Stuff You Should Know - How did Nikola Tesla change the way we use energy?

Episode Date: June 9, 2009

Many people associate Edison with the invention of electricity, but Nikola Tesla heavily shaped the electrical system we still use today. Get the dirt on the electricity wars between Edison and Tesla in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Sweet, savory, spicy, and smoky flavors that'll satisfy your spirits wherever you choose to wander. Plan your next dining adventure at visitmississippi.org slash dining. Mississippi. Wanderers, welcome. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. How's it going? You can just call me Nicola. Really? Okay. How about you, Chuck? Yes. All right. What are you doing? I'm good, dude. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. I'm juiced. I'm much better than how you asked me 20 minutes ago when I recorded the other podcast. No, that was two days? Two days from now, right? Yeah. It's magic. It is magic. We'll have to reveal our secret one day. We could dress up like Sigfried and Roy. I get to be Sigfried this time, though. And just sit there and tell everybody. Yeah. Okay. I owe it to you after the last time. Jerry is always just the white tiger. Yeah, nice one, 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 it or do you want to say it? I want you to say it. I just asked you a question. Because when they were in Brooklyn, their 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 in these train cars. And so they called them the Brooklyn trolley Dodgers initially. Did they? And then that shortened to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And then the O'Malley family broke the hearts of Brooklyn and moved them to LA. I can't believe that still. I know. Who does that? Did you see a documentary on HBO about the Brooklyn Dodgers? No. Oh, so good. No, it was it. Yeah. I mean, there were people in Brooklyn today that have not watched the baseball game since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved. Their hearts were broken so badly. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I know. Wow. Rip the heart out of Brooklyn. Yeah. But actually it wasn't, people might write in,

there's been some follow up and O'Malley really tried as hard as to keep the team there. And there were some politics involved. That greedy Sandy Kofaks. Yeah. But off topic. A little bit, but not really. Sure. Not really. Because you can make a case that it was 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 1880s, right, 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. Sure. I imagine so, especially when they touched one of those trolley lines. Yeah. Big time. Sure. So, okay. Edison was a visionary, a genius. One can make the case. Sure. 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. Right. Direct current is what he was his big thing.

Right. Direct current is basically, well, not basically. It's where electricity, the electric charge is, is constant. It never changes. So if you look at it, it is. And if you look at it as like a line, it's just a straight line. Right. 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, the, the drawback to it. Other than that, it was enormous. He lit up New York and arguably created what we know of today is light.

Right. Right. But there was another way of looking at things. And that is the alternating current. Yeah. 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 characterize direct current that will kill you if you touch it. Yeah. Big time. Yeah. And alternating current is if you, instead of that straight line of a charge or flow of electricity from one pole to the other, I think negative to positive all always alternating current looks like a sine 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. Right. And these days it does so at about 60 cycles

per second. So it changes direction 60 times in a second. Right. 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, we're talking about electricity here. Well, 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 as a great business man as a genius. Right. Yeah. 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. Right. There's another guy whose name people might be familiar with and his name is Nikola Tesla. Not a great businessman. No. 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. Yeah. 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. Right. So Chuck, we've got Edison on one side with DC and we have Tesla on the other side with AC. Yeah. That was his little baby. 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 basically at stake was the infrastructure. Yeah. Of the United States and the, in the world. Exactly. Yes. This huge, huge massive competition. Sure. That just took

place and there was some crazy stuff that went, that came out of it. Yeah. Lots of electrocutions, lots of nefariousness. Oh yeah. 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 DC or AC. I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild present Bridgewater Season 2. A lot of people now actually believe that there is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity. The Bridgewater Triangle. And that sounds about right. You're still denying that there's something beyond our understanding going on here. Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzio, and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk. Written by Lauren Shippen

and created by me, Erin Mankey. Something about all of this doesn't feel right. Hello? Is someone there? Something went wrong here. Olivia, we should hurry. We have a much bigger problem. What is that? Olivia, run! Listen to Bridgewater now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more over at grimandmild.com slash bridgewater. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God took a walking into the devil's den. The car kales. They just killed everybody that was home. They started pulling out pictures

of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So, Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh, no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for Murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, we're just going to pay this out, baby. This is just interesting. So, yeah, Nikola Tesla. He was Austrian, born, and he arrived in the United

States in 1884 when he was just a young lad of 28. And a mere 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? No. Great movie. I've heard. David Bowie played Tesla in that movie. Nice. Yeah, very cool. Did he do a good job? Yeah. Like labyrinth quality job? Oh, better. Okay. I thought so. All right. But just a little sidebar if you're interested in that kind of thing. 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. Oh, big time. As much an innovator. Yeah. Especially if you are an innovator, you need to be a self-promoter. You get lost out in the annals of history. Especially back then. Right. So Chuck, let's talk about this. You said that he came to the States. Yeah, from Austria at the age of 28 and filed some really important patents early on. And they were for his alternating current system, right? Yes, indeed. Here's the huge advantage of alternating current. We were talking about how DC is a constant steady output of electricity and alternating current is all

over the place. But it's also a steady output of power. The thing is, is because DC doesn't alternate, it loses a lot of energy to heat. And so it's not good for transporting at long distances, right? Mm-hmm. So Tesla came up with 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 you do is you generate this electricity and you run it through a transformer and with very little power loss, right? Mm-hmm. You can step it up to a tremendous voltage. Right. We'll step it down in this case. Well, no, you step it up first for long distance travel. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you're using less power to

generate it. Right, right, right. But then you run it through this transformer and all of a sudden, say, 1,000 volts goes to like 500,000 volts. Right. So you can shoot that thing amazingly long distances 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, right, 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. Right. And so since you've lost very little and it's being stepped down easily without much power loss to this transformer, you can supply tons of homes with a single line. Right. Like 120 volts, I think, is what you end up using out of,

let's say, a million volts that'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 stays on cost. Because, you know, you remember when the economic fallout was going on and people were stealing copper out of other people's cars and air conditioners because it was valuable? Right. It's expensive stuff, especially if you're talking about creating the infrastructure of an entire country. Right. So Tesla comes up with these patents and pretty much right then and there changes everything, again, except for the self-promotion part, right? Right. He did,

he did his best work when he was able to hook up with people that were very good businessmen. Right. 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 probably means he did a pretty good job if you still know that name. He had an electric company, George did, and it was struggling to work out some details of a successful AC system. And then he heard about this famous lecture that Tesla gave in 1888. 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 going to give you guys 25 grand in cash and another 50,000 in notes and some royalties for the electricity that we create. Right. Well, he gave him, I think, $2.50 for every horsepower that was sold through his invention by Westinghouse. Well, I have a little modern conversion for you. Let's hear it. That $75,000 back then would be $1.8 million today. Holy cow. And that's not even counting the royalties. Wow. 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 he can actually compete with Edison. Right. His nemesis. He worked for Edison.

He did. That was awesome. 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 idea. It's really going to work it out 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. Yeah. Right. So actually, yeah, the, the apparently Tesla eventually got so tired of Edison and his mule headedness that he just said, you know what, I'm going off of 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.

I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild present Bridgewater Season 2. A lot of people now actually believe that there is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity. The Bridgewater Triangle. Now that sounds about right. You're still denying that there's something beyond our understanding going on here? Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzi and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk, written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Erin Mankey. Something about all of this doesn't feel right. Hello. Is someone there? Something went wrong here. Olivia, we should hurry. We have a much bigger problem. What is that? Olivia, run. Listen to Bridgewater now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more over at grimandmild.com slash Bridgewater. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God, talking about walking into the devil's den. The carcels, they just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it

all for this CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So, Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh, no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for Murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, that brings us back up to the current time. Well, not current as in now, but current back then. And they, he battled, you know, Tesla sounds kind of like a little stubborn guy too. He used 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 60 cycle current that we still use today. And you talked about that lecture that attracted

some adherents to Tesla, including Westinghouse, right? Yeah. 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. Right. There's a lot of that involved. He, his idea was so good. And it was just so clearly superior to DC in the minds of some people that he couldn't help but get publicity. So, as this started to develop, Edison engaged in an all out public war. Well, he got a little nervous, which is why he engaged in the war in 1890, when this thing was kind of picking up steam and they were getting the 60 cycle thing worked out. That's when Edison was like, ew. So what Edison decided to do was to prove to everybody that alternating current

is just dangerous. Yeah. That was his main focus. And he did so by performing publicly executions on dogs, horses, and eventually he beat 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? Right. But it turns a little grim. Right. Have you heard of William Kemmler? Well, I thought it was already grim. But yeah, sure. Did you? You got it tough enough, Nancy. Right. William Kemmler was a convicted ax murderer. I looked him up actually as a convicted hatchet murderer who killed his girlfriend. Okay. And then very calmly went next door and said, I just killed my girlfriend by the boom, by the being not much of a trial

later, he was sentenced to death. The thing about Kemmler was he was 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. I did some extra research. Nice work. I heard electrocution. I'm like, oh, I got to look more into this. Right. So Kemmler is going to be the first person in the electric chair. And yes, on August 6, 1890, he has this date with destiny and Tesla's invention. Apparently they hadn't decided which way to go. Should it be DC, should it be AC? And this guy who also used to publicly electrocute animals on behalf of Edison managed to finagle a used old Westinghouse AC generator to be used to get rid of Kemmler.

And the execution was very public and it was very horrible. Apparently there were 25 witnesses, most of them vomited, at least one fainted. I think one of the physicians that was attending to the guy ran out of the room, couldn't watch. They put 2000 volts of juice through the guy for I think like 10, 12 seconds. He just turned totally rigid, apparently punctured his finger with his fingernail. 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. They had to kill this guy because he was obviously in excruciating pain. So they 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 blood came out of his pores like sweat. He started to burn and finally after a minute they turned it off. The long shot of this is that it came out that this was an AC generator, albeit an old beat up one that shouldn't have been used in the first place. And William Kemmler was an actual casualty, a very brutal casualty in the war between Edison and Tesla. Well, he should have thought about that before he took the hatchet to the girlfriend. You know, I bet he would have thought twice had he known what his fate was going to be. See, this would have had the opposite effect on me. Edison was saying,

look how dangerous this is. If I would have seen that, I would have said, wow, that's the electricity that I want supplying power to my house. The kind that makes blood come out of your pores? Yeah, because I mean, if you can do that, it can probably, you know, light up your room. Right. Well, it certainly lit up William Kemmler. So they're in a public war. A very public war now. Edison is is sweating it. And then in 1893, Westinghouse won the bid to light up the Chicago World's Fair, which was the Colombian exposition. Yeah, a big, big deal and a big blow to Edison. He did. And you know how we how we won the bid? He underkey undercut Edison. GE had put in a bid for a million dollars, which if 75,000 was 1.8 million, imagine how much a

million dollars was back then. Yeah, time. That was GE's bid. And by this time, GE, GE had assumed Edison's company. Right. Edison General Electric, I think is what it was called. So he was with GE 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 DC, the copper wire has to be big. Right. You have to keep the amps up to keep the voltage up so you lose less on the far end. Right. Sure. So just by using less copper, that alone, Westinghouse was able to put in a bit of half a million, undercut them by half. So they got the rights to 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, you know, Grover Cleveland flipped the switch and 100,000 light bulbs lit up and everyone said, boy, AC 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 27 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 10 cents tops. Yeah. And there's no telling how much it would be with DC. Plus also, I was thinking

about this, it's you could make the argument that Tesla has saved tons of lives from electrical accidents that never took place. Yeah, true. 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 500,000 volts into your electrical outlet. You know how many people die if we just gone with DC? It would have never happened. Maybe, maybe not. Would have never happened. So a few years after that, Westinghouse built a hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, and all of a sudden Buffalo had power, and then that went on to power New York City. They 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. No, because we still use

DC. We use both. We use DC and car batteries. Yeah. And locomotives, some types of motors use DC, so it's not. I would call those consolation prizes. Yeah, sort of the booby prize. Yeah. And you put AC and DC together, and you have one of the best rock bands in history. So Chuck, you want to talk a little more about Tesla? You know that he also had a vision. He never managed to do it, but he had a vision of wireless. Yeah. The wireless that we enjoy now, he was thinking about in like 1890. Yeah, Josh, he met with JP Morgan, who was, as you know, one of the most powerful men on earth at the time. Sure. And he said, basically, I envision a world system of wireless communications to relay telephone messages across the ocean. Not just

telephone, I think music as well. Broadcast news and music and stock market reports and private messages. Exactly what we're doing now. Dude, Tesla. Yeah. He was where it's at. Sure. He basically just didn't have enough money. I think he probably could have done it had he had enough money. He was working on a tower and it was very clear that he needed a lot more than 150,000 Morgan kicked them. Yeah. Morgan kind of lost interest. And it was Marconi, actually, who put the nail in that wireless coffin. Yep. Because he came up with a telegraph. It's like, oh, the 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 Marconi used no less than 15 Tesla patents to create that wireless

transmission of the S that made him so famous. Right. My impression of Tesla is that he was just this Uber genius who was so much into his own genius of 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 1943 in New York. Sad stuff, Chuck. It is. Not quite as sad as the fate of Topsy the Elephant or William Kemler, but still very sad. Yeah. That was our awkward walk through the life of Nikola Tesla. Did we ever say, well, yeah, he won out. Well, I guess we implied it. But yeah, today, even still, the power stations that generate power do them on the 60 cycle process. Right. But everyone, if you ask your common 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 95 percent inefficient? I know. I know. What a hack. All right. So that's Tesla and Edison can rock. Speaking of rock, the band Tesla rock. If we really didn't want to go there, remember them? Yeah, they didn't rock those, the thing. No, they're terrible. Okay. So, Chuck, we just did that. Do you think it's time for listener mail? Please God, yes. Please indeed. Thank you. So Josh, I'm just going to call this dreamy listener mail and it's another dream. And 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 them in haiku 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 2008. Oh, I know where Ruth changed clothes. And she said, congrats on your country, by the way, which was kind of funny. We're very proud of it. We're going to take full credit for that. Congrats on 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 gas station. Right. We should have introduced 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, she had this dream when she was in her mid twenties. And here it is. I was a woman in my mid twenties with a very maternal and passive attitude on holiday on some kind of island resort. As the dream wore on, the atmosphere in 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. Appearance in my mind is a microcosm of an apocalyptic 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 a travel diary. This is where it gets interesting. She wrote it down in her diary and she told about, you know, told this to a lot of different people. So such a cool dream over the years. And when she returned to England, or 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, a space devoted to rediscovering books that have gone out of publication. And there was an exact synopsis of her dream. So she would dreamt about a book she'd read before? No, she'd never read it. She, this was a book was written by an Australian woman 80 years ago, was out of publication for decades, was not even popular at the time, and she had never read it. So she dreamt about an

80 year old unpopular novel she had never read. We're pretty cool. We're just 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 of the aquarium. So Ruth thinks that Atlanta is Atlantic City, that Chuck and I founded America, and that we know the Girl Scouts that saw her change in the bathroom. Right, and I like this, I like this, Ruth. Yeah, and I bet because she's possessed by the some 80 year old Australian. The demon of an 80 year old Australian. Right,

so Ruth hats off to you. If you're ever in town again, look us up, we'll go out and get a pint together. You're buying, Ruth. If you want to buy Chuck and me a pint, yeah, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more howstuffworks? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? In 1968, five black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in Mount Megs, Alabama. I'm writer and reporter Josie Deffie Rice, and in a new podcast, I investigate the abuse that thousands of black children suffered at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro

children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, The Turning Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balangene. He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you, only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like, he was a god. Listen to The Turning Room of Mirrors on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.