Idea and Illusion: The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla - W.B. Carlson - 11/12/2020

welcome everybody it's a pleasure to see you remotely by zoom my name is jed buckwald i'm a professor at caltech and director of the caltech huntington research institute for history of science and technology this is the first time we've had the pleasure of running the william and myrtle harris distinguished lecture series in science and civilization via zoom and it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's seminar the harris series began in 1996 with the generous support of the harris family and their interests and contributions to our activities have enabled us to bring distinguished scientists historians philosophers and other analysts of science to lecture on issues of science and its relationship to society bill earned his bachelor's and master's degree from cal tech in mechanical engineering in 1949 and 1950 and he's an active member of the associates and a member of the president's circle and he's always conveyed to us that his contact with humanities at the institute has enriched his life and we've had the pleasure to host many outstanding scholars scientists and public figures under the auspices of the harris lectures and the harris endowment has also made possible the einstein centennial distinguished lecture series in 2005 and again in 2015. today's speaker is professor bernard carlson he is the joseph l vaughn professor of humanities chair of the engineering and society department and professor of history and director of the engineering business programs at the university of virginia bernie carlson is one of the most distinguished historians of technology practicing today he took his phd degree under tom hughes one of the greatest historians of technology of the past century bernie has written three books has edited many things and has given talks and advised people on the development of technology uh in many different respects uh for quite some time we're very happy to have him with us today he has helped us most recently in uh co-organizing a major meeting on the history of electrical power technology which we again held via zoom today he is of course speaking to us on a topic that i know everybody is interested in nikola tesla a famous person and a strange one and a great engineer and um bernie uh recently uh published a major biography of tesla the first one which really penetrates in detail all the various aspects of this very complicated man's life and with that uh let me turn the session over to professor carlson uh bernie you can come online thank you jed and it's a great pleasure to be joining you from the university of virginia at caltech and i want to say thank you to uh to jed and uh to diana buckwald for inviting me to be the uh harris lecturer this year thank you bill harris for his long-term support of this this lecture series and um we would not be coming to you without the uh you know expertise of the caltech webinar team that is making sure that all of these links and all the connections and details work seamlessly behind the scenes and i'd be remiss at the outset not to thank the sloan foundation who many years ago gave me a grant to undertake this work on nikola tesla a few days ago i was thinking about what it meant to be doing the harris lecture on science and civilization and it occurred to me that i should tell you a little story about one of the ways that i've been motivated as a historian of science and technology over the years so oh about 30 years ago when i first got to the university of virginia i met a fellow professor here who was in the english department and he said so young man what do you do and i said well i do the history of american technology and without missing a beat my uh colleague from english said ah so is the story a tragedy or a comedy and to some extent that really has motivated me to think about the history of technology in a big way you know what are we going to tell what's the story of technology science and the shaping of civilization is it going to be a tragedy or is it going to be a comedy now i approach that and i have some slides to share with you tonight so give me a moment i'm going to bring up my slides so the way i approach this question of of the history of technology as tragedy or comedy is is i'm a biographer uh my mentor as jed mentioned uh tom hughes was was a biographer as well and and so you might be easy you might ask well why do we need more more biographies of famous individuals like thomas edison or einstein or in my case nikola tesla the answer is is is this is we may think that technology is largely shaped by you know in large impersonal forces such as science in the marketplace but in reality no i maintain that individuals make choices and they shape the evolution of technology and business and this is above all especially important when we start talking about a certain class of technologies disruptive technologies the steam engine the airplane the personal computer all of those disruptive technologies that altered the status quo of the economy reoriented the industrial landscape and dramatically change our daily lives where do those those technologies come from those disruptive technologies that's the thing that's animated much of my career and i think more often than not truly disruptive technologies start with an idea from a single creative mind oftentimes we think about the the long span of the history of technology uh by borrowing an idea from economists particularly this this notion of of cycles of chondriad cycles which is is that's that the whole history of say the last 300 years can be described as a series of of waves of technology and each of these ways would be very easy to think that oh well people as these waves came along sort of said you know what this this third wave which is the the electrical wave that i i often uh you know focus my efforts on that everybody looked one day at their watches and said you know what it's 1876 it's time to invent the telephone because it's time for the third wave and the argument i want to make tonight is is this is that each of these ways but particularly the wave that involves electricity from the 1880 to 1930 is the product of the minds of highly indiv highly creative individuals who made a whole series of choices made it took on a series of risks and tesla illustrates them well so what did tesla do nikola tesla invented two major disruptive technologies in the early part of his career he worked on the alternating current motor and in a second act of his career he worked on the wireless transmission of power close to radio broadcasting as we think of today but he had a very different vision of what to do with radio waves he's one of the few inventors of his time period he's a riot he's a rival of edison a contemporary marconi but he's one of the few individuals from that period of heroic inventors that contributed to both power and communications but most importantly tesla offers us an opportunity to think about how radical new technologies are created without having to sort of say ah he was just a genius or hey he was just lucky we can devise a more sophisticated explanation as to why things happened why that wave of technology took place at the end of the 19th century now tesla's a lot of fun to talk to write about because he turns up everywhere in popular culture if you were to go on and do a google search for it for tesla you find out that there's something like i didn't haven't done one lately but there are thousands upon thousands of tesla websites versus hundreds for thomas edison tesla is a major figure in a series of movies the movie came out in september with about tesla he's also again turns up as a as a figure in a variety of video games but in popular culture he's often been viewed in a couple of ways if you find a tesla fan the first thing they'll tell you is he was the leonardo da vinci of the 20th century a brilliant genius who invented everything and then of course there are other people say ah he was a genius but he was crazy he was so crazy that he spent the last days of his life feeding pigeons in the park bryant park behind new york the new york public library and then of course my all-time favorite is this is in popular culture there's a stream of thought that says you know he actually was a space alien who came to earth on the wings of a giant dove and of course that's a reliable reliable stream of ideas because it comes from a book published in the early 1950s that was printed in green inc always always trust your sources when they're printed in green ink so what do we do with tesla how are we going to understand somebody who is this pop culture figure but more importantly in my mind is an individual who really shaped the technology that we have around us today tom hughes always said he was a great southerner i'm i'm from new jersey so anytime i do a southern accent you should be suspicious but tom hughes said find the inventor's style every inventor like a painter or an artist has a unique style tesla's style is a blend of two things that were intention ideal and illusion tesla was like alexander graham bell a theoretical inventor he thought about how he wanted to invent something came up with it in his mind and then built it opposite of edison who basically messed around with wires and circuits and batteries and chemicals on the workbench and out of that mess out of all of that all of that brucolaj as the french would say came an invention tesla would impose his idea on the material world he believed that if he figured out what was the perfect way to develop an invention the fundamental principle behind it he could come up with great inventions so he's always pursuing an ideal a perfect idea now the problem is is while he can picture as the philosopher inventor the perfect idea the ideal he can't always explain it to mere mortals how are they going to understand this so he would have to resort to a demonstration to an illustration to a story to a metaphor all of which were only an approximation of the perfect ideal this tension between ideal the perfect idea and illusion the way you demonstrate it the way you express it to people is at the heart of tesla's story and the question as you'll see tonight this afternoon excuse me is how did tesla's illusions perhaps eventually interfere with his pursuit of the ideal so let me go back now thinking about that and talk a little bit about tesla's tesla's origins he was born in 1856 in what is today modern-day croatia in the balkans um but in those days it was the austro-hungarian empire or if you talk to uh historians from that area they always say call it the habsburg monarchy it's a young man it's the habsburg monarchy okay his family was not croatian but was serbian and his father was a priest in the serbian orthodox church which is the largest branch of the orthodox church today bigger than the russian orthodox bigger than the greek orthodox but his father was always in tension with the locals he was in tension with the with the the croatians who were all catholics and also with the austrian overlords who were controlling that portion of what is today croatia and throughout his life tesla was always very cautious about mixing mixing with strangers he always kept to himself now as a child when he was eight nine ten years old he had terrible nightmares that were very very visual and tessa was always a visual individual as he as he said in his autobiography from 1919 he said if you told me about a juicy apple when i was a young man i'd see the juicy apple right in front of me rotten right in front of my eyes and i could picture it in in three dimensions and it would be gorgeous and i'd be ready to eat the juicy apple but the problem was this is i could never erase the image of the juicy apple and when you had nightmares and you have that kind of ended memory it can be a real challenge as eleven twelve-year-old tesla eventually conquered it through sheer mental discipline he overcame these visual visual images that just took over his life and he replaced them by carefully controlling them with imaginary places and imaginary entire kingdoms where all sorts of things happen and he could even go be basically go flying so as a 12 year old he decided that he would build his own flying machine some sort of kind of if you will combination jet pack and helicopter kind of a some sort of propeller above it we don't have any pictures we only have one one version of this story but what was important about that story is is this is he built some sort of piston pump type thing that was going to turn the propeller and he got it to work just a little bit and he was thrilled because he suddenly realized that what he could imagine in his mind might actually exist in the material world what a powerful powerful thing if you're going to be an inventor i can imagine it and i'm not crazy if i imagine it because i can make it work i can manifest it in the real world and tesla always looked for evidence that confirmed what he came up with in his imagination and well as you'll see we'll return to that point in a little bit tesla's family hoped that he would follow in his father's footsteps and go to seminary and become a serbian orthodox priest but tesla convinced his family that he should really go and study science and then mathematics and ultimately engineering at the johanna polytechnic school in graz austria he was there for a few years uh he had a scholarship that supported himself but he at us after a certain point became far more interested in playing playing cards staying up all night in coffee houses he became an expert billiard player and sure enough he flunked out in 1881 while working in budapest for a telephone company he had the i the vision and i mean literally a vision walking in a park that he could build a new type of sparkless electric motor that was based on the ideal of a rotating magnetic field and i'll tell you about that in the next slide for the next few years he worked for a series of companies associated with the edison organization first in budapest that was the telephone exchange that you work for then an electric lighting company that edison the edison organization set up in paris and ultimately tesla came to new york and worked for edison there while he was there he only had a few interactions in new york with with the great man himself with that including one where edison actually walked up to tesla one day and very calmly said to tesla so is it true that your parents are cannibals and that may seem like kind of a bizarre story but it underlines just how unusual tesla was as being from eastern europe not being from western europe like like edison or lots of other you know leading inventors and he wasn't also from a protestant background he came from the serbian orthodox background and so they it was perfectly reasonable that you know people would make fun of him and think his family were cannibals anyhow after a short time tesla quits the edison organization and he falls in with a series of business partners two individuals charles peck and alfred brown who basically give him a laboratory in downtown manhattan and say invent us something really big in electricity and tesla starts working on the a planet on an alternating current motor so in 1887 tesla perfected the what was came to be the first practical ac motor and he did it by following up on this rotating magnetic field as an ideal now electric motors this is the first of three physics lessons that you'll get tonight i know that i always have to keep these short because people go oh no he's going to talk about electricity and i don't know what's going to happen you know my head's going to explode okay here's what you need to know about electric motors electric motors always have a pair of magnets in them okay and the magnets are set up so that they are always pushing away from each other one set of electromagnets is stationary they're fixed and the other set are rotating so one set is called the stator and once that's called the rotor now all inventors and electrical engineers before tesla dating back to the 1830s always built an electric motor by changing the magnetic field in the moving part in the rotor tesla said no i'm a maverick i'm going to do this entirely differently i'm going to change the magnetic field in the motor make the make the shaft turn by creating a rotating field in the stator okay so he did the opposite he pulled a 180 compared to what everybody else had done turned out it made for a much simpler electric motor and indeed these are this is the design of electric motors that we use everywhere today and our computers our refrigerators our elevators in our machine tools every every electric motor that you plug into the wall works on the same basic tesla idea now when tesla developed it what he had done is this is in i want you to look over here at the diagram is this is he had a great big generator here on the right and this is the prototype motor okay the stator is the donut that's the coi the round coil that you see the rotor is this this rectangle you see in the middle okay now initially tesla only had the donut so he basically turns on the generator sends alternating current to the donut and for the rotor he says he basically takes a shoe polished tin like those kiwi shoe polish chin so we still get it he took an empty one of those put a thumbtack in the middle and dropped it in the middle of the donut and the the the tin can basically you know because of the electromagnetic field set up in the in the donut in the stator basically the the tin cam went wee and rotated around tesla said eureka and called in his partners particularly mr brown and said to mr brown look look i've invented the new alternating current motor and i'm convinced that brown looked over into the donut saw a tin can spinning around looked down looked up again look down look at tesla and said you brought me over here to see a tin can spinning isn't that special so tesla had a certain type of emotional courage and here we see how it played out most of us would probably be disappointed and give up but tesla thought about it and a couple days later he went to the pekka and brown's office and he said to them you know the story of the of the yeager columbus and this of course is is is a well-known it turns out this is a well-known story in american history at that time in the 1880s essentially how did columbus get the money to pay for the nina de pinta and the santa maria the ships that he basically took to the new world to discover america well queen isabella gave him the money because columbus asked for the money but he only got the money because one day he was in queen isabella's court and all the experts were arguing about whether the world was flat or where was round and columbus was going he was giving was arguing with them and finally columbus headed up to here and said bring me the egg and he said gentlemen can you make an egg stand on end and of course all his scholastics and scholars went oh i don't know i don't know i don't know and they got into a big philosophical argument so columbus reaches into his pocket takes out a teaspoon whacks off the bottom of the egg stands it up on the table and says done queen isabella watches all of this and says i'll give you the money tesla repeats the whole story to peck and brown and basically they say if you can make the egg stand on ed and tesla interrupts him and says and i can make it spin and they said we'll give you the money to patent your idea so tesla went back to his laboratory on the way back to the laboratory from the offices found a place where he could buy a copper egg and the next day they came in the egg was sitting on the donut as you can see in this diagram tesla turned on the electric current and the egg started spinning around slowly slowly slowly faster and faster and faster until it came up on its long axis and peck and brown were convinced the egg of columbus is a classic example of tesla showing people how to invent how his inventions were going to make a difference with the egg of columbus peck and brown helped tesla formulate a business strategy they hired him the best patent lawyer in new york city so he got strong patents resulted in current motor they arranged for him to give a series of lectures interviews in the technical press and they negotiated a lucrative contract for tesla with george westinghouse who had already established an electrical manufacturing company in pittsburgh and they arranged for westinghouse to pay a royalty in every motor that used the tesla patents tesla went to work for westinghouse in pittsburgh but the routine engineering work bored him to death and he soon quit and moved back to new york where he set up another a new laboratory now while he was casting around as to what he should work on in that new laboratory he went to paris and he went to the world's fair and this was the 1889 world's fair which is indeed the one where the eiffel tower was unveiled but while he was there he met with graduate students who were studying with heinrich hertz and the graduate students told tesla all about the work that hertz was doing with electromagnetic waves hertz was the first to detect the electromagnetic waves that had been predicted by the famous scottish physicist james clerk maxwell was fascinated not so much with the physics but with the apparatus and when he came back to new york tesla repeated hertz's experiments and he took hertz's apparatus and scaled it up typical move by an inventor you get a little experimental apparatus that the physicists are playing around with but you scale it up how did you scale it up he said i'm going to figure out a way that i can increase the the output so it has higher voltage higher voltages and the radio waves it produces are at higher frequencies and he developed it and he then had to start thinking about it by the way tesla never accepted hertz's ideas about electromagnetic waves in particular tesla thought that the that the waves were trans were longitudinal whereas hertz maintained that they were transverse which is indeed what we how we think about them today so what can you do with electromagnetic waves here tesla's got this great new idea about how you can develop a new system he's got this great new device the tesla coil what can he do with this thing how can he develop it tesla discovered that if he took a tube with a small amount of gas in it like neon and he placed it close to his tesla coil between the two terminals indeed of his tesla coil he could make it light up without any wires so tesla discovered how you could transmit energy through space wirelessly tesla gave a series of demonstrations of this to various electrical electrical organs electrical engineering societies and people were amazed because up to this point energy moved from point a to point b either through a wire or through some mechanical connection since tesla said imagine an entire lighting system that's wireless you don't need any pesky wires in your house you can just simply have a basic metallic wallpaper and you just adjust the light by tuning it by a by orienting it so that it falls between the two terminals of the tesla coil now to give you a sense of just how amazing this wireless lighting demonstration was i'm going to show you my tesla coil which i've been hiding behind my head for the last few minutes so the tesla coil is is is throwing off electromagnetic waves and the electromagnetic waves travel wirelessly through space to light up the neon in my tube and nest don't try this one at home unless you've got you know complete supervision my my technician insisted that in order for me to do this demonstration for you that i had to connect the tesla coil to a separate circuit in the office building away from all the computers so tesla's vision in the 1890s for for what to do with his tesla coil was to create an entire system for powering lights and motors without wires and he secured those patents and then he proceeded to promote his ideas through lectures through private demonstrations for individuals like you can see here on the slide mark twain who was a good close personal friend through newspaper interviews in other words he created all of the all of the illusions all of the possibilities for wireless lighting and then he waited for investors to come along like peck and brown with the motor and buy up and license his patents but the mid-1890s were it was a terrible time to be trying to develop an introduce a new technology it was the panic of 1893 and the economy was sincere severe recession so frustrated tesla began to think about how he might use his technology differently and he began to think about how he might transmit power through the earth now why would he think about transmitting power through the earth okay consider the top diagram on the left you've got a transmitter and the transmitter is connected to an antenna and it's connected to a ground to the ground in other words there's a pipe that goes into the ground and a wire that that you know is it goes into the earth okay how does how would this transmitter send a message or send power to a receiver over here so the energy would be converted into electromagnetic waves they'd go up to the antenna they travel through the atmosphere come to the receiver's antenna and the receiver would then convert the signal into if it was radio into music or if we're trying to transmit power into into power and the whole thing would work by completing the circuit by having a current travel from the receiver back via the ground connections to the transmitter now tesla said radio waves electromagnetic waves are like light waves and light waves travel in straight lines so if you're beaming energy off of this antenna only a small percentage one percent is ever going to get from the antenna to the to the to from the antenna on the transmitter to the receiver and tesla said thinking again like a maverick i'm going to do it in reverse what i'm going to do is is this is i'm actually going to send energy from the transmitter as an electric current wave into the ground have it travel through the ground to the receiver and have the return be in the atmosphere so to test out these ideas tesla goes to colorado springs in may 1899. there he builds which is what's in this picture the largest tesla coil ever and the primary is on this fence or this that you can see behind him and it's it's a it's a it's a 50 foot radius circle and the secondary the tesla coil which is where all the lightning bolts are coming off of is is this cage in the middle okay and that's tesla sitting there calmly reading supposedly through a giant artificial lightning storm but at the same time while he's building this giant tesla coil he studies the thunderstorms that roll across the plains of eastern colorado and tesla decides that he can indeed pump energy into the earth set up stationary waves and send energy all over the world with minimal losses and he became convinced that what he had to do is he had to have the stationary waves be at the resonant frequency of the earth okay in other words they had to be at just the right frequency so that once those waves were standing up were standing and moving through the earth's crust he didn't have to add any more energy because he wasn't losing energy so the resonance was his ideal now he did no public demonstrations there there were no witnesses in colorado springs there was no effort to disconfirm tesla remember what he learned when he was a child if i can imagine it and i get a little bit of evidence out there in the world that confirms my idea by god i can actually do it in 1900 having found having convinced himself that you could sense electrical energy through the earth he returns to new york and tesla boldly announces that he would send power and messages across the atlantic from new york to paris in eight months just to promote his idea he writes a 35-page article where he says all of my inventions are going to solve all the problems of humanity and the article is titled the problem of increasing human energy and he publishes it in century magazine which in some ways was that time for that time period around 1900 the equivalent of the new yorker or the atlantic today he's highly confident of success tesla moves into the luxurious world off astoria hotel he eats dinner and delmonicos he dresses to the nines he's a man about town um and along the way he also tells people by the way that he's while he was in colorado he received radio messages from mars this is the moment where tesla really pushes the illusions if you say all the right things you do all the right things you look like a winner then then the technology and success will ultimately follow in 1901 and it's still not really clear exactly how it came to pass tesla meets morgan and jp morgan the wall street financier gives tesla a loan for 150 000 so that tesla can pursue his his grand experiments with wireless power 150 000 is to put it into context was the same amount of money that in 1901 morgan spent to buy gainsborough's famous painting the duchess of devonshire okay so you know so this isn't a huge investment for morgan you know tesla gainsborough you know about the same you know i'll take my chances now it's a loan and tesla secures the loan by giving morgan a share of the patent rights this is an important little detail morgan doesn't tell him what that percentage should be but tesla hoping to have a great business partnership with morgan gives morgan 51 of the patent rights this will come back to haunt tesla as you'll see in a few moments tesla uses the 150k to build an elaborate transmitting station on the north shore long island at a place called warden cliff it included as you can see in the photograph 187 foot high tower and everybody wants to talk about the tower but remember what really counts is not sending energy up the tower but sending energy into the earth and so underneath that tower and and the the this still the tower is long gone but the the 120 foot deep shaft is still there um and at the bottom of that shaft they will eventually figure it out but there are 16 of the the people that own the own the museum will eventually get and be able to excavate this were 16 iron pipes that projected out out from the ground in order to as tesla said get a grip on the earth meaning an electrical grip and shake it because tesla was going to pump electric current waves into the earth of course at its resonant frequency so the whole earth would hum with tesla energy now while tesla is building warden cliff he's watching his chief rival in europe marconi and marconi is of course watching tesla marconi has been working on his version of what to do with electromagnetic waves since about 1895 and marconi is convinced that the thing to do is communications to develop a wireless telegraph system and he does so incrementally first he basically is able to transmit across his father's estate in bologna italy then five miles 10 miles 35 40 miles across the english channel and each step of the way he's able to convince more and more people to come in and invest in them in the marconi wireless company okay now here it is 1901 and marconi hears that tesla is going to be the first to send a message across the atlantic marconi says i've got to beat him to the punch i've got to do it before tesla does it and marconi succeeds in december 1901 and marconi with his assistant george kemp hear the morse code signal for the letter s sent from cornwall england across the atlantic to where they are at st john newfoundland tesla's been scooped now if we had been scooped we probably would just kind of put our tail between our legs and hang our heads and be depressed but here tesla has a certain type of intellectual courage or as they would say where i grew up in new york new jersey hutzpah so what does tesla tell morgan tesla says we are going to create you and i the world the first world telegraphy system at every major city new york paris london tokyo we're going to install a power plant just like we have at warren cliff and those power plants are going to be able to generate messages and power and send it to every corner of the earth those plants are going to be connected by wires to the downtown and as fast as stock quotes come in telegraph messages come in telephone calls faxes newspaper stories we're going to beam that energy out we're going to pump it into the ground we're going to tag it with it's each it's its own unique frequency and we're going to send it into the ground and people will receive those messages because everyone will have a small receiver no bigger than a pocket watch the whole earth said tesla morgan it's like a brain and the capacity of this system is infinite you see mr morgan the revolutionary character of this idea it's civilizing potency it's tremendous money-making power the point that i think that is is we have come to appreciate about tesla is is is this yes in the 20th century we've had an information revolution for much of the 20th century it was an information revolution that began and focused on what businesses were going to do with information here in 1902 tesla is thinking about an information revolution that is about you and me about the individual consumer not united states steel not ibm not the us government but you and me a personal information revolution and one way that the newspapers imagine this is it says here's tesla's tower and they imagine that signals would be sent out from the tower they're getting this technically wrong because they would basically sort of say you have the tower and if you're a camper like in this this oval right here all you do is stick a post up like a tent pole and you'll get your energy and you'll get your messages now of course what's actually happening is it's it's the bottom of the pole that's getting the signal okay and you could also do the same thing on your yacht down here but my all-time favorite is this oval right here where this woman is is away from new york is say on vacation at saratoga springs or cape may new jersey and she wants to hear the latest news or get a call from her friends in the city and she just holds up her parasol and she gets the signal an information revolution that was going to be personal so how were morgan and tesla going to pursue this well for a little while they thought about creating a new company called the tesla manufacturing company that would produce those receivers but while they were thinking about that other electrical wireless inventors show up particularly an individual named lee deforest and lita forest invented a number of number of interesting technologies including the first vacuum tube later on but early on in his career he fell in with a swindler named abraham white and white created a series deforest radio companies and subsidiaries and sold stock in them over and over and over and over again made a fortune and never invested it in improving the technology so in silicon valley terms white created vaporware okay and as a result morgan and other wall street bankers in tesla's own words concluded that they should stay away from wireless stock wireless technology companies and they wouldn't touch them with a 20-foot pole in july 1903 morgan just said no more money you got the hundred fifty thousand dollars i'm done good luck to you tesla basically went back and forth between pleading with tesla with morgan in letters oh please please give me the money i'm such a nice guy to se to writing morgan and saying things like don't you know i'm the most powerful successful inventor in the history of the world and he would go back and forth between these two things at the same time all of this is happening and you know he's trying to build wharton cliff he's trying to raise the money he learns that his closest friend and potentially is his lover richmond p hobson has decided to basically abandon his friendship with tesla and marry a woman named griselda because as a naval war hero hobson wants to become a congressman and is ultimately elected to congress tesla falls apart can't raise the money can't get the technology to work lost my best friend he he has a nervous breakdown and he begins to sign letters nikola busted so can't raise the money losing friends can't find additional investors now why can't he find additional investors remember the 51 percent essentially tesla didn't control the intellectual property so he couldn't set up a separate deal with another investor without actually having morgan make money off of the deal and so various bankers sort of said we're not in the business of putting more money into jp morgan's hands so that's the finance side of the problem but you can also ask the technical question would warden cliff have actually worked and to answer that question we have to take up the the age-old issue of is the earth like an ocean or a water balloon let me just check on check check my timing here okay so is the earth like the ocean or a water balloon okay tesla thought that from an electromagnetic standpoint the earth was like a water balloon okay so his station his transmitting station would have been like that little hand pump that you see on the left and if you keep pumping energy into the earth eventually you reach the frequency of the earth it's resonant frequency and with each additional stroke each additional amount of power pumps it pumped into the earth you would have energy at each of these little stations around the world and in the case of the water balloon out of that that assumes that the the earth from an electromagnetic standpoint is filled with an inelastic medium the reality is is the earth is like an ocean you pump on one side and the energy is dissipated throughout the water in the water below in the ocean and it doesn't come out the other side tesla never recovered from the breakdown he had circa 1904 1905. in his later life he works on a few different inventions including a bladeless steam turbine in the 1930s he gets a bit of of publicity because he announces to the newspapers that he's invented a particle beam weapon that he claims is going to be able to shoot down attack planes attacking a city like new york he dies in 1943 the us government concerned that maybe he actually developed that particle beam seizes his papers hold on to them for about 10 years and in the 1950s gives papers to the people of yugoslavia so what can we learn about tesla come back to that issue about disruptive technologies tesla was a visionary disruptive technologies don't always start out having well-defined pre-existing needs and what tesla did as a visionary was to give people ideas hope excitement around the possibilities of new technology and he shows us these important negotiations that need to happen if you want a major new technology to have a significant impact and i always love this quote from arthur c clarke because it sums up so well tesla's tesla's career any sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic and the magic is you have to shape the illusions you have to shape the stories in order to get people to believe in your great ideas i think tesla would be continuing to think about this personal information revolution i think he continued to see himself as a maverick but above all he'd ask us to dream boldly and think hard i appreciate you taking time to listen to me this afternoon and i hope we have time for a few questions thank you ernie thank you very much for this extremely interesting talk on a very complex subject we have a lot of questions i've chosen a few and i have some of my own that i'd like uh to ask you maybe we could start with the first one which is from really um steve moosman and dr carlson if i can put the two of them together and what it amounts to is this question of the hero inventor and the two of them if i put the two questions together ask for a comparison with steve jobs yeah so i think one of the reasons why tesla has made a comeback is because tesla and steve jobs are very similar both of them understand that what you have to do is you have to get the illusions right okay there's to some extent you could argue that whether we're talking about you know an apple computer or an ipod or an ipad the technology already existed but jobs knew know knew how to get people to imagine great new possibilities for these technologies he was the master of illusion in in our day and age and so that's the parallel between tesla and jobs to some extent and i could go on at some length is is this is is you know edison is like bill gates okay both of those guys are much more focused on the technical side of things and that that's very interesting that um as i say we have a fair number of questions um if i can put some of them together in a number of ways first uh just a matter of a question of fact from david shaffer he asked did tesla ever claim what the resonant frequency of the earth actually is did tesla calculate it he he he calculated it and and based on what other electrical engineers have told me is this is tesla thought it was about and i'm gonna it's it was about eight and i'm now i'm it's not kilohertz i'm i'm blocking on what what's the right right multiplier there um and tesla was operating at about 6.9 okay yeah i apologize for not be you know not having that that factoid right that fact on it but tesla did calculate it and he thought he was pretty cl he was operating pretty close the difference is is is this is you know now most of the time when people talk about you know about the resident frequency of the earth they're talking about the human cavity which is is the space between the ionosphere and the earth's crust and that counts for some differences and that of course brings me to another question which reaches across some of the ones that we've uh received here and maybe i could frame it by asking for a comparison with somebody who was pretty much his contemporary i think it was only about nine years younger and that's charles proteus steinmetz and of course if one looks at steinmetz's work one finds it highly mathematical uh quite complex and yet he worked for years did he not as a a major uh character in general electric um and if you would compare these two which will then bring me to some other questions we've had how do you easily right so steinmetz steinmetz always works from the science and the mathematics sign metz's big contribution is what are the design rules the equations that engineers at general electric or westinghouse should use to design an optimal electric motor okay and so his steinmetz's approach is is highly mathematical grounded in the in in the work that's done by a series of physicists that you've written about and know well jed the maxwellians okay tesla hears about hurts his early experience experiments you know reads up on all the stuff that the lodge and the other maxwellians are saying and basically says i don't want to do this using mathematics i want to do this by using you know theorizing and doing it on the bench top so tesla is a much more intuitive inventor and steinmet's solid guy but he's doing it using mathematics and i look for years in tesla's notebooks and other sources for anything that look beyond any any mathematics that's beyond sort of basic algebra and i never found any and that brings me really to the uh and very interesting question of this complicated relationship particularly in the 1890s early 1900s between the academic scientists on the one hand and engineers like tesla and edison let me relate the story i heard many many years ago from a professor of mine when i was an undergraduate in the uh in the late 60s at princeton who had a relative who would work for edison and the story i heard was the following that uh edison was designing his this story may be apocryphal but nevertheless it raises the question and edison was designing shapes of light bulbs so the story went and he called in a group of his people and he needed to know the volume of the light bulb that he was going to have manufactured and he asked these uh young men that he'd hired many of whom were trained several at mit for instance at the time how can we calculate this precisely and they sat down and they drew curves on a piece of paper and they used calculus to rotate the curves around and there were these four light bulbs in front of edison and he wanted to know what the volumes were and they had done all these measurements and they told them and he said gentlemen nonsense he knocked the bottom off filled it with water poured out the water there is a kind of exemplar of the difference between at least in the case of edison the hands-on person trying to drive something from the highly trained academic scientist of the sort that we train at caltech and that of course we have at mit what do you make of a story like that well i've you know i love that i love that story and and it is it illustrates that that in the world of technology particularly in the age of well even today there there are certain things that you can do if you have a degree of of willingness to actually you know do the hands-on stuff deal with the phenomena but even tesla would tell you you know that you know that doing that you know severely limits you and doesn't necessarily allow you to predict what's actually going to happen next and um and you know my parallel story is years ago i was trying to write right you know write a book review of a famous historian that you know jed you'll know well eugene ferguson and and i i said to for i finally got fed up and i called one of my my colleagues uh here in the engineering school and i said i said dick why do engineers have all these mathematics why do they do all these equations and dick dick was a man of extremely few words and he said he said prediction and he hung up the phone so the point is is this is you can do a lot of amazing things by as edison did you know knocking off the you know the bottom of the light bulb measuring measuring how much water it fills up or you can do an awful lot by just messing with the wires you know as tesla did you know or theorizing it in your head and imagining as tesla did but a certain amount of mathematics a certain amount of theory allows you to predict so you don't have to build you don't have to do you don't have to do this over and over and over again and that's that's a really important lesson that that these these early inventors signal to us is to you know what they could do what they could not do and we still need to have that that respect for what you know behind every great you know every great you know engineering researcher at least in my university and indeed a caltech there's a technician who can make the make the stuff happen okay my tesla coil stopped working it's a technician that figured out how to add a little teeny tiny piece of wire so that it started working again that we only have a couple more minutes here um but um dick holmquist had sent in a question which relates to what we're talking about about the way in which can we say anything about how tesla actually had an influence on science maybe i could add a moment there you had mentioned hertz and that he had heinrich hurts and that he tesla had uh replicated or attempted to reproduce hertz's experiments even though tesla had as it turns out a completely incorrect idea of what waves were involved now in those days back in your 1890s and 1900s a practicing scientist like heinrich hurts sitting by himself in a laboratory with maybe an assistant had to make or have made everything by himself sitting on his desktop and then had to go out and convince others other scientists academic ones that he'd done something and then people had to pick that up and translate it as it were into something effective as in the case of marconi uh and so on uh and that was obviously a very difficult question to find the interface if you will between these complex mathematically structured academical experiments and the practical world of making something that would work that people would be using what do you think well i think that that's the you know that's the fascinating thing is is this is we we don't necessarily you know pay attention to you know um you know you know what you could argue with is is is this is is two things have to happen for if you will the insights that hurts had about electromagnetic waves to escape his laboratory and go and change the world and one is is is you need individuals like marconi who are going to basically build you know rugged reliable devices that can be used in a variety of situations you know and and you know marconi early on had to commit to that because his his radio systems were going to be put on ships not just warships but passenger ships and so they had to work in a challenging environment so that's one thing that has to happen the other thing which is equally important is is somebody has to engage the imagination of people to see the possibilities in a new scientific phenomenon the phenomenon does not sell itself we often have this picture i used it in the lecture last week for my students of tesla whole excuse me edison holds up a test tube and he's got this glitten his eye like i've discovered it eureka and the and of course what that photograph says is is what's ever in that test tube its social and economic ramifications are already there they're inherent in the material in in the discovery and they're not as you said hertz had to translate these things so his other scientists would follow up and do his experiments he had to convince you know basically his his academic bosses to let him do it and tesla shows us how hard that work is to build up and create a network where people believe that a disruptive technology is actually going to be a valuable thing and i think that you've shown so much about that our time is now up bernie i want to thank you so much for a very stimulating talk there are so many many other things we can talk about and we will be getting together again of course as i mentioned bernie had uh with uh eric conway run a wonderful session uh for us on the caltech huntington research institute for history of science and technology on electrical power and more will be forthcoming in the years with that i want to thank you so much for your talk and i will now sign off on zoom you

Channel: caltech

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Keywords: Caltech, science, technology, research

Id: 9ksF2Tobjrc

Length: 61min 56sec (3716 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020