Einstein×Tesla

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Nikola, I have been thinking about something you said once—about wireless transmission of power. At the time, I confess, I did not pay enough attention. I was too busy with other things, with light and gravity. But now I wonder if perhaps you saw something the rest of us missed.
2. 00:16
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Of course I saw it! The entire planet is a conductor, Einstein. We spent the whole century stringing copper wire across continents like primitive men stretching vines through the jungle. Millions of tons of metal, buried, hung on poles—all unnecessary! The Earth itself could have carried the power.
3. 00:34
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   But the engineering, Tesla. You must admit the engineering problems were—are—substantial. The inverse square law alone suggests that broadcasting power through the air or ground would be terribly inefficient, no?
4. 00:48
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   That is because you think in terms of radiation, like Hertz. I was not talking about radiation! I was talking about conduction through the natural media, using resonance. Standing waves. The Earth has a certain electrical frequency—I measured it at Wardenclyffe. If you tune your transmitter correctly, the power does not dissipate. It resonates.
5. 01:12
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Ah, but here is where I must be the skeptic. Even with resonance, you have resistance in the medium. Energy is lost as heat. This is not opinion, this is thermodynamics.
6. 01:23
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   You dismiss it too quickly. Yes, there are losses, but compare them to the losses in our current system—the transmission lines, the transformers, the infrastructure that requires constant maintenance. We built a system that enriches the copper companies and the power monopolies, not one that serves humanity efficiently.
7. 01:43
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Now that point I cannot argue with. The economic structures around electricity have been... well, let us say they have not always served the common good.
8. 01:53
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Morgan understood this perfectly. That is why he withdrew his funding from Wardenclyffe. When I told him anyone could receive the power freely, anywhere, with a simple receiver—he asked me: where do we put the meter? How do we charge? I told him the truth would transform civilization. He heard that his monopoly would end.
9. 02:13
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes, I know something about projects that make powerful men uncomfortable. But tell me, what about alternating current itself—you won that battle at least, against Edison. The whole world runs on your polyphase system. Surely that is a victory?
10. 02:30
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    A partial victory! Yes, alternating current triumphed, and I am proud of that work. But even there, we compromised. The frequencies we chose, sixty cycles in America, fifty in Europe—these were not optimal. They were chosen for the characteristics of the generators and motors we could build at the time, not for human health or environmental harmony.
11. 02:53
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Human health? You think the frequency matters for health?
12. 02:56
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Everything in nature has a frequency, Einstein. The human nervous system, the brain—these operate on electrical principles. You surround humans with sixty-cycle fields for decades, for a century, and you think there is no effect? We should have studied this more carefully before we electrified every building.
13. 03:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Now you sound a bit like the people who were afraid of radio waves causing brain fever. I am not saying there is no effect, but the evidence would need to be substantial. The intensity of household electric fields is quite small.
14. 03:29
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Small but constant! Ubiquitous! Every wire in every wall, all vibrating at the same frequency, creating fields that penetrate everything. In my day, we were just beginning. But by the end of the century—your century—the electromagnetic environment was completely artificial. Nothing like it has existed in all of evolutionary history.
15. 03:53
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is true. Though I spent my career thinking about electromagnetic fields, I confess I thought mostly about light, about the high frequencies. The power grid frequencies seemed so low, so... mundane.
16. 04:06
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    That is because you were a theorist! No offense meant, but you worked with equations, with gedanken experiments. I worked with millions of volts, with machines that made lightning, with currents that could melt metal. When you handle such forces directly, you develop an intuition—almost a fear—of what they can do.
17. 04:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No offense taken. You are right that I preferred the chalk to the dynamo. But intuition must be tested, Nikola. Even your intuition. What you felt working with high voltages—could any of it be measured, quantified, verified by others?
18. 04:41
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Some of it I measured, yes. But much of what I understood came from direct experience, from sensitivity to the phenomena themselves. I could feel when a circuit was properly tuned. I could sense the resonance. Modern science wants everything reduced to numbers, but nature speaks in qualities too, not just quantities.
19. 05:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    There you lose me a bit. I agree that intuition guides us toward truth, but the numbers—they are how we separate what is real from what we merely wish to be real. I learned this the hard way many times.
20. 05:14
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And yet your numbers said quantum mechanics was correct, and you spent years insisting God does not play dice! Sometimes even the great Einstein trusts his intuition over his equations.
21. 05:25
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ha! You have me there. Yes, I have been stubborn about quantum theory. I still think it is incomplete, though I cannot prove it yet. But that is different from claiming we can understand electricity without measurement.
22. 05:39
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I made measurements! Thousands of them. But I also envisioned systems that were beyond the mathematics of my time—perhaps beyond yours too. When I described a rotating magnetic field to my professors in Graz, they said it was impossible, a perpetual motion machine. Three years later I built one.
23. 05:59
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And that was a genuine achievement. Your motor is one of the great inventions. But the wireless power transmission—forgive me—it was not completed. The theory was not fully worked out. Perhaps if you had collaborated more with theorists...
24. 06:14
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Collaborate! I tried, Einstein. I published, I demonstrated, I invited the greatest scientists to Wardenclyffe. But they could not see past their assumptions. They were trapped in the Maxwellian formulation, thinking only of radiation. They could not imagine what I was proposing because their mathematics had no room for it.
25. 06:36
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Maxwell's equations are rather fundamental, you know. They describe all of classical electromagnetism. If your system violated them, then perhaps...
26. 06:45
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Not violated—transcended! There are solutions to Maxwell's equations that nobody bothered to explore because they seemed impractical or difficult. Near-field effects, longitudinal waves in certain media, resonant coupling over great distances. The mathematics exists, but the will to investigate did not.
27. 07:06
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Longitudinal electromagnetic waves? Now I must be very skeptical. In vacuum, Maxwell's equations demand that electromagnetic waves are transverse. This is connected to the very structure of—
28. 07:19
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Who said vacuum? I was talking about transmission through the Earth, through the atmosphere, through conducting media! Different boundary conditions entirely. This is what I mean—everyone assumes the simplest case, the empty space, and declares all else impossible.
29. 07:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    All right, all right. I see your point. Perhaps some of these ideas deserved more investigation. But you must admit, you made it difficult sometimes. The claims about extracting energy from the ether, about death rays, about communicating with Mars—these things made serious scientists hesitate.
30. 07:56
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I never said I communicated with Mars! I said I detected signals of possible extraterrestrial origin. This is completely different. As for energy from the medium, I was talking about ambient heat, about tiny temperature differences that could be harvested. But the newspapers wanted sensationalism, and my rivals wanted to paint me as a madman.
31. 08:19
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, the newspapers are terrible. I know something about this too. They want Einstein to comment on everything from politics to pickles. It is exhausting.
32. 08:30
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    At least you received the Nobel Prize. At least the scientific establishment embraced you, celebrated you. I gave the world the electrical grid, and I died alone in a hotel room, feeding pigeons.
33. 08:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I am sorry, Nikola. Truly. Science does not always reward its contributors fairly. And you are right that you deserved far more recognition than you received.
34. 08:51
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I do not need sympathy. I need people to understand what was lost. The twentieth century could have been different. We could have had wireless power, unlimited energy, a completely different relationship with electricity. Instead we got a centralized grid, controlled by monopolies, dependent on fossil fuels for generation. We built a system that requires scarcity to be profitable.
35. 09:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    On the fossil fuels, I completely agree. This is perhaps the greatest mistake. We understood thermodynamics, we understood combustion chemistry, but we did not think about the consequences for the atmosphere, for the climate. Or rather, some did think about it, but not enough to change course.
36. 09:33
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Because the infrastructure was already built! Once you have millions of miles of wire, millions of generators, entire industries dependent on the system—change becomes almost impossible. This is why my approach was better. Begin with the correct system, the elegant system, and build that instead.
37. 09:52
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But sometimes you must start with what is possible, not what is ideal. Edison's direct current system was crude, yes, but it worked. It lit houses. Your polyphase system was better, and it replaced Edison's eventually. Progress happens in steps.
38. 10:10
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Steps! Sometimes a leap is required. Sometimes you must build the thing that seems impossible, or humanity stays trapped in incremental thinking forever.
39. 10:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I am too cautious in my old age. Certainly with quantum mechanics the young ones made the leap and I hesitated. Maybe in electrical engineering too, someone needed to be as bold as you were.
40. 10:34
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    It is not too late, you know. The twenty-first century could still correct course. Wireless power is being investigated again—on a small scale, but the principles are sound. If we could convince the engineers to think bigger, to test the resonance methods properly...
41. 10:50
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I hope you are right. Though I suspect the economic barriers are higher than the technical ones now.
42. 10:56
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    They always were, Einstein. They always were.