Poetry from M.I.T.; Richard Wilbur

But. Welcome to innovation. I'm Karen Miller. That was the song Tesla by king cake. Not every day you find an inventor celebrated in song but Nikola Tesla is a guy who made every electrical appliance in your house from the microwave to the TV possible. And he died destitute but somehow he has also emerged in recent years as a folk hero. So joining us now to talk more about the man who is called The Wizard is W. Bernard Carlson professor at the University of Virginia and author of Tesla and Venter of the electrical age. So Bernie CARLSON How do you explain this fascination with a guy who was nearly forgotten when he died. Tesla's popularity as well I think first off there's always been since the 1960s and through the 1970s an undercurrent in Tesla because he was an underdog. He's perfect right off the bat for the

counterculture because he's going to take on the establishment as he promises with wireless power. Edison Westinghouse AT&T he's going to put them all out of business. And one step away in mythology to sort of say that if that's what he was planning to do then than Morgan Edison must've made a series of countermoves and set out to destroy him and so that sort of underdog fighting with the titans of Finance the titans of industry just was perfect stuff for people that were critical of capitalism and big business in the late 1960s early 1970s so. So there's that underdog piece. Add to that the fact that Tesla was fairly clear that one of his favorite stories was this is when he was in Colorado in 1999. He picked up radio messages that he suggested he let the newspaper people conclude were messages from the Martians. So he's engaged in interplanetary communications and as soon as he dies man there's a whole subject sub world out there people that just grooved on that for 20 or 30 years.

And basically people have interpreted what he wanted to do with wireless power that it would be free energy that that indeed he was just going to give the electricity away and what countercultural person won like that. So there's a whole combination of things that came together. Now most recently he's really a patron saint of the new age and I use a patron saint of the new age because Tesla brings together two things that many people want on one hand. People want a sense of spiritual engagement authenticity contact with their their inner selves with their soul and they feel that modern science and big business are relentlessly rational. He was a really creative guy somebody who in some ways you could say never sold out never sold he never absolutely You got it absolutely right. He never sold out. And on top of that he really is this person that sort of says you get ahead you are inventive if you pay attention to those little Few those hunches those those intuitions. So on one hand he represents that on the other hand he's like

bees you know in touch with your inner spirit and you can have the best high technology you ever want it. So he's like this perfect merger. And I have not talked to I've not had any interaction with the Tesla Motor Company. But I think it was a brilliant move on the part of the Elon Musk and his associates to decide to call this new electric vehicle Tesla. Elon Musk who is a billionaire made his money from Pay Pal. That's right. But when he went in and he decided I'm going to I'm going to build this incredible Lectro vehicle and I want to call it that Tesla had a real insight because on one hand it's yes it's electricity in tussles all about electricity but it's high tech. And on top of that. So you get your high tech thrill but at the same time you're not destroying the environment. And there was one one early ad campaign which was zero emissions zero guilt. That sums up the Tesla the man or Tesla the the hero in a lot of ways in other words we can have without feeling guilty all the high technology we want and at the same time we're

we're being true to our inner selves. So what does the modern innovator learn from Nick like Tesla for the most part in modern business and engineering education today where I spend my time. We are absolutely convinced we can. We can teach the next generation of innovators we can produce the next generation of entrepreneurs and we proceed to teach them how to do incremental innovation go out there and find me a market and if you find me a market then we'll find the technology and move the whole thing worked out but it's all very demand driven. And we tend to say that the disruptive innovations the big breakthroughs whether they be e-bay or Pay-Pal or the Internet we don't know where those come from and we we really kind of assume that they're based on genius and luck. And one of the things that I've I really worked on in this book is to suggest that because Tesla is involved in two major breakthrough innovations alternating current where he was a success and we was less than a success wireless power we have two

wonderful case studies of disruptive breakthrough innovations and we can actually see where they came from how he shaped them how we succeeded how we didn't succeed so I'm really working against We're challenging the notion that breakthroughs are only based on genius and luck. Well you actually tell a story. Correct me if I'm wrong about this where you look at his chalkboard but it is like worn through because he has been working so much on the chalkboard trying to figure things out. That's right. That and as I say it be easy to sort of imagine that all the Tesla ever did was just be imagining things and working them out in his head and that that little chalkboard underlines that that he had an interesting mix of both a vivid imagination and a mind as we often say like a steel trap that he insisted on a degree of rigorous analysis in other words he had imagined it. But then before he could move forward with it even in his own work he had

to. He had to do certain types of mathematics calculations and he had to do a certain type of analysis and that board cut worn out doing all of that. And Tesla was lost for a little while it seems to history and sort of his fame was overshadowed by some of the people we think a lot about like Thomas Edison in terms of his contributions to electricity. How did Tesla as an innovator get last fall out of favor for a while. Tesla died one thousand nine hundred three and in the time since he was around which was the Cold War and the heyday of scientific based innovation we tend to canonize in and make a hero some people that are already their hard nosed business guys like like Edison or you know genuine scientists. So the people who can really take what they've got and I mean I would include in here maybe a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who says OK I know what I've got and I know how to make 300000 of them. That's right. And sounds like Tesla was not that kind of guy.

No. And one of the big things that I've been interested in my whole career spending 30 years studying inventors and innovators and entrepreneurs is there are different styles and in fact I would argue that the success of the American economies is always about a mix of these different styles. And you're absolutely right that Bill Gates or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison who understand the new technology. But look around and say I can make a million of those. I can drive down the costs of those things through mass production or software engineering or one style of innovator and they're very important. But there's a whole nother style of innovator which Tesla represents which is more of the visionary and the person that's willing to develop and pursue a big idea that may not actually payoff from a marketing standpoint early on. You know you also say that Tesla was not a convenient figure for awhile when the Eastern Block was are our enemies. That you know the Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers these sort of seemingly all American

people pushed Tesla off the stage for a bit. Well Tesla background is very interesting and it is very central to the way he develops as an inventor. He comes from Eastern Europe and he comes from the Balkans. He grew up in a Serbian family that was living in the mountains of what is today Croatia at that time was the border land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and most of the innovators and engineers in the late 19th and early 20th century and in the United States in science and technology were northern european they came from Germany they came from England Edison's family is Dutch In fact if you ride the bus in Amsterdam there are there are giant signs that say Edison rugs because one of the big discount rug stores in Amsterdam at least was a few years ago was the Edison rug store. And so you know many people were Northern European and Tesla didn't really capture that sense of Yankee ingenuity that again was one of the things that we wanted to put forward to celebrate in the 1950s and

1960s and to underline how that experience of being from Eastern Europe being an outsider shaped Tesla's own career. Edison supposedly at one point turned to Tesla in the brief time that Tesla worked for Edison and Edison said to Tesla So is it true that your parents are cannibals. Yikes. Where do you how do you get that idea. I'm not I'm never really completely worked out. I don't really know what the basis of that is other than I think that these were all white Protestant Americans and they were vaguely aware that Tesla was from a Serbian Orthodox background his father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. And there are some really profound differences between Western Christianity and the Orthodox Church in the east. My one guess is it has something to do with. This disconnect between their religious outlooks but I've never really figured out why. Why of all things Edison thought the Tesla family might have been cannibals.

We're talking to Bernie Carlson a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Tesla inventor of the electrical age about Nikola Tesla talking about this sort of mythology that grew up around nickel and Tesla. The first scene in your book Tesla is already known as the wizard. Like that's how people talk about him. So bring us for a moment into that fancy restaurant in New York Delmonico's the night that this tabloid journalist Arthur Brisbane meets Nikola Tesla. What happened what was it like. Tesla was incredibly handsome man he was tall he was dark he was charming he was mysterious. And so he would have cut quite a figure in the dining room of Delmonico's. And he would have been surrounded by the nouveau riche the people who were making a success on Wall Street to people that were also the old mercantile families of New York. And he would have arrived there and it would have been sort of stunning because people might have even been whispering kind of behind their back not only that was the Eastern European But on top of that

this is somebody who had only arrived in America 1984 so he was a recent. Recent emigre and he was regarded as an absolute genius in terms of what he could do with electricity. And by that time he had already the famous dinner we're talking about was in 1904 he had already done a series of demonstrations where he'd walk into a darkened auditorium and he would walk up to a Tesla coil a high frequency high voltage transformer that was about the same size as he was and he would touch a brass ball which he was holding in his hand one of the terminals of the coil and he would be completely electrified and took 250000 volts or his body so people when he walked into Delmonico's people were probably whispering I mean oh my gosh there's the magician of electricity look at all the amazing things that he can do. And we don't necessarily even understand half of what he's telling us. And Brisbane had a sense that there was a real opportunity to celebrate Tesla to suggest that there

was indeed a rival to Edison a successor to Edison and that it was embodied in Tesla. When you say 250000 volts through his body does that mean the sky is late not from the inside I mean is that what's happening. This means that the guy is glowing on the outside because the principles of electricity the electricity power always prefers to be on the surface of a body if it can possibly help and so as a result he was able to take the 250000 volts at a relatively low amperage because the current would have just sort of crossed his entire body in one description he says. It's like being pricked by a thousand little teeny tiny needles because you've got all of these little sparks coming off of you. He would have not just had a halo like a saint in the medieval times he would have had a aura around his entire body. Now you mentioned Edison to what degree were Tesla and Edison both of whom were real pioneers in electricity. To what extent were they enemies.

My sense after going through all of the Tesla materials and also having spent a certain amount of time before I worked on Tesla studying Edison in Edison's career is that we overdraw the notion that they were mortal enemies bent on destroying each other at least Edison was bent on destroying Tesla and it makes for great movies and comic strips but the reality of it was that first and foremost Tesla got his start by working for various Edison companies and while he was there he learned a great deal about electricity and how you design electric machines and motors. And he he appreciated that chance to really basically go to what was then the equivalent of graduate school in electrical engineering. As he progressed he became more and more successful in alternating current. He obviously was on the opposite side of the business plan that Edison had Edison believe that the future of electricity and electric lighting was going to be built around direct current because people understood direct current you could build the systems the systems were fairly cost

effective whereas the Westinghouse alternating current systems that were based on the Tesla patents were going to be bigger. They were going to be more expensive. They were going to be riskier and at one point Edison writes to one of his financier's and he says alternating current is not worthy of the attention of practical men. And so Edison had good business reasons not to get involved with alternating current or to be suspicious of it. Tesla goes on and does what he's going to do in terms of of alternating current and Edison basically sort of lets him go and doesn't really pay all that much attention to him. And in fact these are two people much like Jobs and Bill Gates knew each other and interacted and in fact did some deals together if you look at it. Walter Isaacson's very fine biography of Steve Jobs. These are two guys that had to learn to be in the same room with each other and in fact TESL was quite pleased. In the late 1890s when Edison sent him a signed autographed picture and he wrote home to his family he says can you believe it Edison sent me a picture. Similarly in about 19 0 4 19 0 5 there was an

electrical engineering meeting and Edison generally doesn't go to those meetings Edison is stone deaf and it's very hard for him to be in social situations like that. Interesting. And so Edison comes to this meeting and and he slips into the back and Tesla sees him while he's finishing up his presentation and he says Ladies and gentleman we are so honored to have Mr. Edison here and it is so seldom he comes out. Would you all stand and give him a round of applause and everybody gets up and cheers Edison with Tesla leading the applause. And so our notion that these two guys are mortal enemies is deeply problematic and and I've argued. Elsewhere in some of the stuff that I've been working on that what happens is these people want to believe that invention and innovation is often done for very pure non economic motives and Tesla really embodies that. And on the other side people want to be very critical when the work is being done by hard nosed businessmen like Edison.

You know one question I have when I read about Tesla and you talked about Edison saying look we can market this it's clear to people this is something that we can take out to a lot of businesses all over the country. Is was Tesla too ahead of his time. And I'm going to play for you just a little bit of an interview that I did recently with Jeremy Rifkin who's an advisor to the European Union and he's basically talking about what's happening and manufacturing something that Nikola Tesla predicted. What's happening is manufacturing and services are automated. So I wrote a book back in 95 called The End of Work in which I said we're going to see the end of Mass wage labor in the manufacturing services and knowledge industries with software. What we're seeing is near worthless factories. We're going to end factory work mass wage labor work over the next 15 years. It's already phasing out the service industries the same thing. Bank tellers and secretaries and file clerks and insurance salespeople. It's all going.

I'm Karen Miller This is innovation hub on WGBH and we're talking with Bernie Carlson a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Tesla inventor of the electrical age. So Bernie Carlson Nikola Tesla said a long time ago you know the hard work it's really going to be done by electricity in the future not by people. And people thought he was nuts. He loved to go out and in certain public speeches he would give his he would tell people it's coming in a few decades. All we would do everyday is push buttons. And in fact those of us that had to push buttons would be looked at as having just absolutely miserable terrible jobs and so he like Rifkin was predicting that electricity would revolutionize the way that work was taking place now to some extent. It's true it came about it came about in tussles on Lifetime. One of the technologies that's behind the moving assembly line which is at the heart of mass production are electric motors. All of those belts that you see in movies you know starring Charlie Chaplin trying to assemble things and having to go through quicker and quicker and quicker Well what they're doing is they're speeding up the

belts they're turning up the speed of the electric motors. And so even in Tesla time electric motors and electric lighting were changing dramatically the way that factories and the way work was actually happening. Listening to innovation hub I'm Tara Miller. We're talking with Bernie Carlson the author of Tesla and Bernie Carlson. Why did Nikola Tesla make such grand predictions Why did he take such big risks why not work for a steady paycheck and certainly there were times in his life he really didn't have much money. Tesla took the path that was not necessarily towards huge riches and having the corner office and being the robber baron I think because Tesla basically saw himself as something of an artist. And he in more than one place in over the years of the work that I did and I was spent a lot of time studying patent testimony and looking at Tesla's depositions when he was defending his patents and in more than one place he sort of said Ah those other engineers they can go do that. But I'm actually

really an artist of electromagnetic waves I'm I'm shaping them into things. And he was he really was an artist in the sense that he he felt that what was really exciting for him to do was to discover the underlying principles the perfect way to build an electric motor the perfect way to design what we would now call a radio system. And that meant that he had to sit and he had to wait and listen for the muse. And this came out of his family background what he learned growing up in the Serbian Orthodox Church. But it was it was that he was really an artist and then once he actually had a great idea. He had a different sort of strategy we tend to dwell on we we tend to make a big deal that the that the heroes of technology made their money and were famous because they went into manufacturing. That is to say they created companies like Edison did to produce the light bulbs that's were General Electric essentially the biggest piece of General Electric grows out of his there were a whole series of companies called Edison General Electric that made light bulbs and they made

generators and they made meters but they had to manufacture all that stuff. And similarly Alexander Graham Bell we remember him because essentially his father in law in a series of businessmen created American Bell Telephone not to make products but to sell the service of telephone calls. So we assume that people have to basically integrate inventors make their money by going into manufacturing. Tesla underlines that there actually was a very viable alternative strategy doesn't necessarily mean that you make the history books but it does allow you to do the artistic thing that you wanted to do. And as I describe it in the book his business strategy had three parts you patent. You promote and you sell. And the patent means that you get the very best patents you possibly can. You basically secure strong intellectual property. You then promote that. Intellectual property you give lectures you give interviews you do fabulous demonstrations you take if you have to 250000 volts across your body and you are the showman because the trick is you're going to make back your R&D

costs by driving up the expectations by getting the buzz going about your particular technology. And then when that buzz peaks when it crests you and your business partner step in and sell the intellectual property to the highest bidder. Now Kara Surely you have heard this story somewhere before and it will slip into Mass other next and I do believe that you may have heard about it in a place called Silicon Alley. Yes. Where this is where the strategy is exactly that. OK but Nikola Tesla departed from that salesman expectation and pretty soon after that dinner at Delmonico's that we were talking about he began a really spectacular fall. So the question is I mean how did that happen. Here he was building the things that later would make Silicon Valley possible. Well what you have to do is you have to get the right mix of ideal and illusion. In other words you have to have a great idea and you have to keep honing it. I have to keep developing it and you have to keep promoting it and the illusions are the

promotions. This is what is going to do this is how it's the next big thing. This is how we're going to go to a pushbutton society and you keep pushing those things out. Now you always have to get the right balance of actual practical results evidence or information that engineers or or business people can use and the hype and from eight thousand nine hundred one thousand Oh for what sadly happens is the illusions get ahead of the reality. And indeed by the time we get to the end of that period in one thousand one hundred three nine hundred four when Morgan excuse me when Tesla is being funded by JP Morgan Tesla comes to believe his own hype. And he comes to believe and he says at one point when he is just absolutely he's right on the edge of the nervous breakdown he says. He writes a letter to Morgan and he says Don't you know I am the greatest inventor who ever lived. I am about to launch a technological revolution and surely you is the greatest financier should support me. And he fell into

delusions of grandeur. And so he basically got more caught up with the promotions and the demonstrations and the exciting it's exciting to bring in the newspaper reporters and tell them all sorts of marvelous things but eventually people come to the point to sort of say well that's great but you told us two years ago or three years ago or five years ago that all of a sudden we'd be using this technology in that way and where's the final product. And he never came up with the final product because on his way up again the book is kind of organized around to two periods and you're right that the dinner at Delmonico's is the pivotal point from when he arrives in New York in 1884. To 1894 that first 10 years the secret behind him is he has a fabulous business partner a man named Charles Peck who basically gets in some Tesla biographies he never turns up at all and others other cases he gets like three sentences. And I argue that Tesla's career is made by peck peck is a very successful

lawyer and speculator in Wall Street and peck looks at Tesla I was imagine this in my mind and says I don't know half of what you're talking about when you get into this electricity stuff. But I know it's good and I'm going to make you a star and peck proceeds to basically provide the practical realistic stuff that complements Tesla's ideals and Tesla's vision and the two of them are enormously successful with the alternating current motor Tesla's big hit when he's a young man sadly. Pet Dies in the early 1890s in the later 1890s that second half of his career eight hundred forty one thousand four Tesla looks and tries but he never winds up with a good business partner that Sordo is able to ground him to help him connect what he's doing with current business practices and current business opportunities. You talked about the letter that he wrote to JP Morgan his backers saying you know how I'm the greatest thing. Paint a picture of

what Tesla was like in the last year or two of his life. Where was he. What was he doing. How was he functioning. Well the letter that he writes to Morgan he writes in 1983 or 1984 at that point he has been struggling and he has been exhorting every last ounce of energy to make his laboratory his wireless power station on the north shore of Long Island at a location called Wharncliffe. See he's working like crazy there and what happens is Morgan is basically set up in a more money in this I'll talk to you about how to structure a business deal with other guys but I'm not anymore my own money in this. Marconi scooped you on this. And Tesla is out there and he's you know and I'm sure there are nights when he's so fed up that he fires up the tower and there are lightning bolts flying off of it. But what he's really trying to do it's the same time as he's trying to figure out a way to pump electrical oscillating electrical energy into your earth because he believes that you can pump it into the earth and then tap it anywhere on the planet. In other words you get the energy going into the earth at just the right frequency the

whole earth is humming and you just drop your wire into the ground in Timbuktu or into Haiti and you can have electricity and all the messages that you want. Problem is Tesla never figures out how you actually can transfer the energy to the earth's crust in a way that it actually goes somewhere. And Tesla always says I'm never wrong. I am a perfect instrument of understanding nature's secrets. And so he's stuck in a bad place. Circa 1995 which is on one hand he's never wrong. On the other hand the results that he's getting at the bottom of this hundred sixty foot tunnel or not tunnel but well beneath his tower basically saying the electricity is not going where you think it's going. And so he's stuck between reality and his vision of himself just never aligning. And that's when he basically cracks up and that happens in 1984 905 when you know he's not even 50 years old he's 47 48. I don't think he ever really recovers from that nervous that

crackup rest of his life is from 1945 to when he dies in 1903 is fairly sad he has a couple of more inventions but they never go anywhere. He never is able to get a whole lot of credibility or traction. He goes bankrupt in the teens. He struggles and you know basically winds up living in more and more modest hotel rooms in the 1920s in the 1930s. And when he finally dies in the 1940s he's more or less alone because he's never married he's long since lost contact with his family in Serbia. But then being called Yugoslavia and his friends at the end of his life were pigeons that he had befriended in the park Bryant Park behind New York Public Library Bernie Carlson an amazing life and amazing story. Thank you very much for joining us. It's been my real pleasure. And when we come back we shift from a great innovator to a world of innovators. What if we didn't have to wait for the big studios to come up with great movies or first watch to

design the watch that we want to buy. Can you democratize innovation. We're going to look at the Kickstarter phenomenon. And you can always grab our podcasts on our website. Innovation hub dot org or go to SoundCloud or iTunes. And this week we've actually got a special Web Extra for you gadgets for outdoor activities with our gadget guru. We're going to be right back. I'm Carol Miller and this is innovation.