In 1891, a Serbian scientist demonstrated his latest inventions before an awestruck
audience at Columbia University.
“Tubes… held in the hand of Mr. Tesla,” a reporter wrote, “appeared like a luminous
sword in the hand of an archangel representing justice.”
Nikola Tesla was already famous – the scientist whose experiments with electricity were destined
to transform daily life in the 20th century.
We live in an electrical world.
We take it all for granted.
We have light bulbs, we run our refrigerators, our air conditioners, our electrical motors.
All of that is all directly back to Tesla.
A hundred years ago, he pointed the way toward robots, radio, radar, remote control,
the wireless transmission of messages and pictures.
He dreamed of harnessing the wind and the sun to make free energy available for everyone.
When you think about electricity you think of Edison.
But Tesla was just more of an original American than Edison.
Tesla had a lot of obsessions and odd phobias and yet he was
enormously popular and celebrated.
They did not stop him.
At the turn of the 20th century, Tesla was acclaimed, millions of Americans knew his name.
But only decades later, he was forgotten by all but a few.
He doesn’t have a disciplined imagination.
He has a fertile imagination.
And so he gets kind of crazy.
Oh, he is a genius, no doubt about it.
But he’s an idiosyncratic genius.
His luxuriant imagination was the source of his genius, and the cause of his downfall.
On June 6th, 1884, 28-year-old Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City,
one of the millions of immigrants who had begun to transform the fabric of American society
during the final decades of the 19th century.
The young immigrant knew no one.
Six feet 2 inches tall, he spoke with a heavy Serbian accent and weighed little more than
140 pounds.
He’s very tall, gangly, handsome.
Looks like a vampire a little bit.
“What I saw was… rough, and unattractive,” Tesla wrote.
“‘Is this America?’
I asked myself in painful surprise.
Everything about him is fastidious and courtly.
He’s very elegant looking.
He’s got these amazing blue eyes that people notice.
Tesla had only four cents in his pocket along with some of his favorite poems,
but he carried with him a recommendation to the man he admired more than any other.
Thirty-five year old Thomas Edison was already a celebrated inventor, an American folk hero.
The incandescent light bulb he had patented five years before had captured the imagination
of people all over the world.
Light was always associated with flame.
And Edison, by inventing a light bulb was going to shift the country away from natural
gas and gas lighting to a world in which there would be electricity and electric light bulbs
in every household.
And this was very astonishing to people.
It was a miracle.
Electricity was very mysterious at the time.
My grandmother, born in 1900 maybe,
insisted that we always have those child proof things
in the plugs because she thought the electricity was dripping out and it would collect on the
floor and you’d step in it.
Tesla meandered down the lanes of lower Manhattan heading toward Edison’s office with a revolutionary
idea he was certain the celebrated inventor would be grateful for.
Beneath the ground ran 80,000 feet of copper conductors - the world’s first electric grid,
Thomas Edison’s creation - lighting homes and powering factories on the lower tip of Manhattan.
But Edison’s system generated direct current, DC,
and DC had severe limitations.
Direct current couldn’t go very far.
You would have had to have a generating station every mile.
It was a very limited form of power.
So this was a real problem.
And Tesla had the solution, a brilliant solution.
With Direct Current, a generator produces electricity – a stream of electrons –
that flows along a wire to a light bulb, or a motor, and then returns to the generator
in one long continuous loop.
But as the electrons travel, energy is lost to the resistance of the wire.
like a long river whose energy is spent the farther the current travels.
The alternative to DC is AC, alternating current.
With alternating current, the electrons don’t flow in a single direction.
Instead they vibrate back and forth,
like an ocean tide, surging with power that could send electricity long distances.
But no one had designed a motor that could run efficiently on AC.
Even Thomas Edison himself was baffled.
But in a waking vision, Nikola Tesla had imagined an AC motor when he was twenty-six,
two years before he met Edison,
as if he had been waiting for that astonishing revelation since he was a small boy in Croatia.