Nikola Tesla and the War of Currents, Part 1

In 1857 Nikola Tesla began work on direct current motor issues. In 1884, he approached Thomas Edison with ideas about alternating current, but Edison championed direct current. Their disagreement led to one of history's most famous scientific rivalries.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Debline and Chok reporting and I'm fair douting. And we
recently did an episode on nineteenth century dentist Horace Wells
in his battle to receive credit for discovering inhalation anesthesia.

(00:24):
And that episode was really fascinating to research, just to
find out about the rivalries that were created because of
this discovery and the lengths that they would go to
to get credit or discredit one another, and all this
for a discovery that was supposed to be for the
benefit of everyone, something that maybe people shouldn't have fought
over quite as much as they did. So it definitely

(00:47):
got us interested in exploring some more of those science
related rivalries. Yeah, and of course one of the most
famous also involved one of our most requested historical figures.
I feel like we always say that, but this one
really is requested a lot. Is the big time, and
that's Nicola Tesla. Tesla's probably most famous for inventing a
safe and effective motor that could be used to deliver

(01:09):
electricity using alternating current, and that alternating current method is
still used today, But he also invented the Tesla coil
and induction coil used in radio technology and many other
things which we will mention in a bit, But it
was that first invention and simply Tesla's devotion to the
idea that alternating current was superior to direct current as

(01:30):
a means of delivering electricity that sparked a bitter rivalry
with a very well known, very accomplished American inventor, Thomas Edison.
Of course, so we're going to be exploring Tesla's life,
his contributions, his eccentricities, but we're also going to take
a closer look at the contentious relationship that he had
with Edison and the battle that they fought in the

(01:53):
late nineteenth century to electrify the world. There was a
lot at stake, so by the time you get to
the end of Tesla's story, will really want to know
how minds like his got its starts. So that's where
we're going to begin. Tussa was born on July nine
or ten, sources tend to differ on that, eighteen fifty six,
into a family of Serbian origin in a village and

(02:14):
a part of Austria, Hungary, that's now Croatia. His dad
was an Orthodox priest and his mom was a homemaker
who hadn't had much, if any schooling, but she was
said to be very smart and really inventive to According
to PBS dot Org, Tesla's mom would invent all sorts
of gadgets to just help her around the house, including

(02:34):
a mechanical egg beater, and apparently Tesla later credited her
for his own inventive tendencies. His parents, though, kind of
expected their son to follow in his father's footsteps, but
he really excelled in math and science from an early age,
and it soon became pretty apparent that further academic achievement
along those lines was what he was going to try

(02:54):
to pursue. And he wasn't just plain old book smart too.
We should get into that before we start talking about
his his genius. Even when he was very young, he
was really inventive and imaginative and even had a bit
of a literary side to him. Yeah. According to Mental Floss,
Tesla had both conceived of an idea for a water wheel,

(03:15):
a machine for converting water to electricity, and read the
one hundred volume set of the Complete Voltaire by age five,
so pretty impressive. That it is pretty impressive. Not everybody
can even read yet at five, So there you go.
That's true. He was a little ahead of the curve there.
But in eighteen seventy five, Tesla moved to Gratz, Austria

(03:35):
to attend the Technical University there and trained to become
an engineer. According to an article about Tesla and notable
scientists from nineteen hundred to the present, it's while he
was there that he first saw a demonstration of the
Graham dynamo, a direct current induction motor. And while he
saw that demonstration, he noticed something. He saw that sparks

(03:56):
flew well it operated, and that's when he got this
idea of coming up with a method that would overcome
issues with direct current motor. So, after God, there's a
bit of lost time in Tesla's biography during which he
was ill, and apparently he would just study and study
and work on his ideas so hard sometimes that he
would make himself physically thick, or at least that's how

(04:19):
his his father saw it, anyway, and it really alarmed
his parents enough that they tried to get him to
switch career path. They just thought this was not going
to be healthy for their son. Eventually, though, Tesla said
to have moved on to continuous education at the University
of Prague, although according to biographer Margaret Cheney and Tesla
and Man out of Time, there's no record that he

(04:40):
actually went there. He may have just audited classes and
or use the libraries there regardless. By January eighteen eighty one,
he'd moved to Budapesh where he took a job in
the Hungarian government's Central Telegraph Office. In eight two, he
moved to Paris to take a position with the Continental
Edison Company, where his job was to address technical problems

(05:03):
in edison plants in both France and Germany, and according
to Encyclopedia Britannica, it's well he was on assignment in
Strasbourg in eighteen eighty three that Tesla really began serious
work on his first induction motor and came up with
a design for that, but he couldn't get a lot
of support for or interest in it, so it was
time for a big move. At that point, he decided

(05:25):
that he would head to America and see if he
could garner shake up some interest over there, So he
set sail in eighteen eighty four. He was in his
late twenties by this point, and he showed up that
summer with only four cents in his pocket, as well
as a few poems he had written and some calculations
for a flying machine that he wanted to create. That

(05:46):
really paints a good picture of him, I think, and
according to an article in American History by Ronald H. Bailey,
Tesla also only had one outfit left by the time
he got to the United States. It consisted of a
bowler hat, striped trousers and a cutaway coat, and all
of the rest of his clothing and his stuff he
had brought with him had been stolen on the trip over.

(06:08):
He also had a reference from the manager of the
Edison Company in Paris with him too. He so he
had like a recommendation along with him as well, because
he wanted a job with Edison's company in the States.
But there was a little more to it than just that.
There was a little more of a motive behind him
wanting to get work with Edison. Edison, who was thirty
seven at this time, was already considered a celebrated inventor.

(06:31):
He'd invented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph and
had recently created a system for providing electricity to homes
and businesses that people in the New York City area
were already benefiting from. Tesla hoped that he could get
Edison support for his ideas about alternating current, and that's
why he wanted to kind of ring him up, get

(06:52):
Edison in his corner. Yeah, So he went to see
Edison almost immediately after arriving in New York, and according
to Bailey's article, lay Or wrote that he was thrilled
to the marrow to meet him. But it was clear
from the start that these two guys, although they were
both great minds, were complete opposites, even in the way
they looked and acted. I mean, Edison was short, pudgy,

(07:14):
disheveled and kind of folks see you well. Tesla was
more than six ft tall and slender, neatly dressed and formal,
very serious looking. But of course, the biggest difference between
these two guys was not just how they looked, it
was their beliefs about the way electricity should be distributed,
direct current or alternating current. So, before we go any

(07:35):
further would probably help out to give just a little
bit of background on the difference between direct current and
alternating current. Just to give you guys a sense of
what Edison and Tesla disagreed about. So we're gonna stick
to the real, bare bone basics here because this isn't
a science podcast. We're not scientists or electricians or engineers,
but just to give you something to start with. So,

(07:58):
by this point, scientific had already researched electricity for a while,
and people knew it was valuable. It was just a
matter of how to get it where it needed to go,
and Edison believed that direct current was the answer to this.
In a direct current, electrons, which are the particles that
convey electricity, just travel in one direction, and a lot

(08:19):
of Edison's inventions ran off of this type of power.
According to an article in American Heritage by Bernard W. Carlson,
Edison preferred this method because it was simple and safe,
but the downside is that it could only move electricity
for short distances. His early power stations could only reach
customers within about a miles distance, so Tesla's preferred method.

(08:42):
On the other hand, alternating current involves electron switching back
and forth, so they travel first in one direction and
then in the other direction, and they do this many
many times per second. So if you see something that's
labeled sixty hurts, for instance, that means that the current
is changing direction in sixty times per second. So alternating

(09:02):
current is more difficult to set up, but Tesla really
believed in it because it was capable of distributing electricity
across greater distances, and it allowed you to step up
or decrease the voltage when you needed to make something
like that happen. He also felt, Carlson writes that alternating
current would enable people to use electricity for more than

(09:25):
just lighting, including running factory machines, street cars, and elevators.
So there was a lot of potential potential exactly. Edison
wasn't buying it. Though he wasn't buying into this idea.
He thought that Tesla's designs for the new induction motor
were both impractical and unsafe. According to Bailey's article, Tesla

(09:45):
later recalled that Edison said, quote very bluntly, that he
was not interested in alternating current. Anyone who dabbled in
that field was wasting his time. Still, though at least
at first, Edison was impressed by Tesla him himself even
if he didn't like his electricity philosophy. He was impressed enough,

(10:05):
in fact, that he gave Tesla a job, and so Tesla,
with his four cents in his pocket, you know, swallowed
his pride, took the job and got to work at
Edison's Pearl Street power station. And his job there was
to improve the performance of the dynamos, or the generators,
and interestingly, the direct current generators actually worked by creating

(10:26):
alternating current, at least initially. Then they had converted to
the direct current right before it was transmitted by using
something called a commutator. This gig only lasted a few
months for Tesla, though, and that was for a couple
of reasons. First off, the fundamental differences between him and
Edison were just too great. He just really felt limited

(10:46):
by the position and unsatisfied with what he was doing
because he didn't really believe in it. But there was
also the situation regarding payment that caused Tesla to call equips.
Tesla said Edison promised to pay him fifty thousand dollars
if he was successful in enhancing the power stations dynamos,
but after Tesla actually delivered on this, Edison said that

(11:09):
it was all a joke. According to PBS dot org,
the older inventor said something to the effective quote, when
you're a full fledged American, you can get an American joke.
Maybe yeah, not very nice. But according to Bailey's article,
Edison wouldn't even raise tesla salary from eighteen dollars to
twenty five dollars a week, so he didn't even get

(11:30):
some compensation for not getting the joke right. So Tesla
left and struck out on his own, and this time
he was determined to do things his own way, but
things still didn't go so well at first. He started
his own electric company in Raway, New Jersey five but
the first real project he worked on after breaking ties
with Edison didn't have that much to do with furthering

(11:52):
his ideas about alternating current. He kind of got out
of the business almost There were some New Jersey businessman
who hired him to improve the lighting system in the
city of Raleigh, but they wanted him to improve upon
an early system known as arc lighting. So Tesla took
the job because you know, it was at least some
kind of business, and he did create a better type

(12:13):
of arc lighting for the city, or a better system
of arc lighting, but the investors ended up taking all
the money that was earned from the project for themselves,
leaving Tesla with nothing, and according to Bailey, again they
even cheated the inventor out of the patent that he
had gotten for that new, improved arc light he'd created.
After that awful experience, Tesla was broke again and he

(12:36):
had to resort to working as a common laborer, and
to add insult to injury, one of his jobs was
digging ditches that would hold the electrical lines of none
other than Edison's direct current grid. So we're gonna leave
you there for now, with Tesla at a serious low
in the ditch. But if you're a huge Tesla fan,
don't worry, because in part two his luck does change,

(12:59):
and we'll see what happens when Tesla gets some work
done on that induction motor of his that he designed
so long ago and the current war really starts to
heat up. We'll also take a look at Tesla's post
current war life, including how he earned the nickname Master
of Lightning and why some remember this one studious student
as a mad scientist. So plenty in store for a

(13:22):
Part two of Tesla, and with that teaser out there.
I think we will go back to that other scientists,
that other researcher that we mentioned at the beginning of
the podcast Horace Wells, and dive into some listener mail.
We have one email here from listener Lavan and she says,

(13:42):
just listen to the Horace Wells episode while doing my
morning walk, and had to let you know that I
was in Washington, d C. Last weekend with our Hall
County World War two veterans to visit their memorial. One
of the side trips was a visit to the Museum
of American History. They're on display was the first ether
and hailer from six with credit given to William Morton
as the inventor of the device. Because my husband isn't anesthetist,

(14:06):
I took an interest in the display and snapped a picture.
No mention of Horace Wells. Goodness, but the gas layers continued.
The gas lars go on and on. We often got
another email from Frank and I know we've gotten dental
stories from you guys in the past, but this one
really applied after that Horace Wells episode, since he was

(14:26):
in fact a dentist. So Frank wrote us to say
that my parents started seeing dr silver when my older
sister was born. He had a brand new office and
the latest equipment. When he was still in practice, the
local paper ran a story about his fifty years as
a dentist. He had served in World War Two after
hearing the dental drill. For as long as I could remember,
but having good check ups, I had ten cavities and

(14:48):
fillings from the time I was about fourteen until I
was in college, so from the mid nineteen eighties until
early He never asked me if I wanted no beacine.
I didn't know I could ask. I thought it was
for quote, real pain. My parents never asked me if
I had taken any painkillers, and never offered any after
the fact. I quote got through by imagining really cold

(15:10):
ice cream. This is kind of a very sad email,
but funny too. I'm sorry you had to get through
through all of that, Frank, but I guess you could
really identify to some of the people we were discussing
in that podcast. Yeah, on the bright side, you never
had to go through that whole numbing sensation. I think
that's probably preferable at the end of the day. You're right,

(15:31):
you're right, that's not a bright side. But thanks for
writing in and sharing your story. If anyone else has
any related stories that they would like to share, or
maybe just some other recommendations for future podcasts, please write
to us History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can
also look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter
at Myston History. And if you want to learn a
little bit more about the science behind what we're discussing

(15:53):
with this TESTLA episode, we do have an article called
how electricity works, and you can find that by searching
for electricity on our homepage at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is that how stuff Works dot com. M