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Nikola Tesla: life of the week
00:40:44
Iwan Morus revisits the life – and myth – of the enigmatic pioneer of electrical power
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- [00:01]
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- [02:01]
Ewan Morris
Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. Nikola Tesla is remembered as an enigmatic eccentric genius who harnessed the power of electricity. But if we strip away some of this myth, what can we really say about the inventor's life and legacy? Ewan Morris joined Ellie Cawthorn for this Life of the Week episode to reveal how Tesla believed he could invent a death ray, whether he was really a recluse, and how he would feel about Elon Musk's company using his name today.
- [02:42]
Ellie Cawthorn
Thanks for Joining me, Ewan, to talk about the life of Nikola Tesla. Before we go back into his biography and some of his work. What makes Tesla so fascinating? Why has he earned his place in the history books and why are we still talking about him today?
- [02:58]
Historian
I think that in lots of ways the most fascinating thing about Tesla is the fact that we're still talking about him and that we're still talking about him in a very, very particular kind of way, despite the fact that periodically we see biographies appearing or news stories or what have you appearing about Tesla, all describing him as, oh, the forgotten genius, the man who invented the modern electrical world, and so on and so on and so on. He's remarkably well remembered for the forgotten genius. He's featured on the U.S. tV sitcom the Big Bang Theory. He's been on at least one Doctor who episode that I can think of. There have been at least two recent movies. He's completely embedded in the kind of stories that Silicon Valley tech bros tell about themselves. And in lots of ways as a historian, it's that kind of longevity that I find most fascinating. Tesla largely in the 1890s, invented a particular kind of story that he wanted other people to tell about himself, that he kept on telling about himself, which almost single handedly created this image of what it was to be an inventor. This kind of iconoclastic, strange, otherworldly, weird, rule breaking, disrupting great bracket, male, close bracket, individual. And that image of the inventor has proved to be astonishingly resilient and is clearly the model of invention that lots of powerful people in the contemporary world still have about themselves. So I think that's what's fascinating in lots of ways, I think, at any rate.
- [05:02]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. And hopefully today we can unpick a bit of that self made myth from, from the man himself. So let's go back to the beginning. What do we know about Tesla's early life?
- [05:12]
Historian
Tesla was born in a little village called Smilan in 1856. Smiljan at that stage was right on the border between the Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Empire to the east. It's in what's now Croatia. Though Tesla himself and his family were of Serbian descent. So Tesla is born 1856, grows up very, very much on the peripheries, both of the Austrian Empire and of what we would now think of maybe as Western Europe as a whole. Most of what we know about Tesla is mediated, so to speak, through Tesla himself. And Tesla was very good at telling the right kind of stories about himself. So he was born, of course, at the stroke of midnight, of course, there's a thunderstorm raging outside when he was born. So the electrical theme is there from the very beginning. He recalls in his autobiography that he encountered electricity at a very early age. They had a cat called Macaque, a black cat, obviously. And when the young Tesla would kind of stroke the cats, the fur would crackle and sparks would fly. And his father explained to him. His father was a priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His father explained to him that these were electrical sparks, this was electricity. And if Tesla is to be believed, this sparked a fascination with electricity that lasted for the rest of his career. So his father originally wants Tesla to be a priest. But Tesla eventually manages, largely by having a nervous breakdown persuading him otherwise. So he's sent to university, first at Graz Graz Polytechnic, to study electrical engineering. He drops out, gravitates towards Prague, again goes to university at Prague, again drops out. But I mean, in the meantime, he's acquired a kind of solid background in what we would now think of as electrical engineering, and in due course gets a job at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, where he's working on telegraph systems, maintaining and improving those kinds of systems, putting his kind of theoretical and practical knowledge to good use. Telegraphy, of course, is the big thing in the 1870s, 1880s, this new, relatively new way of communicating that can communicate instantaneously across huge distances, increasingly vital to running imperial states, bureaucracies, empires. Then from Budapest, he moves to Paris. In Paris, he finds himself working for Thomas Edison. Edison. By now, we're in the 1880s. Edison is trying to expand his electrical power companies outside the United States. So he's setting up franchises, so to speak, in various European cities, Paris included. That's where Tesla is working. And after a few years, he decides that Edison, America, electricity, that's where the future clearly lies. So he goes to New York to work directly for Edison's companies in New York.
- [08:49]
Ellie Cawthorn
So did Tesla and Edison have a personal relationship as well? And how was that personal relationship?
- [08:55]
Historian
If so, it's clear that for the, must be said, relatively brief period for which Tesla worked for Edison, it's also clear that Tesla was remarkably bad at working for other people. Those relationships never lasted very long. He was clearly far better at doing his own thing. Yes, I mean, there was clearly some level of personal relationship. Tesla obviously knew who his boss was, who Edison was. Edison clearly knew who Tesla was. I mean, one of the reasons that Tesla left Edison's employ was because Edison essentially refused to pay any attention to various suggestions that this kind of precocious young engineer made as to how Edison should organize his company and what sorts of things they would be focusing on. It's a very prevalent myth again in our culture, the stories that we tell about Tesla and Tesla and Edison. There's this huge Tesla Edison feud. Tesla himself may have thought there was a feud, but when you consider the kind of difference in power and status between Edison and Tesla during the 1880s, when Tesla was an engineer of a make, trying to establish himself as somebody who was somebody in the world of electrical engineering, Tesla wouldn't really have figured very largely in Edison's view of the world, so to speak. He would have been this kind of bratty young engineer who refused to do what he was told and left his employ. The bigger story behind all of this is the so called battle for systems, the current wars. Edison is a huge advocate of direct current electrical systems. Others in particular the engineer George Westinghouse advocates alternating current systems. Tesla's big breakthrough, so to speak, as an electrical engineer comes the late 1880s when he invents a motor that can work from alternating current electricity. Most motors during that period worked best from direct current systems. You could make them work on alternating current systems, but it needed a bit of a botch, so to speak. Tesla invented a motor that worked by alternating current. It was a polyphase system, as he described it. And that of course, was exactly the kind of thing that somebody like Westinghouse was looking for because, I mean, if he could show that motors could work directly from his AC systems, then that was going to be a big selling point. So Westinghouse bought Tesla's patent and employed Tesla again. That bit of the relationship didn't last very long to turn this kind of prototype into a real actual working invention. So that was Tesla's contribution to the battle of the systems. He wasn't the protagonist. Edison and Westinghouse were the protagonists. They were the ones who owned the companies who were battling with each other for economic and commercial supremacy. And really, by the time the Tesla came along, around 1890 or so, the battle was mainly over. It was clear that for all kinds of reasons to do with economy and scale, AC was just simply a more efficient system, largely because it was possible to transmit AC current band wires at very high voltages over long distances. The problem with DC was that it could only be transmitted over relatively short distances.
- [12:55]
Ellie Cawthorn
It strikes me from what you've been saying that this is a hugely exciting time to work in this field. You know, it feels like electricity has these limitless possibilities. What kind of Visions did Tesla have for the power of electricity during this.
- [13:12]
Historian
Period, during the 1880s, during the 1890s, everybody thinks that electricity is the future. If you had to sum up the late 19th century view of the future, then flying machines and electricity, with the flying machines usually working by electricity, that's the way it's going to go. And that's very much Tesla's view himself. Except that Tesla, of course, thinks that he's the man who pretty much single handedly is going to invent this particular kind of future. In the early 1890s, Tesla develops a new device for generating what we would think of as very, very, and I mean very high voltage electricity at extremely high frequency. This what we now call a Tesla coil. I mean, that's not what Tesla called it. And with this, Tesla can do amazing things. This is when Tesla really makes a name for himself. In a series of lectures both in North America and in Europe, in London and In Paris around 1892, he performs these amazing acts. There's no better way of describing it. Here he is, Tesla on stage. He's kind of waving electric lights around, he's holding electric lights in his hand. It's kind of look, no wires. It's all illuminated. The electricity is passing through him and not killing him in the process, which is always a plus on these sorts of occasions. This is the wireless transmission of power. And Tesla's vision of the future is exactly that. That rather than having to use all these kind of pesky wires that get in the way and take up space, huge amounts of electricity should be capable of being transmitted through the ether, through the atmosphere, through the earth and power things, wherever you have the apparatus to pick them up. And throughout the 1890s, that's what Tesla's at. He's basically trying to find people to invest in his new system of electricity.
- [15:32]
Ewan Morris
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- [16:42]
Ellie Cawthorn
Does sound familiar to us today. Other parts of Tesla's vision of the future, not quite so much. So he did think he could invent a death ray as one thing, and he also thought at one point that he received messages from another planet. But I wanted to ask you about how outlandish that was seen to be at the time, because considering the kind of mind bending nature of the discoveries that were being made at the time, anything seemed possible. Was this that crazy?
- [17:13]
Historian
It was far fetched maybe, but certainly not crazy either, because. Yes, I mean, as we've said earlier, I mean this was a kind of tremendously exciting technological period. Electricity, electric lights, electric power, telegraphy, telephony. People are discovering strange new rays like X rays, radioactivity. Radio is about to be invented. And of course, Tesla is right in the middle of that. So in lots of ways it does seem that a future is limitless. Electricity can be deployed in all kinds of ways. There are science fiction stories, or scientific romance as the Victorians would call it, in which kind of powerful beings deploy things that look remarkably like death rays. Yes, in order to assert their dominance. Communication with Mars Mars was very much in the news during the 1890s. The American astronomer Percival Lowell said that he could detect through his telescopes, canals on Mars, which obviously are direct proof of the existence of a civilization on Mars. And again, I mean, this wouldn't have been that much of a surprise. It might be surprising to us, but during this period it's largely understood that other worlds are inhabited. They must be inhabited, because what else were other worlds for, so to speak. There's a very strong sense that the Earth is for us as its population. So what? Who is Mars for? It's a bit far fetched actually to say that Mars is for us in any sense. So it must be for the people who live on Mars. So there are people on Mars. It's no accident that he Wells in War of the Worlds has the protagonist coming from Mars, because it's not going to surprise anybody to know that there are potential protagonists on Mars. So when Tesla claims that in the course of his experiments, these are parts of his experiments to develop his wireless electrical transmission systems, when in the course of that, he says, hmm, I got some weird signals. I think they might be messages from Mars. Then on the one hand, that's clearly part of Tesla's hype. I mean, he's pushing himself, he's kicking himself in the news, but nobody's going to be that surprised. At least the possibility of receiving messages from Mars, because after all, we know there are inhabitants there.
- [19:52]
Ellie Cawthorn
So Tesla obviously was a great showman, he was a great promoter of his own successes. But what about some of his failures? Were there any projects that he worked on that just didn't come off?
- [20:05]
Historian
Sad to say, in the end, most of them. I mean, in particular, I mean, this great grandiose fantasy of wireless transmission completely fails to be realized. Tesla eventually gets funding. He's left New York, he's gone out to Colorado Springs to carry out experiments there, building a kind of prototype transmission device. He eventually persuades the financier J.P. morgan to give him $150,000, which is a lot of money, but not huge amounts of money even then. I mean, JP Morgan hasn't become extremely wealthy by being profligate with his outgoings, and he clearly wants to try and make sure that there really is something here. Tesla, with the money, build this huge fantastical tower in Wardenclyffe on Long Island. It's meant to be a station for transmitting electricity wirelessly through the Earth, through the atmosphere. The idea being that wherever there's another one of these towers, then it could be picked up and sort of transmitted locally. That never really works. It's not entirely clear how Tesla thought it could. I mean, he was literally trying to pump electricity through the Earth. It depended on a very particular model of how he thought the Earth was and how it responded to things like this. Not a correct model, shall we say. So Wardenclyffe never really doesn't at all come to fruition. And of course, whilst all of this is going on in the late 1890s, around about 1900, there's this other guy in Europe. What's his name? Oh, yes, Guglielmo Marconi, who does succeed in transmitting electricity wirelessly. Not in anything like the quantities that Tesla fantasizes about being able to transmit. I mean, that's not what Marconi is interested. Marconi is interested in what he calls wireless telegraphy. He's interested in communicating from one place to the other without wires. And that's really what JP Morgan is interested in as well. So when Tesla's funding for Morgan runs out and he goes back saying, excuse me, can I have some more Morgan's kind of looking at these highly successful, from his point of view, experiments over in Europe and thinking, I really put my money in the right basket here. And the conclusion is, well, no, I haven't. So he refuses to give Tesla any more money. And Tesla's story after that, really, sadly, really is a story of decline. I mean, Tesla's heyday was the 1890s. I mean, he was it. Newspapers were kind of flocking to his laboratory to see this reclusive genius showing them around, telling them about his great experiments, this great electrical future that he could promise after the failure of Wardenclyffe. And it was a failure. I mean, a few years after Morgan withdrew funding, essentially, Wardenclyffe was taken from Tesla to be sold off to pay his debts. Tesla had been living the high life in New York hotels, in the Waldorf Astoria. It inspired that he couldn't pay his bills. He moved into a cheaper hotel and spent really, the rest of his life. That's a good chunk of the 20th century. Tesla died in 1943. He spent the rest of his life essentially, still desperately trying to persuade potential investors that all they needed to do was give him their money. And this kind of wonderful electrical future, this future of wireless, not free. There's this common myth that this was all about free electricity. It wasn't that this future of wireless electricity would be there for the taking. And of course, nobody did. I mean, he kept on with the same, the same story, really, for the rest of his life.
- [24:39]
Ellie Cawthorn
It's a sad story, isn't it? It's a career that kind of goes out with a whimper rather than a bang. But it does touch on some interesting themes about something we haven't really focused in on yet, which is Tesla's personal life and his character. You've portrayed him as this ambitious man, a visionary, some points bratty, may be difficult to work with, but what was he like as a person outside of work?
- [25:04]
Historian
That's very difficult to tell, given that he's so enshrouded in myths for which, in large part, at least, he was responsible. He clearly enjoyed the high life. As I said earlier, for Most of the 1890s, he was living in the world of story, New York's most luxurious hotel. He was hanging out at Delmonico's with 19th century celebrities. Mark Twain, for example, was a friend. He's mixing with fashionable celebrities with the people of the moment and clearly sees that this is due, if you like, as the great inventor. This is the kind of life to which he is entitled. But he's also clear in lots of ways. Quite a private man. Well, very private man. There's a clear distinction between the public showman, the Tesla hanging around with celebrities at Delmonico's, and the inner Tesla, so to speak, about which we know remarkably little. Never married. The strongest female influence in his life was clearly his mother. Almost certainly gay, though, again, there's no clear evidence in that respect. You know, lots of stories about eccentricities.
- [26:24]
Ellie Cawthorn
And he's sometimes described in later life, isn't he, as a recluse? Is that fair?
- [26:31]
Historian
Yes and no. I mean, to some degree, the reclusiveness is part of the actual. Looking at kind of newspaper accounts from the 1890s, the number of accounts, that would start off with something. I was so honored to be invited into his laboratory by the reclusive Mr. Tesla. Well, I mean, for somebody who's reclusive, he's inviting an awful lot of people into his lab. But at the same time, I think there is an element of truth in that. He was clearly a very private man. He wasn't letting much of his kind of inner soul act habitually. And the latter half of his life must have been very, very lonely. He almost certainly was a recluse, if not necessarily by choice. You get all these kind of fantastical stories. Oh, he fell in love with a pigeon. That's a kind of Sheldon Cooper in Big Bang Theory favorite. Well, no, he found an injured pigeon in the park and took it back to his hotel room and nursed it back to health. That's not quite the same thing as falling in love with a pigeon. But you get these kinds of stories produced and reproduced about him. And all kind of feeding into this myth of the recluse, the genius whom nobody understood, is an account that Tesla himself is very keen on promulgating. Tesla died alone in 1943 in a new York hotel, less upmarket hotel than the Waldorf Astoria, where he'd been living in the 1890s. And it was a sad and lonely death. I mean, he was an old man when he died. His room and the room next to it were stuffed with papers. And fascinatingly, it's a nice reminder of a Tesla myth. The CIA promptly turned up to take all that stuff away just to see if there was anything of interest there. The conclusion, sadly, is that there wasn't.
- [28:37]
Ellie Cawthorn
No death rays.
- [28:39]
Historian
No death rays.
- [28:40]
Ellie Cawthorn
So I wonder if we could talk a bit now about Tesla's concrete legacy. What do you think that his most significant contribution to science and technology was?
- [28:50]
Historian
The polyphase motor. I Mean, absolutely no question. I mean, that device that he patented in 1888, there were other inventors around and about at the time who were in the process of developing similar kinds of technology, but Tesla got there first. And one of the reasons he got there first was his polyphase motor was better than the competitors. And yes, I mean, that was a key technological invention that did give AC systems a kind of head start, gave them that edge, that powerful advantage that eventually sent Edison and the DC systems packing, well, not quite packing. Edison, ever the pragmatist, as soon as he sees which way the wind is blowing, starts adopting AC himself. That polyphase motor was the really key significant technological contribution.
- [29:49]
Ellie Cawthorn
And in terms of his mythos more generally, I found it really interesting what you've been saying about Tesla's role in this creation of an idea of what a great scientific man or genius is. I mean, there's a lot of talk today about tech bro culture, but also a new oligarchy of tech giants. Do you think there are any resonances there with Tesla's story? Was he a 19th century tech pro?
- [30:17]
Historian
He was certainly a wannabe 19th century tech bro and would have been had he succeeded, so to speak. But yeah, I mean, I think there are absolutely key and important resonances here that make deconstructing the Tesla myth now more important than it's ever been. He's not the only one, obviously, but Tesla played a key role at the end of the 19th century in inventing this particular myth of where invention comes from, how invention happens. In the Tesla story, invention is done by people like him, by people with different minds, people who are strange or iconoclastic, who don't fit into culture, who disrupt, who break the rules, who do things in their own way. And that's the way the progress happens. That's the way you make breakthroughs. I mean, it's deeply ironic that Tesla is inventing this myth of a sole iconoclastic, disruptive genius inventor at the moment when the real triumphs of late Victorian engineering lie in huge collective works, so to speak. I mean, that's one of the strange paradoxes of the Victorian period. I mean, yes, Victorians reinvent the world through engineering and technology, but it's through huge collective work. And at the same time, you see this kind of myth of the individual inventor being invented. And Tesla is a key figure in that, that notion of the inventor as different, iconoclastic, and therefore privileged in a way that others aren't. And I think it's very, very clear that that kind of Myth feeds into the way some contemporary tech bros see themselves, see their role in the world and what they can do and what they should be allowed to do. If, for example, to choose a completely random and hypothetical example. If you think that scientific breakthroughs, if you think that technological breakthroughs happen as a result of the kind of individual genius, iconoclastic vision making of an individual, why should you think that, say, the federal funding of science is important? Because that's clearly just a waste of money. Because that isn't how science and technology develops. It develops by kind of great idiosyncratic individual men changing the world single handedly. So I think the myth is very, very pervasive in particular parts of contemporary culture. It's very pervasive in parts of contemporary culture that currently wield in parts of the world huge amounts of political power. And I think it's deeply pernicious and needs to be stamped out, not to put too fine a point in it. Which is why I think coming back and looking at Tesla and deconstructing that myth, showing how that myth was made, showing how little resemblance it has to the reality, is really important because myths have real world consequences. Myths have consequences for the way things get done now, for the way the powerful people think about themselves and think what they're licensed to do by that myth. So I think it's never been more important to get behind that myth to the historical reality.
- [34:31]
Ellie Cawthorn
It's worth pointing out, I guess, that if you said the word Tesla to a lot of people today, their first thought wouldn't be Nikola Tesla. It would be Elon Musk's company, Tesla. What do you think that Tesla, the man would have made of his name being used for that company?
- [34:49]
Historian
He would have been delighted and he would have claimed to have invented the electric car. I think very, very simply, in the same way that Tesla claimed to have invented everything that seemed to be sort of on the go, he would have seen it as his due. He would certainly have claimed, oh yes, I invented that. And he would point to something saying that's the first electric car. I mean, of course there were electric cars in the 1880s, in the 1890s. I mean, of course Musk's choice of that name for the vehicle. Actually, I've understood recently that it wasn't actually Musk's choice. The name Tesla had already been selected by the people that Musk bought the car company from. But the name Tesla clearly resonates with Elon Musk, because Musk, I think quite clearly in lots of ways does see himself as a Tesla like figure. Somebody who has that capacity to innovate, supposedly to break molds, to change the world single handedly. There is certainly a deliberate nod towards the original Tesla in the name of the car company and the car.
- [36:06]
Ellie Cawthorn
Finally, Ewan, if we're going to take a more clear sighted view of Nikola Tesla, the man, how do you think we should remember him today?
- [36:14]
Historian
We should remember him as the inventor of the polyphase motor. We should remember him as an inventor of a myth. This proved hugely influential in terms of how invention is understood in contemporary culture. And we should remember him as a warning, I think, really to remind ourselves of how in the real world, scientific and technological progress, change, development really does take place, which isn't through the disruptive interventions of individuals, but by the labor of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people working collectively together to produce new technologies that do indeed have the capacity to change our world. But it's that kind of huge collective enterprise that will change the world slowly, maybe incrementally. Maybe there's something very seductive about that kind of notion of disruption because it makes it happen tomorrow. But that's not the way it goes. I mean, disruptions in the real world take decades, take centuries maybe, to work themselves out. You don't change the world by yourself. You change the world through collective action.
- [37:55]
Ewan Morris
That was Ewan Morris speaking to Ellie Cawthorn. Ewan is professor of History at Aberystwyth University and the author of Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future.