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Nikola Tesla - Inventor of the Modern World Documentary
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00:00:00The man known to history as Nikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljanlika,
00:00:12which was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now located in Croatia.
00:00:19His father was Milutin Tesla, a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church
00:00:25and the son of Nikola Tesla's grandfather who was also named Nikola.
00:00:30His grandfather had served as a military officer for the French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars
00:00:36and had risen to the rank of sergeant before marrying Tesla's grandmother, Anna Kalinich, the daughter of a respected colonel.
00:00:44Following the defeat of Napoleon, Nikola Tesla returned to Lika,
00:00:48which was assimilated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire where he fathered two sons including Milutin and his brother Josef
00:00:56as well as three daughters named Stanka, Janja and another whose name is unknown.
00:01:02Milutin Tesla and his brother were sent to the Austrian military officers' training academy
00:01:08to follow the career path of their father and while Josef thrived,
00:01:12eventually becoming a professor of mathematics at a military academy in Austria where he authored
00:01:18several standard mathematical textbooks, Milutin decided instead to choose a devotional path,
00:01:25enrolling in the Orthodox seminary in Plaski to train as a priest after being castigated in training
00:01:33for not maintaining the shininess of his brass buttons.
00:01:37Nikola Tesla's mother was Duka Mandic, the daughter of a priest from Gracac called Nikola Mandic,
00:01:44and the sister to three very successful brothers including Nikolai,
00:01:49who climbed the ecclesiastical ranks to become the Archbishop of Sarajevo
00:01:53and the metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Bosnia, Paio who became a colonel in the general
00:02:00staff of the Austrian army and finally Trifun who excelled in the business sphere as a respected
00:02:06hotelier and landowner. In addition to being a dedicated housewife Duka Mandic possessed a keen
00:02:13intellect and a strong work ethic and was herself an innovator of her household appliances which she
00:02:20often modified to make more efficient. She was an inventor of the first order according to Tesla
00:02:27and a creative influence on him until her death in 1892. Milutin Tesla was a gifted student and
00:02:36graduated with top honours in 1845, marrying the 25-year-old Duka Mandic in 1847 after being delegated
00:02:45to oversee the parish of Seigne on the Adriatic coast. Settling into a house perched on top of a cliff
00:02:52overlooking the ocean, the newlyweds started a family, with Duka giving birth to their eldest son
00:02:58Dane in 1848, a first-born daughter Angelina in 1850 and finally another daughter Milka in 1852.
00:03:08However, due to the poor pay he received and the salty sea air which caused him health problems,
00:03:14Milutin Tesla was reassigned to the church of St Apostles Peter and Paul in Smilyan which meant
00:03:21the place of sweet basil in Lika province where he was provided with a picturesque farmhouse,
00:03:28a parcel of fertile land and even an Arabian horse so that he could ride to see his parishioners.
00:03:35It was given to him by a Turkish Pasha based in Bosnia as a reward for assisting some local Muslims.
00:03:42As well as being an extremely smart man who assembled a vast library packed full of volumes on religion,
00:03:49mathematics, science and literary works in many different tongues, Milutin Tesla was also an
00:03:56arduous reformer of the Serbian people, regularly writing articles for a variety of newspapers and
00:04:03tirelessly promoting the establishment of language schools where Serbians could learn to read and write.
00:04:09According to his family Nikola Tesla was born at midnight sometime between the 9th and 10th of
00:04:17July 1856 in the middle of a terrific thunderstorm. Three days later Nikola was baptized at his family
00:04:24home and with his future seemingly already planned he was also enlisted as a member of the 1st Lika
00:04:32regiment of the 9th Medak Company, a squadron he was to join when he was 15 years old by law.
00:04:39By all accounts Tesla's childhood was happy and one he shared with his older siblings as well as his
00:04:45younger sister Maritza born in 1859 who would often accompany him to the churchyard or the farmyard to
00:04:53play with the chickens, geese, sheep and other livestock which his father kept. Tesla was often joined by his
00:05:00black cat Machak who first introduced him to the phenomenon that would define his life's work after
00:05:07he set off a loud spark upon stroking him, an event which was explained by his father as a secretion of
00:05:15electricity. In another formative experience again involving Machak, Tesla noted one day how a halo of
00:05:22light suddenly surrounded his dear cat, illuminating briefly the candlelit room he was sitting in.
00:05:28Inspired by such marvels, Tesla devoted much of his energy as a child to experimenting and encouraged
00:05:35by his mother's inventive streak, drew up plans for flying machines very similar to how a helicopter
00:05:42would later function. He disassembled clocks to see how they worked and even designed himself a wooden
00:05:49sword so he could pretend to be a valiant Serbian warrior. Behind the fascination however lay a
00:05:55troubled young mind as Tesla revealed that as a young boy he suffered from a strange affliction
00:06:02whereby he couldn't distinguish images from reality which troubled him greatly. Tesla's childhood trauma was
00:06:09exacerbated by the death of his older brother Dani in 1863 who was killed in front of Tesla by the
00:06:16family's Arabian horse in a traumatic experience that would endlessly haunt him, and which was also
00:06:23the reason why his distraught father moved his family from the idyllic Croatian countryside to the
00:06:29larger town of Gospic, an unfamiliar environment where Tesla struggled to adjust to urban living.
00:06:37The untimely passing of Dani cast a long shadow over Tesla's own relationship with his father,
00:06:44who, mired in grief, always underappreciated the talents of his youngest son, a neglect that young
00:06:51Nikola tried to compensate for by striving to be perfect in everything he did so that he could win
00:06:57back the love of his parents. Blinded by sorrow, Milutin Tesla treated his young son with contempt,
00:07:05flying into rages when he caught him reading from his private library, and on one particularly hurtful
00:07:12occasion after Nikola had accidentally ruined a local noblewoman's dress by unintentionally jumping
00:07:19on it as it trailed down the aisle of a church, he slapped his son across the face in public as a
00:07:26punishment. As a result of his strained relations, Tesla developed a series of peculiar phobias as a
00:07:33child, such as a repulsion for women who wore earrings and pearls, a strong aversion to hair,
00:07:40a loathing for the smell of camphor, as well as a number of other strange habits,
00:07:45including an obsession with counting his steps and measuring in volume the contents of his meals,
00:07:52calculations he was only satisfied with if they were divisible by three.
00:07:57Overwhelmed by a plethora of odd neuroses, Tesla was able to regain some sense of balance after he came
00:08:04across a novel called Abafi, published in 1836 by Hungarian author Miklos Josiká, which featured
00:08:12the story of Oliver Abafi, a young impulsive nobleman and hedonist, recast as a valiant national hero,
00:08:21who sacrifices himself for the well-being of the country. Tesla was particularly inspired by the
00:08:27character of the protagonist, seeing in his desire to better his moral character, while ignoring
00:08:33frivolous distractions, a masterful example of self-restraint, which showed Tesla that it was
00:08:40indeed possible for him to control his wild emotions. Tesla realized that a good coping strategy was to
00:08:47work with, rather than against, the nebulous visions that assaulted his consciousness, and,
00:08:53delving even deeper into the make-believe world of his imagining, Tesla began to embark on strange
00:08:59journeys, where he would stumble across fantastical countries, people and cities that he dreamed up.
00:09:07As Tesla honed that untamed imagination that would later serve him so well in his profession,
00:09:13he began theorizing about the nature of reality itself, coming to the conclusion that he could trace
00:09:20all of his mental images back to something he either saw, smelt or touched, in an early echo of the
00:09:27mechanistic view of the world he would later espouse. It was also an idea that had real-life
00:09:33application for Tesla, who, on one occasion, was extolled as a hero by a band of firemen after he spotted a
00:09:41small kink in a fire hose he instinctively knew was preventing water from reaching a burning building,
00:09:48a problem he quickly fixed by ironing the groove out. Tesla's ingenuity would be further fostered
00:09:54at the Real Gymnasium, the grammar school he attended in Gospic, where he would amaze his
00:10:00mathematics professors by demonstrating a natural ability to calculate numbers. But, while he excelled
00:10:07in scientific pursuits, Tesla was unable to translate his talents to drawing class, where a preference for
00:10:15undisturbed contemplation distracted Tesla heavily, leading to grades that were so extremely poor,
00:10:22his father had to speak with the principal, which instilled in a young Nikola a lifelong aversion to
00:10:29diagrams. During his schooling at the Real Gymnasium, Tesla began to take invention seriously, devising the
00:10:37schematics for a flying machine that would use the pressure of a vacuum to push air molecules,
00:10:44a concept that a grown-up Tesla would later go on to disprove. Shortly after he graduated from the
00:10:50Real Gymnasium in 1870, Tesla, perhaps because of his overactive imagination, became very sick with a
00:10:58range of maladies sufficiently serious enough for the doctors treating him to nearly give up on his case
00:11:05entirely. Throughout his recuperation, Tesla began voraciously reading, and it was during this period
00:11:12that he was first introduced to the tales of Mark Twain. It was a story he would later recount to Mark Twain
00:11:19himself, who burst into tears upon hearing it. After a period of convalescence, Nikola Tesla was next
00:11:26enrolled at the Haya Real Gymnasium in Karlovac in 1873, where, in accordance with his father's wish for
00:11:35Tesla to continue the family profession, he was enlisted in classes at the local seminary. However,
00:11:42Tesla's true desire was to learn everything he could about electricity, a passion ignited by an
00:11:48inspirational physics teacher who taught him about the radiometer invented by British scientist William
00:11:55Crookes, a device that powered a vacuum bulb with energy produced by four rapidly spinning tinfoil
00:12:02veins. This roused Tesla to conduct some of his first experiments with batteries, induction coils,
00:12:09and electrostatic generators. Yet Tesla would have to put some of his projects on hold, after again
00:12:16falling seriously ill with cholera upon his return home to Gosbij, causing the young prodigy to be bedridden
00:12:24for over nine months, and to experience several close shaves with death. After one particularly
00:12:30worrying incident, Tesla supposedly implored his father that if he were to study engineering, instead
00:12:37of entering the priesthood, that he may well recover, causing Milutin, desperate to avoid the
00:12:43unbearable pain of losing another son, to solemnly promise that Nikola would go to the best technical
00:12:50institution in the world. Having finally been heard, Tesla made a miraculous recovery. But before
00:12:58he could become a student, he was sent to the Croatian mountains with nothing but a bundle of books
00:13:04and some hunting equipment by his father, who, worried for his son's health, did everything in his
00:13:10power to hide his son from the authorities, as, by law, Tesla would have to serve in the Austrian
00:13:16armed forces for three years. For nine months, starting in the early fall of 1874, Tesla wandered
00:13:24the forests and lakes of the Eastern European countryside, becoming stronger physically and
00:13:29mentally as he thought deeply about invention, reshaping the vividness of his visions from a
00:13:35debilitating weakness into a powerful contemplative tool that could be used to flesh out the contraptions
00:13:42that flashed across his mind, such as a pipe installed underwater that could transport letters and
00:13:49packages placed in capsules using the principles of hydraulic pressure, and a ring constructed
00:13:55around the Earth's equator that could be used as a high-tech transport network. When Tesla returned,
00:14:02his father had kept his promise, securing for him a scholarship at the Military Frontier
00:14:07Administration Authority, that would enable him to study for three years at the Polytechnic School
00:14:14in Graz, Austria. Receiving an embroidered bag made from typical Serbian materials from his mother,
00:14:21which he would always prize, in 1875 Tesla left Gospic to start anew in a completely different culture
00:14:29and environment, in the same way that his own Serbian relatives had adapted to life on the Austro-Hungarian border
00:14:37decades prior. During his freshman year, Tesla proved himself to be a perfect student,
00:14:44never once missing a lecture, and supposedly studying from 3 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day,
00:14:50a schedule that was thought so extreme that one professor wrote to Milutin, warning him that
00:14:56unless his son was escorted out of the school, that he might work himself to death, while others
00:15:02commended him for his zeal, such as the dean of the technical faculty, who informed Milutin Tesla
00:15:08that his son was, quote, a star of first rank. In fact, Tesla was keeping himself very busy,
00:15:17administering his earliest experiments with alternating current or AC that would later make his name, but
00:15:24during his sophomore year, Tesla would be sidetracked, developing a destructive gambling habit,
00:15:31and wagering away his entire tuition fund in the process. Near destitute, Tesla had also neglected
00:15:38his studies, scoring extremely poorly in the examinations, and with no marks registered for
00:15:44his final semester, he was also unable to graduate and was forced to abandon the university in December
00:15:511878, a failure he made sure to keep secret from his family as well as his classmates, as he was riddled
00:15:59with guilt and embarrassment. In 1879, Tesla would live for a while in self-imposed exile, first making
00:16:07his way to the city of Maribor where he became a draftsman and was paid 60 florins a month, while in
00:16:15his free time he continued to play cards and wager money on the streets with the locals, yet Tesla's
00:16:22Slovenian sojourn would be short-lived, as a couple of months into his stay, he was seized by the
00:16:28authorities for not possessing a proper residency permit and returned to Gospic escorted by armed
00:16:35police. Back home, Tesla's father would not get much time to set his son straight, as only a month later,
00:16:42on the 17th of April 1879, Milutin died, heartbroken that his son had been labelled as a vagrant and had chosen
00:16:52to indulge in a life of vice. Not content to see their talented nephew waste his abilities, in January 1880,
00:17:00two of Tesla's uncles gave him enough money to start courses at the Charles Ferdinand University in Prague,
00:17:08despite Tesla not meeting the language requirement, which specified that students had to be fluent
00:17:14in both Czech and Greek. However, communication issues aside, he also arrived too late and was
00:17:22unable to enrol in classes, and so for the entire time, Tesla was only permitted to attend lectures
00:17:29and received no formal grades. In 1881, Nikola Tesla landed his first job for a telecommunications
00:17:38firm in Budapest called the American Telephone Company, where he was drafted in as an electrical
00:17:45engineer by Thivador Puskas, who had previously worked alongside Thomas Edison, the inventor of the
00:17:52lightbulb, at the Edison Laboratories in Menlo Park. Making himself a valuable employee and sharing his
00:17:59findings with his work colleague Anital Sigeti, Tesla continued his study of the concept of the
00:18:05alternate current in his spare time, proposing that a motor driven by circuits that were out of phase,
00:18:13could maintain power levels to supply a constant stream of electricity. But in order to make the
00:18:19system function, Tesla realized he needed to figure out how to rotate magnetic fields. Strolling in the
00:18:26park with Anital Sigeti in February 1882, Tesla had a sudden stroke of genius, and solved the rotating
00:18:34magnetic field field problem, going on to explain the concept of the induction motor to his friend by
00:18:41drawing its basic blueprints in the sand with a stick, outlining a new type of engine that, unlike its
00:18:48direct current or DC counterpart, did not need a commutator, an inefficient cylindrical device segmented
00:18:56with metal that had to be regularly maintained. Impressed by Tesla's genius, Thivador Puskas recommended
00:19:03that Tesla moved to Paris to work for his old acquaintance Thomas Edison at his Continental Edison
00:19:10company, a firm that specialized in electrical equipment, where he was first assigned by his
00:19:15boss Charles Batchelor, a manager who had worked for Edison since 1870 with designing dynamos,
00:19:22a contraption that converted mechanical energy into electrical energy and which was used most commonly
00:19:29in direct current circuits. Off the clock however, Tesla continued to advance the AC theory after he
00:19:36was sent to work on a project in Strasbourg, where he built the first induction motor prototype.
00:19:44However, Tesla was unable to garner any serious interest in alternating currents. This was unfortunate,
00:19:51as alternating current is recognized today as a better method of electric current delivery than direct
00:19:57current. Direct current, of the kind which came to dominate electricity delivery systems in the late
00:20:0319th century, consistently sends electricity in one direction along an electric grid. Alternating current,
00:20:11by way of contrast, periodically reverses and changes direction along a grid or system as its magnitude
00:20:18alternately reverses course. Alternating current is considerably more efficient than direct current.
00:20:24Tesla's error, if it can be defined as such, is that he was simply ahead of his time in trying to propose
00:20:31alternating current as the better method of energy generation. He was correct, but the technology
00:20:37available at the time simply favored the more crude direct current method. Tesla soon found himself in
00:20:44another personal finance crisis, after spending all of his wages, yet he had done enough during his stint at
00:20:51the company to impress his overseer Charles Batchelor, who was convinced that Tesla had the intellectual
00:20:57fortitude to work alongside Thomas Edison himself. In 1884, after being mistakenly registered as a
00:21:06migrant from Sweden, after the immigration officer misheard him saying Smiljan, Nikola Tesla arrived in
00:21:12America armed with an introductory letter penned by his mentor Charles Batchelor, who stated, quote,
00:21:19I know two great men, one is you, Thomas Edison, and the other is this young man. Although Tesla
00:21:26fundamentally disagreed with the notion of direct current, he was put to work improving the DC motors
00:21:32devised by Edison, who believed that the AC devices that Tesla envisioned were too dangerous and unfeasible,
00:21:40a diversion of opinion that would become a lifelong rivalry. Forced to develop an invention he had no belief in,
00:21:47Tesla became disillusioned and began outlining the weaknesses of DC and championing the advantages
00:21:54of AC, pointing out the inefficiency of Edison's direct current which only dimly lit lamps and
00:22:01proposing instead that generators should be engineered with what he termed the polyphase principle,
00:22:07whereby energy would be constantly recycled, since he believed in the cyclical nature of electricity.
00:22:13Tesla also insisted that a huge disadvantage of the direct current was its reliance on costly power
00:22:20stations installed at two-mile intervals, since it was unable to maintain high levels of voltage over
00:22:27distance. In contrast, arguing that the alternating current, in which the direction of energy was
00:22:33changed 50 to 60 times per second, was a lot more effective, since it could flexibly sustain varying
00:22:40levels of high voltage power and minimise power loss over long distances. This is why today the power
00:22:46delivered to consumers via power grids is AC, which sustains power over long distances using transformer
00:22:54substations. These reduce the AC voltage over a given distance. Once the AC power reaches its destination,
00:23:01such as a home, the AC power is used directly for electrical appliances, such as washing machines,
00:23:08but for other smaller appliances, it is possible to convert AC power to DC via diodes within the
00:23:15appliance's power supply. These only allow the electrical current to flow in one direction,
00:23:20thus ensuring the appliance receives a constant stream of power.
00:23:25Disassociating himself from Edison and eager to spread the AC gospel, Tesla started his own company in
00:23:331885 called the Tesla Electric Light Company with the financial backing of two rich benefactors, Robert
00:23:40Lane and Benjamin Vale, who were certain that the alternating current was the future. However, in a
00:23:47common issue that would prevent almost all of his later endeavours from succeeding, Tesla asked for too
00:23:53much money from his patrons, who, increasingly fearful that AC was too risky, ejected Tesla from his own
00:24:00company that same year, forcing him to eke out a living for the majority of 1885 as a repairman and even
00:24:09as a manual labourer, a job in which he was paid just two dollars a day to dig ditches. Having learned
00:24:15from his mistakes, in 1886, with the aid of philanthropists Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union
00:24:22superintendent, and Charles F. Peck, Tesla established another company, this time called the Tesla Electric
00:24:30Company, based in Manhattan, New York, where he finalised the designs of the polyphase induction
00:24:37motor, unveiling it to the amazement of the scientific community in 1888, when he presented a landmark paper
00:24:45to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers entitled, A New System of Alternating Current Motors
00:24:52and Transformers. George Westinghouse, an investor most famous for inventing the railway airbrake,
00:25:00and head of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, was particularly impressed,
00:25:06and his curiosity was piqued in a visit to Tesla's lab a few days later, where he was shown an early
00:25:12polyphase prototype. Convinced that Tesla's groundbreaking invention could power America,
00:25:18Westinghouse purchased all 40 of Tesla's trailblazing patents pertaining to the generators, motors,
00:25:25and transformers necessary to construct a polyphase alternating current circuit,
00:25:30and recruited Tesla as an advisor to serve for 12 months at the Westinghouse plant in Philadelphia,
00:25:37where some of the first commercially available AC devices would be produced.
00:25:41The release of the first AC machine in 1886 was the harbinger of a bitter conflict that erupted
00:25:49between Westinghouse and Edison, known as the War of the Currents, which pitted AC against DC from 1888 to 1892.
00:25:59During the dispute, Edison would try to use his resources to sway public opinion in his favour,
00:26:06and despite the evidence clearly showing that AC was safe and more effective over long distances,
00:26:13he issued a number of articles in the biggest publications warning of the dangers of the alternating current.
00:26:19Edison was unable, however, to convince his largest benefactor of the superiority of DC,
00:26:26and Wall Street Wolf John Pierpoint Morgan, who in 1892 merged Edison General Electric with the AC-focused
00:26:34Thomas Houston Company, removed Edison's name to create General Electric, and switched entirely to
00:26:41alternating current instruments. With Edison sidelined, the alternating current emerged as the
00:26:48undisputed victor of the War of the Currents, as Westinghouse increased his annual turnover from
00:26:54$800,000 in 1887 to $4.2 million in 1890, while Tesla was paid around $105,000 in royalties by the
00:27:06end of 1891, a period that also witnessed several other personal and professional triumphs for Tesla,
00:27:13who officially became a US citizen in July 1891, at the same time as he established two personal
00:27:20laboratories in New York, situated at South Fifth Avenue and East Houston Street. On the other hand,
00:27:28Tesla's dividend checks would come to an abrupt end after Westinghouse's finances were left in
00:27:34disarray, their plans to expand the company by borrowing heavily, falling through in November 1890,
00:27:42after the collapse of the Bering Brothers brokerage firm compelled panicked creditors to call in their
00:27:48loans. To cover his losses, Tesla continued to focus his attention on high-frequency AC experiments,
00:27:56inventing a lamp that required only one wire, an oscillating transformer and a high-frequency
00:28:02alternator, which he exhibited at a lecture in spring 1891 at Columbia College in New York,
00:28:09on behalf of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, to a flabbergasted crowd who were amazed
00:28:15at the ways that AC could be implemented into modern lighting circuits. The Columbia lecture established
00:28:23him as the leading electricity researcher of his day, and in follow-up experiments, Tesla would
00:28:29consistently show that electricity for light and power could be transmitted over long distances.
00:28:36Before long, Tesla was also sketching out the fundamentals of radio technology. In an 1893 lecture
00:28:43at the Franklin Institute, later popularized by Century Magazine, illustrating the concept of telegraphy
00:28:50without wires, he first underlined the importance of grounding the transmitter and receiver to astonished
00:28:57onlookers. The same year, Tesla's company achieved its greatest accomplishment to date, after lighting
00:29:03up the Chicago venue hosting the World's Columbian Exposition, entirely with alternating current,
00:29:10an honor that Tesla procured after outbitting General Electric by $1 million. By 1894, Tesla had
00:29:18gained the admiration of his peers and was awarded honorary doctoral degrees from Columbia and Yale
00:29:25universities as well as the Elliott Crescent Medal by the Franklin Institute. More good news followed
00:29:31after the Tesla Electric Company was contracted to build the first ever hydroelectric power plant
00:29:37at Niagara Falls, a childhood dream of Tesla's that became a reality in 1895 after the first schematics
00:29:45were unveiled. The Niagara facility was an accomplishment that represented the ultimate defeat of the Direct
00:29:52Energy School of Thought and Energy School of Thought, and Tesla was lavished with the highest praise and honors,
00:29:58including even the Order of Danilo from King Nicholas of Montenegro, as his achievement was celebrated
00:30:05worldwide as an important step for the future of humanity. Tesla remained unperturbed after a fire in
00:30:13March 1895 at his laboratory destroyed much of his early research, including hundreds of models, notes,
00:30:21scientific tools and photographs that had a combined value of $50,000. Despite this, in 1896 he demonstrated
00:30:30some of the earliest uses of the X-ray, discovered around the same time by the German scientist Wilhelm
00:30:37Konrad Röntgen, and astonished his contemporaries with the first ever X-ray of a man, published in the
00:30:44Electrical Review, printed using rudimentary X-ray tubes of his own design. Having revealed some of the most
00:30:51innovative functions of the X-ray, Tesla next devised the basic elements of the radio transmitter,
00:30:57and in 1896 built a rudimentary unit that received radio waves. He assessed his new invention at the
00:31:05Gerlach Hotel, located on 27th Street in Manhattan where he was living, by sending radio waves to it from his
00:31:12New York laboratory on South Fifth Avenue. Tesla presented his insights at an 1898 exhibition at
00:31:20Madison Square Gardens, where he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat he called a telautomaton to
00:31:27stunned audiences, and by 1901 he had been awarded with a patent clarifying that he had created a system
00:31:35for transmitting electrical energy. Between 1899 and 1900, after being commissioned by John Jacob Astor
00:31:44to assemble a new lighting system in a contract worth $100,000, Tesla relocated his laboratory at
00:31:51Colorado Springs, where, disobeying his patron's instructions completely, he decided instead to
00:31:56explore terrestrial stationary waves, which he regarded as his greatest discovery. At this rural outpost,
00:32:04located far away from the humdrum of New York City, Tesla started to piece together an enormous
00:32:10transmitter, powered by millions of volts of electricity, at an experimental facility built
00:32:15on the outskirts of the town of Knob Hill, keeping inquisitive onlookers away with an ominous Dante line,
00:32:22nailed to the front entrance which read, quote, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. It was here that
00:32:29Tesla first discovered that the Earth had electric potential and could be employed as a finely tuned
00:32:35conductor to transfer electrical energy without wires, while next noticing that when his experimental
00:32:42Tesla coil was powered, it emitted sparks as far as 30 feet that could be detected by antenna 10 miles away.
00:32:50Realizing that he could now wirelessly transmit signals using the electromagnetic frequencies of the
00:32:56planet, Tesla explored the practical applications, managing to light up 200 lamps, fed by a power
00:33:03source situated 26 miles away. Exploiting the same phenomena, he was even able to produce man-made lightning
00:33:11as a result. Tesla noted that the discovery of stationary electromagnetic waves and how they
00:33:17interacted with the Earth had far-reaching implications. It was a discovery which Tesla would spend the majority of
00:33:24the rest of his career investigating as he felt it had the potential to transmit electrical power across
00:33:30large distances without the need for wires. Indeed, he hoped that his work could one day provide the
00:33:37whole world with clean and free electrical power. However, as with so many of Tesla's ideas, it was funded by
00:33:45investors such as J.P. Morgan, who intended to market his inventions for profit, and were only prepared to
00:33:52fund research which would garner a return on their investments. Thus, it would be the all-powerful
00:33:58market forces that would eventually scupper so many of Tesla's imaginings. It was during this fertile
00:34:06period of discovery that Tesla also made some more unorthodox assertions, claiming that he had made
00:34:12contact with extraterrestrial beings that had triggered a series of ominous beeps that sounded from one of his
00:34:18receivers. Tesla had first heard this strange combination of noise from the device in the middle
00:34:24of the night and interpreted the regularity of the beeps as a sign that they were being manipulated by an
00:34:31intelligent entity, a theory he publicly advanced in a letter to the American Red Cross in January 1901.
00:34:39Although Tesla's story was discounted by many skeptics, there were still some who believed him.
00:34:45Influenced by the notion of an intergalactic race of Martians, first popularized in 1895 with
00:34:51the release of a book called Mars, penned by the American astronomer Percival Lowell,
00:34:57Tesla's supporters pointed out that he may have established contact with aliens from the Red Planet.
00:35:04Nevertheless, convinced of the revolutionary potential of terrestrial stationary waves,
00:35:09Tesla returned to New York in January 1900, eager to secure funding for a major invention that would
00:35:17eclipse his scientific rivals who were also investigating wireless systems such as Reginald Fassenden,
00:35:24Leder Forrest and in particular Giulielmo Giovanni Mario Marconi, an Italian inventor who became Tesla's next
00:35:32arch-nemesis after Edison. Eager to keep his May 1899 promise, in which he vowed to wirelessly
00:35:40communicate with Paris by 1900, Tesla hunted for a source of funding after patenting the magnifying
00:35:48transmitter he had constructed at Colorado Springs. Since the device he envisioned had to generate
00:35:54enormous volumes of electricity from AC equipment, Tesla first approached his old ally George Westinghouse,
00:36:02who declined to become involved but loaned him the necessary machinery, while the majority of the
00:36:08project's funding came from the coffers of Wall Street whiz JP Morgan, who signed a deal with Tesla
00:36:15after negotiations discussing the purchase of Marconi's wireless patents broke down. After convincing him
00:36:21that the wireless transfer of information would make the expensive underwater cables his company
00:36:28used to send transatlantic messages obsolete, Morgan informed Tesla he was willing to support him with a
00:36:35$150,000 investment on the condition that he would own a 51% stake of the inventor's patents.
00:36:44Between 1901 and 1905, with the backing of the biggest financial titan in the world,
00:36:51Nikola Tesla constructed the 187-foot-high transmission tower at Wardenclyffe Laboratory,
00:36:58topped with a 68-foot copper dome, which was the first wireless broadcasting system ever built,
00:37:04and was largely powered by a gigantic magnifying transmitter designed to channel large concentrations
00:37:11of electricity to any destination conceivable. Assured that by setting up receivers attached to the
00:37:17ground he could pick up the electromagnetic waves emitted by the tower anywhere, Tesla was desperate
00:37:23to overshadow his rival Marconi, who in December 1901 at St John's in Newfoundland was hailed as the
00:37:31inventor of wireless telegraphy by the world's press, after reporting triumphantly that he had
00:37:37successfully received the first transatlantic signal sent by colleagues at Poldeux in Cornwall, England.
00:37:43With a jaded Tesla making it explicitly clear in newspaper interviews that he believed Marconi had
00:37:51stolen many of his ideas from the 1890s and wishing to keep his benefactor on side, he next announced
00:37:58that he was going to create a world telegraphy system, a cutting-edge communication array similar
00:38:04to the World Wide Web of the 1990s, in which individual receivers would pick up messages and
00:38:11news broadcasted by transmitting facilities. Tesla pictured several different types of receiver,
00:38:18one that anticipated the fax machine by acting as a printer and publishing daily newspapers,
00:38:24one that was a loudspeaker that could play voice messages, and another that was a hand-held
00:38:30contraption attached to a vertical wire on a short pole that could decode radio waves,
00:38:37foreshadowing the modern cell phone. By the summer of 1902, Tesla had moved permanently to Wardenclyffe
00:38:44laboratory and was focusing exclusively on amping up the power levels. On the other hand, after setting
00:38:51up a company with Morgan to assist the enterprise, Tesla found it hard to sell shares to the moneyed New
00:38:57York elite, who believed the investment was too risky, an appraisal not shared by Tesla, who sold
00:39:04$33,000 of his personal property and borrowed a further $10,000 to realise his dream.
00:39:12Faced with an additional $30,000 bill from Westinghouse for the equipment, a lawsuit from the landlord
00:39:19James Warden, who was taking Tesla to court for not paying property tax, as well as another bill from
00:39:25the phone company who had installed a special line out of the laboratory, Tesla struggled financially.
00:39:31Tesla's promise to extend the coverage of his system so that it could be detected as far away as
00:39:37Australia failed to persuade Morgan, who in July 1903 let Tesla know that he was unwilling to invest
00:39:44any more capital. A mortal and unexpected blow to the world telegraphy system that enraged Tesla,
00:39:51who in true mad scientist fashion furiously cranked up the voltage of the magnifying transmitter
00:39:58at Wardenclyffe to the maximum level and hurled lightning bolts into the New York sky.
00:40:04From a risk perspective, Morgan's decision was quite understandable, since after two and a half years,
00:40:11Tesla had failed to fulfil his pledge to provide a transatlantic system in six to eight months,
00:40:17and a Pacific branch a year later. Yet others have postulated that Morgan abandoned Wardenclyffe
00:40:24because he was worried that Tesla was going to make the energy completely free for everyone,
00:40:30and thus deprive his firm of a lucrative paycheck. While another interpretation contests that Morgan
00:40:37was growing increasingly less confident in the wireless industry, which had been mired in scandal by
00:40:43the actions of Lancelot E. Pike. He was a conman who had stolen investor money after promising to
00:40:50create a wireless service between Philadelphia and New York. Moreover, Morgan felt more inclined to
00:40:57invest in deforest wireless automobiles, a company founded by another of Tesla's rivals that was
00:41:03projected to make five million dollars a year, and which had already secured for itself a major contract
00:41:10with the US Navy by February 1903, supplying wireless deforest transmitters. After this,
00:41:18Tesla, no longer the darling of electrical engineering, continued to have no luck attracting investors,
00:41:25as the breakdown of his Wardenclyffe project had turned academic and public opinion against him,
00:41:31with the once celebrated genius now painted as a man who could never quite fulfil his promises.
00:41:38Determined to restore his credibility to investors by putting out a commercial product,
00:41:43Tesla devised a scheme to sell small Tesla coils to laboratories around the country,
00:41:49via a company called the Tesla Electric and Manufacturing Company, but this ultimately went under
00:41:56because of a lack of investment. Downtrodden and defamed in the US, Tesla would learn that even his
00:42:03reputation in his homeland could not save him, after Serbian bankers declined to fund him,
00:42:09while his old business partner, John Jacob Astor, still annoyed that Tesla had spent his 1899 loan
00:42:17researching terrestrial stationary waves instead of wireless lighting, politely refused to get involved.
00:42:24By early 1904, Tesla was hiring out his services as a consultant, and had embarked on a new project,
00:42:32that aimed to harness the power of Niagara Falls in partnership with the businessman William B. Rankin.
00:42:38Yet Tesla's real desire was always to restart his experiments at Wardenclyffe,
00:42:44a prospect that was becoming increasingly unlikely, since investors were discouraged by the fact that
00:42:50Morgan still owned 51% of Tesla's patents, meaning that business partners would always have to consult
00:42:57him to reap any financial benefit from Tesla's inventions. In response, Tesla bombarded Morgan
00:43:04with impassioned appeals to take him back on, in a series of letters that could come in many forms,
00:43:10with some carefully prepared proposals promising Morgan unrealistically high profit margins,
00:43:16while in others Tesla desperately scribbled emotional outbursts, decrying his unfair treatment.
00:43:23Unable to drum up financial backing and still struggling to get the Wardenclyffe tower functioning,
00:43:30Tesla was in a dark place and began spiralling into a true nervous breakdown, after the untimely
00:43:36death of his business associate Rankin and the collapse of Canadian Niagara Power in the fall of 1905.
00:43:43A man who was always fascinated with human psychology, in the 1920s Tesla shared his experience of emotional
00:43:50collapse with author George Sylvester Virek, in a well-publicized book on Freudian theory,
00:43:57explaining how, in his delirium, he was haunted by images of his deceased brother Dane,
00:44:03as well as their mother. Tesla would recover from his breakdown in 1906, and with a new determination
00:44:10to prove himself as a valuable asset, he switched his focus from electrical to mechanical engineering,
00:44:17delving into the science of flight in a bid to raise money so that he could continue his work at
00:44:22Wardenclyffe, which in 1904, due to lack of funds, he had mortgaged to George C. Bolt,
00:44:29the owner of the Waldorf Astoria hotel where Tesla lived for many years. The result was the invention of
00:44:36a turbine that worked without blades. But Tesla's contraption was met less than enthusiastically
00:44:43by John James Astor, who refused to invest in the idea in 1909, yet Tesla still remained highly
00:44:50confident in his design, issuing two patents for a pump and a turbine in October, and even starting a
00:44:57new company, the Tesla Propulsion Company. However, after Tesla again failed to impress at a demonstration
00:45:04at the Waterside Power Station in New York, and still daydreaming about restarting his research into
00:45:11wireless power, he approached the son of JP Morgan, Jack Morgan, in 1913, about him becoming a potential
00:45:19investor. More interested in his turbine designs, Jack Morgan allocated Tesla $20,000, who instead of
00:45:27using the money in the way it was intended, spent it all trying to persuade Sigmund Bergman, a German
00:45:33industrialist, to finance his project, which was discontinued after the outbreak of World War I.
00:45:41Over the next ten years, as his personal wealth began to evaporate, Tesla continued to assess his
00:45:47turbine, and to work in conjunction with manufacturers such as Pyle National in Chicago, Alice Chalmers in
00:45:54Milwaukee, and the Budd Company in Philadelphia. But he was unable to fix a recurring problem that
00:46:00ultimately spelled the project's doom. As if operated at over 10,000 rpm, the thin discs of the internal
00:46:08machinery would start to deform, and there were no stronger materials available. Tesla's inability to
00:46:15secure funding for any of his pursuits, and his penchant for overspending, led to the near emptying of
00:46:21his bank accounts, and from 1916 he was forced to file for bankruptcy. Tesla admitted that his monthly
00:46:28income was no more than $350 to $400, after declaring he was unable to pay $935 in taxes to the New York
00:46:38Treasury, and although he was still technically the president and treasurer of the Nikola Tesla company,
00:46:45over 90% of the company's stock was owned by friends, bankers and creditors, and many of his patents by then
00:46:52had expired, leaving Tesla virtually penniless. In a bid to save himself from financial ruin, Tesla launched
00:46:59a lawsuit against Marconi in August 1915, accusing the Italian of illegally patenting radio technology
00:47:08in 1904. But the case went nowhere, and Marconi remained the official owner for the time being,
00:47:15with a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court in 1943, only a few months after Tesla's death.
00:47:24Consequently, Tesla was forced to earn a living by creating minor inventions, and registering several
00:47:30improvements in automobile speedometers, frequency meters, and flow meters, which he licensed to
00:47:37Waltham Watch Company in 1918. The company used Tesla's name as a marketing ploy to sell scientifically
00:47:44built speedometers, as despite Tesla's changing circumstances, his name still carried a certain
00:47:51gravitas, and Tesla's opinions and thoughts still garnered much press interest, such as in 1917, when,
00:47:59presaging the advent of radar technology in the 1930s, he forecast that microwave radiation could be
00:48:05employed to detect ships. In the midst of his financial troubles, Tesla still had his admirers,
00:48:12and in 1915, it was reported by the New York Times that he had jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics,
00:48:19an honor he was to share with his one-time ally, and now bitter enemy Thomas Edison. But, when it was
00:48:26presented at the awards ceremony, it was instead given to William H. Bragg and his son, as Tesla refused
00:48:33to share the award with his nemesis, nor had he forgiven the Institute for recognizing Marconi as
00:48:40the pioneer of radio communication technology, after they had awarded him the same accolade in 1909.
00:48:47Two years later, in 1917, however, Tesla's individual efforts would be recognized when he accepted the
00:48:54Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the most prestigious prize in electronic
00:49:01engineering, where his life's work was praised in an address by the vice-president of the organization,
00:49:08who said, were we to seize and eliminate from our industrial world the result of Mr. Tesla's work,
00:49:15the wheels of industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our towns would be
00:49:22dark, and our mills would be idle and dead. His name marks an epoch in the advance of electrical science.
00:49:31Yet Tesla cared very little for the decoration, opting to leave the engineers club, where the
00:49:36awards ceremony was taking place, shortly before he was presented with the medallion, forcing his
00:49:42friend and the person who had nominated him, B. A. Behrendt, to embark on a frantic search that ended
00:49:49in Bryant Park, across from the venue, where Tesla was busy feeding pigeons. Tesla particularly loathed the
00:49:56fact that the award was in his rival's name. Despite being lauded for his work in electricity,
00:50:03Nikola Tesla remained poor throughout the 1920s, and because he made only a small income from the
00:50:09royalties he received from licensing his minor inventions, he became embroiled in a string of
00:50:15legal disputes, such as in June 1925 when he was sued by the attorney Ralph J. Hawkins for failing to pay
00:50:23$913 in fees. It was during this decade that Tesla started to retreat from the public eye,
00:50:31living hotel to hotel as an eccentric recluse and spending so much of his time feeding the pigeons
00:50:37in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, that one end of the park, Nikola Tesla Corner,
00:50:44now honours his name. However, on his 75th birthday in 1931, Nikola Tesla was suddenly back in the
00:50:53spotlight, appearing on the front cover of Time magazine, and thanks to the efforts of a young
00:50:58science writer called Kenneth Swayze, he received over 70 letters of congratulation published in a
00:51:05testimonial volume from some of the most esteemed scientists of the day, including Albert Einstein.
00:51:11Interviewed by Time magazine, Tesla outlined many of his future plans and, confidently disclosed,
00:51:18how he was going to disprove Einstein's theory of relativity, how he was unconvinced that energy
00:51:25was released from a split atom, as well as espousing the possibility of interplanetary communications
00:51:31in a conversation he enjoyed so much that every year thereafter, Tesla would organize a press
00:51:37conference on his birthday, usually a six-hour affair where Tesla would speak to a number of
00:51:43reporters and update them about his scientific and personal progress. For example, in 1932 he informed
00:51:51the general public about his desire to build a motor propelled by cosmic rays, and in 1936 he told
00:51:58journalists that he wiggled his toes hundreds of times before he went to bed, an exercise he believed
00:52:05would tone his body and enable him to live until he was 135 years old. The 1934 party was a particular
00:52:14highlight, where Tesla first revealed he was in the process of creating a particle beam weapon, claiming
00:52:21in the New York Times that it could,
00:52:23send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will
00:52:30bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from a defending nation's
00:52:38border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks. Anticipating the later doctrine of
00:52:45mutually assured destruction and the concept of nuclear stalemate, Tesla believed his laser beam could end
00:52:52war completely since it was so devastating that every conceivable defensive measure would be useless
00:52:59against it. Although Tesla was susceptible to flights of fancy on occasion, the death beam was a real project,
00:53:07and was the subject of a Tesla study rediscovered in 1984 entitled, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated
00:53:15Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media, which laid out the fundamentals of a weapon system that
00:53:21discharged tungsten and mercury particles at 48 times the speed of sound to produce devastating projectiles.
00:53:31Despite Tesla's invention being impossible, it elicited a great deal of publicity, motivating Tesla to recruit
00:53:38Hungarian architect Titus de Borbula to design a new tower to evaluate the death beam. Yet the project would never get off the ground,
00:53:47as by 1935 Tesla was no longer working with de Borbula, who had proven himself a slippery character after
00:53:55attempting to borrow money from Tesla and trying to get him involved in an illegal arms deal in Paraguay.
00:54:02Nevertheless, Tesla, ever wily, was still able to use the ferrari that surrounded him to his advantage in some
00:54:10situations, offering up a working prototype of the laser beam valued at $10,000 to the managers of the Governor Clinton Hotel,
00:54:20as compensation for the $400 that he owed them, while warning them that the box he gave them supposedly containing the weapon,
00:54:28would explode if improperly handled, resulting in terrified staff depositing it at the back end of the hotel vault.
00:54:36The laser beam also came to the attention of the international community, and Tesla soon found
00:54:42himself entering negotiations with the League of Nations, the UK government and even the Soviet Union,
00:54:49who signed a contract in April 1935, stipulating that Tesla was to supply them with the information
00:54:56necessary to construct the weapon, although it is unknown if Soviet scientists actually carried out the research.
00:55:03The project, however, would start to disintegrate from January 1938, after the British concluded
00:55:10negotiations with Tesla, while the final nail in the coffin would occur in 1940, after he was left empty-handed,
00:55:18following a desperate attempt to persuade the US government that the laser beam could be a viable World War II weapon.
00:55:25Hampering Tesla in his last-ditch attempts to liaise with international governments was his declining health,
00:55:33which had started to deteriorate in 1937 after he was run over by a taxi and refused to get medical treatment
00:55:40for injuries that he would never recover from. Subsisting on a meagre diet of boiled vegetables and warm milk,
00:55:48and making sure to keep three feet away from everyone to avoid catching germs, Tesla's personal health
00:55:55choices led to no improvements, and by 1942 he was spending the majority of his days confined to his bed,
00:56:03where his grip on reality started to loosen, when in July, for example, Tesla tried to send money to Mark
00:56:10Twain, who had died in 1913. Opting to see only a select few visitors, including the exiled Prince of
00:56:18Yugoslavia Peter II, and a young scientist called Blois Fitzgerald, the creator of an anti-tank gun,
00:56:25who would come to discuss inventions, Tesla isolated himself from the world as he deteriorated.
00:56:31Nikola Tesla died of a heart attack in his sleep on the 7th of January 1943,
00:56:37at his executive suite in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, where he had been living for the previous ten years.
00:56:46Inundated with letters of condolence from major scientific and political figures all over the world,
00:56:52such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the US President, the Vice President Henry Wallace, and a host of Nobel laureates,
00:56:59Tesla's funeral took place at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City on the 12th of January,
00:57:06where it was attended by over 2,000 people and presided over by members of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
00:57:14Afterwards Nikola Tesla, who by the end of his life boasted over 700 patents to his name, was cremated
00:57:21and his ashes were placed inside a golden sphere, which is still exhibited at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
00:57:29Following his death, the US government were curious as to whether among Tesla's surviving notes,
00:57:35there could be information to help them in the war effort, and so they investigated his documents,
00:57:41but found nothing of profound importance, and by 1951, they had been repatriated to the Tesla Museum in Belgrade,
00:57:49and were accompanied a few years later, in 1957, by Tesla's ashes.
00:57:54For decades after though, the mystery surrounding the laser beam gun persisted,
00:57:59as the US government consistently denied they had in their possession, one of Tesla's microfilms,
00:58:05which according to official records, had been intensively reviewed for over a month,
00:58:11some time after his death. The truth of these claims, however, remains unproven.
00:58:17Born to Serbian parents on the Austro-Hungarian borderlands, Nikola spent his early childhood in
00:58:23pastoral paradise, playing for hours in the farmyard and the churchyard with his siblings and his cat
00:58:30Maccak, who first set in motion Tesla's lifelong obsession, after showing him the strange ways that
00:58:36electric phenomena interacted with the material world. As a youngster, Tesla was besieged by a
00:58:43catalogue of perplexing illnesses, including an over-sensitivity to mental images which made the
00:58:49products of his imagination seem real, as well as a fixation with quantifying everything he saw and
00:58:55experienced. Tesla was a classic eccentric genius, possessing an irrepressible self-belief in his own
00:59:03ability to devise fresh and original concepts, which he presented with the flamboyance and performance
00:59:10flair of a showman, as on stage he was equally as electric as his subject matter, coming across,
00:59:17in the words of New York World reporter Arthur Brisbane, as, a most radiant creature, with light
00:59:23flaming at every pore of his skin, from the tips of his fingers and from the end of every hair on his head.
00:59:31By the middle of the 1890s, Tesla was at the apex of his power and making major contributions to a
00:59:39number of other academic fields, but Tesla, who prioritised his intellectual pursuits and never
00:59:45took a wife or started a family, also had his fair share of anxieties, the pressure of his line
00:59:52of work making him particularly susceptible to emotional outbursts of despair and anger when things
00:59:59were not going his way. Tesla's misfortunes often arose because he was overly confident in his
01:00:05outlook, produced only a few tangible commercial results from his experiments and had no qualms
01:00:11about irresponsibly spending all of his investors' money while still asking for more, a habit that
01:00:18would irreparably damage his reputation in his later years and transform him into an impoverished recluse
01:00:24who hid away in New York hotels. As he began to ale in the 1930s, Tesla enjoyed a renewed wave of
01:00:33international popularity when he revealed that he was planning to assemble a laser gun that he anticipated
01:00:40would be so powerful that it would end all conflict. Yet, like many of his schemes, it would never come to
01:00:47fruition, fizzling out by 1940, after his last effort to interest the US government failed. Although,
01:00:54many decades after, curiosity about the death ray would still persist. Following a period of mental
01:01:00and physical deterioration in 1942, Nikola Tesla died at his room at the Hotel New Yorker on the 7th of
01:01:08January 1943, but was immortalised for his foundational contributions to science.
01:01:14Today, one of the world's most prominent and valuable companies is called Tesla Inc. It is a company
01:01:21which seeks to revolutionise transport systems and how energy is delivered across the world, and while
01:01:27it has no direct connections to Nikola Tesla the man, it is fitting that his life's work has been remembered
01:01:33in this way. Tesla, an ethnic Serb, hailed from Croatia in the mid-19th century, at a time when the Balkans
01:01:41was very far from the centre of technological and industrial development, and formed part of the
01:01:47Austro-Hungarian Empire, a backwards power which did not contribute greatly to wider societal development
01:01:54at the time. And yet, despite these impediments, he made enormous breakthroughs during his lifetime,
01:02:00in a wide range of different fields. It was Tesla who first pioneered alternating current,
01:02:06who made major advances in radio technology, and who first devised many of the systems which are used
01:02:12today in renewable energy systems. Perhaps most impressively, he devised the entire concept of
01:02:19wireless technology and communication. In this respect, he stands in a small line of individuals in
01:02:26modern history, which includes Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein,
01:02:33whose life's work have transformed our understanding of modern science and how society functions.
01:02:40Given all of this, we might ask why Tesla was not credited as much as he should have been in his own
01:02:47lifetime for his successes. The answer to this conundrum is relatively clear. Tesla's ideas and
01:02:53the systems he came up with were simply ahead of their time, and he was overshadowed by the innovations
01:02:59introduced into Western society by Thomas Edison, a similar genius whose designs around electricity
01:03:06were more suitable for the level of technological development which prevailed in Europe and North
01:03:11America in the second half of the 19th century. But while many of Edison's inventions and pioneering
01:03:17work around electricity generation are now viewed as being somewhat archaic and inefficient, Tesla's designs
01:03:25and ideas are still widely praised. Perhaps in this respect it should be left to Edison to have the last
01:03:31word on Tesla. While he dismissed the Serbs' idea of alternating current as being impractical at the time,
01:03:39in the end Edison concluded that Tesla was one of the truly great figures in the development of our
01:03:44electric world. Edison was entirely correct in his assessment. While Edison won the contest to become
01:03:50the leading figure in electrification in North America at the end of the 19th century, when you
01:03:56boil a kettle or use many other electrical appliances today, you are most likely using an alternating current
01:04:03device rather than the direct current which Edison championed. As such, while Tesla lost the current war
01:04:10in the 19th century, he was a prophet of 20th and even 21st century technology and energy efficiency.
01:04:19Although Nikola Tesla did not invent, or rather discover, AC power, his genius lay in his ability
01:04:25to find far-reaching real-world applications to new discoveries and natural phenomena. He possessed a
01:04:32vision which few of his contemporaries could match, even Thomas Edison, and there is no doubt that he changed
01:04:38the world just as much as his former employer, as the light bulb would be next to useless without a reliable
01:04:46and safe means of power delivery over long distances. Indeed, there are few people whose work has
01:04:52impacted more on modern-day society than Nikola Tesla, with electric power now being available to the
01:04:58majority of the human race, largely thanks to his work. He even tried to work out a way in which power
01:05:05could be delivered freely to consumers, which perhaps both explains why he is today so highly regarded,
01:05:12but also why he never managed to monetize his work in the same manner as people like Edison. Perhaps
01:05:19what most endears us to people like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and the breed of latter-day inventors
01:05:25and scientists, who with little or no formal education revolutionized their respective fields,
01:05:31is the image of the eccentric mad scientist working alone on experiments and calculations.
01:05:37It's alive! In an age in which the discoveries and achievements of individual scientists are today
01:05:43subsumed by the multinational corporations they work for, there is something romantic and inspiring
01:05:50about one human being having such a positive impact on human civilization through their own endeavor.
01:05:57Nikola Tesla is one of these people, and despite the fact that he did not perhaps receive the money
01:06:02or recognition he deserved in his lifetime, he has, since his death, been immortalized,
01:06:09as one of the greatest and most important inventors to have ever lived.
01:06:15What do you think of Nikola Tesla? Do you believe he was a more brilliant scientist than Einstein?
01:06:21Please let us know in the comments section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
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