The Genius of Nikola Tesla
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised.

Nikola Tesla was one of the most enigmatic but least known scientists of the past century. He was a pioneer of both electricity and radio, and creator of one of the first electrical motors. So why did he die in poverty and under suspicion by the FBI? Nikola Tesla created some of the most incredible inventions the modern world has ever known. AC power, X-ray technology, radio, and most controversial,

free energy. Although Tesla was naive in lots of ways, I think he genuinely was a genius. Tesla was one of the most amazing engineering inventors of his century. Why do I not like the sound of this? He sowed the seeds for radio, he had the major patents, he sowed the seeds for radar. If you look at his list about what he called the world system, you go, "Hang on, that's our world now." He was brilliant.

in his imagination. He thought outside the box all the time. Probably what Tesla didn't have was the follow-through. It's like being in the eye of the storm, seeing the lightning blasting off in your face. It's extraordinary. That's the most extraordinary thing I've ever done.

The history of Nikola Tesla is an extraordinary tale of genius, invention, tragedy and defeat. But there was a sinister side too. Many people believe that he was hampered, shut down and maybe even killed by forces in America who were opposed to his plans for free electricity.

And when you consider that this industry has made several trillion dollars over the past century, you can begin to see a motive for stopping him at all costs. Journalist Jamie Theakston is on a mission to unravel the facts from the fiction about Tesla's remarkable life.

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856, in what is today's Croatia.

As a young man, he began working for the Edison Company in France, designing and making improvements to electrical equipment. Then, in June 1884, Tesla relocated to New York City, reputedly arriving with only four cents in his pocket. And, not quite 30 years old, he was given the task of redesigning the Edison Company's direct current generators. He was, as some remarked at the time, a bona fide genius, but a strange one.

Tesla was a very strange man in all sorts of ways. He was almost certainly autistic. His brain was wired up differently than most of our brains are. He had an incredible memory. I mean, totally photographic, could remember an entire book, no problem. He was a man who rarely slept at all. He was a man who was obsessive-compulsive.

in all manner of ways. He could not sit down at a meal without working out the volumetric capacity of the bowl or plate from which he was eating. He had strange phobias. He could get himself into a literal fever. If he saw a peach, he couldn't touch human hair. He was an oddity.

He would crunch each of his toes a hundred times before he went to bed because it would stimulate thoughts so he would be productive in the morning. He refused to shake hands and although he was a gentleman, he would just turn and get really nasty with people and no one was quite sure why. He had a photographic memory.

but was really, really peculiar. He worked precisely from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day and then ordered his dinner from the same gentleman, and that gentleman had to clean his silverware with 18 napkins. I mean, he had many, many of the symptoms today that we know about as being OCD. Tesla believed in alternating current, or AC, which he thought was far superior to Edison's DC, or direct current.

So in 1887, he set up his own Tesla Electric Company with a laboratory at 89 Liberty Street in Manhattan, where he constructed his famous alternating current induction motor. It was revolutionary and way ahead of its time. He had a mind very similar to that of Leonardo da Vinci in that it worked in many different directions simultaneously. But he was, in essence, an engineer.

He thought like a physicist but acted like an engineer. The greatest legacies he left to the world

Almost certainly alternating current is one of those, as opposed to what existed before, which was the production of electricity through direct current. That was complicated because it was very difficult to push direct current a long way. So if you lived a long way from the power station, it was difficult for you to get your electric. Alternating current works in a different way and so therefore it's

it can be pushed much further. So that's clearly one of the greatest things that Tesla did. Keith Tutt is an author who's researched and written about the curious genius that was Nikola Tesla.

He moved to New York when he was about 26. He'd already been working in Paris for Edison's company in Paris, and he wanted to hit the big time in America. America was where everything was happening. The potential for big money to be spent on big projects was there. I guess he felt that he could not just make his fortune, actually, because he was more of an idealistic person than that. He wanted to transform the world. He wanted to bring electricity to the world, and America was the place where it was happening.

So tell me a little bit more about some of the experiments that he was doing at the time. His big thing, his first big thing was AC alternating current electricity. And he had an experience in 1882 in a park where he claimed to have

seen this idea of how alternating current could work in motors. And this was a huge advance. At the time, it was thought that the future of electricity was in DC, direct current. But Tesla firmly believed that AC was what was going to make electricity really liberate people actually and make commerce industry possible, which is absolutely true and is actually what happened.

Needless to say, Tesla's invention of an AC motor and his ambitious plans for free energy made him an arch rival of his former boss, Thomas Edison, who was championing DC. They called it the Battle of the Currents. Edison and Tesla were two totally different types of personality.

Edison, to some extent, was in the pocket of the big business organizations that were buying his work, buying his inventions, buying his technology. Whereas Tesla was an idealist and a dreamer. And those two personalities clash. And now we pay quarterly or monthly or even by putting a coin in the slot for what Edison was responsible for. Whereas had Tesla succeeded,

we would be able to enjoy free electricity. He was working on ways in which electricity could be moved wirelessly, is that right? Yes, he was. He'd been given the contract to electrify Niagara Falls, a massive project, and...

He had successfully achieved that and this gave him a platform to do things that he really wanted to do. And his big dream was to make electricity freely available to everyone at any point on the planet. And he had two main ideas for doing this. One of them was electricity through the atmosphere and the other was actually electricity through the ground so that one could simply stick a pole in, if you like, a receiver and receive limitless amounts of electricity anywhere on the planet.

Tesla was a fantastic showman, traveling across the states, dazzling his audiences with his million-volt coils. And today, people across the world recreate his experiments. He came up with a wonderful idea of putting an enormous copper ball on top of a 200-foot tower and then charging it. And he did, and he produced it.

discharges like lightning that was 130 feet long and then the whole thing blew up and his experiment came to an end.

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That's BetterHelp.com slash Forbidden US. Journalist Jamie Theakston is investigating the life of one of the 20th century's most enigmatic and mysterious scientists, Nikola Tesla. For some, he was a genius, pioneering developments in electricity, radar, and telecommunications. But to others, he was a dreamer, a mad scientist with no head for business.

There are rumors that he was in fact the victim of his own success and that he was shut down by the big corporations precisely because his plan for free electricity for all did work. And now Jamie has come to a special effects company in England who have agreed to demonstrate a large million volt Tesla coil.

Lightning through the air, it actually pushes electricity out. And we're going to demonstrate that by having some fluorescent tubes there which suck up that power without being connected to it. Hang on, just explain that to me again. So this is like you're talking about wireless? A wireless system. This was wireless back in Tesla's day. Okay. So he was trying to set up systems which actually gave you wireless power. Was there any truth that he was working on building a network of these coils that would allow electricity to be passed

essentially from place to place? Well, the coil would have been, generally speaking, the generator that would be sending the power out to these different receiving stations. And was he successful in doing this? Well, it's really questionable the level of success that he had with this great plan. He had some success, he claimed success, and he had patents which cover this activity. There were two sides to Tesla's mind.

The one side, the side we remember best, was of the brilliant inventor thinking of strange new ways of using electrical power. But the other side of him was a great humanitarian, an idealist, a man who wanted to provide free energy for everyone so that we could use it, enjoy it, make the most of it.

And that did not go down well with the big businesses who were supplying electricity at a cost. And they felt threatened. This was why Tesla never succeeded financially. Although he's been dead for over half a century, Tesla still has fans and devotees around the world today who like to replicate his experiments, including the Faraday cage.

There's a man who calls himself Dr. Electricity. He's a doctor by day, but at night fires up his Tesla coils and puts on a huge light show for his neighbors. Jamie called him at his home in Australia. Peter, why do you do this? Why do you go into your garden and unleash half a million volts?

Sir Edmund Hillary answer, because it was there, sort of springs to mind. But it's just something I've enjoyed since I was young and as I started to do my own stuff, you know, the internet came along and I began to put that on the internet and sort of, you know, found I can do things that other people aren't doing. So it sort of grew from there and, you know, I sort of became more enthusiastic about the website and, you know,

and other people are seeing it so yeah it's built up and uh i just enjoy that sort of uh that power and the energy of it all in some way the people enjoy uh you know power and energy and other forms you know racing and so on and what do your patients make of what you do well a lot of them have heard or seen or on tv or just in pictures in my waiting room their response is um

You know, it varies from he's really a bit crazy, you know. That's one person's response to, but yes, it varies from incredulity to sort of frowning and nodding their head. Listen, Peter, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for talking to me. Not a problem. Okay, you take care. Okay, thanks a lot, Jamie. Bye, Peter. Bye. See you.

In May 1899, Tesla moved to Colorado Springs to work on the high-frequency, high-voltage experiments for which he became best known. Using vast Tesla coils, he created artificial lightning, discharging millions of volts of electricity up to 135 feet, and understandably, it caused quite a stir in the surrounding area.

According to reports from the time, the electrical discharge sounded like a huge thunderclap, which could be heard 15 miles away. And people claimed to have seen huge flashes and sparks of light coming from Tesla's laboratory high on a hill. It was crude and it was dramatic, but Tesla had created working wireless electricity.

At Colorado Springs, Tesla felt he had the opportunity to really develop the magnifying transmitter, the equipment to produce huge voltage, high frequency electricity. This was all a development he expected to take forward into the wireless transmission of electricity. And he carried out experiments there that did enable the wireless transmission of electricity. He set up a field of light bulbs.

just light bulbs not connected to anything, just stuck in the ground. And the power of the induction that was coming out of his coils actually lit these lights in the darkness. That's a pretty cool trick. It's a great trick. Even today, that would be impressive. It would be. It would be. So he was proving that it was possible to transmit electricity wirelessly.

Yes, through electromagnetic induction. I mean, that has a die-off in the sense that he was only doing it to a certain extent. And then the question comes, what happens when you try and do that across a huge area? Well, in his case, he... Did he try and do that? Well, he did it across a pretty large area, and horses started to skip about because their horseshoes were actually starting to react with the ground.

So it was not entirely safe. So he caused quite a stir then in the town. He caused a huge stir. The great thing for him at Colorado Springs was that he had unlimited amounts of electricity. That's why he went there, in fact. He had a deal with the local power source. Unfortunately, he blew up the power station at least once. As well as wireless electricity experiments in Colorado, Tesla was also fascinated by X-ray technology.

and developed a cold cathode tube to take primitive X-ray photographs. He was also an early pioneer in radio waves before Marconi, setting up a temporary lab in the Gerlach Hotel in Manhattan to test out his inventions. And in 1898, Tesla demonstrated the world's first radio-controlled boat at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The crowd that witnessed the demonstration was astonished, and rumors about how he did it ranged from his use of black magic and telepathy to the boat being piloted by a trained monkey hidden inside. Well, he was a born showman. He was very much a Barnum and Bailey type. And one of his favorite tricks was to get inside a Faraday cage.

and then using the same principle as those machines that we've all seen in the physics lab when we were schoolboys and girls.

that the electricity, static electricity, completely harmless, would radiate from him in a most spectacular manner. And people at his period who didn't realize that it was harmless and who lived in an era when criminals were executed with an electric chair were thinking that Tesla was

surviving what would seem to them to be an absolutely fatal process. And of course, he loved the acclaim and he loved to mystify his audience. If we can imagine Tesla himself inside his Faraday cage,

and on either side of it, these gigantic Tesla coils. And then the spark would fly a distance of many feet from one coil towards the other, and the Faraday cage in the middle with the man in the cage looking as if he was being cooked alive.

And he is unharmed. He is completely untouched by all of this that's going on around him, and it looks impossible.

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Tesla's grandest plan yet was to build a huge tower in Wardenclyffe on Long Island in New York that was to transmit free wireless electricity around the world using other huge transmitters that he was going to build in other countries. It was a hugely ambitious project, and he struggled to get the funding for it.

So what was he working on at Wardenclyffe? Wardenclyffe was the site that he chose on Long Island, on the east coast of America, to build a 187-foot tower which had a magnifying transmitter within it. And he wanted to send radio signals across the Atlantic. He had this...

huge desire to make radio and telephony and communications possible across the world. And he managed to get some funding to do this. And

He was successful up to a point, and the point was Marconi managed to send the first radio signal from Cornwall across to Newfoundland, and that really actually put a big stop on Tesla's funding. So when it comes to Marconi and to Edison, Tesla's sounding a bit like a nearly man. You know, he was always just...

That close? He was a nearly man in certain ways. I don't think you can say that about AC electricity. He was the man who electrified Niagara Falls. In fact, with radio, he had 17 patents prior to Marconi. And Marconi used...

Tesla's 17 radio patents to achieve what he achieved. It was only in the year of Tesla's death, death in 1943, that it was acknowledged that it was actually Tesla's patents that had made radio possible.

He was brilliant in his imagination. He was brilliant at putting ideas together. He thought outside the box all the time, maybe too much. He wasn't a businessman. He wasn't very personable. He didn't get on with people. He didn't follow through any contacts he might have. I mean, he fell out big time with Edison, for example. And probably what Tesla didn't have was the follow through.

He came up with brilliant ideas on paper, he conceived of amazing things, some of which have yet to be followed through, invented properly, but he just couldn't follow them through himself. He couldn't build them, or if he did, they fell apart or something happened to them. He didn't have much luck, actually. After the disaster in Wardenclyffe, Tesla was a broken man and in serious financial difficulty.

But he continued inventing, with plans for a radar system, a vertical take-off biplane, and even a ray gun. Unfortunately, none of them came to fruition, and he died, impoverished and alone, in the New Yorker Hotel on the 7th of January, 1943. New York journalist Kim Mance is a self-confessed Tesla groupie and takes people on tours of the main Tesla landmarks in the city.

including the actual suite in the hotel where he died. So it's in these two adjoining rooms that Nikola Tesla lived the last 10 years of his life. He actually died here, too, in the New Yorker Hotel. And it's not unusual because he actually lived out his entire adult life in New York City hotel rooms.

So it was a kind of interesting existence, but he did a lot of experiments and crazy things in there and also had a big man-sized safe full of all of his documents that actually got seized by the FBI when he died because they wanted to make sure that the nation would stay secure with whatever secrets that he was coming up with. So they actually went through all of his stuff here and then brought it out. ♪

know if there are any misconceptions about Tesla. He was pretty straightforward with how out there he was with all his ideas, and he was so proud of them. You know, Edison always said, like, if it doesn't make money, I won't invent it. And Tesla said, if I ever get as much money coming in the doors, I'm throwing out the window on new experiments and ideas, then I'll be a wealthy man. So he was fully owning the whole Thor's hammer thing and his persona that he had built up.

But he also really believed in what he was saying. So he wasn't just doing it to be eccentric. But if you can imagine, in 1906, Tesla was describing a wireless cell phone. In a time when people were using huge switchboards and multiple operators and cranks and things like that, he was talking about being able to wirelessly carry around a telephone device and that an operator wouldn't need any specific knowledge of how to use the device for using it. So it's pretty cool. He was saying stuff like that back then. You can see why they would think that he was a little nutty.

The last year or so of Testa's life was a heartbreaking story. He's living in a small room in a New York hotel. Keep in mind, he's never had a love or woman in his life. And the highlight of his day is going and feeding the pigeons. Not just any pigeons. He had particular pigeons that he was fond of and would spend lots of money on.

It was a very tragic situation, especially since the first Wall Street, the first crash of the financial markets caused his biggest funder to stop what would have been his most revolutionary project, the tower that would have given the world free energy. So he died and hardly anyone took notice. Nikola Tesla, genius, pioneer and visionary. So why did other people claim the credit for some of his most important inventions?

And why did Tesla himself die in poverty and shame? And why did the FBI seize his papers and research notes after his death? Had he developed successful prototypes that his commercial rivals and the US government were determined to get their hands on?

Journalist Jamie Fexton has been investigating Tesla's incredible story in a quest that has taken him from the UK to Australia and New York. Imagine Tesla himself inside his Faraday cage. The spark would fly, the man in the cage looking as if he was being cooked alive. And he is unharmed. It looks impossible.

Although he died in 1943, the spirit and inventions of Tesla live on. Today there are thousands of amateur inventors and Tesla enthusiasts all over the world. And every year, a small group meets in Nottingham in England to attend an event called GaussFest, where they swap tips, show off their coils, and spark up all manner of Tesla-inspired devices.

I build Tesla coils. My specialty is the electronic coils. But we've also got people here who have built the more classic Tesla coils that Tesla himself would probably recognise, not a lot dissimilar to what he was playing with. Tesla was a genius. He was way ahead of his time. And it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say he more or less invented the modern world. He developed the AC electricity concept and that's how the modern world is run.

He had this idea for what he called the World System, which was a series of transmitting towers built near generating stations and it would avoid the need to have wires going to people's houses. They would basically tap the energy using a giant receiving aerial. I think the reason it failed was they realised they wouldn't be able to charge the customers for the electricity. Anybody could just help themselves to it.

By common consent, Nikola Tesla was a genius, but also an enigma. A socially awkward and difficult man, who was said to have preferred the company of pigeons to humans. There's no doubt that he was also a passionate scientist, who worked nearly 20 hours a day to create his electrical inventions. And yet the questions remain about his legacy. Was he deliberately hampered in his plans to offer the world a network of free electricity?

Did the big American corporations decide that this idea was just too dangerous to their profits to let him succeed? Or was he simply a victim of his own hubris and ambition?

Tesla never got the recognition he deserved. At the beginning of his career, he was exploited by Edison. At the end of his career, it was J.P. Morgan and many others in between. He would quip when new inventions would come out attributed to somebody else, "Hey, wait a second, that used 17 of my patents." But it did no good. Nobody wanted to know. He was the mad scientist, not a businessman. What's Tesla's legacy? What will history remember him for?

I think really particularly for AC, alternating current, polyphase electricity, sounds like a complicated name, but it's actually what makes the electrification of this city, major cities all over the world, the transmission of power possible. That is what Tesla did. He did a lot of other things as well. He sowed the seeds for radio, he had the major patents.

He sowed the seeds for radar. He did radio control. If you look at his list about what he called the world system, he wanted to create a world system of communication. If you read through it, you go, hang on, that's our world now.

I think you can safely say that Tesla was a fantastic scientist and just an awful businessman. He was exploited all the time. Edison waved a carrot of, I think it was $50 if he did this or that and discovered this unbelievable sort of machine that he needed to do certain things in his company. And Tesla did, and he never got paid. And that was the story throughout his entire career. People were nicking his patents and absolutely just...

taking advantage of everything he did because they had more money and a greater opportunity to exploit it. It almost seems as if there was a conspiracy of big business working against him to shut him down and to make certain that he and those who had invested with him lost everything and that it was to the, what we might call, Edisonian angle

that the future developments turned. It's an awful tragedy when we think that his idealism was wasted and how different our society could be today if people had gone with Tesla instead of with Edison and the big business.