I, Nikola Tesla
have invited you here,
to pull back the curtain.
Shall we begin?
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor
who lived in New York
around the turn of the 20th century.
People will only know Tesla
because of the cars and Elon Musk.
But the only reason Elon Musk
actually called it Tesla...
because he was a fan of Nikola Tesla.
Nikola Tesla dreams up the 20th century
before it happens.
Before you have X-rays,
Tesla had shadowgraphs.
Before you have drones,
Tesla has automatons.
Before Marconi gets the patent for radio,
they have to take it from Tesla
because he invents it first.
He also had a laboratory at Wardenclyffe
that he was trying to build,
which he wanted to use to unite the globe
with signals over the air.
World wireless system.
That’s Wi-Fi?
Did Tesla have the idea for Wi-Fi?
History tells us that Tesla was a genius
but died penniless,
but only because he wasn’t a businessman.
It’s as simple as that.
He had a big rivalry with Thomas Edison,
which became very bitter.
Edison champions a rival form of electric current
to Mr Tesla’s AC.
Direct current, of course he would champion
something so slow and inefficient.
That man is a liar and a thief.
Tesla had worked for Edison
when he came to America first
and Edison had exploited some of Tesla’s ideas.
The general feeling was that
Edison was the better businessman
and Tesla was the more visionary inventor.
Half of your inventions
were thought out by other people.
Anyone can have ideas,
I make them happen.
You’re to blind to see that my factory
is the best idea either one of us ever had.
You’re not a man of vision;
you are a man of parts.
For people to learn how brilliant Tesla was
and what he wanted to do with radio waves
and what he wanted to do with electricity
and the whole bit.
It’s extraordinary.
Really, I mean how do you learn that,
how do you know that stuff?
He was an extraordinary character
who was not really given the respect he deserved
in the time that he was alive.
And history has proven him to be
very very insightful and forward looking
and right in a lot of what he was trying to create.
The present is theirs.
I work for the future.
And the future is mine.
Shall we?
