In this the age of the
internet, Nikola Tesla
has enjoyed a posthumous
surge in popularity
that makes Einstein look
like an old French fry.
It took an entire David
Bowie to fill his shoes
in the movie The Prestige.
Our real life Iron Man makes
electric cars with his name.
You can even buy a [BLEEP]
Edison t-shirt for $25.
The Renaissance is here.
And it's been a
long time coming.
Today, we're looking
at things you
didn't know about Nikola Tesla.
But before we get started, be
sure to subscribe to the Weird
History Channel and
leave us a comment
about what famous
inventor or mad scientist
you would like to hear about.
Now we go to the past to
talk about this futurist.
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There are statues
of Tesla on both
the American and Canadian
sides of Niagara Falls.
Spoiler alert,
Canada's is cooler.
Upon witnessing the supremely
frothy glory of the falls
for the first time,
which was on a postcard,
Tesla remarked that he wanted
to put a giant wheel under them
and use it to power the world.
Oh, and by the way,
he was a child.
Years later, he would
make that dream a reality
with the help of fellow
dream science wizard George
Westinghouse.
Today, the hydroelectric
plant at Niagara Falls
generates over four million
kilowatts of electricity
for the US and Canada.
Erecting a couple of
statues was really
the least we could
do, especially
considering the fact that
a big part of Tesla's
appeal to the nerds of the new
millennium lies in the fact
that in spite of his
greatness, he got profoundly
shafted by the man.
He shocked crowds of rich
people by running current
through his body to illuminate
light bulbs in his bare hands
not because he was a David
Blaine and an attention junkie,
but for world god damn peace.
He invented with a view to
making the world a better place
and improving the quality
of the average human life
even at the expense of his own.
Thanks largely to the rise of
the robber baron, these days
we call them tech titans,
this bright future
never materialized.
And Tesla died penniless.
World peace, you might exclaim,
what about that infamous death
ray?
And we're glad you
hypothetically asked.
The Tesla death ray called
the teleforce was actually
intended to end war forever.
By the way, it's 1934.
And Germany has an excitable
little man named Adolf Hitler.
This particular Tesla
brainchild was an oops baby.
While experimenting with
broadcast power, a method
of transmitting limitless
electrical energy,
Tesla evidently discovered
that he'd accidentally
invented an honest to
God diabolical death
beam capable of bringing down
planes and flame broiling
entire armies.
Rather than calling
world leaders
to inform them of his demands,
the benevolently mad scientist
proposed the construction of
a wall of teleforce energy
to make foreign invasion
a thing of the past.
No one went for it.
But when he died,
the US government
employed some legal sorcery
to seize his property.
His being an American
citizen did not stop them.
And the beam is now
highly classified.
Tesla had an almost
squirrel-like sense
of excitement when
it came to inventing.
Critics of his career
correctly harped
on his divergent thinking
as one of the things that
stood in the way of
his greater success.
Imagine if Jack Skellington was
maniacally into every holiday.
Jack's Talk Like
a Pirate Day song
would definitely have to be
Tesla's earthquake machine
or high frequency oscillator.
Like TLPD, we're not altogether
sure it really exists.
And we're even less certain
why anyone would want it.
Tesla claimed that he could use
a system of pistons, springs,
and a central rod to send
vibrations through objects
to shake them apart.
MythBusters tried to make one
only to declare it infeasible.
To that we'd say,
y'all ain't Tesla.
Tesla couldn't have predicted
his online cult following.
But he might have predicted
the devices which people gush,
rant, and fight about.
Speaking to business partner
and literal criminal JP Morgan,
Tesla described a new method
of instant communication
that could send information
via encoded frequencies
and then broadcast them
to a receiver small enough
to fit in your hand.
In one fell swoop,
Tesla had conceived
of Wi-Fi and smartphones,
even if he would never
put his idea into practice.
He was never able to figure
out quite how to do it.
But as theorizing in
this area also led him
to conceive of things like
radar, x-rays, and that death
beam we talked about back there.
He might even have
engineered a utility device
to keep us from dropping our
receivers into the toilet.
Given how things
went with Morgan,
Tesla probably could have
warned us about Zuckerberg too.
Oh, well.
Though he was said
to be possessed
of a photographic memory,
the mental firepower
Tesla was packing was
fittingly much sexier.
Eidetic memory is
the ability to see
an image of an
object in your head
immediately after you
look away from it.
Don't get excited yet.
Everyone can do it.
What sets Tesla and
other memory giants
apart is that while
the rest of us
lose that image
after a few seconds,
they can summon that image
whenever they want forever
and ever.
Photographic memory lasts
only a few months at most.
Armed with his
bad-ass skill, Tesla
could not only recall entire
books after reading them once,
but conceived of
hundreds of inventions
entirely in his head.
He kept stockpiles of these
blueprints sitting in his brain
until he could commit them
to paper to be stolen later.
This one may or may
not be apocryphal.
We won't even go there.
But it would be a crime
not include it here.
Remember the earthquake machine?
Tesla was good buddies
with Mark Twain.
Because, of course, he was.
When Twain had heard that
his friend had figured out
a way to make
buildings jiggle, he
had to come and check that out.
He probably had a fresh
zinger for the occasion
too, maybe something about the
world shaking enough on its own
without men provoking it.
But if he ever got to
use it we'll never know.
Because something singularly
beautiful happened,
a meme was born.
Aware that Twain had recently
been experiencing some fairly
aggressive digestive
distress, Tesla
had him stand on a platform
near the oscillator.
When he turned it on, the
unsuspecting gentleman
allegedly filled
his lily white suit
with a hefty scoop of
mama's nature soil.
The foundation for the cult
of the brown note was set.
As befits a legendary
mad scientist,
Tesla came into this world
in the middle of the night
on the wings of a
violent lightning storm.
Family lore tells us
the Serbian midwife
assisting the birth warned the
family that the lightning was
bad luck and meant dark
tidings for a young Nikola.
His mother, understandably,
disagreed proclaiming no.
He will be a child of light.
She had no idea
how right she was.
Tesla was born into lightning
and then became its master
like some meteorological Batman.
Most geniuses had their
quirks and eccentricities.
And Nikola Tesla was
certainly no exception.
He had an intense and
unexplainable aversion
to pearls to the
point that he would
refuse to speak to any
woman who was wearing them.
On one occasion, one
of his secretaries
came in with a
new set of pearls.
And he made her go home.
Before we judge,
let's consider this.
In a way, pearls
are to mollusks what
does it zits are to teenagers.
Our immune system
secretes pus in response
to the heinous shit we've
got growing on our faces.
Likewise, when an oyster gets
something nasty up its flaps,
it secretes a compound
that surrounds the irritant
and eventually becomes a pearl.
Kind of gross, right?
It's as if Tesla had an
instinctive understanding
of the world like a wild mage
or a sorcerer-- third edition
rules.
With over 300
patents to his name,
Tesla had a very busy brain.
When asked where his
inspiration came from,
his answer could be
boiled down to mind
shredding hallucinations.
Fueled by eidetic memory
and often accompanied
by bright lights and
flashes, Tesla's visions
allowed him to see how
inventions or anything he
wanted worked in real time--
literally, right
in front of him.
If that's not real magic,
we don't know what is.
That the real life star
man believed in aliens
isn't that surprising,
even if such a belief
was a little ahead of its time.
By now, we figured
out that that's
kind of the story of his life.
No.
The rub is that he also
believed that aliens
were talking to him.
While pioneering
innovations in radio,
Tesla said he received
signals that he could not
trace to their source.
He wrote, "The
feeling is constantly
growing on me that I have been
the first to hear the greeting
of one planet to another."
Turns out the
signals were a result
of normal cosmic activity.
But that hasn't stopped
the History Channel
from doing tired specials
on Tesla's ET pen pals.
Tesla swore off intimacy and
committed to a life of celibacy
early on in his career.
But he saved a place in his
heart for, of all things,
pigeons.
He kept them at his
hotel in New York.
One of them, a white female,
he claimed to straight up love.
Tesla said that the bird
came through his window
one night to tell him
that she was dying
and then shot beams of
light from her eyes,
which is generally not a
behavior you see in pigeons.
Soon after, the pigeon
died in his arms.
And at that moment
he said he knew
his life's work was complete.
Yeah.
We'd pack it in after getting
spot lit by a pigeon too.
So do any of these facts
about Tesla surprise you?
Let us know in the
comments below.
And while you're at it, check
out some of these other videos
from our Weird History.
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