Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housetof
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Debline and Chok reporting and I'm fair douting. And we
Speaker 1: recently did an episode on nineteenth century dentist Horace Wells
Speaker 1: in his battle to receive credit for discovering inhalation anesthesia.
Speaker 1: And that episode was really fascinating to research, just to
Speaker 1: find out about the rivalries that were created because of
Speaker 1: this discovery and the lengths that they would go to
Speaker 1: to get credit or discredit one another, and all this
Speaker 1: for a discovery that was supposed to be for the
Speaker 1: benefit of everyone, something that maybe people shouldn't have fought
Speaker 1: over quite as much as they did. So it definitely
Speaker 1: got us interested in exploring some more of those science
Speaker 1: related rivalries. Yeah, and of course one of the most
Speaker 1: famous also involved one of our most requested historical figures.
Speaker 1: I feel like we always say that, but this one
Speaker 1: really is requested a lot. Is the big time, and
Speaker 1: that's Nicola Tesla. Tesla's probably most famous for inventing a
Speaker 1: safe and effective motor that could be used to deliver
Speaker 1: electricity using alternating current, and that alternating current method is
Speaker 1: still used today, But he also invented the Tesla coil
Speaker 1: and induction coil used in radio technology and many other
Speaker 1: things which we will mention in a bit, But it
Speaker 1: was that first invention and simply Tesla's devotion to the
Speaker 1: idea that alternating current was superior to direct current as
Speaker 1: a means of delivering electricity that sparked a bitter rivalry
Speaker 1: with a very well known, very accomplished American inventor, Thomas Edison.
Speaker 1: Of course, so we're going to be exploring Tesla's life,
Speaker 1: his contributions, his eccentricities, but we're also going to take
Speaker 1: a closer look at the contentious relationship that he had
Speaker 1: with Edison and the battle that they fought in the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century to electrify the world. There was a
Speaker 1: lot at stake, so by the time you get to
Speaker 1: the end of Tesla's story, will really want to know
Speaker 1: how minds like his got its starts. So that's where
Speaker 1: we're going to begin. Tussa was born on July nine
Speaker 1: or ten, sources tend to differ on that, eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: into a family of Serbian origin in a village and
Speaker 1: a part of Austria, Hungary, that's now Croatia. His dad
Speaker 1: was an Orthodox priest and his mom was a homemaker
Speaker 1: who hadn't had much, if any schooling, but she was
Speaker 1: said to be very smart and really inventive to According
Speaker 1: to PBS dot Org, Tesla's mom would invent all sorts
Speaker 1: of gadgets to just help her around the house, including
Speaker 1: a mechanical egg beater, and apparently Tesla later credited her
Speaker 1: for his own inventive tendencies. His parents, though, kind of
Speaker 1: expected their son to follow in his father's footsteps, but
Speaker 1: he really excelled in math and science from an early age,
Speaker 1: and it soon became pretty apparent that further academic achievement
Speaker 1: along those lines was what he was going to try
Speaker 1: to pursue. And he wasn't just plain old book smart too.
Speaker 1: We should get into that before we start talking about
Speaker 1: his his genius. Even when he was very young, he
Speaker 1: was really inventive and imaginative and even had a bit
Speaker 1: of a literary side to him. Yeah. According to Mental Floss,
Speaker 1: Tesla had both conceived of an idea for a water wheel,
Speaker 1: a machine for converting water to electricity, and read the
Speaker 1: one hundred volume set of the Complete Voltaire by age five,
Speaker 1: so pretty impressive. That it is pretty impressive. Not everybody
Speaker 1: can even read yet at five, So there you go.
Speaker 1: That's true. He was a little ahead of the curve there.
Speaker 1: But in eighteen seventy five, Tesla moved to Gratz, Austria
Speaker 1: to attend the Technical University there and trained to become
Speaker 1: an engineer. According to an article about Tesla and notable
Speaker 1: scientists from nineteen hundred to the present, it's while he
Speaker 1: was there that he first saw a demonstration of the
Speaker 1: Graham dynamo, a direct current induction motor. And while he
Speaker 1: saw that demonstration, he noticed something. He saw that sparks
Speaker 1: flew well it operated, and that's when he got this
Speaker 1: idea of coming up with a method that would overcome
Speaker 1: issues with direct current motor. So, after God, there's a
Speaker 1: bit of lost time in Tesla's biography during which he
Speaker 1: was ill, and apparently he would just study and study
Speaker 1: and work on his ideas so hard sometimes that he
Speaker 1: would make himself physically thick, or at least that's how
Speaker 1: his his father saw it, anyway, and it really alarmed
Speaker 1: his parents enough that they tried to get him to
Speaker 1: switch career path. They just thought this was not going
Speaker 1: to be healthy for their son. Eventually, though, Tesla said
Speaker 1: to have moved on to continuous education at the University
Speaker 1: of Prague, although according to biographer Margaret Cheney and Tesla
Speaker 1: and Man out of Time, there's no record that he
Speaker 1: actually went there. He may have just audited classes and
Speaker 1: or use the libraries there regardless. By January eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: he'd moved to Budapesh where he took a job in
Speaker 1: the Hungarian government's Central Telegraph Office. In eight two, he
Speaker 1: moved to Paris to take a position with the Continental
Speaker 1: Edison Company, where his job was to address technical problems
Speaker 1: in edison plants in both France and Germany, and according
Speaker 1: to Encyclopedia Britannica, it's well he was on assignment in
Speaker 1: Strasbourg in eighteen eighty three that Tesla really began serious
Speaker 1: work on his first induction motor and came up with
Speaker 1: a design for that, but he couldn't get a lot
Speaker 1: of support for or interest in it, so it was
Speaker 1: time for a big move. At that point, he decided
Speaker 1: that he would head to America and see if he
Speaker 1: could garner shake up some interest over there, So he
Speaker 1: set sail in eighteen eighty four. He was in his
Speaker 1: late twenties by this point, and he showed up that
Speaker 1: summer with only four cents in his pocket, as well
Speaker 1: as a few poems he had written and some calculations
Speaker 1: for a flying machine that he wanted to create. That
Speaker 1: really paints a good picture of him, I think, and
Speaker 1: according to an article in American History by Ronald H. Bailey,
Speaker 1: Tesla also only had one outfit left by the time
Speaker 1: he got to the United States. It consisted of a
Speaker 1: bowler hat, striped trousers and a cutaway coat, and all
Speaker 1: of the rest of his clothing and his stuff he
Speaker 1: had brought with him had been stolen on the trip over.
Speaker 1: He also had a reference from the manager of the
Speaker 1: Edison Company in Paris with him too. He so he
Speaker 1: had like a recommendation along with him as well, because
Speaker 1: he wanted a job with Edison's company in the States.
Speaker 1: But there was a little more to it than just that.
Speaker 1: There was a little more of a motive behind him
Speaker 1: wanting to get work with Edison. Edison, who was thirty
Speaker 1: seven at this time, was already considered a celebrated inventor.
Speaker 1: He'd invented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph and
Speaker 1: had recently created a system for providing electricity to homes
Speaker 1: and businesses that people in the New York City area
Speaker 1: were already benefiting from. Tesla hoped that he could get
Speaker 1: Edison support for his ideas about alternating current, and that's
Speaker 1: why he wanted to kind of ring him up, get
Speaker 1: Edison in his corner. Yeah, So he went to see
Speaker 1: Edison almost immediately after arriving in New York, and according
Speaker 1: to Bailey's article, lay Or wrote that he was thrilled
Speaker 1: to the marrow to meet him. But it was clear
Speaker 1: from the start that these two guys, although they were
Speaker 1: both great minds, were complete opposites, even in the way
Speaker 1: they looked and acted. I mean, Edison was short, pudgy,
Speaker 1: disheveled and kind of folks see you well. Tesla was
Speaker 1: more than six feet tall and slender, neatly dressed and formal,
Speaker 1: very serious looking. But of course, the biggest difference between
Speaker 1: these two guys was not just how they looked, it
Speaker 1: was their beliefs about the way electricity should be distributed,
Speaker 1: direct current or alternating current. So, before we go any
Speaker 1: further would probably help out to give just a little
Speaker 1: bit of background on the difference between direct current and
Speaker 1: alternating current, just to give you guys a sense of
Speaker 1: what Edison and Tesla disagreed about. So we're gonna stick
Speaker 1: to the real, bare bone basics here because this isn't
Speaker 1: a science podcast. We're not scientists or electricians or engineers,
Speaker 1: but just to give you something to start with. So
Speaker 1: by this point, scientific US had already researched electricity for
Speaker 1: a while and people knew it was valuable. It was
Speaker 1: just a matter of how to get it where it
Speaker 1: needed to go, and Edison believed that direct current was
Speaker 1: the answer to this. In a direct current, electrons, which
Speaker 1: are the particles that convey electricity, just travel in one direction,
Speaker 1: and a lot of Edison's inventions ran off of this
Speaker 1: type of power. According to an article in American Heritage
Speaker 1: by Bernard W. Carlson, Edison preferred this method because it
Speaker 1: was simple and safe, but the downside is that it
Speaker 1: could only move electricity for short distances. His early power
Speaker 1: stations could only reach customers within about a miles distance,
Speaker 1: so Tesla's preferred method. On the other hand, alternating current
Speaker 1: involve electrons switching back and forth, so they travel first
Speaker 1: in one direction and then in the other direction, and
Speaker 1: they do this many many times per second. So if
Speaker 1: you see something that's labeled sixty hurts, for instance, that
Speaker 1: means that the current is changing direction in sixty times
Speaker 1: per second. So alternating current is more difficult to set up,
Speaker 1: but Tesla really believed in it because it was capable
Speaker 1: of distributing electricity across greater distances, and it allowed you
Speaker 1: to step up or decrease the voltage when you needed
Speaker 1: to make something like that happen. He also felt, Carlson
Speaker 1: writes that alternating current would enable people to use electricity
Speaker 1: for more than just lighting, including running factory machines, street cars,
Speaker 1: and elevators. So there was a lot of potential potential exactly.
Speaker 1: Edison wasn't buying it. Though he wasn't buying into this idea,
Speaker 1: he thought that Tesla's designs for the new induction motor
Speaker 1: were both impractical and unsafe. According to Bailey's article, Tesla
Speaker 1: later recalled that Edison said, quote very bluntly, that he
Speaker 1: was not interested in alternating current. Anyone who dabbled in
Speaker 1: that field was wasting his time. Still, though at least
Speaker 1: at first, Edison was impressed by Tesla himself even if
Speaker 1: he didn't like his electricity philosophy. He was impressed enough,
Speaker 1: in fact, that he gave Tesla a job, and so Tesla,
Speaker 1: with his four cents in his pocket, you know, swallowed
Speaker 1: his pride, took the job and got to work at
Speaker 1: Edison's Pearl Street power station. And his job there was
Speaker 1: to improve the performance of the dynamos, or the generators,
Speaker 1: and interestingly, the direct current generators actually worked by creating
Speaker 1: alternating current, at least initially. Then they had converted to
Speaker 1: the direct current right before it was transmitted by using
Speaker 1: something called a commutator. This gig only lasted a few
Speaker 1: months for Tesla, though, and that was for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons. First off, the fundamental differences between him and
Speaker 1: Edison were just too great. He just really felt limited
Speaker 1: by the position and unsatisfied with what he was doing
Speaker 1: because he didn't really believe in it. But there was
Speaker 1: also a situation regarding payment that caused Tesla to call
Speaker 1: it quits. Tesla said Edison promised to pay him fifty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars if he was successful in enhancing the power
Speaker 1: stations dynamos, but after Tesla actually delivered on this, Edison
Speaker 1: said that it was all a joke. According to PBS
Speaker 1: dot org, the older inventor said something to the effective quote,
Speaker 1: when you're a full fledged American, you can get an
Speaker 1: American joke. Maybe yeah, not very nice. But according to
Speaker 1: Bailey's article, Edison wouldn't even raise tesla salary from eighteen
Speaker 1: dollars to twenty five dollars a week, so he didn't
Speaker 1: even get some compensation for not getting the joke right.
Speaker 1: So Tesla left and struck out on his own, and
Speaker 1: this time he was determined to do things his own way,
Speaker 1: but things still didn't go so well at first. He
Speaker 1: started his own electric company in Rahway, New Jersey five
Speaker 1: but the first real project he worked on after breaking
Speaker 1: ties with Edison didn't have that much to do with
Speaker 1: furthering his ideas about alternating current. He kind of got
Speaker 1: out of the business almost There were some New Jersey
Speaker 1: businessmen who hired him to improve the lighting system in
Speaker 1: the city of Raleigh, but they wanted him to improve
Speaker 1: upon an early system known as arc lighting. So Tesla
Speaker 1: took the job because you know, it was at least
Speaker 1: some kind of business, and he did create a better
Speaker 1: type of arc lighting for the city, or a better
Speaker 1: system of arc lighting, but the investors ended up taking
Speaker 1: all the money that was earned from the project for themselves,
Speaker 1: leaving Tesla with nothing, and according to Bailey, again they
Speaker 1: even cheated the inventor out of the patents that he
Speaker 1: had gotten for that new, improved arc light he'd created.
Speaker 1: After that awful experience, Tesla was broke again and he
Speaker 1: had to resort to working as a common laborer, and
Speaker 1: to add insult to injury, one of his jobs was
Speaker 1: digging ditches that would hold the electrical lines of none
Speaker 1: other than Edison's direct current grid. So we're gonna leave
Speaker 1: you there for now, with Tesla at a serious low
Speaker 1: and the ditch. But if you're a huge Tesla fan,
Speaker 1: don't worry, because in part two, his luck does change,
Speaker 1: and we'll see what happens when Tesla gets some work
Speaker 1: done on that induction motor of his that he designed
Speaker 1: so long ago and the current war really starts to
Speaker 1: heat up. We'll also take a look at Tesla's post
Speaker 1: current war life, including how he earned the nickname Master
Speaker 1: of Lightning and why some remember this one studious student
Speaker 1: as a mad scientist. So plenty in store for a
Speaker 1: Part two of Tesla Okay, what do we have on
Speaker 1: the plate for a listener mail today? We have one
Speaker 1: email here from listener Lavan and she says, just listen
Speaker 1: to the Horace Wells episode while doing my morning walk
Speaker 1: and had to let you know that I was in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Last weekend with our Hall County World War
Speaker 1: two veterans to visit their memorial. One of the side
Speaker 1: trips was a visit to the Museum of American History.
Speaker 1: They're on display was the first ether and hailer from
Speaker 1: six with credit given to William Morton as the inventor
Speaker 1: of the device. Because my husband isn't an aesthetist, I
Speaker 1: took an interest in the display and snapped a picture.
Speaker 1: No mention of Horace Wells. Oh goodness, so the gas
Speaker 1: lars continued to gasloors go on and on. We also
Speaker 1: got another email from Frank and I know we've gotten
Speaker 1: dental stories from you guys in the past, but this
Speaker 1: one really applied after that Horace Wells episode, since he
Speaker 1: was in fact a dentist. So Frank wrote us to
Speaker 1: say that my parents started seeing Dr Silver when my
Speaker 1: older sister was born. He had a brand new office
Speaker 1: and the latest equipment when he was still in practice.
Speaker 1: The local paper ran a story about his fifty years
Speaker 1: as a dentist. He had served in World War Two
Speaker 1: after hearing the dental drill. For as long as I
Speaker 1: could remember, but having good check ups. I had ten
Speaker 1: cavities and fillings from the time I was about fourteen
Speaker 1: until I was in college, so from the mid nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties until the early nineteen nineties. He never asked me
Speaker 1: if I wanted no vacine. I didn't know I could ask.
Speaker 1: I thought it was for quote, real pain. My parents
Speaker 1: never asked me if I had taken any painkillers, and
Speaker 1: never offered any after the fact. I quote got through
Speaker 1: by imagining really cold ice cream. This is kind of
Speaker 1: a very bad email, but funny too. I'm sorry you
Speaker 1: had to get through through all of that, Frank, but
Speaker 1: I guess you could really identify to some of the
Speaker 1: people we were discussing in that podcast. Yeah, on the
Speaker 1: bright side, you never had to go through that whole
Speaker 1: numbing sensation. I think that's probably preferable obviously to the day.
Speaker 1: You're right. You're right, that's not a bright side. But
Speaker 1: thanks for writing in and sharing your story. If anyone
Speaker 1: else has any related stories that they would like to share,
Speaker 1: or maybe just some other recommendations for future podcasts. Please
Speaker 1: write to us a history podcast at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 1: You can also look us up on Facebook and we're
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Myston History. And if you want to
Speaker 1: learn a little bit more about the science behind what
Speaker 1: we're discussing with this TESTLA episode, we do have an
Speaker 1: article called how electricity works, and you can find that
Speaker 1: by searching for electricity on our homepage at www dot
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: M