who among us doesn't want to live a bizarre and eccentric life
doing whatever the hell we want
gazing upon the world with our crazy eyes
and increasing awesome wherever we go
For people like us there's Nikola Tesla
The patron saint of holy cows, the crazy geniuses
If you can think of a cool invention
he probably contributed someway to making it possible
safe, affordable electricity, delivered to your home
That was Tesla
hydropower, radio, robots
Tesla, Tesla, Tesla
X-ray photography, electric generators, spark plugs, remote controls, fluorescent lights
You get the idea
By the way, he spoke eight languages, EIGHT!
When he died at the age of 86, Nikola Tesla held over 700 patents
and was being investigating by the United States government for claiming to have invented
A sixty million volt death ray that could vaporize a tank from 200 miles away
Most of the time, when an old man says something like that, it's the nurses,
Not the federal agents taking up the case
But with Tesla, sort of hard to know when a genius was talking and when it was the crazy talking
A lot of times it was both
Basically, the guy was Scishow gold
Tesla was born in 1856 in what is now Croatia
And by all accounts, he was one of those kids who could do advanced calculus in his head
And recite entire books from memory
But his father, who was a priest, wanted him to be a priest too
So when little Nickie contracted Cholera at seventeen
He made a deal with his old man
"I'll try not to die, if you promise to send me to engineering school when I get better"
This was on his death bed, mind you, of course his dad was like
"Yeah, sure, and I'll throw an camaro, and a car and a camel, to sweeten the deal"
When, of course because Tesla loved science so much, he made a miraculous recovery
And they shipped him off to college
In 1884, Tesla went to New York City
With literally four cents in his pocket and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison
When he got to New York, he discovered that people were using incandescent lights
Powered by Edison's Direct Current, D/C power Supply
D/C Current flows continuosly in one direction, and since it can't maintain the high voltage levels
Over long distances, Edison was building D/C power stations every two miles along the eastern seaboard
And with all those new powerlines, New Yorkers were getting electrocuted all over the place
"No, no no, no, no: There is a better way of doing this"
Tesla explained to Edison his idea for A/C, or Alternating Current
A system of power generation that sent energy through wires
But periodically reverse the direction, so it was continuously stepping up its voltage
As it went, This allowed the electricity to travel efficiently for much greater distances
Edison told Tesla he'd paid him fifty thousand dollars if he could redesign
His motor and generators to be safer and more efficient
So a couple months later, Tesla came back with a fully functional
Induction Motor that ran on A/C Current
But when he asked Edison for his money, Edison was like
"I was joking when I told you I'll give you fifty thousand, you don't get
My hilarious american sense of humor"
So after Edison put that...asshat move, he and Tesla became life long Arch enemies
In fact, they hated each other so hard it prevented either one of them from getting
The Nobel Prize in physics in 1915
They each said that they refuse the award if the other received it first
And they sure as hell weren't gonna share it
Indeed, after Thomas Edison died, Tesla was interviewed for the orbituary and he told the reporter
"He had no hobby,
Care for no sort of amusement of any kind
And lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene"
That, my friends, is called, some bad blood
In the end, Tesla won the battle over A/C vs. D/C
Because objectively speaking, his alternating current induction motor
Is one of the most amazing inventions of all time
He sold his patents to Pittsburgh industrialist George Westinghouse for sixty thousand dollars
And they went to turn the Niagara Falls into the first Hydroelectric power plant
Using the technology that Tesla invented
After that, Tesla became obsessed with the idea of transmitting energy wirelessly
He started out by inventing the Tesla coil
The terrifyingly cool, high voltage, high frequency transformer
That shoots out volts of mad scientist electricity
We still use a version of the Tesla coil in electronics
But you can usually see the original version in science museums
During this research, Tesla went out to the discovery that he could transmit and receive radio signals
When they were tune to resonate at the same frequency
But even though he patented his findings, a fire in his lab destroyed his work before he could show it off to the public
A year later, an italian named Guglielmo Marconi patented a wireless telegraphy device
That didn't work very well
Marconi later altered his invention using a Tesla oscillator to transmit the signals across the english channel
During this time, a friend told Tesla
"Looks as if Marconi gone the jump on you"
To which Tesla responded
"Marconi is a good fellow, let him continue, he is using seventeen of my patents"
Unfortunately, the patent system not ironclad and marconi went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909
For his contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy
But at this point in his carreer, Tesla had already achieved celebrity status
As an undisputed supergenius
Se he could afford to be magnanimous
And America, loved it some Nikola Tesla
He was always immaculately dressed, he lived in fancy hotels
Talked with a funny accent, made sweet ass contraptions for their entertainment
Like the first remote controlled toys and they never knew quite what he was going to do next
But despite his celebrity, he became more and more obsessed
With the idea of wireless energy transmition
Something he was never quite able to sell investors on
And who knows what it would have come up with if Tesla had been given free range
To experiment on whatever he wanted
Maybe we'd be able to power the entire world wirelessly, probably not
In the 1899 he went out to Colorado to experiment with wireless energy transmission
Building a yanky ass machine out of some scrap metal
And reportedly using to transmit energy wirelessly to two hundred light bulbs
From a source twenty six miles away
So where are the plans for that machine?
They are gone, Tesla kept complex three dimensional schematics
For his inventions...
...In his head
He rarely made sketches of any of his inventions as a result scientists
Simply aren't able to replicate some of his experiments
to put this in perspective, in 2007, a group of MIT scientists managed to wirelessly transmit energy
A distance of seven feet through the air
And they were very proud of themselves
Tesla's last big ambitious project was to build a fancier version of that wireless transmition device
He made in Colorado
In 1900, Gajillionaire J.P. Morgan commissioned Tesla to build a power plant and transmission tower
That would wirelessly broadcast information to any part of the world
In his pitch, Tesla told Morgan
"When wireless is fully applied, the Earth would be converted into a huge brain capable of response in everyone of its parts"
But Morgan, gave him a hundred fifty thousand dollars
To basically build an enormous cell phone tower
But what Tesla didn´t tell Morgan was that the tower he was building would probably cost more like a million dollars
And he wanted to use it to provide the world with wireless energy
In 1901, construction began on a giant Tesla coil called the Wordenclyffe tower
On the cliffs of Long Island Sound
But in the end, as Marconi's wireless telegraph machine became more popular
And Tesla asked for more, more money
Morgan, backed out the project
And then, the stock market crashed
And Tesla was forced to give up on the whole thing
Because of the price of materials skyrocketed
And he suffered a complete nervous breakdown as a result,
Cursing what he called the "Blind, fade, harded doubting world"
As he got older, Tesla began rescuing injured pigeons
And taking them back to his hotel room,
One of this pigeons, he spoke off rather too fondly to his biographers saying
"I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman"
I.... Wow... I hope not
He also periodically reported receiving messages from extraterrestrials
Which was actually nothing new for Tesla
But people stopped thinking it was so adorable
Eventually, he started making weird statements to the press about a new "Death Beam"
That he was developing that could "end all war"
He said that his new weapon could basically vaporize ten thousand airplanes
At a distance of two hundred fifty miles
But, Tesla was a pacifist!
And he wanted to make war impossible with his weapon
By offering every country an invicible chinese wall
The world might never know what he was talking about, probably, because it was crazy talk
Tesla died in 1943, and because the "Death Beam" talk, the U.S Government confiscated his papers
After his death
Just after the war, a military task force, called "Project Nick" was established
To sort through his notes and see if his Death Ray ideas could be implemented
Details of the experiments were never published, and some time during "Project Nick"
Tesla's Death Beam papers dissappeared
Until this day, no one know what happened to them
But whoever has those papers today, probably can't do much with them because they don't know what Tesla knew
Because nobody knows what Tesla knew (creepy face)
Thanks for watching this episode of Scishow
And thanks to all the people who suggested that we do an episode of Nikola Tesla
We...We got it!
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