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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Please clarify why you think Tesla's death beam would inspire Oda to write about the ancient weapons Pluton, Poseidon and Uranus, which are named after Greek gods representing underworld, sea and sky respectively.
I'm really interested in your reasoning.
Hank!