In Our Time - Nikola Tesla

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and his role in the development of electrical systems towards the end of the nineteenth century. He made his name in New York in the contest over which current should flow into homes and factories in America. Some such as Edison backed direct current or DC while others such as Westinghouse backed alternating current or AC and Nikola Tesla’s invention of a motor that worked on AC swung it for the alternating system that went on to power the modern age. He ensured his reputation and ideas burnt brightly for the next decades, making him synonymous with the lone, genius inventor of the new science fiction. With Simon Schaffer Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, University of CambridgeJill Jonnes Historian and author of “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World”And Iwan Morus Professor of History at Aberystwyth UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press, 2013)Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, Tesla: Master of Lightning (Barnes & Noble Books, 1999) Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (Open University Press, 1988)Iwan Rhys Morus, Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (Icon Books, 2019)Iwan Rhys Morus, How The Victorians Took Us To The Moon (Icon, 2022)David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, 1991)John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (first published 1944; Cosimo Classics, 2006)Marc J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, Biography of a Genius (first published 1996; Citadel Press, 2016)Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (first published 1919; Martino Fine Books, 2011)Nikola Tesla, My Inventions and other Writings (Penguin, 2012)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, Nicola Tesla, 1856 to 1943,

is inseparable from the story of the electrification of America, if not the world. When Tesla arrived there from Europe, Europe in 1884, Edison was trying to light up New York with DC, direct current for his filament light bulbs, while Westinghouse was promoting the rival AC, alternating current. And when Tesla invented a powerful motor that used AC, he teamed up with Westinghouse, so ensuring the supremacy of that system down to today. We meet to discuss Nikola Tesla are Ewan Morris, Professor of History at Aberystwood University. Jill Jones, historian and

author of Empires of Light, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the race to electrify the world, and Simon Schaffer, Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Simon Schaffer, Nicola Tesla's life began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Can you take us there and tell us about his education? He was born in a small town in what is now Croatia, but then in 1856 was a military province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the border with Ottoman Turkey. For most of his life, Tesla, who was ethnic Serb, was proud of his Serbian heritage and indeed saw it on some occasions as a way of celebrating the defence of European civilization on

what he rather distressingly called the Asian threat. He was thin, tall, ailing. He caught cholera when very young. His father was a Serbian priest. His mother, whom he described as an extremely superior inventor significantly, was obviously an inspiration for him. He'd been destined for the priesthood, but managed to convince his parents that he should rather study engineering. It's important to emphasize that although we might now think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at this period as the land of coffee, cream, rich cakes and waltzes, it was in fact a rapidly and intensely modernising state, investing very significantly in engineering and especially in technologies that the rulers of the empire reckoned would bring the empire together and that included electrical communication. So he had an extraordinarily powerful education in precisely the area he was going to move into. That's exactly right.

At the high school and then subsequently at the technical university in Graz, in what is now Southern Austria, he was subjected to some of the most advanced training in physics and engineering that would have been available in Central Europe at the time. His reminiscences, which provide our main source of information for this period of his life, include great details that are very striking and impressive of his early capacity in engineering, his fascination with electricity and especially with systems of alternating current. How did he develop his interest in electricity while he still in Europe? He spent quite a deal of time.

in his teens and 20s, wandering between some of the major intellectual and scientific centres of the time, not just Gruts, but also Prague, and eventually the new telegraph and telephone centre in Budapest, where he worked with a genial and rather magnificent Hungarian engineer and entrepreneur, Theodore Pushkas, who obviously played a rather. inspirational role in his career. When Tesla was in Budapest, Tesla later reminisced about this, he came up with, so he claims the idea for a motor that could run on alternating current. This

at a moment when direct current was dominating electric systems of power and light. What was also significant is that in Budapest he came to know a, I think, brilliant young man called Antal Shigeti, who would eventually accompany him to America and who worked mainly as his lab assistant and also as his companion. So he became familiar, did Nicola Tesla, with the most advanced thinking in electricity, magnetism and telecommunications of the time. Does it surprise you that there's so much intense technical education in that part of Europe at that time? From our no doubt biased point of view, it is surprising because I think we've inherited what we might call an Anglo-American bias in writing the history of electro technology. We need to remember that central European states the nascent German Empire, which is unified in 1871, the Austro-Hungarian,

Empire and other related states. In France, for example, where Tesla worked for a really significant period of his life in the early 1880s, were electrifying intensely and rapidly. This is the moment when Paris became, to all intents and purposes, the city of light. Thank you very much. Jill, Jill Jones, he went to America. What was happening in the USA when Tesla arrived in America? It's been called the War of the Currents. Yes, Nikola Tesla arrived in New York in June of 1884.

He was coming from Paris, where he had worked for the Edison Company, and he had had this vision of a complete alternating current system, most importantly, including the great unsolved mystery, which was how to make alternating current work in a motor. So he had been working for Edison, and Edison's systems were all running on direct current, and no one was interested in Tesla's vision. And so he had come to the United States to meet Edison and persuade him that he should be interested in and adopting this other system of electricity. When he arrived in New York, Edison had opened about a year and a half earlier his very historic Pearl Street station. So this was the first central station.

It operated on D.C. And as Tesla arrived, more central stations were being built. But far more prolific were what were called isolated plants. And there were 400 of these installed, hotels, offices, factories, and mansions. And why was this? Because there was a huge constraint on direct current as generated by these coal-fired central stations. It couldn't travel more than about half a mile radius around the central station. But the advantage it had over alternating current at this point was that it had a motor.

Well, I mean, the reality was that Tesla was a not very important employee. and Edison was not interested. He took enormous pride in having established this entire system, commercial system of D.C. current. And George Westinghouse, who's another famous American inventor and industrialists from Pittsburgh, now began to eye this field. And Westinghouse, unlike Edison, was not wedded in any way to direct current. And he was really paying attention to what was happening to Europe, acquired some AC patents, imported some engineering talent, and very secretly up in the Berkshires, developed a working, alternating current system. What were the main strengths and weaknesses of the two systems we're talking about, DC and AC? So direct current, which was the basis of Edison's inventions and his company, its strength,

is that it's very safe. Its weakness was that these central stations that Edison was installing did not send electricity more than a half-mile radius. Its other strength was it not only provided light into these new Edison light bulbs, it also operated many different kinds of motors, very important in factories. Alternating current, on the other hand, is high voltage, and it can go a long distance, but at the time that Nikola Tesla arrived in New York to persuade Edison that this was the route to go, there was no working motor.

Thank you very much. Ian Newman Morris, to get an idea of how distinctive this was at the time, how did it compare with what was going on in Europe? I mean, there's really no equivalent of the Battle of the Systems of the War of the Currents in Europe at this time. European countries too rapidly electrifying In the UK, Joseph Swan had invented and patented his version of the incandescent light bulb at around about the same time as Edison.

Edison himself is quite aggressively trying to push into the European market from very early on in the 1880s. He establishes a power station in London, the Hulburn Viaduct power station, for example, in 1882. But there are also AC systems being developed, in particular, London, brilliant Italian engineer, Sebastian DiFerante, starts in 1887 to design and build a power station at Deptford, which is being set up to do something completely different from the Edisonian model. Ferranti's plan is essentially to electrify London, or at least a large part of London, using an AC system, sending power, high voltage, long distances, and creating a central.

power station for the first time, rather than a kind of disaggregated system. Why was the hesitation that you should go straight to AC? I mean, a variety of reasons. Electricity in its beginnings is expensive. I mean, this is very much a middle class or an upper class toy, so to speak. I mean, the first electrification in the UK is in stately homes. So it's not actually entirely clear at the beginning that there's a huge market for electricity. So there says that, well, you know, maybe DC is enough, so to speak. But during the

course of the 1880s, it becomes apparent that yes, because I mean, electricity symbolises the future, symbolises the modern for middle class Victorians. And it rapidly becomes clear that, yes, they are going to take up this new technology. It shows that they're at the kind of forefront of a late Victorian dash into the future. Sam, Mnysha, let's turn to this great invention, the electric motor. What was it and why did it matter? As we've said, one of the crucial obstacles to the large-scale adoption of anything like alternating current was that there was no adequate alternating current motor.

One of the key features, it seems to me, of Nikola Tesla's innovations, is that he's very often extremely key. to identify what the main technical obstacles to an electric system are, and as far as possible, remove them. In electric motors run on direct current, these devices relied on a piece of apparatus called a commutator, which turns alternation current back into direct current and direct current into alternating current.

The trouble with commutators is that you have huge energy losses. You have sparks. They break down and they're not efficient and therefore not profitable. So what the Nikola Tesla system involves is a motor which does not use commutators. Instead, brilliantly, what Nikola Tesla saw is that it would be possible if you could engineer an oscillating magnetic. field in what are called the staters. In other words, the components that don't move, the electromagnets in the motor, they could in principle then be used to drive what was called the rotor, a metal cylinder positioned inside a ring of electromagnets. If you change the magnetic field in those static

electromagnets, they would induce what are called eddy currents, in other words, small electric currents inside the metal cylinder. You'd then have magnetic forces between the stator and the rotor. If you could make those oscillate in phase, the motor would start to rotate. In the very first trials that he ran rather wonderfully, he uses a empty metal tin of shoe polish as the rotor and then builds up the machine until it's clearly a viable electric motor with no sparks and no commutator and which if you can organise the phase of oscillation of the field, you can build what rapidly comes to be called a polyphase motor, which generates uniform, controllable motion indefinitely, and you then have really the holy grail of the electric system.

Was he out on his own doing this? He was certainly not alone. There are many rival claimants, some with good claims, some with less good claims, to the divest. development of the AC polyphase motor. There is, for example, the absolutely brilliant Italian engineer working in Turin with the magnificent name of Galileo Ferraris, who worked at the Turin Engineering University, who at almost the same time developed a very similar but in fact less efficient motor. What Tesla had on his side was an extraordinarily simple system that was clearly efficient and profitable and could in principle attract wealthy investors.

And then, and this I think is the decisive aspect of Nikola Tesla's vision, it could be integrated into a large-scale system. So within a year less of putting forward these designs, George Westinghouse simply bought all the patents and all the rights to Nicola Tesla's new system. Thank you, Jill. Jill Jones, what was the link between invention and showmanship at that time? It seems to be reading about it

that being a showman was part of the business. You had to show what you could do to people who came to decide, whether or not they would invest in it? Well, Tesla has worked for Thomas Edison, and Thomas Edison was really the showman par excellence. And he also pioneered these relationships between inventors and investors in Wall Street. Tesla had seen how Edison put himself forward,

very friendly with the press, and he did the same. When he announced to the world, the full development and fully patented AC system that he had developed. He did it with a lot of promotion in front of a huge audience of what were then called electricians, but we know as electrical engineers, in May of 1888 at Columbia University. Thank you. Even. How did Tesla's fame start to spread more widely and one can even say more deeply?

and why. He's landed up in America from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spent a little time in Paris. Actually quite a bit of time in Paris and he did work there. Nevertheless, he's a lone ranger and there he comes, pops up and next thing we know is the leading light.

Leading light. Sorry about that. Well, I mean, as as Jules explained, I mean, showmanship was absolutely key. Edison and Tesla by no means the first to realize this. I mean, one of my favorite quotes from the early history of telegraphy.

He's one of the attempted telegraph inventors, a guy called Edward Davey, writing to his father. You did not think to have your son turned showman because he understood right for the beginning, you have to put on a show. And, I mean, Tesla, having learned his lesson in that respect, absolutely from Edison, understood that he had to get himself out there.

And brilliantly, in a series of lectures in the early 1890s, First of all in New York, then off he goes to London to perform in front of the institution of electrical engineers at the Royal Institution. And then to Paris, he puts on this amazing spectacular show. I mean, imagine this exotic-looking gentleman on stage, a very, very carefully prepared stage. He's walking around, he's got discharge tubes, long rods of glass. in his hands. They're glowing. There's no wires. There's nothing else. And Walt, he's wandering around. He's waving. He's waving things in the air.

It's the wireless transmission of electricity. And that's the future that Tesla was promising his investors and his audiences. And when he comes back to America from that European trip, I mean, he's gone a relatively well-known electrical engineer. He comes back. He comes back. a celebrity. And he worked very hard indeed to cultivate relationships with the press in particular and to cultivate a very, very particular kind of image. I mean, the number of times when I was researching Nikola Tesla for the biography, I'd see press reports along the lines of I was very privileged to be allowed into the laboratory of the reclusive Mr. Tesla. Clearly not so reclusive really.

But I mean, he's working very, very hard indeed at the business of promotion, of self-promotion, and kind of conveying this very specific notion which kind of fitted the American imagination, I think, of what an inventor should be like. Simon Shavar, let's try to tease out his particular contribution here. Does he seem to be, was he,

did he continue to be ahead of the game? There are some absolutely remarkable and extremely effective innovations that Tesla helped introduce after the development and implementation of the polyphase motor of the alternating current motor. Two, I think, really matter to the image that Nikola Tesla was keen on cultivating. One is that in alliance, very close alliance at this point with George Westinghouse, they won the contract to electrify the Chicago World's Fair. This mattered not only because, as Jill and Iwan have pointed out, Tesla was a master performer and he uses the Chicago World's Fair as a kind of theater for the new motor and

associated devices, including his notions of telecommunication that accompanied it. But it also led quite directly to the establishment of a very important power station using the fall of water at Niagara Falls, a site which Nicola Tesla himself proclaimed as the symbol of the future. Jill. Again, it's hard for us to understand how novel and how uncertain alternating current was. There's a very famous quote from Lord Kelvin that he sends to Edward Dean Adams, who's in charge of the Niagara Falls project, saying,

trust you avoid gigantic mistake of adoption of AC. Simon. The second, and in many ways even more dramatic innovative, of that period developed after his European trip because of one thing he saw in Paris in 1889. He witnessed the demonstration of what were effectively the first experiments on radio waves, which had been due to the great German physicist Heinrich Hertz. What Tesla understood from that demonstration is that it would in principle be possible, to build what was called an induction coil.

In other words, an electrical machine that could generate long and very, very high voltage sparks. If you could increase the frequency of the oscillations of the alternating current, Tesla rather movingly calls this a Wagnerian experiment. And the frequency that he was aiming for was something like, 20,000 cycles a second, what we would now call 20 kilohertz,

at those frequencies Tesla guessed correctly, you could produce an extraordinary range of new phenomena. Jill, can ask you what kind of obstacles he was up against making his ideas viable? Well, when he first started off, of course he was a very low-level engineer and he was quite eccentric. and I think people were, his fellow workers found him, you know, somewhat kind of amusing. He was a man with various phobias and very specific ways he liked to do things. But also he...

Can he give us one of two examples, though? Everything he did in life, he liked for it to be divisible by three. If he swam laps, it would be 27. If he stayed in a hotel, it would be in a room divisible by three. stayed on floor nine. But I think his bigger problem was that he simply didn't have access to money or powerful people. And I think one of the things that's really important to understand about Nikola Tesla is that his alternating current system became a reality because of George Westinghouse,

the Pittsburgh inventor and industrialists. So after he had bought the patents and he, well, he fended off. being acquired by J.P. Morgan, but he went in to make his bids for the Chicago 1893 World's Fair, having to scale up what they had done and what they knew about alternating current to an extraordinary extent. They had one year from the time the bid was accepted in Chicago by the fair managers to the opening of the fair. At the time they made their bid, the most lights that any AC plant in America had lit up worth 10,000. They had to put light of 160,000. They also had to make all these motors work.

When the fare opened, they were operating the ferris wheel, an electric railway, all kinds of boats. There was even an electric kitchen. Ewan Morris, he gained a lot of money from his patents. He spent an extraordinary sums at Wardencliffe and Colorado Springs. What was he doing there? As Simon explained, after his visit to Europe, when he'd encountered Hertzian waves, radio waves, there's to say for the first time,

he was inspired by the notion that you could use these kinds of technologies to send huge quantities of electromagnetic energy over long distances. He developed what he called the oscillating transformer, what we now call a Tesla coil, which is essentially a machine for building up very, very, very, very high voltages, very, very high frequency electricity. And he thought, he imagined that this could be developed into a practical system for sending vast quantities of electrical power through the ether, through the air, without wires. He spends much of the 1890s essentially trying to get money for this. that's why he goes to Colorado Springs

to build a laboratory there to try and persuade people that this really was a viable technology. He manages to persuade J.P. Morgan to give him $150,000, not as much as Nikola Tesla wanted, but it is all he was going to get. And with that, he built

this amazing edifice at Wardencliffe. A laboratory, and essentially this kind of huge tower. And what he wants to do, I mean, essentially what's in the tower is a huge oscillating transformer, generating huge quantities of high voltage, high frequency, alternating current. And he wants to send that literally through the earth. He thinks that actually

it's through the earth that you should send electricity, not through the atmosphere, not through the ether. And that if his system works, if you had a network of warden cliffs, so to speak, scattered around the place, then you could transmit. huge quantities of electrical path between these places. You could transmit it then to individual factories. You could run the world with wireless electricity. That was the Tesla fantasy during the 1890s. And Wardencliffe was his attempt to realise that dream.

It's kind of glorious, glorious fantasy. And of course it didn't work. Simon Schaffer, in more ways, was Tesla making good use of the funds coming his way? because quite a lot came his way. $150,000 was a lot, though. $150,000 when he got it from Morgan is something like $5 million in current money. And he also received something around $100,000

from one of his other major patrons, John Jacob Astor, who was exceptionally keen briefly on the project, that Nikola Tesla was launching, only to be disappointed when it emerged that Nikola Tesla was after a scheme of power transmission that Astor had been up till then completely ignorant of. They broke off almost all relations and these relations terminated completely when Astor was drowned on the Titanic. The relation between Nikola Tesla and his wealthy,

New York banker patrons are, I think, extremely instructive. On the one hand, Tesla was obviously an extraordinarily charismatic, histrionic and seductive figure. He was capable of persuading folk, like Westinghouse, Astor and Morgan, to fund his projects. On the other hand, from the later 1890s onwards, these projects became bluntly less and less successful, less and less viable. Tesla plowed his own furrow.

He broke decisively with most of the orthodox physics of the time. For example, he simply denied that radio waves, wireless transmission, is electromagnetic radiation, which was the physical orthodoxy of the time, and it still is. For Tesla, no, what's going on in radio is the conduction of electricity through highly rarefied gas. And as Tesla's life went on into the 20th century, these, we might think of them as eccentricities, and modes of independent and dissident thought became more and more evident and more dramatic. This did not mean that Tesla lost his mastery of publicity. During the First World War and well into the jazz age,

Tesla was a news celebrity. From the 1920s and 30s onwards, he would organize rather dramatic and effective birthday parties to which he would invite the press, at which he would deliver what became celebrative, celebrated speeches about the next great technology coming down the pipe. Cars driven by cosmic rays, death rays that would bring war to an end, machines that would produce earthquakes,

electrical devices that would allow each other to read one's thoughts at a distance. Did people believe him? I think what Tesla was brilliant at, amongst all the other things he was brilliant at, was producing the suspension of disbelief. The charisma and the brilliance of the performance, especially with the press, meant that even if one might remain skeptical,

one wanted to believe. Because what was on offer in the 20s and 30s from this aging genius was a prophecy of what the future would bring, Tesla again and again denounced his critics as locked tragically into the present when it was he and his allies who would control the future. He made really, really good copy. And it's a hugely seductive vision. When I was doing some research on Tesla's reception, I came across this brilliant frontist piece to a book by Hugo

Gernsback, the kind of science fiction entrepreneur. This is the round by 1930, I think, and it's this image of a man sitting in his office, overlooking a kind of cityscape. Everything in the office is electrical through the window. He can see flying machines, all sorts of things running around, all powered by electricity. And there in the distance is a warden cliff type. tower. You know, this is the Tesla vision. This is the vision that Tesla was pushing and pushing and pushing every time you got a chance. And it was just so seductive. I think it was such an alluring image. But in a sense, it didn't matter, I think, whether or not people believed Tesla that he really could do this. It was just such a great story.

But I think it's important to understand that from the The Niagara Falls triumph, I mean, that might have been the height of his realistic fame, meaning that he had accomplished something gigantic. Tesla really was hard up for money. He had given up foolishly and naively his royalties to the AC system when Westinghouse was on the brink of bankruptcy, and he failed to get any kind of an agreement to have them reinstitute. stated when the Westinghouse company was in better shape, he really did not have the money that he needed, and he got it by offering to do very practical things. So Simon mentioned his

unfortunate relationship with Colonel Astor. Colonel Astor thought that Tesla was going to Colorado Springs to develop what he referred to as a cold light. So these were wireless sort of proto-fluorescent light bulbs that were going to displace all the other light bulbs in the entire world. So Astor found this extremely appealing. He gave Tesla $30,000, which even then, I think, was not anywhere enough money. Tesla went off to Colorado Springs, spent all of his six months there on what Ewan has well described as completely other scientific research, and came back and, you know, just had done nothing about the light bulb. And that was a big point of unhappiness. So he was pitifully asking people like J.P. Morgan, who then did give him money,

but he also kept Tesla's patents. And so much of his later life, until he died in 43, he was close to a pauper. So the quality of the fantasies that he was lived, and promoting through, you know, the enthusiastic American press has to really be seen in that light, that he wasn't really a meaningful inventor anymore because he really didn't have the money that he needed, aside from whatever kind of mindset and outlook he had. How good was his science? How good is his physics? Well, I think that in the early days, his physics was very good, but what we're hearing from both Simon and Ewan is that as time went on,

he was often his own space. And I think it's interesting that there is a, you know, certain cohort of people who believed then, and I suppose to this day, that Tesla was not even a human being. He was some sort of an alien that had come from elsewhere that had such a deep vision that he was bestowing on mere earthlings. I think you also have a sense of his disconnection from becoming a sense. of the real world, by virtue of the fact that in his later years, his great love was a white pigeon. And there's actually a photograph of this that he kept. He was a man who had an enormous and gigantic scientific achievement earlier in his life. But one does get the very distinct impression that he had gone off into the world.

world of scientific fantasy and lacking any kind of a meaningful income or company or institution of people that he worked with. I mean, that was one of his flaws. What did you say was Tesla's legacy, starting with you, E1? I think that his legacy is in all sorts of ways the image of invention and the image of who invents the future, so to speak. that he in so many ways personified. You know, this notion of the inventor as the iconoclast, the disruptor, the breaker, the somebody, well, let's say,

the man who forges his own furrow but pays no attention to anybody else who is somehow outside the rules. We've inherited that image of invention and the invention and how we get to the future. I think from Tesla and people like, him at the end of Victorian age. And it's a very seductive and I think a very dangerous image. Jill, what do you think?

I think that the sense of the inventor as exploited by Wall Street and the money people of his time, that's very powerful. There's a strong, lingering story that he was in some way cheated out of what he was due by Edison. And there's no visible. basis for that. So one of the things I found when I was working on Tesla is that he was very celebrated for that, celebrated as the genius who was misunderstood. And it's not at all clear that there's that much validity to that because he was, when he finally articulated and demonstrated his alternating current system, it was enormously successful. And he, he was, you know, His mistake was giving up his royalties.

The other thing that's important to understand about Tesla is the only one of his many inventions. He had more than 100 patents that was ever commercialized was that he did with George Westinghouse. I often like to point out that he demonstrated remote control in 1898 before a group of potential investors at Madison Square Garden. He had a big pool. He was moving boats all around in the water, turning lights on and off. And the investors just had no idea what was this. It looked like magic. And once Tesla had demonstrated something, had made a big publicity about it, he rarely was interested thereafter in how it worked in the practical world. I think that's another part of his legacy that you, in something spectacular, you demonstrate something spectacular, and then that's sufficient. Then you move on, as we must do here. Simon, what do you think is legacy is? I think the landscape of Nikola Tesla's career is being constructed between two very, very powerful principles of modern life, manufacturing industry and finance capital. Between those,

two forms, roughly between figures like Westinghouse, the manufacturer and Morgan, the capitalist. You have a figure like Tesla, someone who at the time and since has been almost universally treated like a martyred wizard. It's no coincidence that when Christopher Nolan decided to make a film about magic in the late 19th century, He casts David Bowie as Nicola Tesla. It seems to me that that captures perfectly the alien and disturbing power that is still attributed to the figure of Nikola Tesla. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Jill Jones, Simon Schaffer and Ewan Morris, and to our studio engineer Emma Hath. Next week, Aristophanes-Comany's comedy Lizistrata,

in which the wives of Athens and Sparta unite to end a war by staging a sex strike. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Let's start with you, Simon Schaffer. What didn't you say you would like to have said? What we did not get into

that I wish we'd had time to explore more is treating Tesla like a European. This is a period when there is mass migration from Europe to North America. And many of the protagonists of the electrical world in the late 19th century in the United States are migrants from Europe, including figures like Elihu Thompson or Charles Batchelor, or Nikola Tesla himself, who would then exercise huge roles in the development of American industry and modernization. It seems to me always, therefore, that the relation between old world and new, between what counted as traditional societies and the very notion that America itself represented a certain

version of the future is absolutely in play in the career of Nikola Tesla and many of his contemporaries. I'd mentioned, for example, his extremely close friendship with Mark Twain. Mark Twain was a very, very close. and admirer of Nikola Tesla, a potential investor, someone who gave Nikola Tesla a great deal of publicity. And for Twain, what Nikola Tesla represented was the principle of the unreconstructed genius that by arriving in North America would revivify society, drag it into the modern age and take really a very different path from the misfortunes of the old continent. I think there's something very interesting, for example, to say about the relation between

Nikola Tesla's career and Twain's masterpiece, a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, which is a novel about the effects of North American engineering skill on the Middle Ages. That is quite close, it seems to me, to one way in which we can frame what Nicola Tesla achieved. What about you? I would like to have said more about what I regard as the fascinating and entirely confected rivalry between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. At the time there was no rivalry. Edison, one suspects, barely noticed Tesla's.

existence for most of their respective careers. Tesla may or may not have thought there was a rivalry, but Edison certainly didn't. But it's now such a central plank in the way that Nikola Tesla is portrayed, the way in which the story of the forgotten genius, the forgotten genius about whom countless biographies, at least a couple of movies, a Doctor Who episode,

I'm probably missing a few things here, have been made, so not really that forgotten. But the way that rivalry is played out in contemporary culture. Edison, the unscrupulous, businessman, beholden to capitalism, Tesla, Nikola Tesla, the free-thinking genius, fascinated by invention as a kind of thing in itself. There are different images of invention. There's the invention, there's the invention, there's science, science is mired in the mud of capitalism on the one hand, so to speak, and this free, fantastic invention for its own sake.

Tesleyan image, on the other hand. And that's the way the story is now played out. And I think it tells us a great deal about the way we now think and understand science and technology that the story has played at in that way. Jill, what's your take on this? Well, the thing that I think is important to understand from the vantage point of today is that there wasn't any kind of really obvious place for a Nikola Tesla. There wasn't a place for him in a university the way there is for someone. He was a man who was interested in pure science, and yet he didn't really have colleagues who could work things through with him.

He did not have a company the way Edison did and Westinghouse. There were not pure research labs the way Bell Labs of later years existed. So he was a loner. And I think actually what Ewan is saying about this false story of the Edison-Tesla rivalry really speaks to that. that Tesla was a loaner, and part of the reason he had to be a loaner, he's a terrible businessman, so he was not going to have a company. But there was no other place in society for him to operate as a scientist. And so he did the best he could to operate and make himself known.

But he didn't really have a meaningful institution. that he could be part of that would have really helped him to play out and fully think through his scientific ideas. And you have to wonder if one of the reasons he went so off the rails was the lack of such an institution in the era in which he was being a scientist. And by the time those sorts of institutions came along, it was really too late for him. One thing that was not mentioned, this is perhaps you might think it's rather trivial, is that he put himself up at the Waldorf Hotel, one of the most expensive in New York at the time, went next door to one of the most expensive restaurants in New York, and this money that was pure scientific research went into high living.

No, he never paid his rent at the Waldorf Astoria. That was why the Wardencliffe Tower was blown up. He owed the Waldorf Astoria, something like 20 years of rent. No, it must be said. One of Tesla's many striking and useful inventions is how

to stay at ridiculously expensive Manhattan hotels without ever quite paying the bill. My favorite story associated with this is that at one of these

hotels, the Governor Clinton Hotel, he instead of paying the bill, offered the management a sealed box, which he claimed a contained a device of extraordinary power and value, and secondly, that it should not be opened because it would be lethal to open it. I have never tried doing that in any Manhattan hotel. But one of Tesla's biographers, Bernie Carlson, reports that when the box was in the end posthumously, obviously, opened, it contained a number of pieces of scrap metal of no power or value or significance. And the man who opened the box, the man who was sent by the United States government to examine, again, posthumously,

Tesla's manuscripts was an MIT electrical engineer of great distinction, an engineer so distinguished that this engineer managed the relation between American and British radar projects during the Second World War. His name was John Trump, and he's the former President Trump's uncle. It's for reasons like that, it seems to me, that Tesla has... has attracted more than his fair share of conspiracy theoretic stories. Did you want a final word? I mean, I wanted to emphasise, I mean, precisely as you said, this is a reclusive man of science who is living at the Waldorf Astoria

and dining at Delmonicos with Mark Twain. And I think that sums up perfectly the kind of image of what an invention to should be that Nicola Tesla was trying to live in the 1890s. A very well-fed hermit. We have a very well-fed producer coming to say hello to us. Does anyone want to your coffee? Tea, please. Coffee, please. Coffee, please.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, this is Kirsty Young. I just wanted to let you know that Young again, my podcast for BBC Radio 4, is back. I'm telescoping two bits of the story together. That's okay. It's only memory. There's only show bits. We can say what we're like. In Young Again, we're joined by some of the world's most intriguing people. Bill was the CEO at Microsoft at the time. And I ask a simple question.

If you knew then, what you know now, what would you tell yourself? Be very, very careful about the people you surround yourself with. I gave too much power to people who didn't deserve it. Subscribe to Young Again on BBC Sounds. I'm looking forward to your company. Thank you.