Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant, Chuck, Chuck. That's going. You can just call me Nikola really okay? How about your Chuck? Yes, all right, Chuck? Good God, I'm good. I'm good. I'm I'm much better than how you asked me twenty nights ago when I'm recorded, Yes podcast, No, that was that was two days three two days from now right. Yeah, it's magic. It is magic. We'll have to reveal our secret one day like some sort of we could dress up like Siegfried and Roy I get there and tell everybody. Yeah, okay, I owe it to Jerry. Jerry is always just the white Tiger. Yeah, yeah, nice and Jerry. Chuck. I have a trivia question for you, beautiful, Okay, hit me. Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers named the Los Angeles Dodgers? Okay, Chuck, I know the answer. Do you want me to say? What do you want to say? I want you to say. I just asked you a question because when they were in Brooklyn the original spot. There were a lot of train trolley cars in Brooklyn at the time that had really dangerous electrical wiring that operated them, and people would dodge these electrical lines and these train cars, and so they called them the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers initially, and then that shortened to the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then they o' mount the O'Malley family broke the hearts of Brooklyn and moved them too. L A, I can't believe that still, I know who does that? H Did you see a documentary HBO about the Brooklyn Dodgers so good? No, it was it. Yeah, I mean there are people in Brooklyn today that have not watched the baseball game since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved their their hearts were broken so badly. Yeah wow, and uh wow, rip the heart out of Brooklyn. But actually it wasn't. People might right in and there's been some follow up and O'Malley really tried as hardest to keep the team there, and there were some politics involved that greedy Sandy kofax Y. Yeah, but off topic a little bit, but not really not really, because you can make a case that it was um Thomas Alva Edison, who gave the Brooklyn Dodgers their name. Bring it Home, Baby, Okay, I will so. By the time the Dodgers were formed in the eighteen eighties, right, um, Edison had basically lit up parts of New York with his incandescent light bulb. Big, big innovation. It was huge, man. I mean imagine going from like gaslight to electricity. Yeah, I mean I bet it blew people's minds back then. I imagine so, especially when they touched one of those trolley lines. Sure so, okay. Edison was a visionary, a genius, one can make the case um, and an innovator, and he came up with what we know of as the modern harnessing of electricity, which I should probably point out electricity is not energy, it's an energy carrier. Direct current is what he was his big thing, right. Direct current is basically it is, well not basically, it's where electricity. The electric charge is constant. It never changes. So if you look directional, it is, and if you look at it it's like a line. It's just a straight line. And Edison was pretty happy with his direct current inventions. The problem is is that you lose a lot of it to waste heat over long distances. Yeah. Well basically you can't really transport it over super long distances they found out, right, Okay, So that was kind of the drawback to it. Other than that it was enormous. He lit up New York and arguably created um what we know of today is light. Right, But there was another way of looking at things, and that is the alternating current. So Edison was super, super super married to direct current. He just saw it. I think I read a quote of a river flowing gently to the sea. That's how we characterized direct current. That will kill you if you touch it, yeah, big time. Uh. And alternating current is if you instead of that straight line of a charge um or flow of electricity from one pole to the other, I think negative, depositive, all always. Alternating current looks like a sign wave, right, So it has a wavelength and it actually goes back and forth from one pole to another, which is why it's called alternating. And these days it does so at about sixty cycles per second, so it changes direction sixty times in a second, and it's very steady and reliable. And actually in those days too, I think it's the same yeah, which is one of the cool things. Right. So here's the thing we're talking about electricity here. I think a lot of people overlook is that Edison was also quite a showman and great businessman, very very much so, as much as much of a great businessman as a genius, right, But he was also very stubborn, and he didn't he didn't he didn't think there was any way to improve or any need to improve upon direct current. There's another guy whose name people might be familiar with. His name is Nicola Tesla. Not a great businessman, in fact, a very poor businessman. Evidently he was. Actually he spent some time after he became a great inventor digging ditches just to try to make ends meet. Apparently he didn't. He did file for a lot of patents, but apparently he didn't do that nearly enough because a lot of his stuff was kind of stolen and kind of you know, nicked from. So, Chuck, we've got Edison on one side with d C, and we have Tesla on the other side with a C. That sounds like, you know, a couple of a couple of nerds going at it, but really these two guys engaged in this very very public rumble and based gleet stake was the infrastructure of the United States and the in the world exactly, this huge, huge, massive um competition. Sure, that just took place, and there was some crazy stuff that went that that came out of it, Lots of electrocutions, lots of nefariousness, And we're not going to tell you who won yet because a lot of people don't necessarily know what kind of electricity we use more than the other d C or a C. So we're just gonna pay this out. Baby. This is just interesting. So yeah, Nicola Tesla he was Austrian born and uh he arrived in the United States in four when he was just a young lad of twenty eight and a merror. Three years later, after being in the United States, he filed for a series of patents that basically outlined what you would need to make the alternating current work. So he made pretty quick work when he came over here to the States, right he did. Did you ever see the Prestige movie? I've heard David Bowie played Tesla in that movie? Nice? Yeah, very cool. Did he do a good job like Labyrinth quality job? Oh? Better? I thought so? All right, but um, just a little sidebar if you're interested in that kind of thing. Um. But yeah, you know, after reading this and then finding out that Tesla actually may have sort of invented the radio, even though Marconi gets credit for that, there's a lot of things that Tesla did. He's sort of the unsung inventor when you kind of look at all these little things. Yeah, and again, like you made the point, I think you have to be a really good self promoter time as much an innovator, Especially if you are an innovator, you need to be a self promoter. You get lost out in the in the annals of history, especially back then. Right, So, Chuck, let's talk about this. She said that he came to the States from Austria at the age of twenty eight and filed some really important patents early on. Uh and they were for his alternating current system. Right. Here's the huge advantage of alternating current. We were talking about how d C is a constant, steady output of electricity. Uh. An alternating current is all over the place, but it's still it's also a steady output of power. The thing is is because the because DC doesn't alternate, UH, it loses a lot of energy to heat and so it's not good for transporting it long distances. Right, So Tesla came up with these, uh, these patents for the generation of an alternating current and a transformer. Right, you've heard of these and you probably don't know what they are. Well, here this is the key to alternating current. Absolutely. What what you do is you generate this electricity and you run it through a transformer and with very little power loss. Right, you can step it up to a tremendous voltage. We'll step it down in this case. Well, no, you step it up first for a long distance travel, so you're using you're using less power to generate it, right, But then you run it through this transformer and all of a sudden, say a thousand volts goes to like five hundred thousand volts. So you can shoot that thing amazingly long distances, uh, without losing very much of the electricity involved in it. And then when it gets to say a neighborhood, after passing through you know, the desert or nowhere very dangerously, when it gets to a neighborhood, it goes through another transformer and then it gets stepped down. That's what I was thinking about. And so since you've lost very little and it's being stepped down easily without much powerless to this transformer, you can supply tons of homes with a single line like a d volts I think is what you end up using out of let's say a million volts. It's on the line right sure, And it can also be when it's stepped up voltage wise, it can be stepped down or it is inevitably stepped down in amplitude, which means that it requires less of a physically smaller line of copper, which also says on costs because you know, you remember when the economic fallout was going on and people are steeling copper out of other people's cars and air conditioners because it was valuable. It's expensive stuff, especially if you're talking about creating the infrastructure of an entire country. So Tesla comes up with these patents and uh, pretty much right then, and there changes everything again except for the self promotion part, right right, he did, But he did his best work when he was able to hook up with people that were very good businessman. Who did you back him? Who did he hook up with? That really changed everything? So Josh, you're talking about George Westinghouse yes, And I know you've heard of the Westinghouse company, which is probably means he did a pretty good job if you still know that name. Uh. He had an electric company, George did, and it was struggling to work out some details of a successful A C system, And then he heard about this famous lecture that Tesla gave in so he said, you know, we should get this guy. And Tesla had a couple of financial backers named Peck and Brown, so they approached Westinghouse about commercializing Tesla's work. And at the time he said, all right, sounds like a great idea. I'm gonna give you guys rand and cash and another fifty thousand in notes, and some royalties for the electricity that we create, right well, two and fifty cents for every horsepower that was sold through his invention by Westinghouse. Well, I have a little modern conversion for you. Let's hear that seventy five dollars back then would be one point eight million dollars today. Holy count. And that's not even counting the royalties. So this is a lot of dough, it is. So thankfully, with Peck and Brown's help hooked him up with Westinghouse. Now Tesla has a viable situation going on here, and you can actually compete with Edison, his nemesis. He worked for Edison. He did that was awesome. He he went and worked for Edison. And there's a there's legend that he went to Edison and said, look, I've got this alternating current ideas together and Edison did not want to hear it. Yeah, he was very, like you said, very stubborn. He was like, no DC, buddy, go make the DC better, which he you know, he worked on that, right. So actually, yeah, the the apparently Tesla eventually got um so tired of Edison and his um mule headedness. Uh that he just said, you know what, I'm going off on my own. And I think that's when he started digging ditches, right, That's when he struggled before he eventually hooked up with Peck and Brown to give him some backing. Right, So that brings us back up to the current time. Well not current is in now, but current back then and uh, they he battled. You know, Tesla sounds kind of a little stubborn guy too. Exeused to battle with the Westinghouse guys on the best way to do this and eventually they settled on what we said before, which is a three phase sixty cycle current that we still used today. And you talked about that lecture that attracted um, some adherence to TESLA, including Westinghouse, right, Yeah, uh, well it's he started to get more and more publicity just because he had such a good idea despite his terrible self promotion, right and showmanship was lot of that involved. He his idea was so good and it was just so clearly superior to d C in the minds of some people that um, he couldn't help but get publicity. So as this started to develop, Uh, Edison engaged in an all out public war. Well, he got a little nervous, which is why he engaged in the war. In when this thing was kind of picking up steam and they were getting the sixty cycle thing worked out, That's when Edison was like, So, what Edison decided to do was to proved everybody the alternating current is just dangerous. Yeah, that was his main focus, and he did sope by performing publicly executions on dogs, horses, and eventually he crescendoed by electrocuting to death an elephant named Topsy in public. He did that's pretty funny. There's nothing funnier than publicly electrocuting an elephant. Right, but um it gets it turns a little grim. All right? Have you heard of William Kemmler? Well, I thought it was already Graham. But did you you got it tough enough, Nancy um Way. William Kemler was a convicted acts murderer. I looked him up, actually as a convicted hatchet murderer, um who killed his girlfriend and then very calmly went next door and said, I just killed my girlfriend. But a boom about it being not much of a trial. Later he was sentenced to death. The thing about Kemmler was he was a going to be the first person in New York and, as far as I can tell, the first person in the United States who would be electrocuted to death rather than hung. This is news to me. They I did some extra research. I heard electrocution. I'm like, oh, I gotta look more into this. Um. So Kemmler is going to be the first person in the electric chair, and he has on August six, ninety has this date with destiny and um Tesla's invention. Apparently they hadn't decided which way to go. Should it be decent, he should be a C. And this guy who also used to publicly electrocute animals on behalf of Edison, managed to finagle a used old Westinghouse a C generator uh to be used to get rid of Kembler. And the execution was very public and it was very horrible. Apparently there were twenty five witnesses. Most of them vomited. At least one fainted. I think one of the physicians that were attending that was attending to the guy ran out of the room couldn't watch. They put two thousand volts of juice to the guy for I think like ten twelve seconds. He just turned totally rigid, apparently punctured his finger with his fingernails. It was bad, right, And then they stopped and the doctors went over and looked at him, and he started breathing again, and they shouted to throw the juice back on, and they had to kill this guy because he was obviously in excruciating pain. So he did it again, and they left it on for a minute, and apparently the generator didn't stop generating more and more voltage, so they have no idea how much they passed through this guy apparently sweat came out of his pores or um, blood came out of his pores like sweat. Uh. He started to burn and then finally, after a minute they turned it off. The long shot of this is that it came out that this was an a c generator I'll be an old beat up one that shouldn't have been used in the first place. And William Kemmler was a an actual casualty, very brutal casualty in the war between Edison and um Tesla. Well, he should have thought about that before he took the hatchet to the co frience. You know, I'll bet he would have thought twice had he known what his fate was going to be. This would have had the opposite effect on me. Edison was saying, look how dangerous this is. If I would have seen that, I always said, Wow, that's the electricity that I want supplying power to my house, the kind that makes blood come out of your ports. Yeah, because I mean, if you can do that, I can probably you know, light up your room. Right. Well, it's certainly lit up William Kemmler. So during the public war, a very public war. Now Edison is uh is sweating it and then in uh Westinghouse won the bid to light up the Chicago World's Fair, which was the Colombian Exposition, a big, big deal and a big blow to Edison. He did, and you know how we how we won the bid. He under key undercut g E had put in a bid for a million dollars, which if seventy five thousand was one point eight million, imagine how much a million dollars was back then. That was ge s bid And by this time ge he G had assumed um Edison's company, Edison General Electric I think is what it was called, so he was with G. Now they put in a million dollar bid. Most of it was to cover the copper wire because remember to get copper to get electricity over long distances using d C, the copper wire has to be big. You have to keep the amps up to keep the voltage up, so you lose less up the far end. Right. So just by using less copper that alone, Um Wessing else was able to put in a bit of half a million, undercut him by half. So they got the rights of the Colombian Exposition, which was big. This was the turning point right here, Yeah, I mean the rest literally, as they say, is history because that uh, you know, Grover Cleveland flipped the switch and a hundred thousand lightbulbs lit up, and everyone said, boy, a C might be the way to go here. That was it. Yeah, it was cheaper, it worked, and also apparently all over the fair were Tesla's inventions on display. So I think twenty seven million people visited the Chicago World's Fair that year, and every single one of them got to witness alternating current, which ultimately won. And even without the World's Fair, I mean that really punctuated it. But just because it was efficient and economical, I mean, do you know how much you pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity? Now? Not much, No, it's like ten cents tops uh and there's no telling how much it would be with DC uh plus. Also I was thinking about this, it's you could make the argument that uh, Tesla has saved tons of lives from electrical accidents that never took place, because if you have DC, you're not using transformers, you're not stepping it up or down. Yeah, that's a lot of heat and you can't just send five thousand volts into your electrical outlet, you know how many people die. If we've just gone with d C, it would have never happened. Maybe maybe not, would have never happened. So a few years after that, Westinghouse built a hydro electric plant at Niagara Falls, and all of a sudden, buffalo had power. And then that when in New York, New York City were just showing off by this time, Yeah, and then dude, it was all over. But don't don't feel too bad for Edison, because we still use d C. We use both. We use DC in car batteries and uh, locomotives, some types of motors use d C, so it's not I would call those consolation prizes. Yeah, sort of the booby prize. And you put a C in DC together and you have one of the best rock bands in history. So, Chuck Um, you want to talk a little more about Tesla. Did you know that he also had a vision He never managed to do it, but he had a vision of um wireless. Yeah, the wireless that we enjoyed now he was thinking about in like eighteen ninety. Yeah, Josh, he he met with JP Morgan, who was, as you know, one of the most powerful men on earth at the time, and uh, he said basically envision a world system of wireless communications to relate telephone messages across the ocean. Not just telephone, I think music as well, broadcast news, music and stock market reports and private messages, exactly what we're doing now. Tesla, Yeah, he was where it's at. Sure, he he basically just didn't have enough money. I think he he probably could have done it had he had enough money. He was working on a tower, and uh, it was very clear that he needed a lot more than the hundred and fifty thousand. Morgan kicked him, and Morgan kind of lost interest. And it was Marconi actually who put the nail in that wireless coffin, because he came up with the telegraph. It's like telegraph and the radio, which we already said. Tesla kind of did a lot of work on the radio too. Yeah, Apparently Tesla pointed out that um marc Coni used no less than fifteen um Tesla patents to create that wireless transmission of the s that made him so famous. Right. My impression of Tesla is, uh that he was just this uber genius who was so much into his own genius work that he didn't understand that it required self promotion and business savvy and showmanship. And he didn't care about that stuff. So that's why he died alone in New York, said stuff, Chuck. It is not quite as sad as the fate of Topsy the Elephant or William Kemmler, but still very sad. So yeah, that was our awkward walk through the life of Nikola Tesla. Did we ever say, um, well, yeah he went out. Well I guess we implied it. But yet today, even still the power stations that generate power do them on the sixty cycle process. But everyone, if you ask your comment person on the street who invented electricity, they would say, oh, Edison. And did you also know that the light bulbs, the incandescent light bulbs that he created, were inefficient? I know, I know what a heck? Al right, so that's a Tesla and Edison can rock? We have speaking of rock, the band Tesla rock. If we really didn't want to go there, remember them? Yeah they didn't rose? Okay, so Chuck, we just did that. Do you think it's time for a listener mail? Please? God, yea, please, indeed, thank you, So Josh, I'm just gonna call this dreamy listener mail and it's another dream. And uh, just let me tell folks, I'm not getting into this. Please don't start sending me all your dreams, and certainly don't send him in haikou form. But this is this is a good one. This is sent to us from Ruth from England. And Ruth was backpacking around the United States in two thousand eight. Oh I know where Ruth changed close and she said, can grats on your country, by the way, which was kind of funny. We're very proud of it. We're going to take your country as well. And she actually came through Atlanta with her friends and she this is kind of funny. She mistakenly thought they were going to Atlantic City. And so if you happen to see three very confused English girls in mid September carrying backpacks looking for casinos, that was us. They ended up at the video poker machines in the Big h G. Right, we should introduce Ruth to the Internet, where she could have found out that she was about a thousand miles off course. So Ruth writes in and says, uh, she had this dream when she was in her mid twenties, and here it is. Um I was a woman in my mid twenties with a very maternal and passive attitude on the holiday on some kind of island resort as a dream war on the atmosphere, and this resort began to change. The reps became increasingly belligerent and some of the holiday goers became edgy. Then followed a very detailed and structured experience of the island becoming a prison state. Apparent to my mind is a microcosm of an apoca liptic world. She became involved in a secret resistance movement led by a group of African Americans and they were There were many interpersonal stories which I won't bore you with now, so she wrote it down in her travel diary. This is where it gets interested. She wrote it down in her diary and she told about you know, told this to a lot of different people because it's such a cool dream over the years, and when she returned to England, I guess over her travels. She returned to England, she picked up a newspaper, flipped to the art section and there was a Books of the Past column space devoted to rediscovering books that have gone out of publication, and there was an exact synopsis of her dream, So she jumped about a book she'd read before. Now she had never read it. She uh, this was the book was written by an Australian woman eighty years ago, was out of publication for decades. It was not even popular at a time, and she had never read it. So she dreamt about an eighty year old, unpopular novel she had never read. Pretty cool. It was pretty cool. So that is from Ruth. She says. You don't have to read this out, but it's a little late for that, Ruth. We did anyway. And what you're talking about with her changing clothes, she says that when she went to the Atlanta aquarium, she said, please say thank you to the troop of schoolgirls who had to see us wash, brush our teeth and change our clothes in the bathroom and the aquariums. So Ruth thinks that Atlanta's Atlantic City, Chuck and I founded America, and that we know the girl scouts that saw her change in the bathroom, right, And I like yeah, And that guess she's possessed by the some eighty year old off demon of an eighty year old listroain rights. Ruth, hats off to you if you're ever in town again. Look us up, we'll go out and get a plank together. You're buying Ruth If you want to buy Chucking Me a pint. Yeah, you can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want more house stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. H brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant, Chuck, Chuck. That's going. You can just call me Nikola really okay? How about your Chuck? Yes, all right, Chuck? Good God, I'm good. I'm good. I'm I'm much better than how you asked me twenty nights ago when I'm recorded, Yes podcast, No, that was that was two days three two days from now right. Yeah, it's magic. It is magic. We'll have to reveal our secret one day like some sort of we could dress up like Siegfried and Roy I get there and tell everybody. Yeah, okay, I owe it to Jerry. Jerry is always just the white Tiger. Yeah, yeah, nice and Jerry. Chuck. I have a trivia question for you, beautiful, Okay, hit me. Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers named the Los Angeles Dodgers? Okay, Chuck, I know the answer. Do you want me to say? What do you want to say? I want you to say. I just asked you a question because when they were in Brooklyn the original spot. There were a lot of train trolley cars in Brooklyn at the time that had really dangerous electrical wiring that operated them, and people would dodge these electrical lines and these train cars, and so they called them the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers initially, and then that shortened to the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then they o' mount the O'Malley family broke the hearts of Brooklyn and moved them too. L A, I can't believe that still, I know who does that? H Did you see a documentary HBO about the Brooklyn Dodgers so good? No, it was it. Yeah, I mean there are people in Brooklyn today that have not watched the baseball game since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved their their hearts were broken so badly. Yeah wow, and uh wow, rip the heart out of Brooklyn. But actually it wasn't. People might right in and there's been some follow up and O'Malley really tried as hardest to keep the team there, and there were some politics involved that greedy Sandy kofax Y. Yeah, but off topic a little bit, but not really not really, because you can make a case that it was um Thomas Alva Edison, who gave the Brooklyn Dodgers their name. Bring it Home, Baby, Okay, I will so. By the time the Dodgers were formed in the eighteen eighties, right, um, Edison had basically lit up parts of New York with his incandescent light bulb. Big, big innovation. It was huge, man. I mean imagine going from like gaslight to electricity. Yeah, I mean I bet it blew people's minds back then. I imagine so, especially when they touched one of those trolley lines. Sure so, okay. Edison was a visionary, a genius, one can make the case um, and an innovator, and he came up with what we know of as the modern harnessing of electricity, which I should probably point out electricity is not energy, it's an energy carrier. Direct current is what he was his big thing, right. Direct current is basically it is, well not basically, it's where electricity. The electric charge is constant. It never changes. So if you look directional, it is, and if you look at it it's like a line. It's just a straight line. And Edison was pretty happy with his direct current inventions. The problem is is that you lose a lot of it to waste heat over long distances. Yeah. Well basically you can't really transport it over super long distances they found out, right, Okay, So that was kind of the drawback to it. Other than that it was enormous. He lit up New York and arguably created um what we know of today is light. Right, But there was another way of looking at things, and that is the alternating current. So Edison was super, super super married to direct current. He just saw it. I think I read a quote of a river flowing gently to the sea. That's how we characterized direct current. That will kill you if you touch it, yeah, big time. Uh. And alternating current is if you instead of that straight line of a charge um or flow of electricity from one pole to the other, I think negative, depositive, all always. Alternating current looks like a sign wave, right, So it has a wavelength and it actually goes back and forth from one pole to another, which is why it's called alternating. And these days it does so at about sixty cycles per second, so it changes direction sixty times in a second, and it's very steady and reliable. And actually in those days too, I think it's the same yeah, which is one of the cool things. Right. So here's the thing we're talking about electricity here. I think a lot of people overlook is that Edison was also quite a showman and great businessman, very very much so, as much as much of a great businessman as a genius, right, But he was also very stubborn, and he didn't he didn't he didn't think there was any way to improve or any need to improve upon direct current. There's another guy whose name people might be familiar with. His name is Nicola Tesla. Not a great businessman, in fact, a very poor businessman. Evidently he was. Actually he spent some time after he became a great inventor digging ditches just to try to make ends meet. Apparently he didn't. He did file for a lot of patents, but apparently he didn't do that nearly enough because a lot of his stuff was kind of stolen and kind of you know, nicked from. So, Chuck, we've got Edison on one side with d C, and we have Tesla on the other side with a C. That sounds like, you know, a couple of a couple of nerds going at it, but really these two guys engaged in this very very public rumble and based gleet stake was the infrastructure of the United States and the in the world exactly, this huge, huge, massive um competition. Sure, that just took place, and there was some crazy stuff that went that that came out of it, Lots of electrocutions, lots of nefariousness, And we're not going to tell you who won yet because a lot of people don't necessarily know what kind of electricity we use more than the other d C or a C. So we're just gonna pay this out. Baby. This is just interesting. So yeah, Nicola Tesla he was Austrian born and uh he arrived in the United States in four when he was just a young lad of twenty eight and a merror. Three years later, after being in the United States, he filed for a series of patents that basically outlined what you would need to make the alternating current work. So he made pretty quick work when he came over here to the States, right he did. Did you ever see the Prestige movie? I've heard David Bowie played Tesla in that movie? Nice? Yeah, very cool. Did he do a good job like Labyrinth quality job? Oh? Better? I thought so? All right, but um, just a little sidebar if you're interested in that kind of thing. Um. But yeah, you know, after reading this and then finding out that Tesla actually may have sort of invented the radio, even though Marconi gets credit for that, there's a lot of things that Tesla did. He's sort of the unsung inventor when you kind of look at all these little things. Yeah, and again, like you made the point, I think you have to be a really good self promoter time as much an innovator, Especially if you are an innovator, you need to be a self promoter. You get lost out in the in the annals of history, especially back then. Right, So, Chuck, let's talk about this. She said that he came to the States from Austria at the age of twenty eight and filed some really important patents early on. Uh and they were for his alternating current system. Right. Here's the huge advantage of alternating current. We were talking about how d C is a constant, steady output of electricity. Uh. An alternating current is all over the place, but it's still it's also a steady output of power. The thing is is because the because DC doesn't alternate, UH, it loses a lot of energy to heat and so it's not good for transporting it long distances. Right, So Tesla came up with these, uh, these patents for the generation of an alternating current and a transformer. Right, you've heard of these and you probably don't know what they are. Well, here this is the key to alternating current. Absolutely. What what you do is you generate this electricity and you run it through a transformer and with very little power loss. Right, you can step it up to a tremendous voltage. We'll step it down in this case. Well, no, you step it up first for a long distance travel, so you're using you're using less power to generate it, right, But then you run it through this transformer and all of a sudden, say a thousand volts goes to like five hundred thousand volts. So you can shoot that thing amazingly long distances, uh, without losing very much of the electricity involved in it. And then when it gets to say a neighborhood, after passing through you know, the desert or nowhere very dangerously, when it gets to a neighborhood, it goes through another transformer and then it gets stepped down. That's what I was thinking about. And so since you've lost very little and it's being stepped down easily without much powerless to this transformer, you can supply tons of homes with a single line like a d volts I think is what you end up using out of let's say a million volts. It's on the line right sure, And it can also be when it's stepped up voltage wise, it can be stepped down or it is inevitably stepped down in amplitude, which means that it requires less of a physically smaller line of copper, which also says on costs because you know, you remember when the economic fallout was going on and people are steeling copper out of other people's cars and air conditioners because it was valuable. It's expensive stuff, especially if you're talking about creating the infrastructure of an entire country. So Tesla comes up with these patents and uh, pretty much right then, and there changes everything again except for the self promotion part, right right, he did, But he did his best work when he was able to hook up with people that were very good businessman. Who did you back him? Who did he hook up with? That really changed everything? So Josh, you're talking about George Westinghouse yes, And I know you've heard of the Westinghouse company, which is probably means he did a pretty good job if you still know that name. Uh. He had an electric company, George did, and it was struggling to work out some details of a successful A C system, And then he heard about this famous lecture that Tesla gave in so he said, you know, we should get this guy. And Tesla had a couple of financial backers named Peck and Brown, so they approached Westinghouse about commercializing Tesla's work. And at the time he said, all right, sounds like a great idea. I'm gonna give you guys rand and cash and another fifty thousand in notes, and some royalties for the electricity that we create, right well, two and fifty cents for every horsepower that was sold through his invention by Westinghouse. Well, I have a little modern conversion for you. Let's hear that seventy five dollars back then would be one point eight million dollars today. Holy count. And that's not even counting the royalties. So this is a lot of dough, it is. So thankfully, with Peck and Brown's help hooked him up with Westinghouse. Now Tesla has a viable situation going on here, and you can actually compete with Edison, his nemesis. He worked for Edison. He did that was awesome. He he went and worked for Edison. And there's a there's legend that he went to Edison and said, look, I've got this alternating current ideas together and Edison did not want to hear it. Yeah, he was very, like you said, very stubborn. He was like, no DC, buddy, go make the DC better, which he you know, he worked on that, right. So actually, yeah, the the apparently Tesla eventually got um so tired of Edison and his um mule headedness. Uh that he just said, you know what, I'm going off on my own. And I think that's when he started digging ditches, right, That's when he struggled before he eventually hooked up with Peck and Brown to give him some backing. Right, So that brings us back up to the current time. Well not current is in now, but current back then and uh, they he battled. You know, Tesla sounds kind of a little stubborn guy too. Exeused to battle with the Westinghouse guys on the best way to do this and eventually they settled on what we said before, which is a three phase sixty cycle current that we still used today. And you talked about that lecture that attracted um, some adherence to TESLA, including Westinghouse, right, Yeah, uh, well it's he started to get more and more publicity just because he had such a good idea despite his terrible self promotion, right and showmanship was lot of that involved. He his idea was so good and it was just so clearly superior to d C in the minds of some people that um, he couldn't help but get publicity. So as this started to develop, Uh, Edison engaged in an all out public war. Well, he got a little nervous, which is why he engaged in the war. In when this thing was kind of picking up steam and they were getting the sixty cycle thing worked out, That's when Edison was like, So, what Edison decided to do was to proved everybody the alternating current is just dangerous. Yeah, that was his main focus, and he did sope by performing publicly executions on dogs, horses, and eventually he crescendoed by electrocuting to death an elephant named Topsy in public. He did that's pretty funny. There's nothing funnier than publicly electrocuting an elephant. Right, but um it gets it turns a little grim. All right? Have you heard of William Kemmler? Well, I thought it was already Graham. But did you you got it tough enough, Nancy um Way. William Kemler was a convicted acts murderer. I looked him up, actually as a convicted hatchet murderer, um who killed his girlfriend and then very calmly went next door and said, I just killed my girlfriend. But a boom about it being not much of a trial. Later he was sentenced to death. The thing about Kemmler was he was a going to be the first person in New York and, as far as I can tell, the first person in the United States who would be electrocuted to death rather than hung. This is news to me. They I did some extra research. I heard electrocution. I'm like, oh, I gotta look more into this. Um. So Kemmler is going to be the first person in the electric chair, and he has on August six, ninety has this date with destiny and um Tesla's invention. Apparently they hadn't decided which way to go. Should it be decent, he should be a C. And this guy who also used to publicly electrocute animals on behalf of Edison, managed to finagle a used old Westinghouse a C generator uh to be used to get rid of Kembler. And the execution was very public and it was very horrible. Apparently there were twenty five witnesses. Most of them vomited. At least one fainted. I think one of the physicians that were attending that was attending to the guy ran out of the room couldn't watch. They put two thousand volts of juice to the guy for I think like ten twelve seconds. He just turned totally rigid, apparently punctured his finger with his fingernails. It was bad, right, And then they stopped and the doctors went over and looked at him, and he started breathing again, and they shouted to throw the juice back on, and they had to kill this guy because he was obviously in excruciating pain. So he did it again, and they left it on for a minute, and apparently the generator didn't stop generating more and more voltage, so they have no idea how much they passed through this guy apparently sweat came out of his pores or um, blood came out of his pores like sweat. Uh. He started to burn and then finally, after a minute they turned it off. The long shot of this is that it came out that this was an a c generator I'll be an old beat up one that shouldn't have been used in the first place. And William Kemmler was a an actual casualty, very brutal casualty in the war between Edison and um Tesla. Well, he should have thought about that before he took the hatchet to the co frience. You know, I'll bet he would have thought twice had he known what his fate was going to be. This would have had the opposite effect on me. Edison was saying, look how dangerous this is. If I would have seen that, I always said, Wow, that's the electricity that I want supplying power to my house, the kind that makes blood come out of your ports. Yeah, because I mean, if you can do that, I can probably you know, light up your room. Right. Well, it's certainly lit up William Kemmler. So during the public war, a very public war. Now Edison is uh is sweating it and then in uh Westinghouse won the bid to light up the Chicago World's Fair, which was the Colombian Exposition, a big, big deal and a big blow to Edison. He did, and you know how we how we won the bid. He under key undercut g E had put in a bid for a million dollars, which if seventy five thousand was one point eight million, imagine how much a million dollars was back then. That was ge s bid And by this time ge he G had assumed um Edison's company, Edison General Electric I think is what it was called, so he was with G. Now they put in a million dollar bid. Most of it was to cover the copper wire because remember to get copper to get electricity over long distances using d C, the copper wire has to be big. You have to keep the amps up to keep the voltage up, so you lose less up the far end. Right. So just by using less copper that alone, Um Wessing else was able to put in a bit of half a million, undercut him by half. So they got the rights of the Colombian Exposition, which was big. This was the turning point right here, Yeah, I mean the rest literally, as they say, is history because that uh, you know, Grover Cleveland flipped the switch and a hundred thousand lightbulbs lit up, and everyone said, boy, a C might be the way to go here. That was it. Yeah, it was cheaper, it worked, and also apparently all over the fair were Tesla's inventions on display. So I think twenty seven million people visited the Chicago World's Fair that year, and every single one of them got to witness alternating current, which ultimately won. And even without the World's Fair, I mean that really punctuated it. But just because it was efficient and economical, I mean, do you know how much you pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity? Now? Not much, No, it's like ten cents tops uh and there's no telling how much it would be with DC uh plus. Also I was thinking about this, it's you could make the argument that uh, Tesla has saved tons of lives from electrical accidents that never took place, because if you have DC, you're not using transformers, you're not stepping it up or down. Yeah, that's a lot of heat and you can't just send five thousand volts into your electrical outlet, you know how many people die. If we've just gone with d C, it would have never happened. Maybe maybe not, would have never happened. So a few years after that, Westinghouse built a hydro electric plant at Niagara Falls, and all of a sudden, buffalo had power. And then that when in New York, New York City were just showing off by this time, Yeah, and then dude, it was all over. But don't don't feel too bad for Edison, because we still use d C. We use both. We use DC in car batteries and uh, locomotives, some types of motors use d C, so it's not I would call those consolation prizes. Yeah, sort of the booby prize. And you put a C in DC together and you have one of the best rock bands in history. So, Chuck Um, you want to talk a little more about Tesla. Did you know that he also had a vision He never managed to do it, but he had a vision of um wireless. Yeah, the wireless that we enjoyed now he was thinking about in like eighteen ninety. Yeah, Josh, he he met with JP Morgan, who was, as you know, one of the most powerful men on earth at the time, and uh, he said basically envision a world system of wireless communications to relate telephone messages across the ocean. Not just telephone, I think music as well, broadcast news, music and stock market reports and private messages, exactly what we're doing now. Tesla, Yeah, he was where it's at. Sure, he he basically just didn't have enough money. I think he he probably could have done it had he had enough money. He was working on a tower, and uh, it was very clear that he needed a lot more than the hundred and fifty thousand. Morgan kicked him, and Morgan kind of lost interest. And it was Marconi actually who put the nail in that wireless coffin, because he came up with the telegraph. It's like telegraph and the radio, which we already said. Tesla kind of did a lot of work on the radio too. Yeah, Apparently Tesla pointed out that um marc Coni used no less than fifteen um Tesla patents to create that wireless transmission of the s that made him so famous. Right. My impression of Tesla is, uh that he was just this uber genius who was so much into his own genius work that he didn't understand that it required self promotion and business savvy and showmanship. And he didn't care about that stuff. So that's why he died alone in New York, said stuff, Chuck. It is not quite as sad as the fate of Topsy the Elephant or William Kemmler, but still very sad. So yeah, that was our awkward walk through the life of Nikola Tesla. Did we ever say, um, well, yeah he went out. Well I guess we implied it. But yet today, even still the power stations that generate power do them on the sixty cycle process. But everyone, if you ask your comment person on the street who invented electricity, they would say, oh, Edison. And did you also know that the light bulbs, the incandescent light bulbs that he created, were inefficient? I know, I know what a heck? Al right, so that's a Tesla and Edison can rock? We have speaking of rock, the band Tesla rock. If we really didn't want to go there, remember them? Yeah they didn't rose? Okay, so Chuck, we just did that. Do you think it's time for a listener mail? Please? God, yea, please, indeed, thank you, So Josh, I'm just gonna call this dreamy listener mail and it's another dream. And uh, just let me tell folks, I'm not getting into this. Please don't start sending me all your dreams, and certainly don't send him in haikou form. But this is this is a good one. This is sent to us from Ruth from England. And Ruth was backpacking around the United States in two thousand eight. Oh I know where Ruth changed close and she said, can grats on your country, by the way, which was kind of funny. We're very proud of it. We're going to take your country as well. And she actually came through Atlanta with her friends and she this is kind of funny. She mistakenly thought they were going to Atlantic City. And so if you happen to see three very confused English girls in mid September carrying backpacks looking for casinos, that was us. They ended up at the video poker machines in the Big h G. Right, we should introduce Ruth to the Internet, where she could have found out that she was about a thousand miles off course. So Ruth writes in and says, uh, she had this dream when she was in her mid twenties, and here it is. Um I was a woman in my mid twenties with a very maternal and passive attitude on the holiday on some kind of island resort as a dream war on the atmosphere, and this resort began to change. The reps became increasingly belligerent and some of the holiday goers became edgy. Then followed a very detailed and structured experience of the island becoming a prison state. Apparent to my mind is a microcosm of an apoca liptic world. She became involved in a secret resistance movement led by a group of African Americans and they were There were many interpersonal stories which I won't bore you with now, so she wrote it down in her travel diary. This is where it gets interested. She wrote it down in her diary and she told about you know, told this to a lot of different people because it's such a cool dream over the years, and when she returned to England, I guess over her travels. She returned to England, she picked up a newspaper, flipped to the art section and there was a Books of the Past column space devoted to rediscovering books that have gone out of publication, and there was an exact synopsis of her dream, So she jumped about a book she'd read before. Now she had never read it. She uh, this was the book was written by an Australian woman eighty years ago, was out of publication for decades. It was not even popular at a time, and she had never read it. So she dreamt about an eighty year old, unpopular novel she had never read. Pretty cool. It was pretty cool. So that is from Ruth. She says. You don't have to read this out, but it's a little late for that, Ruth. We did anyway. And what you're talking about with her changing clothes, she says that when she went to the Atlanta aquarium, she said, please say thank you to the troop of schoolgirls who had to see us wash, brush our teeth and change our clothes in the bathroom and the aquariums. So Ruth thinks that Atlanta's Atlantic City, Chuck and I founded America, and that we know the girl scouts that saw her change in the bathroom, right, And I like yeah, And that guess she's possessed by the some eighty year old off demon of an eighty year old listroain rights. Ruth, hats off to you if you're ever in town again. Look us up, we'll go out and get a plank together. You're buying Ruth If you want to buy Chucking Me a pint. Yeah, you can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want more house stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. H brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you