tesla
wanted to strike out on his own at this point
and develop his own ideas, but when we saw him last,
his first attempt to do so hadn't worked out so well,
(01:51):
and he was stuck doing manual labor to survive. So
Tesla may have been down in the dumps, but he
stuck fast to his ideas about alternating current and kept
on trying to get financial backing to make them a reality,
And in eighteen eighty seven he did manage to attract
the attention of two investors, Alfred Brown of the Western
Union Company and Charles Peck, who was an attorney. But
(02:13):
according to that American Heritage article by Bernard Carlson that
we mentioned in the Laugh podcast. All Tesla had to
show them initially was this really crude version of the
motor he had designed back when he was in Europe,
and it was basically a shoe polished him that would
spin around in a big donut shaped coil. So Brown impact,
they come and look at this creation of of Tesla's
(02:36):
and they were kind of skeptical of the whole thing. Yeah,
So to make believers of them, Tesla devised a little
electrical spectacle which was based on an old legend about
Christopher Columbus. So, as the story goes, Columbus scott Queen
Isabella to finance his journey by challenging members of her
court to balance an egg on one end, And of
(02:56):
course several people tried and they couldn't do it. So
then Columbus up and he made the egg stand up
by gently cracking the shell on one end. Queen Isabella
was so impressed by his resourceful solution that she gave
him the funds that he needed. So Tesla asked Brown
and Peck, who knew of this legend, He said, if
I can make an egg stand on end without cracking
(03:17):
the shell will you support these experiments again? According to
Carlson's article, Peck basically said, yeah, we might. We might
help you to some extent. We might help you a
little bit if that were to happen. So Tesla came
back with a copper plated egg and his donut coil
attached to the underside of a wooden table. When Tesla
applied alternating current to that coil, the egg not only
(03:38):
stood on end, but it started spinning. Then it flipped
up and started rotating on its axis. I mean it
looks like a magic trick. So better than a shoe
polished tin. Right, much better than a shoe polished tin.
And Brown and Peck were so impressed that they agreed
to back his work. So with their help, Tesla was
able to set up a laboratory in Lower Manhattan and
(03:59):
perf all the components of his alternating current system, and
that same year he built the prototype for his polyphase
induction motor. And the problem with alternating current systems before
this had been that there wasn't really a workable motor
that alternating current could power. So Tesla's motor solved that
issue at least and then again with the help of
(04:20):
Peck and Brown. In late he was able to secure
seven more patents for a complete alternating current system based
on this induction motor, including patents for generators, transformers, transmission lines,
and lighting. So he had the whole set. Finally, there
was still that little detail of getting these breakthrough ideas
(04:43):
introduced commercially though. I mean, you have the technology, great,
you have the patents, that's great, but how are you
going to actually make money off of it? So that
process started to take off the next year after Tesla
demonstrated his alternating current motor at the meeting of the
American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and that demonstration caught the
(05:04):
eye of George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's company, which was based in Pittsburgh,
had successfully developed some safety components for rail transportation, including
the air brake, and by eight eight or so, he'd
become interested in getting in on the electricity transmission game.
According to the article by Ronald Bailey in American History,
which we referenced in the last podcast, Westinghouse had already
(05:26):
set up a limited alternating current system, but it was
confined to downtown Buffalo, New York, and he was attracted
to that potential of Tesla system to distribute power over
longer distances, so Westinghouse made a move. He offered to
buy Tesla's patents, and again Pack and Brown helped Tesla
negotiate this deal, and the deal is slightly different depending
(05:47):
on what stores you look at, but it basically amounted
to Westinghouse paying about sixty thousand to seventy thousand dollars
and anywhere from five thousand to twenty thousand dollars if
that was paid in cash. He also agreed to pay
Tesla two dollars and fifty cents in royalties for each
horsepower of developed electrical capacity, so according to Bailey's article,
(06:09):
Westinghouse also agreed to a minimum of thirty thousand in
royalties to be paid over the next three years, and
according to PBS dot Org, Tesla got one hundred fifty
years of Westinghouse stock in the deal, so there was
a lot covering um. I don't know depending on how
successful the implementation of the ideas was how much Tesla
(06:31):
would benefit from that. When the deal was done, Tesla
went off to work as a Westinghouse consultant and helped
develop the Alternating Current system for commercial use. So not
only did he get some money out of the deal
and potential for more money, but he also got to
still work with his invention Westinghouse engineers, though just as
an aside, a little side note here, they didn't really
(06:52):
love working with Tesla though. He didn't make real blueprints.
He just had these sketches that he made in a
tiny notebook and they were really hard to follow. And
Tesla himself said, well, I can just give you the
measurements and they will be exactly what you need to
build this. But as you might imagine, these engineers, yeah,
I mean interestingly, also, Tesla had always said that he
(07:17):
just created this induction motor from like as he had
envisioned it in Europe before he came to America, is
exactly how he built it. Like, he didn't develop it.
You might imagine this going through like many revisions and
many changes, but with a prototype or something, yes, exactly,
But he said that he just made it as soon
as he saw it in his mind. He knew that
(07:38):
that was like composers who say that they just heard
it in their head and wrote it down exactly. He
claimed that exactly as he saw it is how he
built it, and it was meant to work. But these engineers,
they also disagreed with Tesla over what the motors frequency
should be, but Tesla one out with the sixty cycles
per second, so Tesla had the final say in that regard.
(07:58):
But this was where the full on current war really
started to take off, and it was a battle between
Westinghouses alternating current and Edison's direct current. And what was
really at stake here was whose system was going to
become the standard and fuel the development of electricity in
the future. Edison, though, of course, had a bit of
an edge going in since he already had about one
(08:21):
power stations in operation compared to Westinghouses nine stations. But
as we've mentioned a few times, Testla's alternating current system
showed more promise for carrying electricity over long distances, whereas
Edison's direct current had a range of only about a mile,
so it seemed like it was going to have more
limited applications. Also, alternating current was a lot cheaper because
(08:43):
direct current required the use of these expensive copper wires,
and alternating current systems used copper as well, but only
about a third of the amount that direct current used,
so it looked like Westinghouse and alternating Current might provide
some serious competition for Edison, and Edison stepped up his
game at that point by starting a propaganda campaign against
(09:06):
alternating Current. He focused in this campaign on his own
belief that alternating current was unsafe, so he started to
spread around the idea that alternating current and its high
voltages could actually kill you. The most direct Current could do,
he said, was just give you a little shock. Edison
even hired a professor named Harold Brown to go around
(09:26):
and lecture on the dangers of alternating current, and these
talks included things like public electrocution of animals, including dogs, cats, horses,
and cows. Edison even had an elephant named Topsy electrocuted
once to previous point, We've had a tragic run for
elephant from the podcast between this and P. T. Barnum.
(09:46):
But Edison made his biggest point August six when Brown
helped New York's Auburn State Prison perform the first execution
by electric chair. And according to PBS, Brown had obtained
Westinghouse technolog illegally to build the chair. I mean, you
can imagine Westinghouse would not have wanted his work associated
with that. The man who was executed was the convicted
(10:09):
murderer William Kemmler. His death was described as quote an
awful spectacle, worse than hanging, and thereafter electrocution was known
as Westinghouse being through really bad pr for alternating current Yeah.
Despite these negative associations, though, team Westinghouse and Tesla started
to come up with some wins. They were picked to
(10:32):
illuminate the Chicago World's Fair, for example, which was also
of course known as the Columbian Exposition, something we discussed
a little in the H. H. Holmes podcast indeed, and
if you pick up Eric Larson's book Double in the
White City, you'll learn a little bit more about kind
of some of the things we're about to talk about.
But this was the first all electric World's Fair in history,
(10:54):
and Westinghouse has bid ended up winning out here just
because it was so much cheaper. It was about half
as much as the competition Shian And in Bailey's article
he talks about how the fair became this grand showcase
for alternating currents and electricity in general. So it turned
out to be a really good win for them, and
Tesla system lit up something like one D eighty thousand bulbs,
and it was used to power a lot of exhibits,
(11:17):
and there was even a great Hall of Electricity where
his system was displayed, and Tesla was even on display
to some degree. He did a demonstration in which he
sent two hundred thousand volts through his body while wearing
corks old shoes for protection. So don't get too worried,
but he sent these volts through his body to prove
basically that alternating current was indeed safe. And I can
(11:39):
see how that would be more compelling combined with the
glowing white city too, then seeing an elephant electrocuted or
somebody put in an electric chair, somebody surviving this, the
demonstrating it really is okay if it's handled properly. Yeah,
if you're willing to do it on yourself, then you
must have some faith in it. But after the fair
according to pb quote, of all the electrical devices ordered
(12:03):
in the United States were for alternating current, And this,
of course at the stage for another big win in
the current war, which was a contract with the Niagara
Falls Commission, and the mission wanted the Westinghouse Company to
use alternating current to harness the power of the falls
to generate electricity. And this was the realization of a
(12:25):
long time dream for Tesla. As we mentioned in part one,
he had started dreaming about converting the power of water
to electricity when he was only about five years old,
and he had specifically thought about Niagara Falls at some point.
And it did take several years to get the project completed,
which was a situation that made investors pretty nervous. But
on the night of November they flipped a switch and
(12:49):
by midnight the Niagara Systems were providing power to the
city of Buffalo, which was twenty six miles away. The
Buffalo Enquirer wrote, quote, it was the journey of God's
own lightning to the employee of man. In a few years,
there were ten enormous generators at Niagara Falls, and according
to Bailey's article, of all the electricity in the United
(13:11):
States came from there, including all the power that lit
up in New York City and Broadway and all of that.
And even the Edison systems converted to alternating current after that.
So with that about face on Edison's part, it seemed
that Tesla and Westinghouse had won the war of the currents.
But the inventor had made some significant sacrifices along the
(13:32):
way too, though, and during the financial panic of the
eight nineties, Westinghouse and Edison's company were both in trouble,
and on top of this, seeing the money making potential
of hydroelectric power, some Wall Street forces like JP Morrigan
he's been popping up in podcast lately, tried to take
over Westinghouse. So Westinghouse the Man asked Tesla to release
(13:55):
him from the initial contract that gave Tesla those generous royalties,
and HeLa generously agreed to give up future royalties and
supposedly even tore up the contract. Um. He might wonder,
considering the problems he had had making money off of
his work earlier, why he would do that, But according
to PBS, he was very grateful to this one man
(14:17):
who had believed in his invention, and this was his
way of showing how grateful he was. He also just
probably wanted them to keep going, I would imagine instead
of going under. Must save the Westinghouse Electric Company while
Edison's own company was taken over by General Electric. Tesla, though,
had trouble with finances for pretty much the rest of
(14:37):
his life, so it's could have used the royalty. Yeah,
that's sort of a poignant thinking about those royalties gone
away and and how much money he could have made
down the line. But it wasn't for lack of trying, though.
Tesla did keep on experimenting, and he was convinced that
there were more amazing inventions on the horizon, And so
we want to talk about some of the other things
(14:59):
that he did even while the so called current war
was going on. Of course, we can't cover everything. There
are just so many inventions and patents to to cover,
and so many ideas to cover that you know, maybe
didn't get patents or didn't um immediately inspire inventions. But
we're just going to go over a few of those.
He had invented what we now know as the Tesla
(15:20):
coil in eightee, and this basically allowed him to take
the ordinary sixty cycle per second household current and kind
of kick it up a few notches into the hundreds
of thousands of cycles per second, so maybe more than
a few notches. So this let him experiment with high
frequency electricity, which was a big interest of his for
a while, and that in turn allowed him to create
(15:42):
the first meat lights and the first fluorescent lights, and
he also took the first X ray photographs, another obsession
of his which really stuck with him to the end
with the wireless transmission of energy, and he discovered in
the early eighteen nineties that he could use his Tesla
coils to send and receive radio signals, but a lab
fire in eighteen destroyed his work before he could truly
(16:06):
test this, and that was just the little bit of
delay that really messed him up here. Yes, Tesla did
end up filing for radio patents in eighteen ninety seven,
but by this time he had a competitor across the pond,
Guielmo Marconi. Marconi had been granted a wireless communication patent
in England in eighteen ninety six, and he tried to
(16:26):
file for a patent in American nineteen hundred, but it
was turned down at that point because of Tesla's existing patent.
But in late nineteen o one, Marconi became the first
to transmit and receive signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Jesla
did take that turn pretty well. Um Otis Pond, who
was an engineer working for Tesla at the time, said
to him a quote, looks as if Marconi got the
(16:47):
jump on you to which Tesla replied, quote, Marconi is
a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen
of my patents. No one could accuse him of lack
of confidence. But he was singing a different tune in
nineteen o four, when inexplicably the U. S. Patent Office
changed its mind and gave Marconi the patent for inventing
(17:08):
the radio. Marconi also ended up winning the Nobel Prize
in nineteen o nine, and Tesla was really unhappy about this.
I mean, he was angry, but he didn't have the
cash to get involved in a patent infringement case. He
wanted to, He wanted to sue, but then he was like,
I don't really have the ability to carry this out.
Tesla continued to experiment with the wireless transmission of energy,
(17:30):
and in eight he made a demonstration of the world's
first radio controlled vessel at an electrical exhibition in Madison
Square Garden. It was basically a toy boat that was
manipulated by remote control. Yeah, and as a side note here,
many people think of this as the birth of robotics.
Tesla hoped that it would eventually lighten the workload of humans.
I mean, it was a toy boat for now, but
(17:52):
it could be something more in the future. So in
the late eighteen nineties, Tesla also began to experiment with
the transmission of a let trical power without wires, and
in order to conduct these experiments, he went out to
Colorado Springs for a while and set up a lab there,
and he created man made lightning to test his ideas
(18:13):
while he was there. The first experiment was successful in
a way, but also fairly disastrous. He did create man
made lightning, but it burned out the dynamo at the
El Paso Electric Company and the entire city lost power,
and Tesla was made to pay for the damage of
causing this outage. Yeah be at the head of the
(18:33):
power station wasn't very happy with him at that point.
But it was in Colorado that Tesla also noticed a
signal being picked up on his transmitter that he later
said was a signal from outer space, or he believed
it to be a signal from outer space. According to
PBS dot org, it's quite possible that he was the
first to actually detect radio signals from space, but people
(18:54):
just dismissed this. They just thought that he was crazy
suggesting these things. But ultimately this time in Colorado. It's
it's really interesting. It could probably be you know, a
separate episode or a blog post or something, but it's
a very shrouded in mystery. A lot of people still
really don't have a handle on exactly everything he was
working on there. It just reminds me a lot of
(19:15):
his role in that movie The Prestige, where um, I
think he might have been in Colorado at the time
that maybe it's been a long time since I've seen that,
but with just sort of the experiments that we're going
on there and the mystery surrounding that as well, so
we could go on and on. Like I said about
toughless ideas and patents and inventions, he continued to come
(19:35):
up with ambitious concepts for pretty much the rest of
his life, though not much that really inspired immediate practical applications.
During his lifetime, he experimented with a new type of
turbine n engine, for example, and at age seventy eight,
he announced that he was working on a death ray
that could send a concentrated beam of particles through the
(19:56):
air and bring down up to ten thousand enemy planes,
and this was intended by him to help prevent war,
which he really hated. I think that could be the
title of an article in his later career, to toy
Boats to Death rays Tesla's later life. So his ideas
definitely had taken on a kind of mad scientist type
edge as he aged, especially, but Tesla was really known
(20:19):
almost as much for his eccentricities as he was for
his inventions as the years went on, and he did
have friends. He have friends like Mark Twain, for instance,
but he never married, even though he was linked to
several heiresses at various times, and he said quote, I
did not believe an inventor should marry, because he has
so intense a nature, with so much of it of
(20:40):
wild passionate quality, that in giving himself to a woman
he might love, he would give everything and so take
everything from his chosen field. So he was really in
love with his work, I guess, is what he was
trying to say in part there. But according to Bailey,
he had a lot of phobias that probably prevented him
from having a relationship as well. So it wasn't just
(21:00):
that he wanted to give all of his intention and
focus to his work. There were some personal issues that
he had that maybe kept him from connecting with people.
For example, one of his phobias was throughout his lifetime
he sort of was a germophobe, but he also didn't
like to touch people's hair. Specifically, he didn't like the
site of smooth round surfaces, which gave him an aversion
(21:23):
to women's earrings. He couldn't stand to see peaches the fruit.
He also had quote strange numerical fixation, so, for example,
the number of his hotel room always had to be
divisible by three, And strangely enough, Tesla did end up
living in a hotel, the Hotel New Yorker at the
end of his life, and he didn't have that much
(21:44):
money at that point, and by then some of his
closest companions were pigeons who were hanging out around the hotel.
He would actually take thick birds to his room and
nurse them back to help. He even had the hotel
make a special mixture of food for them, and he
clearly became very attached to these pets. So when one
of Tesla's favorite pigeons died, he told a newspaper writer,
(22:07):
John O'Neil, quote, I loved that pigeon. Yes, I loved
her as a man loved the woman. When that pigeon died,
something went out of my life. Up to that time,
I knew his certainty that I would complete my work.
But when that something went out of my life, I
knew my life's work was finished. Tesla died January seventh,
nineteen forty three. He'd gotten his last patent in nine
(22:30):
at the age of seventy two, and it was for
a quote apparatus for aerial transportation, which is said to
have inspired today as a vertical short take off and
landing plane, but he never had the money to actually
build a prototype of this. He never won the Nobel Prize,
though there were rumors that he and Edison might share
it in nineteen fifteen, which he was kind of unhappy about.
(22:51):
They didn't. Neither of them really wanted to share it
with each other, considering their relationship, but Tesla did, ironicly
when the Edison Medal in nineteen seventeen, which was the
highest honor of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. According
to Encyclopedia Britannica, he almost didn't accept this award though
because of the name, because of the Edison Association. He
(23:14):
said this would basically be something that was honoring Yeah,
not honoring me. So he sat outside where the awards
ceremony was being held, feeding the pigeons for a little
while and had to be convinced to come inside, which
he finally did come inside and accept the award. Who
really won the war between Tesla and Edison? You know,
(23:34):
you have Tesla winning the Edison Award, but it's called
the Edison Award. I mean that really illustrates that point.
And people still debate who went out in the end.
Some say Tesla because we still use the A C
system today. I mean that system clearly one. Others, though,
say Edison because he did have more patents, he made
more money, and let's face it, he just became more famous.
(23:56):
Tesla has a lot of people who are clearly very
devoted to his memory. We can tell that by the
number of people who have suggested him. But I would
say Thomas Edison is probably still the more famous name. Yeah, definitely.
I think more school students learn about Edison growing up
than Tesla in their classroom. Even though Tesla is the
one in our recording studio. That is true, he's on
(24:17):
our wall. Interesting side note here too, in just A
few months after Tesla's death, the U s. Supreme Court
upheld Tesla's radio patent over Marconi's. According to PBS dot org,
the court had a selfish reason for doing this, though.
The Marconi Company was suing the US government for use
of its patents in World War One, and so to
(24:40):
just kind of make that problem go away, they restored
the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi's. So a slight
win for Tesla in the end, regardless of the reasons.
But um, still kind of a sad end to a
very interesting and inventive Yeah. Okay, let's see what we
have our listener mail today. So there's so much more
(25:06):
that we could say about Tesla, but we really did
want to focus on the current war here again. Um,
if anyone has any favorite Tesla stories or inventions or
patents that we didn't mention that you want to share
with us and and maybe the other listeners stuffinitely miss
in history class, you can feel free to write to us.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you
(25:27):
can also look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter.
In mist in History before we find off that we
wanted to include a little real male listener mail that
we got. Um. Some of you might remember we've been
getting postcards from Hillary from her European adventures and actually
went from Monticello to from a stop in the state.
But um she sent she must be in Germany right now,
(25:47):
because she sent us several several postcards from their Munich
and Baden Baden. And um, I love this postcard of
the market in Munich. It just looks so good. It's
got like jams and fresh vegetables, and it makes me
feel like going out and enjoying our local bounty this
weekend or something if I'll stop by. Yeah, tis the season.
(26:09):
Tis the season. Well, thank you Hillary for sending us those.
And like I said, if you want to, I already
gave you guys all our contact info. But you know
how to reach you know how to reach us. If
you have some cool postcards like that, we love to
get them, and we do decorate our cubes with them
and look longing and sometimes put them on our social
media accounts. Do you say you guys can see them?
Very true, So definitely send us those if you have them. Also,
(26:33):
if you want to learn a little bit more about
some of the ideas we talked about in today's podcast.
We have an article called how did Nicola Tesla Change
the Way We Use Energy on our website and you
can look that up by visiting our homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, it how stuff works dot com.
(27:01):
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