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- [00:00]
Mark Gagdon
Nikola Tesla. Maybe you've heard of this guy. Maybe you've seen his name on the back of cars. Maybe you've seen people alleging on the Internet that he possesses the power to literally create power around the whole world. Decentralized electricity from the clouds. He could visualize entire inventions in his mind with perfect clarity. His brain was like a modeling computer. He could remember things, images, sounds, even whole pages of books after just kind of seeing them and skimming over it. His biggest rival, Thomas Edison. Two brilliant adventures, two completely different approaches to electrical power, and millions of dollars on the line. And it was one of the wildest business rivalries in all of American history. Tesla was convinced that 3, 6, and 9 were the secrets to understanding the universe. He started talking about communications with other planets, harnessing forces that most scientists didn't even believe existed. He knew people were after his ideas. He'd spent his life watching others steal his work. Trump's uncle is the one that goes through Tesla's files after he dies. Well, all of that and more will be discussed in the next few moments. So let's go back to the very beginning.
- [01:08]
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- [01:24]
Christos
What's up, people?
- [01:24]
Mark Gagdon
And welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagdon and thank you for joining me in my wonderful, cozy little tent. And in this very tent, every single week, we discuss the most interesting, fascinating and controversial stories throughout all history, throughout all people ever, from all time ever. That's right. Christos, how you doing? Doing great. Okay. Okay. Okay, guys, we don't have any time to waste because today we are diving deep into the man, the genius, the figure whose name has been co opted. And we will be going through all the details of the very, very influential Nikola Tesla. Maybe you've heard of this guy. Maybe you've seen his name on the back of cars. Maybe you've seen people alleging on the Internet that he possesses the power to, you know, literally create power around the whole world. Decentralized electricity from the clouds, maybe an earthquake machine. Well, all of that and more will be discussed in the next few moments. So let's go back to the very beginning. July 19, 1856, there's a massive thunderstorm and in a small little home, there's a woman giving birth. The midwife takes one look at the baby and declares him a child of darkness. Which is an insane thing to say to someone that just had a baby, if I do say so myself, right? And his mother, Dukkha, looks down at her newborn son and says something that would turn out to be eerily prophetic. She says, no, he's not a child of darkness. He will be a. A child of light. And that baby was the man we know as Nikola Tesla. And honestly, both women were right in their own little way. Tesla's father, Mulitin, he was a Serbian Orthodox priest and he expected his son to follow the family tradition, right? Joined the church or the military. But his mother, Dukkha, was something different entirely. She was completely uneducated. She couldn't read, she couldn't write. But she had this incredible knack for invention. She is perhaps the mother of invention, if I do say so myself. Am I right? But in her spare time, she'd create, you know, little household gadgets, tools, like things that would just make life easier. And it's, it's. Some people suggest that it's like she has, like a natural understanding of just how things work, even without any type of formal training. And Tesla would even go out to say that she was the source of his inventive abilities. The Tesla family was not wealthy by any stretch. Molassin's salary as a village priest, like barely KE food on the table. And he was not an only child. He had five kids all together, and he was the fourth. So he had three sisters, one older brother named Dane. And Dane was apparently a bit of a child prodigy. At just 12 years old, the kid was just brilliant beyond his ears. He was the pride of the family, the golden child who could do no wrong. And the parents loved Dane. Everyone thought Dane was going to be the one. But then tragedy struck in a random, cruel way. When Nicola was just five years old, Dane dies in a horse riding accident. And just like that, one moment, you have this brilliant older brother. He's, he's Nicholas Hero. He's the pride and joy of the family. And the next moment, he's gone forever. The family is understandably devastated, but Nicola took it harder than anyone. He started having what you might call almost like a psychological breakdown. He would see these vivid, realistic visions that seemed unreal and sort of, you know, you know, unbelievable. And here's where things get really interesting. Instead of these visions being purely traumatic, they almost unlocked something in Tesla's brain. Tesla later described how he could visualize entire inventions in his mind with perfect clarity. Not like sketches or ideas. It was just a complete, detailed machine that he could mentally rotate and analyze from every angle and even test before he ever put pen to paper. His brain was like a. Like a modeling computer. And so he would build out entire contraptions in his head, run them for a few weeks, kind of just in his imagination, just going through and around in his head, and then he would, you know, almost take it apart and consider which elements had, like, wear and tear. Like, it was truly his brain was like an AI and it, like, by all accounts, his brain was just different than most people today. We might say that he would have, like, ocd, but back then, people just thought he was extremely particular. He was obsessed with cleanliness. He was a bit of a germaphobe. He refused to shake hands and couldn't stand being touched by anyone, especially if it was, you know, someone's hair. Like, he couldn't, like, if hair was on him, it would make him, you know, just go crazy. Smooth, round things like pearls made him feel sick. Later in his life, he even had to calculate the exact volume of his food before he could eat it. Like, he, like, literally, he was doing math before dinner, like, like assessing how many grams and milligrams of each thing he was ingesting. And then there was his thing with numbers, especially ones you could divide by three. Tesla was convinced that three, six, and nine were the secrets to understanding the universe. He'd circle a building three times before going inside. At meals, he needed exactly 18 napkins. That's six times three. And he flat out refused to stay in any hotel room unless the number was divisible by 3. To most people, it seems, you know, like, perhaps he would have some type of mental illness. But to Tesla, it all meant something bigger. Like, these numbers were part of, like, a hidden code that he had to be in perfect synchronicity with. And despite all of his quirks, or maybe because of his quirks, Tesla was an academic machine. He had this photographic memory. He could remember things, images, sounds, even like whole pages of books after just kind of seeing them and skimming over it. He spoke eight languages. I mean, Serbian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and even Latin. His teachers were blown away. His classmates probably thought that he was just like, you know, just a goody two shoes. And his parents started to realize that, you know, their strange, odd little kid might actually be a hidden genius. And in school. Tesla was doing calculus in his head so fast that teachers thought that he was cheating. They couldn't believe that anyone could just solve math problems without writing anything down. But Tesla would just almost, like, zone out for a little bit and you would get this, like, distant look into his eyes, and then he would just calmly give the answer. And sleeping and eating habits, I mean, that was just as weird as, you know, any, any other part of Tesla's personality. He trained himself to sleep only two hours a night, saying that's all he needed. He would take, like, quick naps here and there, but mostly he was just always awake. He also would walk 8 to 10 miles a day, no matter the weather, because he believed it would boost his creativity. And When Tesla was 14, he enrolled at the Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovak, where he was supposed to complete a four year program. He finished it in three years. Not because he was, you know, showing off or, you know, better than anyone, but just because he was genuinely bored with the pace of the normal education. And then comes a moment that changes everything. In 1875, Tesla wins a scholarship to attend the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz, one of the most prestigious technical schools in all of Europe. This was a massive deal for, you know, some Serbian kid born in a tiny modern Croatian village, Right, like it's unheard of. His parents were proud and his teachers were obviously very impressed. Tesla himself was excited to be somewhere that actually might challenge him. And in his second year at the polytechnic, Tesla went to a lecture by Professor Palschol on electrical engineering. And the professor was showing off a Graham dynamo, an early kind of generator that could also run as a motor. But there was an issue. It used brushes and communicators, which made sparks, and it wasted a ton of energy. And while everyone else just watched the demo, Tesla was already thinking about how to get rid of the sparks and make it a little bit more efficient. He assumed that it might be possible to create a motor that used an alternating current instead of a direct current, which would eliminate the need for the brushes altogether. And this stuck in his brain. I mean, he became obsessed with figuring out how to make this alternating current motor work. And he would just walk for hours, turning the concept over and over in his mind, trying to visualize how these electric currents could be made to rotate smoothly without these brushes. And because of Tesla's obsessive nature, it began to backfire. While he was at school. He got hooked on gambling. That just like all, like poker, billiards, anything that would let him test, like, his smarts. In a way to almost gamify his understanding of statistics against other people. And he was very good at it, which obviously made the problem worse. He'd win just enough to stay hooked, but then lose enough to get into real trouble. And his scholarship money started to vanish into these card games and his different bets. And when his father found out about the gambling, he was furious. You gotta understand, his father is a, literally an Orthodox priest. And he sees his brilliant son meant to bring pride to the family, throwing it all away over card games. Tesla tried to quit more than one time, but he kept on falling back into it. And eventually his mother scraped together what little money they had and sent it to him, hoping that it would help him pay off his debts and get his life back on track. And instead of paying off his debts, what does Tesla do? Yeah, he goes straight back to the gambling table, thinking that he could win everything back and he lost everything in a single night, just like that. When it hit him that he had just basically gambled away all of his mother's hard earned money, something just snapped in him. He quit gambling on the spot and never touched it again. But the damage was already done. He couldn't afford to stay in school and he never finished his degree. Tesla spent the next few years drifting around Central Europe taking, you know, different jobs that he could get. He worked as a draftsman, he taught math and physics at his old school. And he tried to figure out what. What he was going to do next. But the problem of the alternating current motor never left his mind. He would walk the streets of Budapest or Prague, talking to himself, drawing diagrams in the dirt with sticks, running experiments in his head Nonstop. Then, in 1882, something crazy happens. Tesla is walking through a park in Budapest with a friend, casually reciting the line from Goethe's Faust, when he suddenly froze and had a vision of the alternating current. He writes in his autobiography, the glow retreats done is the day of toil, if yonder hastes new fields of life exploring. As I uttered these inspiring words, the idea came like a flash of lightning, and in an instant, the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone. So that I told my companion, see my motor here, watch me reverse it. I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion, seeing his statue come to life, could not have been more deeply moved. Tesla had just invented the Principle that would power the modern world. Of course, having the idea was one thing, actually building it a completely different story. Tesla was still a broke engineering student, kind of between jobs with weird habits and a brain with crazy ideas that most people just kind of wrote off. He needed money, tools, and maybe most of all, he needed a support group. He needed people, or even just one person who would actually believe in him. And that someone turned out to be the most famous inventor in America. Someone who had become both Tesla's boss and his biggest rival. But before that could happen, Tesla had to find a way to cross the Atlantic with almost no money and somehow convince one of the most powerful men in the world to take a chance on him. And that man is Thomas Edison. So, June 1884. Nikola Tesla arrives in the United States. On his way to the boat, he loses everything. His train ticket, his luggage, his personal belongings. By the time he lands in New York, all he had was 4 cents in his pocket. But to Tesla, America's the land of opportunity. It's time to get going. He had been working for Edison's European company in Paris, and his boss there had given him a letter of introduction to the great Thomas Edison himself. So Tesla makes his way to Edison's headquarters at 65 Fifth Avenue and somehow talks his way into meeting with the most famous inventor in America. He'd invented the light bulb, the phonograph. He was working on early motion pictures. If something was cutting edge and exciting back then, chances are Edison's name was already attached to it. He was all. He was also, just, like, insanely wealthy. He was running this massive operation with hundreds of workers and different facilities around the world. Investors lining up to throw money at whatever he could do next. So when this weird, skinny European kid shows up claiming that he can improve Edison's electrical systems, you'd think Edison would just laugh him out of the room. But here's the thing about Edison. He was obsessed with finding talented people. He'd give anyone a chance if they could prove that they had real engineering abilities. Plus, Tesla came with a great recommendation from Paris. So Edison gives Tesla a job on the spot. But man, these two could not have been more different. I mean, Edison was hands on trial and error. Make stuff, break stuff, move fast, like, let's get after it. While Tesla's brain worked completely backwards from that, Remember, this is the guy who could build entire machines in his brain and then run them for weeks before ever touching a piece of metal. So Tesla would sit in the corner and stare off into space for a while. Then suddenly he'd announced that he'd solved whatever problem they were working on. He described exactly what needed to be built down to the tiniest details, because he'd already tested it mentally in his head thousands of times. Edison thought the whole thing was magic or like a hoax, or he was just being lazy. He had no clue how Tesla's brain worked. How do you even trust someone who says that they can invent things without building a prototype? Like it made no sense at all. Edison was used to being the smartest guy in the room. And now here's this foreigner who seems to grasp electrical engineering on a different level. But Tesla's methods worked. Edison had been struggling with inefficiencies in his direct current generators and they were losing a lot of power and breaking down all the time. Tesla took one look at the system, disappeared into his mental workshop for a few days, and then he comes back with a complete redesign that solved most of the problems. Edison was impressed, but also a little worried. This new guy was making improvements that Edison's entire team of engineers hadn't been able to figure out. And here's where the story gets really interesting. And it really just shows you the kind of person that Edison was. He pulls Tesla aside and he makes him an offer. $50,000 if he can make the direct current more efficient. $50,000 in 1884 is like, I mean, it's life changing money. To put in perspective, that's $1.5 million for Tesla, who was literally counting pennies. He showed up to a mare with four pennies in his pocket. This is life changing. So Tesla throws himself into the project with that obsessive intensity that he's known for. And he worked 18 hour days for months, completely redesigning Edison's generator. Everything from the systems to the machinery to the materials, everything from the ground up. And he improves the efficiency, he reduces the mechanical problems, and basically created a whole new generation of direct current machines. It was brilliant, truly. And it would have taken Edison's team years to accomplish. And so when Tesla finishes and presents his improvements, Edison is amazed. He's blown away. The new designs work exactly as Tesla had promised they were more reliable, more efficient, and solve problems that have been driving Edison crazy for years. So Tesla walked into Edison's office, he asked for his $50,000, but Edison looked at him and said, this Tesla, you don't understand our American humor. Let that sink in. Just, just think about how you would feel. Tesla had just spent months revolutionizing Edison's entire electrical system. Probably the most important work of his career to that point. And Edison's response was. Ah, come on, dude, we're just goofing around. You. You really thought I was gonna pay you 50,000? Nah. Thanks for the schematics, but nah, we're not gonna do that. Tesla is pissed. And honestly, I mean, I, I don't blame him at all. I mean, I would be livid. This wasn't just about money as much as it was about respect, right? Like, Tesla's a pretty minimalist guy, but just the fact that he would be promised something, do the work, and then someone would go back on their word. Edison basically just lies to him, uses his genius to solve major engineering problems, and then laughs it off as a joke. Tesla quits on the spot.
- [17:30]
Christos
What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you own a small business, or maybe you work for a small business, and I am about to make your life so much easier. Let's say, hypothetically, you own a little, you know, furniture business, right? And you're struggling to keep track of the raw materials, the production schedule, invoicing clients, all that stuff. Well, that's why I want to tell you about Odoo. Okay? Because with Odoo, it's an all in one business platform that streamlines everything. Now you have inventory management, you have manufacturing, you have accounting apps that will make everything so simple. So now if you have a small business, you can monitor the inventory in real time, schedule productions calls more effectively, and you can send invoices automatically, all from one platform. Plus, you get a customized CRM to track sales leads and follow up with potential clients, boosting your closing rates. Back in the day, you'd probably have to get, you know, some, you know, Ivy League operator, business person that's, you know, able to make everything happen for you. But now with Odoo, it cuts it all out. And I'm sure you're thinking, okay, if this is going to make my life easier, give me more free time to.
- [18:31]
Mark Gagdon
Spend with my friends, family and playing.
- [18:33]
Christos
Softball and make me more money. It must be crazy expensive. This is the good news. Listeners of this program are going to get a 14 day free trial. That's right. You get two weeks with Odoo completely for free when you go to odoo.com camp. That's right, odoo.com use the promo code camp and you will get 14 days.
- [18:50]
Mark Gagdon
For free just to try it out.
- [18:52]
Christos
See if you like it. If it's not for you, you don't need it. All right? But Odoo is going to make your life so much easier. Everything you need, all in place.
- [18:58]
Mark Gagdon
Save time.
- [18:59]
Christos
Make more money. Let's get back to the show.
- [19:01]
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- [19:31]
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- [20:00]
Mark Gagdon
But now he has a problem. He's unemployed in a foreign country with no money, no connections. And the job market for brilliant but weird electrical engineers wasn't exactly booming in 84. So Tesla spent the next year doing literally whatever work he could. And at that point, it literally meant he was digging ditches and trenches for the New York City works Department. I mean, it's insane. Like, just put that in your head. One of the greatest minds in human history, he just revolutionizes electrical engineering, spending days with a shovel in his hand digging holes in the street for $2 a day. He later called it one of the most humiliating times in his life. But he had brilliant ideas in his head, but he was just doing hard labor to survive. But sometimes rock bottom is exactly where you need to be to find the right opportunity. So by 1886, Tesla met Alfred S. Brown, who was a superintendent at Western Union, and Charles F. Peck, a successful patent attorney. These guys had heard rumors about Tesla's work with Edison and were curious about his ideas for improving electrical systems. Tesla explained his vision for the alternating current motors. The same breakthrough that he had in that park in Budapest. And he was still obsessed with it. Brown and Peck were smart enough to recognize genius when they saw it. So they gave Tesla the financial backing that he needed to start his own company, the Tesla Electric and Light Manufacturing Company. Finally, Tesla had his own laboratory, his own equipment, and the freedom to work on his alternating current motor without someone looking over his shoulder, Tesla went absolutely nuts with productivity. In 1887 and 88, he filed more than 30 patents. Not just minor improvements or tweaking existing tech. These were major breakthroughs in electrical engineering that no one had ever seen before. He developed polyphase AC motors, new types of generators, improved lighting systems, and basically laid the groundwork for the entire modern electrical grid. But again, the centerpiece of all this work was the AC induction motor. This was the machine Tesla had been visualizing in his mind for years. Tesla's motor used rotating magnetic fields to turn the rotor, which meant no brushes, no sparks, and way more efficiency than anything that Edison was building. So, May 16, 1888, Tesla was invited to present his work at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York. And this is a massive deal. All the major electrical engineers and industry leaders are going to be there. Tesla stood up in front of his room full of experts and basically announced that he'd solved one of the fundamental problems of electrical engineering. His presentation was called, quote, a new system of alternate current motors and transformers, and it absolutely blows everyone's mind. Tesla didn't just describe his motor, he demonstrated it. He had working prototypes that could power machinery more efficiently than anyone had ever seen before. The engineering community is just completely stunned. Here was this unknown inventor who had kind of worked at some different companies, who basically redesigned how electrical power could work. But one person in the audience was paying particularly close attention, and that was a man by the name of George Westinghouse. Westinghouse was Edison's biggest competitor in the electrical business. He was already working with AC power for lighting systems. But he'd been struggling with the same motor problem that had obsessed Tesla. Westinghouse knew that whoever could build a practical AC motor could control the future of electrical power. After Tesla's presentation, Westinghouse didn't waste any time. He walked straight up to Tesla with an offer that would change both their lives. Westinghouse wanted to buy Tesla's patent and hire him as a consultant. But this wasn't going to be like the Edison situation. Westinghouse was offering real money, a lot of real money. He was going to pay Tesla 60,000 upfront for his patent, plus a 2,500 annual consulting fee, plus royalties of $2.50 for every horsepower of Tesla motors that Westinghouse sold. In today's money, the initial payment alone would be 2 million. Tesla finally had someone who understood the revolutionary potential of his AC system. Westinghouse wasn't just buying patents. He was betting his entire company on Tesla's vision of how electrical power should work. Edison, meanwhile, was probably starting to realize that he'd made a massive mistake. This strange foreign kid he'd cheated out of $50,000 had just signed a deal with his biggest rival that could potentially destroy Edison's entire electrical empire. The war of currents was about to begin, and it would be unlike anything the business world had seen before. Two brilliant inventors, two completely different approaches to electrical power, and millions of dollars on the line. Edison had the reputation and the established consumer base. But Tesla and Westinghouse said something more powerful. They just had better technology. Tesla went from a broke immigrant to multimillionaire, literally in the span of a few years. But here is what's fascinating about Tesla's personality. He didn't care about the money. What excited him was that finally someone understood his vision and was willing to bet everything on it. Meanwhile, Edison is pissed. He'd spent years calling alternating currents dangerous and useless, and now his biggest rival had hired the guy who actually made it work. Suddenly, this wasn't just a debate over technology. It was personal. If AC was really better than dc, Edison's whole electrical empire was at risk. So Edison fought back. And he didn't fight back in a gentlemanly way. He fights back dirty. What came next was called the war of currents, and it was one of the wildest business rivalries in all of American history. Edison went all in on a smear campaign against AC power. He staged public demos where he electrocuted animals, dogs, cats, even an elephant using alternating current just to prove how dangerous it was in front of crowds. He'd say, this is what Westinghouse wants in your home. It was horrifying, but it was also effective marketing. People started to associate AC power with death and danger. But Edison's most notorious stunt was getting involved with the development of the electric chair. New York State was looking for a more humane method of execution than hanging. Edison saw an opportunity. He secretly funded the development of an electric chair that used AC and then lobbied the state to adopt it. His logic is twisted, but kind of brilliant. If AC power was being used to execute criminals, people would think it was too dangerous for everyday use. Then, in 1890, William Kemmler became the first person executed by electric chair. And Edison made sure everybody knew it was AC power that killed him. Edison even tried to get people to call execution by electric chair getting Westinghoused like it was a brand name for death. I mean, it's like, crazy. Westinghouse was disgusted by these tactics. He actually hired the best lawyers he could find to try to prevent Kemmler's execution, not because he cared about the guy, but because he knew that Edison was going to use it as a publicity stunt against AC power. But here's the thing about having better technology. At the end of the day, it wins. No amount of scare tactics could change the science. DC power couldn't travel more than a couple miles without losing too much energy. Ac, on the other hand, could go hundreds of miles with barely any loss. If you wanted to power an entire country, AC wasn't just better, it was the only option that made sense. Meanwhile, Tesla was thriving. He had set up an amazing lab in Manhattan where he could finally bring all this wild stuff to life. He didn't waste any time. Between 1888 and 1891, he racked up over 45 patents. That's nearly one major invention every month. This is when Tesla invented the Tesla coil, perhaps his most famous creation. After the AC motor, it could generate hundreds of thousands of volts and shoot lightning bolts across the room. And Tesla loved to show it off. In his demos, he'd even run electric currents through his own body to light up fluorescent bulbs. Tesla became almost like a celebrity scientist at the time, giving lectures to packed audiences who came to see his electrical magic shows. He'd light up full rooms of wireless fluorescent bulbs. He would make electric arcs dance through the air and explain how he was tapping into forces that most people couldn't even imagine. During this period, Tesla also started to experiment with X rays. This was before Wilhelm Roentgen officially discovered them in 1895, Tesla was taking what he called shadow graphs, which is basically an X ray image, and trying to figure out how these X rays worked. He even took some of the first X ray photographs of the human bone. You can see in this image here, this is a actual shadow graph of Tesla's foot. And you can see it just looked exactly like an X ray. But probably Tesla's most ahead of his time invention during this period was wireless communication. In 1893, Tesla was already demonstrating radio transmission. And in 1898, he unveiled something that completely blew people's mind. A remote controlled boat. 1898, Tesla could make it go forward backwards, turn left, turn right, even make its lights blink on command. Remember, 1898, most people had never seen a telephone. And here's Tesla controlling a machine wirelessly from across the room. Some people in the audience thought that it was magic. They thought that, like, he was in touch with some type of, like, dark, supernatural force. Other people thought there was, like, a Tiny person hidden inside the boat or like some type of human movement machine. And it was all just like a gimmick. The idea that you could control a machine through invisible signals was so foreign to most people that they couldn't even process what they were seeing. Tesla tried to explain that this was just the beginning. That someday people would be able to control all kinds of machines wirelessly, maybe even communicate with each other across vast distances without the need for wires. But of course, most people thought that he was, you know, letting his imagination carry him away. And he was way too ahead of himself. Meanwhile, the war of currents was coming to a head. The big Showdown was in 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Basically like the World's fair, it was set to be the largest electrical project ever attempted. And everyone knew the stakes. Whoever lit up the fair would likely power the future of the entire country. Edison put a bid of $554,000 to power the fare with his DC system. Westinghouse, using Tesla's AC tech, undercut him with a $399,000 bid. And he won. And just like that, Tesla's AC system was lighting up the most breathtaking electrical display the world had ever seen. And the fair was a sensation. Smash hit. Hundreds of thousands of people walked through these glowing buildings lit by Tesla's AC system. They rode electric powered attractions and saw jaw dropping demonstrations ch just of what electricity could do. For most, it was their first time seeing electric light in action. And it was all thanks to Tesla's alternating current.
- [31:06]
CD Lamb
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- [31:36]
Mark Gagdon
But the real victory came a few years later with the Niagara Falls project. This was the ultimate test. Using the raw power of the Niagara Falls to generate electricity for cities far away. It was a massive, high stakes undertaking that would finally settle the question. Is the future of electricity AC or DC? And Westinghouse and Tesla won the contract. And by 1896, their AC generators were sending power from Niagara Falls all the way to Buffalo. 26 miles. DC power for the record couldn't even come close to that. But Tesla's AC system made it look easy. So Edison had lost, the war of currents was over and AC Power won decisively. But then something happened that shows you exactly what kind of person Tesla was and why he never became as wealthy as he should have been. By 1896, Westinghouse was in deep financial trouble. He borrowed heavily to fight the current wars against Edison, and now the lenders wanted their money back. His bankers gave him an ultimatum. Canceled the royalty deal with Tesla or they'd bankrupt him and take control of the company. Westinghouse went to Tesla and laid it all out. He was clearly torn. This was the man who had believed in Tesla from the start, backed his ideas and helped make them real. And now he was asking Tesla to walk away from millions in royalties to save the company from collapse. Tesla listened to Westinghouse's explanation. Really? And then he did something selfless. He walked over to his safe, pulled out the royalties contract, the very paper that guaranteed him a future and a fortune, and he tore it up right in front of Westinghouse. And just like that, Tesla gave up what would have been one of the largest fortunes in American history. Some estimates suggest that he walked away from the equivalent of $300 million in today's money, potentially more. But Tesla did. Didn't care about the money. He was already wealthy enough to fund his experiments, and he was more interested in pushing the boundaries of science than just counting dollars. So with the royalty payments gone, Tesla was free to pursue whatever interested him most. And what interested him was getting weirder and more ambitious by the day. He started talking about communications with other planets, harnessing forces that most scientists didn't even believe existed, and at the same time, he may have fallen in love with a pigeon. By 1899, Tesla had basically conquered electricity as people know it, Right? He'd won the War of the currents, revolutionized power, transmission was being celebrated in New York as one of the greatest inventors of all time. Anyone else would have just cashed out toward the world giving speeches and lived off the legacy. But to Tesla, he wasn't like everyone else. The AC motor and modern power systems were just the beginning for him. He had a radical idea, that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly. Not just signals, like his radio work in the, you know, remote controlled little boat, but like real electrical power, enough to light cities and run machines sent through the air without wires. But you can't test ideas like that in the middle of Manhattan. So Tesla needed space, altitude, and maybe a break from the chaos of the city. So in May 1899, he packed up and headed west to Colorado Springs, a quiet town 6,000ft up in the Rockies. And it was the perfect spot. Dry, thin air made electrical experiments much easier. The town was small and out of the way, far from major electrical infrastructure, and the lightning storms were some of the strongest on Earth. Tesla ended up striking a deal with a local power company and he gained free electricity in exchange for improved their generators. So he set up shop in the outskirts of town and built something basically out of like a sci fi movie. At the center was a massive wooden building, about 100ft long with a retractable roof. But towering over everything was the main feature, a 200 foot wooden mast capped with a 3 foot wide copper ball. And the townspeople nicknamed it Tesla's Electric Castle. And they weren't wrong. When Tesla fired it up, the whole building lit up. Lightning shot from the tower and you could hear the crackling energy from miles away. At the heart of it all was this new device, a magnifying transmitter. Basically like a Tesla coil on steroids, it could generate millions of volts, producing more power than most cities even used at the time. But the real magic. Tesla discovered that when his machine was on, light bulbs would glow without being plugged into anything. Just being near the electric field made them light up. He could walk around holding fluorescent tubes and they would shine in his hands. Then he pushed things even further. In one famous test, he managed to light up 200 incandescent bulbs from 25 miles away. No wires, just electricity through the air. Now, there's no official witness or reports from this, but it was written in Tesla's notes. So whether he actually completed this experiment or was just sketching ideas, no one knows exactly. But it's widely claimed that he actually did do this. He became convinced that he discovered a whole new way of understanding electricity. Tesla believed the Earth itself was a conductor, a natural system that could carry electrical energy around the globe. And if you tapped into it the right way, you could send power anywhere. He wrote about detecting what he called terrestrial stationary waves, natural resonating energy patterns from within the Earth. Tesla believed that with the right setup, you could send electricity from Colorado to New York or London or China or anywhere the Earth itself would carry the power. But his experiment came at a cost. His transmitter was so powerful that it kept frying the local power grid. One surge completely knocked out the town's power, completely causing Tesla to be responsible for the repair bill, just to keep the work going. And then things got even stranger. Tesla began picking up mysterious signals on his equipment, rhythmic pulses that came from deep within space. He was convinced that these might be messages from intelligent life. He speculated maybe Mars. Today we know that these were likely natural radio waves from space, like, you know, solar flares or pulsars. But back then, nobody even knew that those signals existed. To Tesla, the idea that aliens were trying to make contact seemed more logical than, you know, invisible stars pulsing radio energy across the cosmos or whatever we know now. So he told reporters that, hey, I might have made contact with beings from another world. He described the signals as too organized, too intentional to just be random noise. And he genuinely believed he was on the brink of two way communication with another planet. Back in New York, the scientific community started to worry. Tesla's ideas were sounding less like science and more like science fiction. People wondered if the altitude or the isolation or maybe the contact with electricity was messing with his brain. But Tesla was more convinced than ever. He filled notebooks with calculations and theories about wireless power, planetary communication, and harnessing Earth's natural energy grid. He believed he was on the verge of changing the world again, only this time on the biggest scale imaginable. Then in December 1899, he wrote to J.P. morgan claiming that his transmitter was capable of effects greater than anything built before. That he was working on discoveries that would affect the entirety of the human race. Tesla said that he'd figured out how to send unlimited wireless power to any point on Earth. Not just signals. Usable energy that could power homes, machines, even city, no wires, infrastructure, just energy beaming through the Earth. I mean, imagine the implications of that. An airplane that's flying around, that never has to refuel. A car, that doesn't need a gas station. I mean, entire cities that could just be propped up in the middle of the desert and get powered all wirelessly through the Earth. By 1900, Tesla packed up his equipment and headed back to New York. He believed that he had the data, the theory, the tech to build a full scale version of his wireless power system. And he was ready to launch into the next phase. So he left Colorado Springs. But what he didn't know was that his next project would be the most ambitious engineering feat maybe ever attempted. And that it would either make him the most powerful man on Earth or destroy his entire legacy. Tesla was convinced that, you know, he'd crack the code for wireless power and he's ready to show the world. But these big ideas have a price, and Tesla needed serious money to make it real. So here we get JP Morgan. If you don't know about JP Morgan, obviously the bank is named after him. He is the main proprietor that started the entire bank. He's basically the Jeff bezos of the 1900s. The guy controlled more money than most governments. And he had a reputation for backing bold, risky projects. Railroads, steel, electricity. If it was massive and could reshape the world, JP Morgan wanted in. So Tesla pitched him what sounded like a simple business plan. Guillermo Marconi had just sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic. And suddenly wireless communication was the hot new thing. Tesla told Morgan that he could build a system that would blow Marconi's out of the water. And Morgan was sold. He pledged $150,000, about 5 million in today's money, which again is a massive investment, even for that time. But Tesla didn't tell him everything. Yes, his tower would handle wireless communication, but that was just the COVID story. Tesla's real goal was bigger. To wirelessly transmit electrical power across the world for free. Tesla found a 200 acre site in Shoreham, Long Island. Far enough from the city to avoid interference, but close enough to get attention. And he named it Wardenclyffe, after James S. Warden, the lawyer and real estate developer who owned the land and sold it to Tesla. Construction began in 1901, and the centerpiece was a 187 foot tower topped with a massive 68 foot copper dome weighing 55 tons. Beneath it, Tesla dug a 120 foot shaft lined with metal, with underground pipes spreading outwards like the root of a tree. He believed this system would let him tap into the Earth's electrical currents. Tesla was all in. Wardenclyffe was his obsession and his opus. I mean, this was his masterpiece. He imagined a world where energy was limitless, wireless and free. A network of towers like this could potentially power the entire planet. But as the project dragged on, Morgan started getting nervous. Tesla kept asking for more money. Timelines, getting kept getting shifted. And what the tower was supposed to do kept changing. At first it was just communication. Then Tesla mentioned weather control, then power transmission. Then something about using the Earth itself as a king. Doctor. And eventually Morgan figured it out. Tesla wasn't just building a new business venture. He was trying to give away electricity for free. And this was a problem. Morgan had just built an empire by controlling industries, right? That was his entire game plan. Railroads, steel, utilities. And if Tesla's tower worked, it would make entire electrical companies obsolete overnight. No wires, no meters, no bills. Just energy everywhere. For free. So by 1906, J.P. morgan pulls the plug. No more funding, no more support. Tesla is crushed. He poured his savings, his reputation Years of work into Wardenclyffe, and now the dream was collapsing.
- [43:27]
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- [44:24]
Mark Gagdon
He spent the next several years scrambling to find new investors. He wrote letters, you know, presentations. He even pitched foreign governments, anyone who might back him. But the answer was always the same. Why would we fund something that destroys the very thing that our society and ourselves profit from? So by 1915, Tesla was broke and the tower stood unfinished. Eventually, Tesla had to sell the property to pay his debts. And in 1917, the new owners tore down the tower and sold it for scrap. Tesla never got over it, and for the rest of his life, he insisted that the tower would have worked. And here's where it gets weird. After Wardenclyffe collapsed, Tesla's life veered sharply into what people would consider bizarre territory. The man, once celebrated as a revolutionary genius began behaving in ways that made even his admirers question his mental state. But here's what makes Tesla so fascinating. Even in his strangest years, he was still making claims that, if true, would have changed the world. The first sign that something had shifted in Tesla was his relationship with pigeons. And not in the casual, you know, park bench sense. Tesla became obsessed with feeding pigeons across New York City, especially near the New York Public Library. He spent hours each day walking with bags of seeds, talking to the birds like they were old friends of his. But one pigeon in particular stood out, this white female with gray tipped wings. And Tesla said that he loved her, quote, as a man loves a woman. If she didn't show up at their usual spot, he'd spend the entire day looking for her. He even claimed that they would communicate and that she understood him than most humans or any human ever could. When she became sick, he brought her to his hotel room and nursed her back to health. He built perches, set up feeding systems and watched over her like a caretaker. The hotel staff thought that Tesla was officially gone, that he had totally lost it. But he didn't care. He said that that pigeon was the most important relationship in his life. Meanwhile, his living situation just became chaotic. Tesla jumped from one New York hotel to another, running up massive bills that he couldn't pay. A matter of fact, the St. Regis kicked him out in 1923. Hotel Pennsylvania followed in 1930, the Governor Clinton Hotel in 1934. Each time, he'd convince a new hotel manager to give him credit by dropping his name. Hey, I'm Nikola Tesla and I usually bought him a little bit of time. But his fame was fading and at the end of the day, the bills kept growing. Even as his personal life started to spiral out of control. Tesla's scientific ambitions only got bigger. So by 1912, he started talking about something he called a mechanical oscillator. A device that could shake buildings apart by matching their natural frequencies. He claimed that he built small versions of this in his Manhattan lab and accidentally triggered a mini earthquake. Tesla later told the story in a 1935 interview. Quote, I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from and they did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound and I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been down about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street, there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That's all they ever knew about it. He even claimed he'd calculated how many oscillations it would take to split the earth in half, but promised he would never do it. Most scientists thought that this was just completely absurd. But Tesla insisted that it was real. He even offered to demonstrate it to the government of but no one took him up. But the most famous of Tesla's late life claims was the so called teleforce weapon, which the Press immediately called the death ray. Starting in the early 1930s, Tesla began telling reporters that he had invented a weapon so powerful it could make war obsolete. The death ray. He said it could shoot a beam of particles across 250 miles, vaporizing aircraft and annihilating armies. He claimed that it could kill a million soldiers instantly and make any country completely invulnerable. He pitched the weapons to the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia. He even wrote detailed proposals describing how the death ray could form an impenetrable Chinese wall of defense around any nation. His logic was simple. If every country had this kind of weapon, no one would dare attack anyone else. And the timing, it wasn't random. This was 1930, right? Just, I mean, imagine the world at that point. Hitler was rising, Japan is growing stronger, and the world is bracing for yet another war. People were desperate for some type of technological miracle to try to preserve the peace. But there was one problem he never shared how it worked. Tesla described the weapon in broad strokes. A focused particle beam that could accelerate microscopic particles at incredible speeds. And today, modern physicists say that it sounds a lot like a directed energy weapon, which makes his claims, at the very least, intriguing. His other inventions during this period were just as wild and just as unverifiable. He said that he'd planned on building a thought camera that could photograph mental images. The idea was that the brain creates electrical patterns when we think, and Tesla believed that he could capture and visualize them. He also said that he had plans for a motor powered by cosmic rays, high energy particles from space that would allow the device to run indefinitely. Basically, a perpetual motion machine fueled by the universe itself. And in 1937, at 81 years old, Tesla made perhaps his boldest claim yet. He announced that he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity, a theory that, in his words, would dismantle Einstein's theory of relativity. Tesla had never accepted Einstein's ideas. He thought relativity was too complicated and believed space was filled with something that he called aether. His theory claimed gravity was just the result of matter interacting with this aether, not actually warping spacetime. He said he would soon publish the theory, but he never did. And after his death, no detailed notes were ever found. By the late 1930s, most of the scientific community had written Tesla off as a tragic failure. Brilliant, but broken. His death rays, earthquake machines, and cosmic inventions sounded more like desperate dreams or the ramblings of a madman than real science. But Tesla never gave up. He kept giving interviews, writing letters, and insisting that one day the world would catch up. He spent his final years alone in a small room at the Hotel New Yorker. He'd occasionally step outside to feed his pigeons or speak to the press. But mostly, he stayed inside, surrounded by notebooks full of ideas no one understood. And on January 7, 1943, Tesla was found dead in his room at the age of 86. But that wasn't the end of his story. Tesla was found in the room 3327. And if you remember, Tesla had an obsession with the numbers 3, 6, and 9, believing them to be the keys to unlocking the secrets of the universe. And if you're not a math whiz, don't worry, I got you. Remember, the room is 3, 3, 2, 7. The two threes are 6, and 2 and 7 is 9, giving you 3, 6, 9. Or you could add the room number up. 3, 3, 2, and 7, which is 15, which is also divisible by 3. But here's the twist. Just hours after his death, government agents entered his room and seized all of his work. 80 trucks worth, to be exact. Not NYPD, not local officials, but the Office of Alien Property. This was the wartime agency responsible for seizing assets from enemy nationals. But here's the weird thing. Tesla had been a naturalized citizen since 1891. He wasn't an alien. Technically, the Office of Alien Property had no jurisdiction. But they took everything away, and nobody stopped them. For decades, Tesla had made increasingly wild claims. Death rays, earthquake machines, wireless energy, yada, yada, yada. But most scientists called it fantasy. So if that's all it was, why was the government so eager to seize his belongings that they bent the law to do it? And then it gets even stranger. The government brought in a specialist to examine the materials. A gentleman by the name of Dr. John G. Trump, a respected physicist from MIT and yes, Donald Trump's uncle. He was an expert in high voltage radiation and X ray technology. And if anyone could tell if Tesla's inventions were legit, it was him. Dr. Trump spent two days poring over Tesla's files. Publicly, he dismissed them speculative, philosophical, promotional. But conspiracy theorists believe that something else happened. They believe that hidden in Tesla's scribbled pages was the blueprint, maybe for a time machine, a device that could harness resonant frequencies and electromagnetic waves to manipulate time and space. And instead of shelving it, Dr. Trump allegedly built it. Again, this is the theory that has gone around from conspiracy theorists. In the 1890s, decades before Donald Trump's presidency, a man named Ingersoll Lockwood wrote two obscure books. One was called Travels and Adventures of Little Barron Trump. And the other was the last president. In them, a boy named Barron Trump is guided by a mentor named Don. They live in New York City, and they discover a secret time portal beneath his home, Castle Trump. He uses it to travel through time and space, encountering future civilizations and chaos and political unrest. Now fast forward to today. Donald Trump becomes president. His youngest son is barren. He lives in New York. He's quiet, unusually intelligent, and has access to knowledge beyond his age. Some even believe that he is the time Traveler, the one Dr. John G. Trump helps send through time using Tesla's technology. Now, of course, this, this is wild. I mean, I don't even know if you could try to verify this, right? This is just a conspiracy theory, but it exists. So I felt like it was important that, you know, the death ray, on the other hand, people have speculated, is very much real. At Wright Patterson Air Force base, Brigadier General L.C. craigie, an early jet pilot and military technologist, reviewed Tesla's particle beam and came to the opposite conclusion. He believed that there was something to it, and he thought that the death ray could actually work. So now we have two arms of the US Government looking at the same material. One says Tesla's ideas were nonsense, that there was nothing to them, they were just promotion and philosophy. The other thinks that there are parts of it that are potentially legitimate and that's not exactly a scientific consensus. And Then comes the FBI's 2016 document dump. Around 250 pages of Tesla related files declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. And the details are pretty interesting. One document shows that Vice President Henry Wallace, FDR's second in command, was personally briefed on Tesla's work. Not just the death ray, but also wireless energy transmission. And that's not the kind of thing you would brief the Vice President on if you didn't think that there was something important. Again, it was just written off as an old man's ramblings. But here's the Vice President getting briefed in on it. Other documents revealed the FBI was tracking Sava Kosanovich, Tesla's nephew and Yugoslavia's ambassador to the U.S. they feared that he might smuggle Tesla's technology to America's enemies and even considered arresting him to prevent that from happening. So we gotta ask, why would the US Government worry about enemy nations getting their hands on Tesla's inventions unless they thought that those inventions could potentially work? And then here's the mysterious death ray prototype. According to FBI files, Tesla had stored what he claimed to be A functioning device in another safe. Along with it, he left a note saying that it was worth $10,000 and that it would detonate if opened incorrectly. When government agents cracked it open, all they found was a bunch of electrical parts. Resistors, capacitors. Nothing special, just ordinary components you could find at, you know, electronic store today. So was Tesla bluffing? Was he playing a prank? Or was that box a decoy? Was it exactly what he wanted them to find? Because Tesla, specifically, at the end of his life, was extremely paranoid. He knew people were after his ideas. He'd spent his life watching others steal his work. I mean, from Edison, potentially Marconi, and who knows how many others out there took the work of Tesla. Would he really have left a real death ray in a hotel closet? Maybe the real prototypes are hidden somewhere. Maybe they were given to someone. Or maybe they never existed at all. Or maybe Tesla's mind, much like his AC motor, worked so far ahead of its time that no one truly understood what he had left behind. It's also worth noting that Tesla's most important work, like the AC motor, existed as detailed mental blueprints long before he built them. He didn't always need physical prototypes to prove his ideas. And maybe the death ray could have been the same. A complete concept on paper, not a physical contraption. In 1952, after years of legal fights, most of Tesla's remaining papers were sent to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where they're now housed at the Nikola Tesla Museum. But not everything made it overseas. Only 60 of the 80 trunks were returned, while 20 trunks of Tesla's papers stayed within the US government and to this day are still classified. What threat could 1940s documents possibly pose to national security in 2025? I mean, unless those ideas, you know, weren't just fantasy. The US Military did eventually develop directed energy weapons. I mean, lasers, microwave beams, even particle weapon prototypes. Reagan's Strategic Defense initiative in the 1980s, nicknamed Star wars, was kind of Tesla's original vision just scaled to outer space. Modern laser defense systems that shoot down drones. That's kind of Tesla's death ray. Just a 21st century edition. Maybe he wasn't crazy. Maybe he was just early. The truth is, we'll probably never know exactly what Tesla discovered or what the government really found in that hotel room. What we do know is that the government didn't treat Tesla's death like it was insignificant. They moved fast, they broke the law, they seized everything. And some of it has still never seen the light of day. The man who changed the world with electricity may have Left behind something even more powerful. And whatever it was, it scared many people enough to keep it locked away. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the life and inventions of Nikola Tesla. I mean, I just find this guy fascinating. Truly, I find all of his work to be impressive. I mean, even ignoring the conspiracy component for a second, just coming up as just a kid from Eastern Europe that eventually works his way up and doesn't care about money and lives, almost this ascetic life and is just this sort of tortured genius that no one understands that eventually changes the world, is just the most fascinating, awesome story that I think everyone, myself included, can attach themselves to. Like, I, I want to be Nikola Tesla. Unfortunately, I'm pretty dumb and no one thinks I'm a. I'm a secret genius. But Tesla was the real deal. He was truly a secret genius. Got screwed over by people and didn't care, kept on pushing forward. And then you bring in, I mean, the conspiracy angle. I mean, it's just too good. I mean, how crazy, right? Like, what are the odds that Trump's uncle is the one that goes through Tesla's files after he dies? I think in to this day, he's still in possession of some of the files. I mean, it's just crazy. And the fact that this book exists that, you know, talks about Barron to Trump and the whole thing is just insane. What do you guys think? Have you heard this before? Do you think that, I mean, Trump's uncle having access to Tesla's files is just a coincidence? I mean, do you think that, you know, these things like directed energy weapons and death rays and, you know, earthquake machines, do you think that there were actual prototypes that worked? Do you think that Tesla was on the verge of democratizing electricity for all people? People and the powers that be got scared? Or was he just a genius guy that kind of went off the rails and slowly lost his mind and was too ambitious and had too much money that he could just, you know, power his own things and none of his later in life inventions actually meant anything. It was just the musings of a crazy person. I don't know. I mean, you could think of some people today, right? Like, I'm trying to think like, you know, Connie west, genius musician, later in his life starts having some ideas that are controversial to say the least. I think most people look at Connie and be like, oh, yeah, back in the day he made great stuff. But today, you know, it's hard to say. I don't know if. I don't know if I rock with Tanya. The way I did before. Was Tesla the same kind of guy? He just had all this brilliant stuff early on, and then as he got older, lost his mind. I don't know. Part of me likes to believe that hidden in those files there's secret information. I can't imagine that the tech from 1940 is still valuable to this day. I imagine everything has come to light, whether it's being carried out in military ops or not. I mean, I just assume that it's all, you know, it's all taken care of, but I don't know. Drop a comment, let me know what you think. And if there's anyone else throughout history that you think deserves more credit or more attention or has a crazy story that you think needs to be told, please drop in the comments. I would love your feedback. I'd love to know what you think. This is still a new channel. We're still growing it, so please subscribe. I read every comment, so please be nice. Whether it's YouTube, Spotify, I'm going through all of it it, and I cannot wait to see you guys next time. Thank you for joining us here at History Camp. Peace.