June 6, 2012 • 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 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 that
(07:38):
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 day in that regard. But
(07:58):
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
(08:19):
since he already had about one power stations in operation
compared to Westinghouses 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 seems like it
was going to have more limited applications. Also, alternating current
(08:42):
was a lot cheaper because 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
(09:04):
starting a propaganda campaign against 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
(09:25):
Harold Brown to go around and lecture on the dangerous
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 prove
his point. We've had a tragic run for elephant from
the podcast between This and P. T. Barnum. But Edison
(09:47):
made his biggest point August 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 the
illegally to build the chair. I mean, you can imagine
Westinghouse would not have wanted his work associated with that.
Um the man who was executed was the convicted murderer
(10:10):
William Kemmler. His death was described as quote an awful spectacle,
worse than hanging, and thereafter electrocution was known as Westinghouse
being though really bad pr for alternating current Yeah. Despite
these negative associations, though, team Westinghouse and Tesla started to
come up with some winds. They were picked to illuminate
(10:33):
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 Devil 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, and
(10:54):
Westinghouse has bid ended up winning out here just because
it was so much cheaper. It was about half as
much as the competition shan 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 Testla
system lit up something like one and 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
cork sold 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 and
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 p. B Quote, of all the electrical devices
(12:03):
ordered in the United States were for alternating current. And this,
of course that the stage for another big win in
the current War, which was a contract with the Niagara
Falls Commission and mcmission 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 long
(12:25):
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 currents 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 Morgan
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 heflin 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, let's 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 could have used the royalty. Yeah,
it'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 eighteen nine, 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
(15:41):
create the first neot 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
(16:05):
truly 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. Tesla
to take that turn pretty well. Um Otis Pond, who
is 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.
You 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 elect iCal power without wires, and in
order to conduct these experiments, he went out to Colorado
Springs for a while and set up a laud 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, the the head of the power
(18:33):
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 just
(18:54):
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 his
(19:15):
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 uh, the mystery surrounding that as well,
so we could go on and on. Like I said
about testless ideas and patents and inventions, he continued to
(19:35):
come 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 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 germaphobe, 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 where 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 in 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 ironically
win 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 to
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 Tefla 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 Tefla because we still use the AH 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. Tesla
(23:56):
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
(24:39):
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. So there's so much more
that we could say about Tesla, but we really did
(25:01):
want to focus on the current war here again. UM,
if anyone has any favorite Testlas stories or inventions or
patents that we didn't mention that you want to share
with us and and maybe the other listeners of stuff
you missed in history class, you can feel free to
write to us. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com,
and you can also look us up on Facebook and
(25:21):
we're on Twitter at 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 States. But um she sent she must be
in Germany right now, because she sent us several several
(25:42):
postcards from their Munich and Baden Baden. And um, I
love this postcard of the market in uh 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 some thing. Maybe I'll
stop by. Yeah, tis the season to seat them. Well,
(26:03):
thank you Hillary for sending us those. And like I said,
if you want to, I already gave you. Guys all
learn contact info, but 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 with sometimes
put them on our social media accounts. You say you
guys can see them. Very true, So definitely send us
(26:25):
those if you have them. Also, 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,
(26:47):
is it how stuff works dot com. The Doo Do
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 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 that
(07:38):
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 day in that regard. But
(07:58):
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
(08:19):
since he already had about one power stations in operation
compared to Westinghouses 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 seems like it
was going to have more limited applications. Also, alternating current
(08:42):
was a lot cheaper because 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
(09:04):
starting a propaganda campaign against 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
(09:25):
Harold Brown to go around and lecture on the dangerous
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 prove
his point. We've had a tragic run for elephant from
the podcast between This and P. T. Barnum. But Edison
(09:47):
made his biggest point August 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 the
illegally to build the chair. I mean, you can imagine
Westinghouse would not have wanted his work associated with that.
Um the man who was executed was the convicted murderer
(10:10):
William Kemmler. His death was described as quote an awful spectacle,
worse than hanging, and thereafter electrocution was known as Westinghouse
being though really bad pr for alternating current Yeah. Despite
these negative associations, though, team Westinghouse and Tesla started to
come up with some winds. They were picked to illuminate
(10:33):
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 Devil 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, and
(10:54):
Westinghouse has bid ended up winning out here just because
it was so much cheaper. It was about half as
much as the competition shan 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 Testla
system lit up something like one and 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
cork sold 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 and
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 p. B Quote, of all the electrical devices
(12:03):
ordered in the United States were for alternating current. And this,
of course that the stage for another big win in
the current War, which was a contract with the Niagara
Falls Commission and mcmission 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 long
(12:25):
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 currents 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 Morgan
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 heflin 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, let's 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 could have used the royalty. Yeah,
it'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 eighteen nine, 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
(15:41):
create the first neot 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
(16:05):
truly 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. Tesla
to take that turn pretty well. Um Otis Pond, who
is 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.
You 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 elect iCal power without wires, and in
order to conduct these experiments, he went out to Colorado
Springs for a while and set up a laud 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, the the head of the power
(18:33):
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 just
(18:54):
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 his
(19:15):
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 uh, the mystery surrounding that as well,
so we could go on and on. Like I said
about testless ideas and patents and inventions, he continued to
(19:35):
come 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 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 germaphobe, 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 where 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 in 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 ironically
win 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 to
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 Tefla 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 Tefla because we still use the AH 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. Tesla
(23:56):
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
(24:39):
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. So there's so much more
that we could say about Tesla, but we really did
(25:01):
want to focus on the current war here again. UM,
if anyone has any favorite Testlas stories or inventions or
patents that we didn't mention that you want to share
with us and and maybe the other listeners of stuff
you missed in history class, you can feel free to
write to us. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com,
and you can also look us up on Facebook and
(25:21):
we're on Twitter at 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 States. But um she sent she must be
in Germany right now, because she sent us several several
(25:42):
postcards from their Munich and Baden Baden. And um, I
love this postcard of the market in uh 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 some thing. Maybe I'll
stop by. Yeah, tis the season to seat them. Well,
(26:03):
thank you Hillary for sending us those. And like I said,
if you want to, I already gave you. Guys all
learn contact info, but 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 with sometimes
put them on our social media accounts. You say you
guys can see them. Very true, So definitely send us
(26:25):
those if you have them. Also, 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,
(26:47):
is it how stuff works dot com. The Doo Do
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