About this episode Imagine Nikola Tesla on a late-night talk show, discussing his groundbreaking inventions and the untold stories behind his genius. This episode brings to life the interview history missed, offering a unique opportunity to delve into Tesla's mind, his rivalries, and his enduring legacy. Discover the visionary behind the alternating current and gain fresh insights into the challenges and triumphs of one of history's most fascinating figures.
0:00 nikola tesla's lifelong journals ask one quiet question what if energy was never meant to be owned in episode 29 we asked socrates why he refused to write things down and now we sit with the man who wanted to broadcast the sky step a little closer to this vitrine we have piece one a brass induction motor built in0:25 1887 copper wiring iron core no sparks welcome to the desk mister tesla it is remarkable to look back across centuries at that machine edison insisted direct current was the only safe path yet alternating current simply required someone to understand the mathematics of the field well edison did run that whole smear campaign but look at the iron core0:52 here most people walk straight past this one but there is a tiny notched screw right at the rim that was your handmade fix wasn't it indeed the question of course is why edison fought so fiercely he held the patents the infrastructure the copper mines to accept alternating current was to dismantle his own kingdom so he turned to1:15 public spectacle instead now step over to piece two wardenclyffe tower 1901 wood steel and a 55 ton dome that jp poore morgan funded until he realized well you couldn't put a meter on free air morgan asked me where the power meter went when i told him the entire earth could resonate as a single conductor he pulled his1:40 investment looking back from ten years from now people will finally see the tragicomedy of it we had the blueprint for global broadcast yet the ledger sheet dictated our horizon look at the bottom corner of this blueprint there that tiny circle that's a spark gap drawn in graphite then violently erased you were furious i was exhausted and yet2:07 that is not the whole picture the world believed i was broken by the tower's demolition in 1917 but the real fracture was earlier when my manhattan laboratory burned to the ground in 1895 hundreds of invention models lost in an hour that's the divergence isn't it the public remembers you and edison as purely an economic rivalry but your2:34 actual dispute was ontological edison believed invention was 99% perspiration you believed in pure complete mental visualization before a single wire was cut thomas tested thousands of filaments like a blind man searching in a room i built the entire machine in my head ran it for weeks to see where the bearings wore down and only then constructed the3:01 iron we did not merely disagree on current we disagreed on what the mind actually does and that led to your stranger years the hotel rooms the precise counts of napkins the beloved pigeon on the window sill people called it madness but when you spend sixty years perceiving alternating waves and high frequency vibrations in the air the physical3:29 world begins to seem like an intrusion the pigeons asked for nothing neither patents nor royalties we have time the room is ours if there's one single idea worth keeping from everything you left behind in that room at the new yorker hotel in 1943 what is it that energy is not a commodity to be hoarded but a shared3:56 commonwealth of the cosmos the moment we bounded electricity with copper wires and commerce we chose scarcity over abundance piece three is through the doorway take your time getting there
