A decade ago, in the dark mist of the now ancient internet of 2012, a webcomic was uploaded to The Oatmeal. It told the story of the forgotten geek-god Nikola Tesla, and the evil techbro chad Thomas Edison. Our hero Tesla was a nerd who made almost everything ever, and wanted to give it away for free. The villain, Edison, was a misanthrope who cheated and lied his way to Scrooge McDuck level pools of money.
It was snide, fun, and subversive; the perfect combo for a sticky meme. It was the culmination of a new fandom that had been mixing around the “I bet you didn’t know this” side of history books, cable TV documentaries, and the ever trustworthy message boards. The idea that we’ve had our perfect science daddy stolen from us, but we can reclaim him with the power of internet snark, was too much for the hormonal teenage internet to ignore. The cult of Tesla was born.
And it remains, 10 years later. In fact, it’s more powerful now than ever. Type “Nikola Tesla” into YouTube and you’ll find popular videos like:
- Nikola Tesla- Limitless Energy & The Pyramids of Egypt.
- Why Did Nikola Tesla Say That The Numbers 369 are the Key to the Universe?
- Nikola Tesla Secret Inventions That Were Lost or Censored
- Nikola Tesla: The Greatest Genius who Ever Lived
- This Old Nikola Tesla Interview Reveals That He Discovered That Something Was Sending Earth Messages
All of these videos wax poetically about the lost cause of the cast-away inventor. Their top comments are predictable, and repeat almost word-for-word. They lament that we “we’re “not taught of him in school,” “Tesla’s ideas could have saved the world,” “We are so much worse off without him,” “Tesla was forgotten, how unfair!”
“Great man” history is a school of thought that the big, important moments happen due to the overwhelming impact of standout individuals. Rome was Rome because of Caesar, America is America because of George Washington, the Zulu are the Zulu because of Shaka. Society is saved by the graces of a civics master, a war is won by a master strategist, or the esoteric secrets of the cosmos are charmed to clarity by the focused genius of one scientist.
This view gained popularity in the 19th century but waned with the rise of historical revisionism, which focused more on class, gender, and race when analyzing history. Tesla sits in the center of these two schools of thought, a great man who was also concerned with class and building a structurally better society.
Yet the Cult of Tesla holds him up as someone who could have built a utopia, who could have contacted aliens and perfected free energy (and maybe he did), who shared without greed and created without vanity, who could have saved lives in wars, or taken lives with a death ray. For this, he died alone and poor, The Piety of a Nobel Scientist.
The Oatmeal’s cartoon credits Tesla with the invention/discovery of:
- Alternating Current (AC)
- Hydroelectric damns
- Cryogenic engineering
- Transistors
- Radar
- Radio
- Recording Radio Waves from space
- X-Rays
- Discovering Earth’s resonating frequency.
- Earthquake machine
- Ball lightning
- Neon lighting
- The remote control
- Modern electric motor
- Wireless communications
You might suspect many of these claims are exaggerated, untrue, or lacking important context. You’d be right, but the amazing part is that it’s not all untrue — Tesla did have a hand in a great deal of that. Even if his contributions to these things helped them just 5%, that’s a far more productive life than most could dream of. Tesla was well-paid, and sought after for his contributions. People who were in the business of making tech breakthroughs wanted him on their team.
Beneath the digital church, with its HTML homilies and JPEG proselytizations, is the real foundation of the story. What did Nikola Tesla, this Serbian-America inventor, actually create? How much did he really make?
Many major inventions are made by incremental advancements. One inventor perfects a necessary material component, another team improves the way it’s implemented, and another team still builds out the energy or scaling needed to produce it. Or still others are needed to make the process economically viable, or adapt the idea into something people actually want to use. Who history remembers as the inventor of any one thing tends to be the one to take it from a curiosity, to a “needed”. If your light bulb works in a lab, it’s a neat trick. When your light bulb works in every home around the block, it’s time has truly come.
The big one for Tesla is the implementation of AC power. Let’s look at a simple timeline.
- 1832 – “The first alternator to produce alternating current was a dynamo electric generator based on Michael Faraday’s principles constructed by the French instrument maker Hippolyte Pixii.”
- 1856 – Théodore du Moncel advised the use of a generator without its metallic brushes. The lab found that electric lights could be lit with AC power from this generator.
- 1856 – Nikola Tesla was born.
- 1875 – Tesla enrolled in college, where he’s schooled in the budding field of AC power. H was said to have argued with his professors.
- 1876 – Pavel Yablochkov of Russia created a system of lights with induction coils that were installed along an AC line.
- 1878 – The Ganz Factory in Hungary began manufacturing electric lighting equipment.
- 1882 – Tesla took a job with the Continental Edison Company in Paris, where he installed lights in houses. He was later promoted to working in dynamos and motors.
- 1883 – Ganz Factory had installed over 50 light systems in Austria-Hungary.
- 1884- Tesla immigrated to America.
- 1885- Tesla submitted some of his first patents, including an enhanced AC motor.
- 1985 – Galileo Ferraris created a dual coil motor that produces two AC currents. The first multi-phase AC motor.
- 1885 – Three engineers with Ganz Works of Budapest filed for a patent for novel transformers. With a closed magnetic circuit, they were three times more efficient than previous transformers. This allowed for AC power to travel long distances on lines.
- 1886 – George Westinghouse and William Stanley patented an improved AC transformer.
- 1887 – Tesla invented an AC induction motor that uses a rotating magnetic field, which was widely adopted. It required far less maintenance than previous motors.
- 1888 – George Westinghouse bought Tesla’s AC motor patent.
That’s a lot of steps, and it’s only a fraction of it. It still shows that AC was being explored and utilized for some time before Tesla was even born. No doubt he was there, making improvements. He was known, working, and paid because his contributions mattered. But did Tesla invent/discover AC power? No.
Okay, but If Tesla didn’t invent AC power, why was there this war between Tesla and Edison over AC and DC power? Well, there wasn’t one, really. Westinghouse backed AC power, while Edison General Electric used DC Power. Edison pointed out that AC power used higher currents, and privately wrote that he anticipated electrocutions if it became popular. Edison did, as people bring up, stage experiments where animals were killed with AC power.
An apologist might argue he did this with a true belief AC was dangerous, but a cynic could say he did it just to increase his market share. The killing blow in the conflict wasn’t Tesla’s inventions or electrocuted animals, though. It was when Monopoly Man prototype J.P. Morgan performed a hostile takeover of Edison General Electric, turning it into General Electric, that the war really came to an end. DC was cheaper, the lawsuits were piling up, and Morgan wanted to lower the bills of the company he was a shareholder of. That’s the story.
What about the X-ray, the radio, the famous photo of Tesla standing in a room full of lighting bolts, his wireless power transmission, his Tesla Towers, his ball lighting, his death ray, his radio waves from space? Those claims are addressed by Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid, and the answers are a mixture of “no,” and “not really.” As with the invention of AC, Tesla was in the mix, but the tales grew in the telling. They warped into more fantastical storylines for our secret science daddy.
By 1903, Tesla’s failed plan to send power wirelessly around the world had bankrupted him. Morgan stopped writing him checks and Tesla started losing the respect of peers who claimed that in his lectures “spectacular sensationalism was accepted as a substitute for the scientific method.”
Everett Collection Inc., Alamy
The more you look into the claims of each invention, the higher resolution you put on the details, the more the narrative is lost. Tesla even praised Edison in his writings, and Edison once wrote a long hot take about how AC sucks — and didn’t mention Tesla once. Tesla’s is a story of bringing light into the world with the power of science and engineering, one that’s powerful, alluring, and even inspiring. But if it dissipates when light is shown on it, then so be it. Tesla is important in the history of electrical engineering, and in the modern history of internet culture. But like all saints, the miracles didn’t happen.
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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