Electric power transmission is the most important innovation in history.
One of the visionaries in that history is the inventor Nikola Tesla.
I never imagined that my own connection to Tesla could bring about the end of the world.
My name is Sophie Clarke. I'm a teaching fellow at a London university.
It is less difficult than it was even a decade ago to be a woman in STEM fields, but
even now that I've finished my PhD I've had more than one colleague warn me
that a career in research will interfere with raising children, or vice-versa.
We could go through the whole list:
smart girls need to be ugly, men gravitate towards science the same way they gravitate towards cars, etc.
But the way I see it, it's not my job to complain about stereotypes. It's my job to break them.
There was a story in our family for years that my great-great grandfather
had worked with the famous inventor Nikola Tesla
which was fun, and which I of course didn't take seriously.
That is, until I found these.
Tesla kept the plans for his inventions in his mind and only wrote them down for patent applications
so there is some conjecture and sensationalism about inventions Tesla might have built.
Among other things, he supposedly developed a means of transmitting electricity without wires.
Could these be the plans for such a device?
Do you like the case?
There's been so much sensationalism about Nikola Tesla's secret inventions
if I'd potentially found one it would be crazy not to see what it was.
I had to build it. I didn't have a choice.
I figured I'd bring it out here and put a couple hundred metres between it and high voltage transmission lines.
You know... just in case.
So I'm just going to test the mechanical components of the "Special Magnifying Receiver: Teslascope."
The term "Teslascope" started appearing after his death
and depending on which conspiracy theorist you talk to
it's a secret device for either transferring energy between planets
or for communicating with extraterrestrials.
There's a big electrical cell in there to drive the mechanical parts
and I'm controlling it with a tablet
so there have been a couple of quite serious modifications to the original design.
The technology's classic stuff: a distribution transformer, high-Q antenna coil,
spark gap, Geissler tube.
Then there's also a lot of other stuff that seems unnecessary to receive wireless electricity.
I wasn't expecting anything electrical to happen.
I was only supposed to be testing the mechanical parts.
Actually, that's kind of scary.
I felt the best thing to do was turn it off
which didn't work as expected.
Ah.
Were you just standing there the whole time?
Apparently I built a time machine
that transported Nikola Tesla to the 21st century.