So many of our modern day inventions, like the radio, is all thanks to a scientist that many people haven’t heard of: Nikola Tesla.

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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Connor: Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: Hi, Connor.

Connor: What do you think of when I say the name, Tesla?

Brittany: I think of one of our favorite guys who even though he’s causing a storm right now, I still love him. Elon Musk. I think of a car, I think of Elon Musk and his company, Tesla, and specifically his very cool cars, which I think you have one now, don’t you?

Connor: I do. I love my Tesla. I’m not a car person, so I don’t really care about the electric vehicle. I’m not like an environmental weirdo that like, oh, climate change. I am a tech guy. I love gadgets. And so the Tesla, to me, it’s like an iPhone on wheels. It’s just this really high, I don’t know. It’s amazing. Plus I drive really fast, and so that’s nice too. But you’re right, most people, when you say Tesla, you think of Elon Musk, you think of the car and Elon and the early founders naming the company. Tesla was not an accident. It was named after a brilliant scientist. I mean legitimately brilliant, scary, brilliant scientist and engineer. His name was Nicola Tesla. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about him today. Maybe those of you listening, I’ve never heard of Tesla, but you see his influence in a lot of things that you’re familiar with today. So, for example, every time you use the radio or you get an x-ray at the doctor’s office, or you see a neon light, even when you use electricity, you have Tesla to think in part, you won’t see his name attached to any of these inventions if you Google it. Tesla didn’t actually invent these things, but without him, a lot of these things, couldn’t really be created even though he lived 160 years ago. And the sad part, I think is even though he was a genius, one of the challenges for Tesla is he never really got the credit he deserved for all his inventions. So, here’s a guy who was born in 1856 in Europe in a place called Croatia, and his mom, like him, was actually an inventor. And so he got his love of inventing from his mom, problem-solving and trying to discover new ways of doing things. His mom was always inventing fun little gadgets, like a mechanical egg beater. Have you ever used one of those from decades ago? Have you ever done crank?

Brittany: It’s a little cranky. Yep.

Connor: Yeah, they’re super awkward, but she kind of invented one of these, and his dad actually wanted him to become a priest just like he was. So he had kind of these competing influences from Mom and Dad, but he went off to study science instead. So, I think then he gets into his twenties. Brit, you take it from there to tell a little bit about him.

Brittany: Yeah, so, when he was 28, he worked for some sort of, I can’t remember what it was. So, yeah, when he was 28, he moved to the United States because in America it was an inventor. People were, I’m trying to a renaissance for inventors. I don’t want to say inventor, I’ve never said it like that before. Inventors. And that was when he started working with a very famous American inventor called Thomas Edison. So, Thomas Edison, you’re probably taught all through school, is the guy who invented the light bulb. He’s credited for modern electricity and he has some very great contributions, but once you learn about Tesla, you always end up not thinking Edison is as cool as you used to. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but that’s what most people say because people don’t talk about Tesla, and I think his stuff was so much cooler. So, he moves to America, he’s 28, he starts working with Edison, and the two eventually get into a disagreement. And it’s funny because you see this a lot with two when somebody goes and studies with somebody, even if it’s a famous philosopher they loved, and then they go become an apprentice under them, or you have these inventors where there ends up being this disagreement where they butt heads over something. And so you have somebody who’s so excited to work with someone that maybe they’ve kind of idolized. And then it turns out that the teacher and the mentor end up turning against each other. And that is exactly what happened here. So, there were two inventions, Edison had created what’s called a direct current, and Tesla had invented what was called an alternating current. I’m going to pause it here, and I’m going to say, what is a current, a current, and I’m going to preface this by saying this definition is probably not going to help you, but we’re going to get there. A current is the rate at which electrons flow past a point in a complete electrical circuit. If you are like me, and you heard that, and we’re still like, yeah, that doesn’t really help me at all.

Connor: It’s just like how electricity is being used. Basically, there’s different ways to use electricity,

Brittany: How it’s used, how it flows, and also how quickly it flows is another big part of that. Okay? So, there’s this debate over what the best current is. And this became such a thing in the scientific community. Actually, they were calling it the war of the current or the current war. So, the war of current of current court wars. So everybody’s got their own opinion on this. So, Edison invented something, I think the direct current, and he used that for his lamp, but it was weak. It wasn’t nearly as strong as the one Tesla invented, and it didn’t travel long distances, so it had a very short shelf. So, a lamp was pretty close, it could light a lamp, but even then it was pretty weak. So, Tesla came up with this alternate current, and it was so much stronger, and it could go so much further, which is going to come into play when you hear about what he did with radio waves and things like that. Thomas Edison’s current would never have been able to go that far. It just wasn’t strong enough. So, eventually Tesla, he stops working with Edison because he’s like, all right, we’re never going to agree, and I’m ready to start my own company, which is always where good inventions come from. That’s always when you see some really good innovation coming. So, he starts what’s called the electric light company, and he’s got kind of a, what do they call ’em, a patron. He’s got another wealthy guy funding him. So, at this point, it’s Tesla being funded by this other guy. I think his name is Westinghouse or Westing Gate. And then you have Edison and Tesla and Edison are now working against each other, competing to provide America with energy. Again, we talk about how great competition is. Imagine you’re in what, by this time it’s probably late 18 hundreds. You’ve never seen the electricity we have today, and now you have two crazy adventures competing to bring you the coolest technology ever. Not too bad, right? Pretty cool situation. So, in 1893, Tesla was what they called an AC electrical system, not air conditioning. Different electrical system was picked over Edison’s at the world’s, it was like a big scientific exposition in Chicago. So, this was a huge win for Tesla. He’s thinking like, all right, Edison, you were my teacher, but guess who just won this round? And then things kind of turned sour for him for a second because the guy who was funding all his work ran out of money. And so Tesla was kind of desperate at this point, and so he had to sell his patent to the AC electrical system. And Connor, it’s funny, over the last couple of episodes, I think the word patent has come up a few times. I’m going to kick it to you to tell us what a patent is.

Connor: Yeah, we probably haven’t defined it super well. So a patent is, there’s a law in the United States government where when you invent something, you can apply for a patent. And what that means is the government, if they verify that you’ve truly created this thing for the first time, you’re the inventor or the creator, then basically you get to be the only one. You get a monopoly where if anyone else tries to copy you or steals your designs or your plans or whatever and does it themselves, then you could sue them and you would win, and they would’ve to pay you money because you were the first one to create the patent. Now, patents can be, I dunno, they can be good if limited, but they also become super, super silly people, patent the silliest of things. And so, this is also called intellectual property sometimes where your property is the thoughts you have that you’ve figured out, Hey, I’ve figured out a new way of doing this, creating this widget. Well, great, if someone else came up with that same way of doing it independently, you’re saying that the government would now punish them just because you happen to be first. And so there’s a lot of controversy here, but patents have been around since the beginning of America. Other countries have ’em too. And it really is just like this, basically it’s a certificate, a piece of paper that says, we recognize that in this case, you, Nicola, Tesla are the inventor of this, and here’s your patent. And then for a number of decades, it protects the person who holds the patent as being the only one who’s allowed to produce that thing. And if others want to do it, they have to pay you money to do it.

Brittany: Yeah, I like what you said that it’s silly. It literally is a piece of paper that’s like, I did this first. And it’s not even necessarily that you did it first. Crazy’s absolutely crazy. But Connor, I want to take it from here and talk about what he did next.

Connor: Yeah, it was like a year after this happened, I think that Tesla was still having some success. It’s 1896, and Tesla created the world’s first hydroelectric power plant, a hydroelectric power plant, generating electricity using water, and he was using it for the city of Buffalo, New York. So, Tesla started construction of a wireless broadcasting system, a tower on Long Island, New York to connect telephone and telegraph services. So, basically people sending communications over wires, whether through Morse code, with a telegraph, or with sound with the telephone. And so he was also trying to set it up to be able to broadcast images, reports, weather information, all wirelessly. And the challenge for Tesla was he always seemed to, I guess, run into bad luck. He had his research stolen by other scientists who claimed it was their own Tesla and found out who had done it. It was a scientist named Marconi. He thought about suing him, but at that point, it didn’t really matter. The entire country was praising Marconi for his long-distance radio transmission and supporting him now against Tesla, even though he stole this stuff from Tesla. I mean, could you imagine how terrible that would feel your life work? You know that you’re pioneering these things, you’re inventing these things, have someone else steal it from you, pretend it was all theirs, and then everyone believes it and is now supporting that guy. That would just be so defeating. How would you feel about that Brittany.

Brittany: I would be, and this probably says more about things that I need to fix in my own life, but I would be so mad. That’s one of the things where I would want everyone to know how unjust the situation was. Thank goodness they didn’t have social media back then. Can you imagine just tweeting it? What is his name? Macaroni Marconi, just being like you liar. But the sad thing is that Tesla’s story didn’t really have a happy ending after this, which makes me sad. And I feel like this sometimes happens a lot with these really brilliant men. So, he had over 800 different patents, and he died without a penny to his name. Just completely poor, nothing. And his own community had turned against him. So, the public was praising other people for his work, Edison’s making history for these accomplishments that aren’t really, they’re good, but they’re nothing like his, right? Yeah, he lit a lamp awesome, but here, Tesla’s like, oh, let me create the technology that was going to pave the way for the radio and all this stuff. And he ended up getting really sad. Which can you blame him? I would’ve gotten really sad too. And so he ends up spending most of his life and his time just alone, right? But he didn’t stop inventing, in fact, spending all this time alone. He was just filling all these notebooks and different diaries with all these ideas, and it was just crazy. And today, actually, really smart scientists are still trying to test all the theories that he left behind in these books. Finally, many of them are being proven to be true or plausible. I don’t like saying anything is true with science because everything in science is always being tested. They’re proving themselves to be very valid. But he died in 1943, which is crazy. That doesn’t feel like that long ago, 1943, 86 years old. And so it’s really a devastating story. But Connor, I wanted to throw it to you and ask you, obviously Elon Musk named the company after him. What do you think that would’ve meant to Tesla? Or what do you think the implications for what that means?

Connor: Well, the idea that you could use electricity to power a vehicle for hundreds of miles, or now trucks like Tesla, a little while back, released this video of this massive truck just on batteries and electricity. Tesla. What’s interesting is a lot of inventors are often poor business people, and I think that’s what Tesla himself suffered from a little bit too. And we talked episodes back about Montessori and similar things. She was great with this idea of the schools, but horrible at running a business. I think this is kind of a common trend where these highly innovative people if they don’t have the right partners to help with all the business side of things, they’re creators. They’re brainstorming new things. And so it’s so sad that things happen the way they did for Tesla. But what I really like, and I mentioned this in an episode one or two episodes ago when I was teasing about Tesla, is I really like that Elon and his team have basically opened up the patents for these cars. And I don’t know if they did that because of Tesla himself and that perspective and experience that the individual had, but it’s really cool that here’s this company named after ’em, and it’s dealing with electricity and innovation and all this stuff. And they’ve basically said, look, we don’t want to protect this with the government and punish you if you try and do electric cars like ours instead, because we want to further humanity and make progress and everything, we will give you the designs and any company is willing. That’s just so rare and unheard of. And so I think it’s super cool that Tesla is doing it today. I really like what you said, Brittany, that scientists today are still proving some of these facts and learning that what he was doing was brilliant, and that he was a man ahead of his time. So, he’s a super cool guy to learn about these people who were just super, super bright. He was one of them. Fascinating life. So, many cool things. So, yeah, little homework assignment for all of you out there. There’s biographies. There’s, go read the Wikipedia page. There’s YouTube videos about the guy he’s worth spending some time learning a little bit more about because he doesn’t get and never got the credit that he deserves. And he’s someone that I think would be worth learning about. So, Tuttetwins.com/podcast. Guys, make sure you’re subscribed. If you’re not, share it with a friend. Leave us a review. Tell the world how much you enjoy learning the way the world works, Brittany, thanks as always. And until next time, we’ll catch you later.

Brittany: Talk to you soon.