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00:00When you think about the greatest inventors of all time, there are a few
00:05names that come to mind. Henry Ford. The Wright brothers. Thomas Edison. But there's
00:13one name that is not as recognizable. When you plug your phone in, turn on the
00:18lights, or use the refrigerator, you have Nikola Tesla to think. This is the story
00:24of the forgotten genius, and the story begins at the end. On January 7, 1943, a
00:32maid working at the New Yorker Hotel walked into room 3327, where she found
00:37the body of an 86-year-old man who called the hotel home for the past decade.
00:42Tesla died alone and broke. He lived off a diet of warm milk and crackers and was
00:48obsessed with feeding the pigeons outside. One of the greatest inventors of all
00:52time faded into obscurity and died penniless. There is a reason why this
00:57happened, which will become clear by the end of this story. Tesla was born in the
01:02town of Smiljan in present-day Croatia on July 10, 1856. He was born during a
01:09lightning storm. According to family legend, the midwife said halfway through the
01:14birth, this child will be a child of darkness. To which his mother replied, no,
01:19he will be a child of light. Little did she know how prophetic those words would be.
01:24When Tesla was five, he witnessed his older brother fall from a horse and later die.
01:29This would haunt him for the rest of his life. As a child, he began seeing visions
01:34accompanied by flashes of light, confusing what was real and what was imaginary. This
01:39never went away. The vision spurred his ability to conceive inventions in his head
01:44in such detail that he didn't even need to draw them out. He explained how the designs were perfected
01:50in his mind in an article in 1919. Invariably, my device works as I conceived that it should,
01:56and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In 20 years, there has not been a single exception.
02:03Tesla credits his mom for his interest in invention. Juka Mandic invented small household
02:09appliances in her spare time. She had an eidetic memory, the ability to recall an image from memory
02:15with high precision, and she passed this on to her son. Tesla's father was a priest and wanted him to
02:20become one too, but Tesla was interested in engineering. When he contracted cholera as a
02:25teen and nearly died, his father promised to send him to engineering school if he survived,
02:31and miraculously, he did. He went to study in Austria at the Technical College of Graz,
02:36where he is said to have worked from 3am until 11pm every day. Professors were worried that he
02:42would die from exhaustion. Tesla had a beautiful mind. He could perform calculus in his head and
02:48spoke 8 languages. He was a good student at the start, but would not finish school. He dropped out
02:54after becoming addicted to gambling and cut ties with his family so they wouldn't find out. His friends
02:59didn't know what happened to him either. They thought he drowned in a river. Tesla moved around Europe,
03:05and eventually ended up in Budapest working as an electrician at a telephone company.
03:09While walking around a park in the city one day, he had an epiphany about developing a new way of
03:15generating electricity using alternating current. It would be his greatest invention that would change
03:21the world. I'll explain more about AC a little later. In 1882, he settled in Paris to work for the
03:27French branch of Thomas Edison's electric company. He started off installing indoor lighting, but the
03:33managers noticed his talents and had him doing more complicated work, designing and building dynamos
03:38and motors. He was soon traveling throughout Europe, fixing problems at other Edison branches.
03:43Two years later, in 1884, Tesla's manager offered him a job at Edison Machine Works in New York City.
03:50He agreed and arrived in America with only four cents in his pocket because his money was stolen on the
03:55boat ride over. Tesla initially had a good impression of Edison. Edison was also impressed by Tesla,
04:01later saying, I have had many hardworking assistants, but you take the cake.
04:06This mutual admiration didn't last. They would become bitter rivals. The two men disagreed over
04:12how electricity should be contained and delivered. Edison preferred direct current, which is a system
04:17where the electric charge only flows in one direction. Tesla was a fan of alternating current,
04:23in which the electric charge changes direction periodically. Changing directions is crucial to
04:29maintaining a steady supply of electricity because it does not overpower outlets. This means it can
04:35provide more power and transmit power over longer distances. It's the reason AC powers our homes and
04:42other large appliances, whereas DC powers smaller items like flashlights. But Edison didn't care about
04:49AC because it could have hurt the sales of direct current since he owned all the patents for DC. According to
04:55Tesla, a manager at Edison's company offered him a $50,000 bonus if he could improve some machines that
05:02ran on DC. When he did, the manager refused to pay up. Another account of the story has Edison telling
05:08Tesla, you don't understand our American humor. Regardless of how it played out, Tesla quit and set
05:14off to form his own electric company the following year in 1885. But his investors showed little interest
05:20and decided to take the company and all of Tesla's patents, which they could do because Tesla had
05:25assigned the patents to the company in exchange for stock, which was now worthless. After losing his
05:31company, Tesla had to take a job digging ditches for $2 a day just to survive. But his fortunes would
05:37change. In 1887, Tesla invented an induction motor that ran on alternating current. The motor was the most
05:45efficient way to convert electricity to mechanical power. A version of it powers Tesla's vehicles,
05:50which took its name from the inventor. He patented the motor and showed it off the
05:54following year at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. That caught the attention of
05:59George Westinghouse, a major player in the electric market who realized Tesla's AC motor might just be
06:05what he needed to complete his alternating current system and compete against Edison's DC system.
06:11So Tesla licensed the patents for the AC motor to Westinghouse for $60,000 and also received stock
06:17and royalties. Westinghouse hired him as a consultant for $2,000 a month, which is the equivalent of over
06:23$50,000 a month today. The war of the currents began. Edison tried hard to try to discredit Westinghouse
06:30and Tesla. He secretly financed the electric chair that used alternating current to prove how dangerous AC
06:37he was. Edison's company also publicly tortured animals to prove its point. In 1903, they electrocuted
06:43a circus elephant named Topsy and produced a film about it called Electrocuting an Elephant. Despite
06:49Edison's schemes, good things were happening for Westinghouse and Tesla. They underbid Edison and his
06:55newly formed company General Electric to illuminate the world's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
07:01The first all-electric fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of
07:07America. It was clear to the 27 million people who attended that AC would power the future. Their
07:14success continued when they beat out Edison's General Electric again to build the world's first
07:19alternating current power plant in Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power station was a massive success
07:25and helped light up Buffalo, New York. The building of the plant also meant Tesla became a pioneer in
07:30renewable energy. His statue can be found at Niagara Falls today. Westinghouse and Tesla won the war of
07:37the currents and direct current was being phased out. But there were problems. Westinghouse's company was
07:44running out of money and eventually went 10 million into debt. In 1897, he went to Tesla and asked if his
07:51royalties could be reduced in a desperate attempt to save the company. Tesla was so compelled by compassion
07:57for his friend that he ripped up his contract. He was grateful to Westinghouse for believing in him
08:03when no one else would. Tesla willingly walked away from 12 million dollars in royalties, which in today's
08:09terms would be worth over 300 million. Had he held onto those royalties over time, he would have likely
08:15become the wealthiest person on the planet and the first person with a billion dollar net worth.
08:21That act of compassion for his friend, of tearing up his contract, saved Westinghouse. In return,
08:27Westinghouse paid Tesla 216 thousand dollars for the rights to use his AC patents forever. This is
08:33the equivalent of about six million dollars today. With that money, Tesla became financially independent
08:39and set up a series of laboratories in New York for new projects, where he was visited by the rich and
08:44famous, including his close friend and one of the greatest American writers of all time, Mark Twain.
08:50This was his period of many inventions. He held over 300 patents in his lifetime. He created an early
08:56version of neon lighting. The Tesla turbine, a bladeless turbine for vehicles. He pioneered x-ray
09:02technology by experimenting with radiation. This is an x-ray of his own hand. Another standout
09:08invention was one of the first remote controls. In 1898, he controlled a miniature boat at Madison
09:14Square Garden in New York. It was so far ahead of its time that the crowd thought he was using
09:19magic to make it move. That would be the ancestor to today's remote-controlled drones.
09:25One of his most well-known inventions is the Tesla coil, a device that can produce large amounts of
09:31high voltage electricity. Because of the coils, he discovered he could send and receive powerful
09:36radio signals when they resonated at the same frequency. Tesla was getting ready to broadcast his first
09:42radio signal. But disaster struck. A fire destroyed his lab in 1895. He lost years of research and
09:50equipment. Tesla didn't apply for a patent for the radio until two years later. The fire would be the
09:56turning point in his life that led to a downhill spiral. At the same time that he was working on radio,
10:03an Italian entrepreneur, Guilielmo Marconi, was also working on the radio in England. He tried to acquire
10:09patent rates in the US but was turned down because it was too similar to Tesla's. However, things changed
10:16when Marconi was able to send the world's first transatlantic radio message in 1901 using 17 of
10:22Tesla's patents. Edison then threw his financial support behind Marconi. Tesla had no problem with
10:28Marconi's achievements. But in 1904, the US Patent Office suddenly changed its mind and awarded Marconi a
10:36patent for the invention of the radio. There has never been a reason given for this decision, but
10:41the powerful financial backing Marconi received could explain it. Marconi went on to win the Nobel
10:46Prize in Physics in 1911, which was only possible due to Tesla's work. Tesla was furious and sued
10:53Marconi. The case dragged on in court for years and was only settled in Tesla's favor after his death.
10:59That radio incident negatively impacted the rest of Tesla's career. For example, Tesla was obsessed with
11:06bringing wireless communication to the world and built a huge wireless transmission station in Long
11:11Island, New York called Ward and Cliff Tower. He imagined a world where we could send and receive
11:16messages wirelessly. He was, again, well ahead of his time. But financial backers did not have enough
11:22faith in his project. They pulled out and banked on Marconi's radio invention instead. This left
11:27Tesla in financial ruin. He had no choice but to abandon his dream project in 1905 and eventually
11:34lost Ward and Cliff Tower to foreclosure. Tesla's mental health deteriorated. He lived his last decade
11:41in the New Yorker Hotel beginning in 1933. Westinghouse Corporation hired him as a consultant and paid for
11:47his room. He lived rent-free but died in debt. So why did one of the greatest inventors of all time
11:54fade into obscurity and die penniless? You could say Tesla wasn't lucky at times, like when the fire
12:00burned down his New York lab. But the main reason is because Tesla was not a capitalist. He made
12:06decisions that those with more business acumen would not have made, such as giving up his royalties
12:11for the AC motor. He wasn't concerned about money. He was concerned about the pursuit of science for the
12:17betterment of humanity. He wanted to change the world, and he did. Thanks in part to Elon Musk's
12:23company, people are starting to learn more about the man who inspired the company, a man whose
12:28inventions would power our entire planet. It's because of Tesla that modern society functions the
12:34way it does. Tesla's mother called him a child of light, and she was quite right. Thanks so much for
12:41watching the story of Nikola Tesla. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Cindy Palm. If you like what you
12:46saw, subscribe to my new channel. I also started a Patreon where you can make a monthly contribution,
12:51and this will go a really long way toward helping this channel grow. See you soon.