Tesla Fact vs. Fiction: Why the Public Perception is Wrong

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

If you want more details and are interested in WHY these myths became so popular: I made another video on the subject which you can see here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oYTceHl7n9SMha8 I also have a book on the history of electricity from 1580-today: "The Lightning Tamers" by Kathy Joseph

[@DownhillAllTheWay]

It's late now, but I will look at your link, because I'm also interested in how all that hype accumulates - like detritus in flowing water that collects around an obstacle. He is overhyped now, but he was a clever man. I just saw a KZbin heading about how Tesla understood the pyramids. I haven't watched it, but I don't imagine it will be 100% factual! More hype than fact - but who knows - maybe he designed them!

[@seanm8030]

Nice link. I would recommend Hans Camenzind's book "Much Ado about Nothing." It's a summation of the history of our use of the electron and electrical engineering. No mathematics were harmed in the writing of the book, it is quite readable, and it was written by the guy who invented the 555 timer, which was a fairly significant integrated circuit, and possibly? the most produced IC of the 20th century. Meaning he knows something of what he is talking about.

[@DownhillAllTheWay]

Thanks very much, Kathy, I followed the link and listened to yout talk. History is never absolute, and there are always differrent opinions, and indeed, different versions of what actually happened. Even people who were there at the time and knew the characters would have had different opinions - but your talk was clearly the result of a LOT of research. It was well put together, logically structured, flowed well and stayed on track. I'm retired, but at the beginning of my carreer, I did a NASA-sponsored course in electronic engineering, covering all aspects of space research at the time - radio, analogue and digital electronics, space physics, orbital mechanics, and, of course, maths - but also covered electrical engineering, and the college had a basement full of heavy motors and generators from the Johannesburg tram system, which had become defunct, and from the gold mines. I was studying how things worked, not who invented them - not the history of it all, as you have done, but I came across the names - Edison and Tesla among others, and was tangentially aware of them. As time went on, I heard more and more about Tesla that didn't seem true - and when I now see KZbin headings of how "Tesla understood how the pyramids worked" (in Egypt), it becomes more and more clear that he has been made the centre of some sort of cult - and cults are self-perpetuating. It was really good to hear your programme, which seemed to me as near factual as we're likely to get, undazzled by the characters, but not cynical or unkind to them either. It was a well-balanced summary, and though I don't know much about the historical aspects, your talk also corroborated what I already believed, especially about Tesla. The modern history of the adoption of the Tesla name by Tesla motors has put his name back into the spotlight, and goes some way to explaining the adoration of his modern-day followers. I wonder what history will say about Elon Musk! He's another who is strong on self-promotion, and may be grabbing more of the lime-light than hsi share - though there's no doubting that he has made his mark. I just have a feeling that there are aspects of his story that he would rather not make public.

Thank you for the history lesson. I, too, fell for the myths & legends surrounding Tesla's life and work... mostly because I wanted to believe them. But I am pleasantly surprised to find this video and your channel.

[@razroook]

Wow! Very revealing, especially since I'm from the Balkans, where he was born and where a "war" is led between nations on who does he "belong" to - don't remember any of this from school back then. I'd love it if you could share a link to that The Age of Electricity article, as I can't find it anywhere. Thanks! Oh, and the link to the article doesn't seem to work, as I'd love to see the references...

[@elbruces]

There's a broader thought problem involved here. Nearly every great inventor or philosopher or whatever is thought of as being completely right about all their idea, or completely wrong about them. In fact, every great figure you could name throughout history had a couple of good ideas (at most) and then a whole bunch of others that were flat-out wrong. They aren't noteworthy in history for being "great" people who are always right, but only for having come up with those one or two good ideas. That's a distinction that more people need to consciously remind themselves of whenever considering the history of ideas.

[@XxxXxx-br7eq]

I like the way you think.

[@TheShamansQuestion]

Great comment. I think about this when thinking about Einstein's discoveries and gaffes but missed it a bit this time for some reason. I guess this video is trying to say not that he wasn't right but that what is quoted of him is, technically, wrong. But the problem of words like "wrong" is that it's incendiary and divisive which is what attracts our attention, and thus makes it more likely we'll make the mistake you described (and definitely a lot of the time).

[@jmckey]

I'd recommend 'Lies my Teacher Told Me: And Everything Thing Else My American History textbook Got Wrong' by James Loewen. He highlights how so many historical figures are whitewashed and made boring and how it happens. It's actually MORE interesting and makes their accomplishments seem more attainable for us as present day people when we know their fallacies and what they got wrong. It might be my favorite book of all times in terms of how it influenced the way I think

[@contrafatual]

There is an even broader thinking problem in your comment. You include Tesla as a "great inventor or philosopher or whatever". Is he? The video is about what's wrong with the public's perception of him. It is not a judgment that he is completely right or completely wrong. There's no point in trying to "defend" him by saying he had some good ideas. Are the facts presented in the video false? If yes, then we have a problem. If not, then why the need to state the obvious? That nobody is perfect? Maybe because you want to salvage some of that feeling created by public perception? "Maybe he's not perfect, but he's STILL great, an imperfect hero." But the problem is that you would probably never think of Tesla the way you do if it weren't for him being singled out by some people as a kind of exotic genius and presented as a hero to propagate a certain ideology. If the facts hadn't been distorted, you might not have heard of him.

[@blitz8425]

I run into this same paradox with art. I hear people say things like "movies are garbage nowadays". But really, movies are probably about the same quality on the whole, it's just that we remember the good ones and not the bad ones, so of course it seems like all the old movies are good. Oh course retrospectively it would seem that movies were better in the past.

[@densealloy]

Westinghouse was not only a brilliant engineer but a visionary & savvy businessman who took care of his workers. He holds gobs of patents that changed industry, many still used today in the railroad industry and natural gas distribution. It is an absolute shame how his contributions have been somewhat erased for a narrative. I can't count the number of times I've corrected people about the "current wars" over the last 25 years. Thanks for making this. Have a wonderful day.

[@de0509]

People hate rich people and when comparing themselves to these rich people, it became very very convenient to lie to oneself that ones own paltry fortune is unrelated to ones own deficiencies, and then when they turn to certain people who do achieve more its very convenient to just say they didnt really deserve it and just boil it down to immoral corporate practices, or inheritance money, etc.

[@man.inblack]

Westinghouse was different to Edison as the latter demanded all the patents of his staff, while WH allowed his engineers to benefit and develop their own patents. While Edison ended up as the biggest individual holder of patents, WH’s legacy is said to have created more industry and innovation that spread the success amongst engineers who went on to create their own empires.

[@grahamstevenson1740]

@@man.inblack George Westinghouse was the classic engineer's engineer and his staff respected that.

[@DH-ts6ho]

Should I take your word for it? Or should I do my own homework? ... But I dkn't have time for it. :(

[@lc9245]

​@@man.inblack He's a different person to Edison, but Westinghouse was the son of a machine shop owner, while Edison was struggling most of his early life to become an inventor. The reason why Edison was celebrated was because his story is much more of an "American story", but also because J.P. Morgan owns GE. Today, the anti-Edison narrative, a push back against American educational system and media putting Edison everywhere, is woefully misguided. The man had his flaws, but while he was a ruthless hustler, he's also a real eccentric inventor. After all, unlike the clean, intelligent Westinghouse and brilliant, popular Tesla, Edison was uneducated, ruthless, unkempt and a slob.

[@edshort1138]

It is so very time consuming to skip summaries and read all the relevant Original sources. But this video is an excellent example of how important it is for someone take on the research burden and share her findings, to improve our access to accurate history. Thanks Kathy.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

Thank you

[@musicurio]

We may be a little disappointed in having some favourite myths "busted" but it is far more satisfying to see credit given to the ones that deserve it. Thank you Kathy.

[@jasonlawson8619]

She is cancel truth portion of cancel culture.

[@bluetoad2668]

@@jasonlawson8619 what?!

[@Mrbfgray]

@@bluetoad2668 He's saying his childish emotional religion was violated. The fragile Nikola Tesla cult has been an obvious farce for many yrs.

[@hexstar8576]

@@Mrbfgray Ya, your right. Tesla only had like just under two hundred patents to his name. What a hack! Just a question for you. Do you have any patents to your name Bo!? One could wonder, how the crazy "Nikola Tesla" could complete so many accomplishments. Hmmm......🤔

[@jzrgrmm]

@@hexstar8576 jesus, look at this tantrum, he starts with sarcasm, proceeds to ad hominem and finish with ad absurdum.

[@muzvid]

My Dad was an electrical engineer specializing in control systems for AC motors. He's long argued that Tesla's gotten more credit than he deserves, but he's never taken the time to explain his assertion. Thanks for doing so!

[@josephjankowski1153]

Thank you so much for combatting this nonsense. The worst thing about this whole Tesla vs. Edison pop culture meme is that people have come to despise Edison, who was a brilliant inventor and Entrepreneur who overcame a disability to make significant contributions to history.

[@vitorribeiro3476]

In the twitter, Tesla is a wizard and Edison a thief. The Elon Musk influence in this is horrible

[@cara-seyun]

They were both brilliant in their own rights, there’s no need to pit them against each other for some fairy-tale like battle

[@Civsuccess2]

The left rewrite history to discredit Edison. He was being portrayed as a greedy white capitalist who abused his minority workers.

[@paradiselost9946]

why did tesla emigrate to the US in the first place, and whose lab did he use twice, later on? edison built a business by himself, and had employees and businesses relying on him to provide a service. then theres the westinghouse deal with making lightbulbs and ignoring patents "until we recieve the court order to stop making them..." unbeknownst to his pet "lab rat"... the money he blew at colorado was invested to do something entirely different... make a better lightbulb. the whole nonsense about three, yet he didnt even develop 3 phase beyond one generator that i am aware of, and that wasnt for any practical application but merely yet another one of his little devices for the lab...

[@zsimon4267]

"Tesla's devices are a gateway drug for many electrical engineers, and that is not a small thing." I do love it

[@seanm8030]

I am an Electrical Engineer. Tesla's devices apart from the AC Induction Motor are a complete waste of time.

[@Lancia444]

@@seanm8030 Yeah, I remember most of our elec professors ripping into most of his devices...this lady is another non-applied physicist...it's all about the concept (even if it's not realistic, viable or possible).

[@seanm8030]

Mr. Danforth 374 If you want to talk about things Tesla had nothing to do with or had peripheral involvement in, such as radio, the fluorescent light, or high power transmission, go right ahead. That's rather what I am talking about. Seems like this would not be the place to do it, Id recommend starting another thread. If you want to talk about things that are truly useless like the Tesla coil or high frequency AC whatever that means, go right ahead.

[@seanm8030]

@@Lancia444 I don't have a problem with people liking Tesla or with the author of the video. What I can't stand is people saying he's some wonder genius that invented infinite power transfer or whatever. He didn't. Infinite power transfer is not possible.

[@CeroAshura]

"Tesla's lab notes are a gateway to many abilities some consider unnatural."

[@stevenskorich7878]

We have turned Tesla into a Merlin-like figure who fills a need for Secret Knowledge That The Man Is Concealing. He was a great electrical engineer, a not-so-great businessman, and a profound eccentric.

[@thegroove2000]

Almost everything commonly told about Tesla is wrong! He didn't invent AC, he didn't battle Edison over AC vs. DC, he didn't even have a rivalry with Edison, he didn't want to give everyone free electricity and he wasn't a Physics genius! WHAT THE FUCK MY MIND IS BLOWN. LIKE A FAULTY BATTERY.

[@Jonodrew1286]

I would like to say one thing though…….! Why did the CIA take all his material after his death? -and why was his tower taken down in a hurry? - Surely instead of demolishing it - you would have just disassembled it and sold the materials on to a respective buyer? - or maybe they were troubled about the possibility that this inventor maybe on to something??? I think we are all swayed by the so called facts and maybe a little disinformation was added just to enhance flavour of making him appear to be an eccentric. Human beings seem to be drawn to ridicule like a moths drawn to light!- because it gives them something to do and makes them feel just!!! The fact is he was not an in your face kind of guy nor a bully! just quirky with fanciful ideas, but ideas with purpose, had he been left to his own devices and given the financial backing he deserved, then maybe we would be honouring a different legacy…..??? Anyway JP Morgans legacy ain’t pretty!!!!!

[@awancah7309]

@@Jonodrew1286 he piss of JP morgan as inventor, so inventor take tower by money. (coper very expensive in that era)

[@Jonodrew1286]

Seems funny that in America, they are now using mini Tesla Towers, what gives, maybe they knew the implications and wanted to shut him down and brand him a madman failed inventor🤔

[@PadraigTomas]

@@Jonodrew1286 Where may I see one of these mini Tesla towers?

[@TheChzoronzon]

Thanks. I have been "battling" this nonsense for years now... Ole Nikola has somehow jumped from being unjustly unknown 15 years ago to become some kind of absurd pop-science comic superhero... it's fascinating. And exhausting.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

So…exhausting

[@YouFallenforit]

I have a sinking suspicion a lot of exhausting people just found out about him more recently. And are more likely to only know a finite amount and possibly only what others have told them. What I find exhausting is the new fanboys that know little of him or his experiments speaking as if they have been studying him for years.

[@sol-hunter2332]

I suspect it's due to the "making electricity free" so people view him as a martyr for the "anti-capitalists."

[@TheChzoronzon]

@@sol-hunter2332 Tha'ts part of the mystique, sure Nobody remembers the Death Ray :( :D

[@Helperbot-2000]

@@YouFallenforit i suspect we will get a more accurate consensus amongst the general public in a few decades, because to me it feels alot of fanboys are overcorrecting for him beeing ralatively underplayed in the us until recently

[@DownhillAllTheWay]

Since learning about Tesla during my time at college in the late 60's, I have seen the myth of Tesla grow unchecked on the internet. I don't know why this is. He was certainly a bright guy, and came up with some nifty gadgets (I really like the one-way fluid valve with no moving parts), but it never seemed to me that he was anywhere near as creditworthy as his myth would have us believe. It's really good to see somebdoy shine a light on him. He must have been supremely self-confident, if he went up against Einstein, calling Relativity "pseudo-science". It should be noted, however, if this was around 1900, then it was before the proofs of relativity had been shown - light being bent by the mass of the sun, and the calculation of the orbit of Mecury. Before those proofs, even the scientific community of the day were skeptical about it, and there were probably a lot of people who doubted it, because, let's face it, it's not exactly intuitive. We can all be misled by the improbability of something, and even Einstein was skeptical about Entanglement - also not intuitive!

[@75aces97]

I think it’s a matter of projection. As a layman in this field I didn’t have strong opinions about Tesla, but I remembered his name as one of many important figures from high school physics in the early 1990’s. I don’t remember him being some folk hero until the past 20 years. I posit that it’s projection in the sense that Tesla is the David who didn’t become a household name, while Edison is the convenient Goliath who represents the soulless corporation or government or whichever bogeyman who screws over the little guy. I do think it’s unfortunate that we pick and choose certain figures like Edison to mythologize as some visionary who “invented” all these essential devices out of thin air as opposed to the less romantic story of purchasing inventions with potential and developing them to the point that they can work more reliably and affordably, or just finding an optimal use for them. But I don’t think the answer is to counter it with more great man mythology.

[@krupert8355]

I recently watched a video about entanglement saying that there were two schools of thought, Einstein's general relativity VS quantum physics, and for a long time these were seen as competing. Yet today we are starting to think both are explaining the same phenomenons viewed from different ways of thinking. I don't really know what I'm talking about, but my point is, it wouldn't necessarily be wrong call general relativity a. pseudoscience when there are alternate valid ways of explaining the universe.

[@DownhillAllTheWay]

@@krupert8355 I'm afraid, Entanglement is a bridge too far for me. Even Einstein didn't accept it initially, and called it "Spooky action at a distance", but I think he had reached the point of believing that there was more to the atomic realm than he knew about, and grudgingly accepted it. It was mostly information being transferred faster than light that he couldn't come to terms with. He argued initially that an entangled pair was like a pair of gloves that had been put into two boxes - if you opened one and found it was a left glove, then nomatter how far the other box had been taken, you would know that it contained the right glove. But he was apparently wrong. I say "apparently" because it's in a realm where I can't honestly venture an opinion. An experiment was set up (I just looked it up - the Freedman-Clauser experiment) in which they proved that entanglement works in entangled pairs which are not known at the time of separation, and a high enough percentage of them demonstrate entanglement that it *_has_* to be true. Read it for yourself and see what you make of it, but I don't understand it. Clever people have repeated the experiment, and believe the results, so I guess I sort-of believe it - but it's down to blind faith in the abilities of others. In 50 years' time, there will probably be gadgets that work using its principles, and it will be taught in infant school, but I'm sometimes amazed at what my grandkids are learning. My grandson, aged 8, knows stuff I didn't know till I was 15 or more, and learning aids like KZbin have been hugely instrumental in this. As the Bard said ... "Oh brave new world, that hath such people in it!"

[@MacLuckyPTP]

I'm no expert, but I've seen a lecture how all the proofs of Relativity can be explained by so called "electromagnetic retardation" without the need bend space or time and melt our brains. There is a genius called Walter Russell who does a great job explaining non-orthodox electricity, using a wave model, not a particle model.

[@klocke5247]

@@DownhillAllTheWay There appears to be a mess of assumptions made that don't appear to have solid evidence behind them. My main skepticism involves measurement errors.

[@Nighthawkinlight]

Very good video. I came across several of these documents myself some years ago when researching Edison, but I didn't feel like kicking this particular beehive. I'm glad you did though. We're all a lot more easily deceived than we realize, by both internal and external pressures.

[@yasirrakhurrafat1142]

Hey bro . How u doin ! Nice to see you being active . Really like your videos , never thought I'd ever discover a KZbin channel that's informative , practical and fun . Loved your Starlite , and Calcium *somethin coating for cooling videos . Love the others as well . I just thought I'd bother you ,.. seeing you here .

[@aqua-bery]

@@yasirrakhurrafat1142 Space goes after punctuation. Like this. Never before. Only after. Including, commas. But (parenthesis) are different. Treat them as their own word, kind of. Even after... Three dots. Even after: a colon Even after; a semicolon And so on...

[@yasirrakhurrafat1142]

@@aqua-bery Sorry.. its kind of a force of habit. ( The putting space thing... ) My grammar or punctuation isn't up to par. I'll try to learn more, expand my vocabulary a bit, improve my punctuation. ( I'm quite dumb in general, an Illiterate Indian guy. ) I've not even graduated high school, dropped out.. I'm old.. . ( Not trying to guilt you. Just saying. ) Hopefully I'll try to be more involved.. someday. In some major ( breakthrough-esque ) things and make a difference someday.. hopefully. Thanks! Its a long tangent. I apologise for... Idk.. being so incompetent. ( Edited punctuation again .. *had to )

[@aqua-bery]

@@yasirrakhurrafat1142 hey it's ok. I'm sure it will all workout man!

[@yasirrakhurrafat1142]

@@aqua-bery appreciate you taking a moment to be wholesome. Thanks bro. I hope the best of the best for you too!

[@harino1066]

i was a young man lecturing people on how misunderstood and brilliant Tesla was. general knowledge overtime tempered my attitude. this video brings a mystic fantasy masquerading as conspiracy back into reality. thank you so much.

[@bobbwc7011]

Tesla was never that brilliant and never misunderstood. He was simply not that relevant. To any electrical engineer the dude is a foot note at best. No discipline within electrical engineering, except one type of high voltage source in high voltage engineering (ergo: a niche application), uses any of Tesla's "inventions" and Tesla was literally overrun by Europeans. All the innovations happened in Europe hammerblow after hammerblow while Tesla sat on an irrelevant North American patent. At the same time a much brighter guy, Michail Doliwo-Dobrowolski, chief engineer at AEG, invented three phase AC generation, transmission, and distribution, and AEG became the global market leader for electrification.

[@loganfisher3138]

Hey Kathy. I just want to say that as a physicist I really appreciate all the work you put into this channel. While my focus is on advancing out knowledge into the future, the history of science is grossly underappreciated and is incredibly important to developing a stronger understanding of why we do things certain ways.

[@solidpython4964]

The thing that made me feel bad for Tesla when I remember researching him wasn’t really all that “warring” with Edison supposedly, but the fact that Tesla gave up on his royalties deals with Westinghouse which cost him a lot of money, and he ended up growing old sad and alone and without much comfort that he should’ve had given his accomplishments.

[@ananya2711]

Exactly! It was heartbreaking to read articles about his later years in life

[@gavindingley2268]

Actually Edison and Tesla got on fine. When Tesla's lab burnt down, Edison offered him lab space.

[@marksherrill9337]

Actually Westinghouse made Tesla an over night millionaire. Tesla spent all that money on research.

[@user-lb8do4ew6k]

@@marksherrill9337 a fair chunk funded Tesla's ridiculously extravagant lavish lifestyle.

[@cck4863]

"growing old sad and alone and without much comfort" Given that he is still doing research on "Edison" money in his old days, he don't seem very sad and alone to me.While he wasn't living a millionaire life, he certainly wasn't poor. Based on account, he had an upper middle class lifestyle paid for by various funds. While he did not get them for free, it is Still considered good comfort.

[@whengale]

i'm currently reading that dual biography of faraday and maxwell that came out in 2014 and found this video via a comment of yours on reddit. i loooove how much work was clearly put into this. thank you!

[@michaelweiske702]

I don't think we can say that tesla was terrible at physics: he has some inventions involving fluid mechanics that are fascinating to look into, namely the tesla valve and the tesla turbine. The tesla valve acts like a valve but contains no moving parts, great for reducing failure, and the tesla turbine uses fluid viscosity to generate power and is used nowadays as a pump for viscous fluids like sewage.

[@cck4863]

It can be said the reason his fluid mechanics stuffs are so strange and great IS BECAUSE HE IS TERRIBLE AT Physics. Physics at that time can't explain how his invention works ... (funny as it sound) neither can he. Tesla was a man with ideas ,money to spend and most important of all: the motivation to spend them. He just make them, modify them to make it work and then leave the rest to scientists.

[@de0509]

Although I can think of one weakness of both these valves and turbines, which is the existence of very tiny spaces where even tiny amount of deposits or changes in the geometry of the cavities (e.g. calcium and dust) would greatly diminish their efficiencies. This means more frequent maintenance and thus downtime

[@grahamstevenson1740]

Tesla clearly didn't understand wireless energy !

[@WentzCraft]

"spooky action at a distance" well I guess Einstein was a terrible physicist.

[@XxxXxx-br7eq]

@@de0509 unless there's a simple solution that can be added to it the clean it out without it being that difficult

[@artdehls9100]

Tesla groupies cannot name a single other electrical engineer. "Tesla was the smartest man who ever lived!" *Koff*John Von Neumann"*Koff*

[@RiverBottom22]

I have that same feeling in the pit of my stomach as when I learned that the Santa Claus I loved so dearly was actually my grandfather dressed up in a homemade Santa suit.

[@edwardvermillion8807]

hello... spoilers! my christmases will never be the same knowing your grandfather is sneaking into my house and eating all my milk and cookies!

[@tolfan4438]

Your grandpop is Santa that is so cool

[@madero-jb5ri]

That your grandfather? That means your grandfather is my father. HFS!

[@growskull]

@@madero-jb5ri his grandfather is my father too... hi brother

[@rolandliana]

Are you related to Michael Jackson? Just wonder since his mother kissed Santa Clause.

[@aprilrain5553]

I’m an autistic 14 year old with a special interest. Learning about scientists (not science in general) keeps my attention. This video intrigued me a lot! I love learning about scientists like Michael Faraday (I love him, I nearly gasped when you mentioned him), Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, etc. I have been meaning to learn more about Tesla so thank you ^^

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

April, I’m glad you liked my video. I have made a lot of videos about Michael Faraday - I am a big fan of his as well. Good luck in your studies

[@aprilrain5553]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics thank you, I’ll make sure to check it out!

[@aprilrain5553]

@@deathsee ???

[@DownhillAllTheWay]

@@deathsee "watching click bait, from a person with an agenda ..." What is her agenda?

[@aprilrain5553]

@@deathsee I mean…you could at least elaborate

[@ffggddss]

Being from a physics background, and having noticed over the last several years what has seemed to be a sort of "stealth PR campaign" to promote the idea that Tesla was an unsung genius who has been jilted by history, I found myself often wondering what was behind all of it. All I knew of Tesla up to that point, was that the mks unit of magnetic field strength was given his name, and that he invented that thing with the sparks flying everywhere, that appears in all the old monster flicks (but not to be confused with the van de Graff generator). I'm glad to see someone has gone to the trouble to ferret out the truth of the matter. Thank you, Kathy. Fred

[@theboombody]

Well, I don't blame Tesla for believing relativity is a pseudoscience. It took me a LONG time to accept time dilation as even remotely possible.

[@thegroove2000]

It appears he was still gifted.

[@ffggddss]

@@thegroove2000 Oh yes, no doubt! But he suffered from lack of knowing what it was that he didn't know. Fred

[@goodmaro]

It's not hard to see why. Everyone who has fringe ideas about technology and wishes to promote them or products or services based on them has an incentive to dig up other examples of outlier technologists whose ideas were unjustly shoved aside. If it can be established that Tesla, or Wilhelm Reich, or some other pioneer who got carried away with hirself and went beyond the bounds of their own competence actually had "it", then why listen to skeptics about other technologies? On this very channel I've brought up a radio pioneer who tends to be ignored and whose theory was wrong, but who actually did devise and demonstrate a somewhat workable (verified independently by experimenters many decades later) radio telegraphy (and later telephony) system in 1865. It was a technologic and financial dead end, but had it been taken more seriously at the time, it likely would have sped the development of the field. Sometimes people with the wrong ideas can honestly produce results "by accident", but that doesn't mean they had the magic touch or that we should be contrarian in all our thinking. It still usually pays to bet "the chalk" against overoptimistic suckers.

[@gavindingley2268]

I think it is simply that Tesla tended to write for journals/magazines for the general public, rather than for academia, this went a log way to remove his name from the history of science and engineering. It is worth mentioning that he was president of the AIEE (now IEEE). Another factor that probably didn't help was that in the latter part of his career he worked as a consultant for Telefunken close to the WW1, perhaps putting him in bad company from the American perspective. As for Relativity, even Albert Michelson still spoke of the Ether, even though his own famous experiment disproved it's existence. Tesla was certainly forgotten, even though he is publicly recognized today, there is still much reluctance by academia, which his recent public revival seems to only strengthen this situation, mainly due to the inherent sensationalism.

[@craigslinkman1348]

Finally someone told the truth! Thank you. I will send Quora questioners to this video. Of course, historical accuracy and respect for science isn't popular in today's world.

[@KulaGGin]

_"respect for science isn't popular in today's world"_ What? We live in a time with the most respect for science. 400 years ago you would be hanged as a heretic for showing people what we can do now or even just saying that Earth goes around the sun. Nowadays no matter what you show to people, you're not gonna be hanged as a servant of Satan.

[@ThePeaceableKingdom]

Tesla wasn't as crap a physicist as you say, though he wasn't a modern man of science either. He invented a very interesting practical turbine pump, no small feat, in a manner very similar to the way he envisioned the rotating fields that led to his practical AC motor. That's some impressive brain power. Tesla sold his patent(s) to Westinghouse, but when Westinghouse couldn't pay he tore up the contract. So he really *_gave_* them to Westinghouse. He wasn't a striving businessman, for sure! And broadcast power does work - it will illuminate a neon tube with no direct connection to the power source. I used to be a sign maker, we did it in the shop for fun and tube testing. But it suffers from the same inverse square law that the transmission of light or radio suffers - you have to be very close. In general, impractical and unfeasible on scales much smaller than Tesla was imagining. And the earth *can* be used as part of a circuit as anyone who has built a crystal set knows, but not in the way - much less the scale - that Tesla was envisioning.

[@ArseneGray]

it is not broadcasting tho, if the objects are very close they are literally interacting with the magnetic fields around the conduit. Look up veritasium's video of how current is actually transmitted.

[@ThePeaceableKingdom]

@@ArseneGray I've seen Veritasium's vid, but he is talking about the transmission of current through a conductor. That's different from broadcasting, but broadcasting is still interacting with electro-magnetic fields. When you pick up a radio station from a hundred miles away, you are receiving the variations in the magnetic field at a particular frequency (if it's AM) and it can be measured as a voltage, even though the conduit (using thousands of watts in a cable sent to an antenna) is a hundred miles away. That's broadcasting.

[@rogerphelps9939]

@@ThePeaceableKingdom Actually you can equally well can receive variations in the electric field.. The only thing that reacts to the magnetic field is a ferrite rod or a eire wound into a large coil. Using the electric field in all sorts of different antennae is far more prevalent.

[@ThePeaceableKingdom]

@@rogerphelps9939 It's the electro-magnetic field. Magnetism creates electric fields, as Faraday showed, and as it does in an old fashioned car generator. And electricity creates magnetic fields, as demonstrated a decade earlier by by Oersted. The coil has a resonance depending on the diameter, length, guage of the wire, number of turns and many other factors, that selects and excludes and intensifies the received signals. That's definitely broadcasting, when the source is hundreds or thousands of miles away. But broadcasting _usable amounts of power,_ as Tesla imagined, would require enourmous energy being pushed out and it would be very dependent on distance. Increasing the distance arithmetically decreases the power received geometrically.

[@vsm1456]

@ThePeaceableKingdom, inventing something and being a good physicist is not the same. It may overlap, but not always.

[@shaun2072]

WOW, that was amazing Kathy. I always wondered why Telsa went down the wacky rabbit hole of wireless transmission, but understanding his rejection of some fundamental physics really puts it into perspective.

[@BartdeBoisblanc]

Indeed an analog of how Tesla understood the Physics of Electric could be compared to someone understanding technology just before the tube era and someone understanding the Semiconductor era. It's that different . He also still believed in the either.

[@Chris.Davies]

He went mad. Batshit crazy, in fact. Much like another famous man who uses the word Tesla!

[@clydekimsey7503]

@@Chris.Davies who else?

[@markkinsler4333]

@@BartdeBoisblanc You can believe in the existence of the luminiferous ether and reject Einstein's theories and still utilize physics quite nicely _if_ you stick to low velocities and short distances. Tesla went through university physics courses, and modern physics wasn't universally recognized as being all that vital. Most elementary college physics courses barely touch Einstein or the ether even today. Neither Edison nor Tesla understood or cared about radio waves because radio and electric power were widely-separated fields at that time. Edison made a primitive vacuum tube but couldn't think of a commercial application for it, and it's likely that Tesla was aware of Maxwell's equations and perhaps Hertz' work, but neither thought about wireless communications much. (It's surprising that Edison, who had a deep knowledge of telegraphy, wasn't interested in wireless.) It all had to wait for Marconi, Armstrong, and others to pursue radio.

[@thomasjamison2050]

@@markkinsler4333 As always, hindsight is flawless. I don't think Tesla was all that crazy when it came to his ideas about electrical transmission through the air, but his vision was not perfect, but if can get past the Einsteinian blinders look enough to take an open minded look at the Electric Universe and it's understanding of Birkeland currents and electrical transmission of power between planets and suns, Tesla looks a bit more attuned to reality. I predict the James Webb telescope is going to cause far more consternation to NASA than it will to Wal Thornhill.

[@gufranansari9286]

This real story didn't sound like a Hollywood biopic packed with rivelry, action, jealousy, too much greed. So people kept throwing in bits and pieces from time to time to spice it up. And in the era of youtube it all went to another level and we got a new version of this story.

[@ogbmt]

I don't remember being taught anything about Tesla when I learned science at school. We were taught about Edison and a lot about Faraday, and I've always been confused about all of the fascination that the public and media seems to have with Tesla

[@overunityinventor]

Tesla didn't invent AC but he popularised it so much that people believe he invented it, just like people believe james watt invented steam engine when he didn't actually. If you go through the technical know-how of wireless electrical transmission through earth and air, you will find that it was actually free energy distribution, because even if 100 receivers receieved 100 watts each (100x100 in total) the one transmitter would still be consuming 100 watts, he was not sending electricity wirelessly, he was creating a situation (rapid (very high frequency) ionisation and de-ionisation of air at nano scale under miles of radius from tower) so receivers would induce (not receive) the same amount of electricity. He could light bulbs with one wire because air was ionising and deionising rapidly and bulbs small capacitance was enough to hold opposite (to wire) polarity of charge momentarily until the cycle is reversed. He has patents showing harnessing cosmic rays, he created a motor that ran on cosmic rays. Even though he didn't create AC, but he was a genius and an electrical wizard. I am wondering who is funding you to spread lies and defame tesla? Must be big oil corps.

[@bobmusil1458]

"created a motor that ran on cosmic rays" Yeah, right 🤦‍♂

[@exclamationpointman3852]

SATAN

[@hugostiglitz6914]

Thank you for this upload. I've been saying yhis for years, but if you make any comments of this nature on the pro myth KZbin channels you get verbally assaulted by the Tesla fanboys who believe Tesla never made a mistake or wandered down the wrong technical rabbit hole!

[@bmabs35]

I wish Faraday got the kind of deification Tesla had received

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

In a way I do too because Faraday was so amazing but In another way I’m glad he’s not revered as a god because he would’ve hated that he was a very humble man who did not like adoration or undue attention.

[@86soulx]

Faraday's name is all over physics textbooks while Tesla's name is only mentioned in physics textbooks when talking about the SI unit of magnetic flux. That, in my opinion, is real deification, not some temporary internet hype.

[@kingduckford]

Nobody should ever be deified.

[@jwnagy]

Interesting. Faraday was experimenting with Chromite, and saw its potential for alloys decades before anyone else.

[@drmodestoesq]

Having an basic electrical unit named after you is pretty high praise. That's like having an element named after a famous chemist.

[@traditionaltools5080]

"Tesla was born that year." So AC actually invented Tesla? Another excellent video.

[@Smellslikenarcspirit]

Yeah like our ancesters ( invented ) fire . You cant invent something that already exists . Same whit tesla . He didn't ( invent ) AC . He only invented a practical use for it .

[@susilgunaratne4267]

Yes, despite all the obvious facts social media & other sensational documentaries made on distorting it to make him a fake hero in the gullible masses mind.

[@KNemo1999]

Correlation is not causation, but in this case I think it may be the case.

[@marin4311]

Yes Tesla was actually born in the USSR, were these kind of inversions happen. He was a time traveler, you know.

[@weezlewubs]

This was an informative watch! I have to admit I get irritated when a figure seems to get idolized and praised beyond reason (no human is ever that perfect). So my instinct was that there was more to the story. Thank you for sharing! Westinghouse, Edison and Tesla deserve measured recognition for all of their contributions!

[@arpadkovacs2116]

After reading a book about Tesla, I came to the same conclusions. I realized, however, that people don't seem to want to hear about it. It is unbelieveable how far can reality and perception be from each other. I am surprised you have not been stoned. 😁

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

Honestly, me too. 🤣

[@Elite7555]

Yeah, the effects of idolization and personality cult. Misinformed at best; creepy at worst.

[@carlosgaspar8447]

not just one book, because i must have read 5 proclaiming much of the same thing.

[@SpotterVideo]

I had a friend who is an electrician get upset with me when I told him Tesla did not come up with a way to get free energy from the air.

[@davidfaraday7963]

@@SpotterVideo There is a type of person who believes that we could all have unlimited free electricity if only "they" hadn't supressed it. "They" is variously the government and/or big oil interests. According to these people Tesla discovered how this free energy could be harvested but government agents stole all his papers and stopped him going public with the information. Its all total BS, of course, but to true believers the more they are told its BS the more certain they are that its true.

[@41.ishankashyap19]

Tired of all the people preaching that Tesla invented alternating current , I came here looking for answers and and a way in which I could expand my knowledge on this topic. Then I came across this gem of a video , which put forth proofs and arguments with which I couldn't agree more.Iam a grade 11 physics student always on a lookout to learn something extra , and seeing this video today has made me feel that today was fruitful. Thank you mam for enlightening us with your knowledge and diving deep into the topic to bust out all the bogus rumors once and for all. Thank you mam for uploading such a marvelous video, I will always be on a lookout for new Physics related videos from your channel to broaden my own knowledge on the subject. Love from India🇮🇳🇮🇳

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

ISHAN KASHYAP so glad you liked it and good luck with your studies.

[@jensschroder8214]

AC is better for arc lamps because the electrodes burn off on both sides. With DC, the positive electrode is consumed faster.

[@bernzeppi]

It’s great to come across a YT channel that puts the myth of Tesla in its right place. This is the stuff all electrical engineers know from academic study but KZbin has its own armchair professors who through the empty clanging and reverberation of self assured dunces become more ignorant than the day they were born. Bravo!

[@johnnycash4034]

Same as with the Tesla brand and Musk who highjacked it to sell his snake oil.

[@anullhandle]

@@johnnycash4034 The Venn for Musk fan boy and Tesla fan boy is pretty much a circle...

[@tonyduncan9852]

@@johnnycash4034 _"highjacked it to sell his snake oil"_ - He backed and sacked, which isn't unusual. He then SUCCEEDED. That IS unusual. "Snake oil", I suppose, is the suggestion that an electrical economy will stop your descendants from dying in wars brought about by mass starvation, mass migration, caused by global warming. That's too hard for you to deal with. Well, your ideology is _my_ snake oil. I celebrate the distance between us.

[@tonyduncan9852]

@@anullhandle _"The Venn for Musk fan boy and Tesla fan boy is pretty much a circle."_ - The enclosing circle is ENGINEERING SCIENCE, which is truth, not opinion. Resenting reason and truth is a destructive trait of humanity. Grow up.

[@anullhandle]

@@tonyduncan9852 No problem with science or engineering it's fan boys that swallow the hype that's annoying. Still a chuckle when they get their panties in a bunch. Thanks.

[@PursuitofKnowledge178]

Such a loving and good knowledgeable person. Love your videos!

[@Trico42]

In the late 90s, I had an assignment that wanted me to evaluate a page on the Internet if it was fact or fiction. It depicted these myths as fact. I easily saw that they couldn't be true then. I was quite surprised to see how much the myths spread since then.

[@paulg3336]

When I was an apprentice radio technician in the 1970s ,we used to refer to current as magic pixies. It seems we were correct all along

[@every1665]

Reminds me of the standard technicians joke about how electricity looks like smoke, and is sealed inside every component. That's why when you see smoke it stops working.

[@jdm3072]

I think the best assessment of Tesla was that he was very savvy as an electrical engineer. His refinements of a few handful of existing designs helped the developing field of electrical generation toward but didn't change it profoundly. The more far-reaching concepts he had that could have profoundly changed humanity all came to failure. His imagination surpassed the reality of his capacities in those instances. He deserves praise, but not unwarranted deification.

[@roccoyates9400]

So wrong lol

[@larsord9139]

Jdm: “His imagination surpassed the reality of his capacities”. I would say: surpassed the reality of physics.

[@atmospheres11]

Thats only an opinion. Fortunately historically the facts which the vast majority don't bother to look at are there for the finding. If an opinion is sourced solely from someone else's opinion then its still just that, opinion, and that by the way is perfectly OK as long as it is never put forth as fact.

[@hm5142]

As a physicist, I have always seen the comparison of Tesla to Einstein a sign of a total misunderstanding of the contributions of both. Tesla was a player in the "wild west" of early electrical engineering He was a very clever engineer and made some interesting and lasting contributions to the field. Einstein, using the discoveries of Maxwell and Planck, made some of the greatest contributions to our understanding of the universe in all of human history. There really have been only a handful of people in history whose contributions are comparable to Einstein.

[@jlmassir]

I like very much in your videos how you can be a deep critic to someone, but also recognize one's great accomplishments and put all of this in historical and human perspective. This kind of balance is sweet and I don't think at all that the very much needed popularization of scicence needs to be sensationalist to attract people, in fact, people are attracted by twisted plots and complex narratives.

[@Dailymailnewz]

Sure, she is not the decended or relative of Edison the theif.

[@peteralcivar6731]

Tesla has a mixed history, but he is not alone. William Shockley, the winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor, later became an ardent believer in eugenics and white supremacy. So you think you know a guy...

[@fernandobernardo6324]

​@@Dailymailnewz Prove it

[@kellecetraro4807]

Mad props for having the guts to make this video 🙏🏼

[@tanner1985]

The video is good and you make good points, and I agree on them. Tesla absolutely needs demystification. But while maybe you have time constraints when making videos, at 9:13 it seems a little bit superficial to say that "Tesla wanted to electrify the whole Earth, so he could input energy at one spot and remove it anywhere else in the world". These are the kind of sentences that makes one sound crackpot and silly, biasing the public in a negative way. It is not good for a physicist (or engineer as well) to fly over the real mechanism this man envisioned. It's true that Marconi did transmit wirelessly and his method "works", Tesla never denied this, he simply told that this is a lossy method that was uninteresting to him. Tesla transmitted what we consider regular radio signals many years before Marconi, according to many sources (the most importat being the book "On his Works.... by Leland Anderson"). Instead, Tesla wanted to irradiate electromagnetic energy **INSIDE** the ground, looking to get reflection on the opposite side of the planet and thus, owing to constructive interference, estabilish a standing wave with nodes and antinodes on the whole planet. Energy could be "removed" only on those voltage antinodes and NOT "anywhere else in the world". This method would also be nearly lossless. This specificity should be clear to a physicist like you, I mean, electromagnetic reflections on transmission lines, dielectrics, metals, etc are common knowledge. The fact that this nuances never get mentioned (in this video too) makes me wonder if really the method is understood to his core or not, even by highly educated content makers like you. Anyway, to conclude, one should say that nobody ever replicated a transmitter such powerful to be able to reach the opposite side of the planet and able to get reflections, so from an engineering point of view his claims remain **UNPROVEN** until someone tries again with modern equipment end measurements. On the other side, standing voltage waves on dielectric materials are easily achieved with small scale Tesla coils from everybody willing to try some experiments in their backyard, so I wonder if more instructed people and scientists are aware or not of these feats easily accomplished even by amateurs.

[@baruchben-david4196]

I'm glad you uploaded this. I can't tell you how many times I've suggested that Tesla wasn't all he's cracked up to be, only to be told that I'm an ignorant fool who should do some research... which is annoying, because I did considerable research to arrive at my conclusions. I will note that the primary source of the wonders of Tesla come from Tesla's autobiography. I would say that this source is not reliable. Unfortunately, many Tesla fans simply refuse to consider anything that might refute their ideas. Maybe it's because Tesla is a hero to them, and they can't bear the thought that their hero was actually just a human being...

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

It’s all such a shame because the tesla coil in particular is so cool and inspires so many people to study electrical engineering and then it turns into this cult of personality.

[@midnightwatchman1]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics My physics Lab at high school had one a Tesla coil you are right it made me want to become an electrical engineer

[@darrinseelye2091]

How many patents of his are using to write your message? He is all he is cracked up to be, even if you only consider the contributions he made to the poly phase system. I do agree with the misunderstanding pointed out in the video, but that's only the genral public making these assumptions.

[@craigtevis1241]

@@darrinseelye2091 Name one Tesla patent used to post to the Internet.

[@darrinseelye2091]

@@craigtevis1241 Well first there is a technicality here, patents expired in about 17 years at the time. Nikola Tesla contributions to the Polly phase system sums up your question though. One of high importance being that of his contributions to the reciprocating engine. Patents are always being modified for better practices, and obviously engineering has come a long way sense those original patents. Oh and yes he is all he is cracked up to be, and we should all be praising the godfathers of our modern society. Kathy's chanel from what I have seen has done a credible job giving credit were it should be given, and I'll probably go crazy watching all her videos.

[@bailydenhouten1072]

This is the most thorough video on this subject I've ever seen. THANK YOU so much for mentioning Ferraris. It's incredible how much misinformation is plugged anymore.

[@normanstallion847]

Tesla also rejected modern physics despite the evidence already there in his time. He also didn't believe in subatomic particles. He even considered the EMWs propagate through ether. The man trashed Einstien's theory of relativity. At his later age, He invented his own version of physics, which was absolutely pure pseudoscience. He was an engineer who was good at making devices from elementary scientific ideas that others had already discovered years ago.

[@erikvedeler9261]

Well said. Most importantly Original Source Material was used! Bravo. I have always said Tesla was a brilliant inventor. That is different than saying someone was a brilliant scientist. Neither Tesla nor Edison had great degrees of rigorous formal scientific education. I think Edison's greatest invention was the Process of Invention, the application of the effort of significant numbers of engineers and dollars to solving engineering problems.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

I agree with you 💯 I think Edison’s invention of the factory of innovation is also part of why he is so vilified today. We have a hard time with not either lionizing or vilifying our scientists and inventors when the truth is often in between. Fun fact, Edison once saw his employees reading a calculus book and wrote on it “this way lies madness”.

[@erikvedeler9261]

@@CharlieSolis yes, very true. Tesla had a good theoretical foundation. It would interesting to know if he would have finished his degree(s) if his father had not died! Tesla’s EM training was just not at the same level as Hertz or Maxwell.

[@erikvedeler9261]

@@CharlieSolis thank you Charlie for pointing to specific patents! I am not familiar with these. I often wonder what was lost in his terrible fire of 1895.

[@TeenageWasteland2112]

What video games did you hear about Tesla in lol?

[@Dripikdrippydipsdropkicks]

Probably played red alert and built Tesla coils

[@hex1795]

Red dead two 😔

[@smartboi5354]

Hearts of Iron 4.

[@jasonm3317]

The game was called Tunguska. 🤪😳

[@beyondaveragemotion]

Call of duty

[@dantheman2907]

Randomly stumbling across a video about Tesla on KZbin where the creator doesn't think he's some kind of god is as rare as hen's teeth, yet here we are. Fantastic stuff!

[@tobystewart4403]

This is one of the best science channels on youtube. It's so well done. As for "free" electricity, this seems a very odd idea to me. I should think that all electricity is manifestly free. It's moving it to where you want it that costs money.

[@TheEpicpwnr100]

I remember in high school hearing and believing the narrative of Tesla, up until a history teacher of mine told the class that everything surrounding Tesla Vs. Edison was either overblown or untrue. I still believed in the narrative a little because, as I recall, my teacher didn't go into detail as to how and why it was unfounded. In bad faith I assumed that he was espousing a narrative of his own that falsely painted Edison in a good light. Even though I still wanted to believe the story, I didn't believe it with all my heart as I did before because I respected that teacher too much to think he would make a claim like that without doing his homework. I put it out of my mind until watching this video, and I'm glad to see he was right, and I know a bit more about what really happened with the development of electricity at that point in time.

[@beatrixxxkiddo]

Tesla's most important creation was AC-DC, I saw them live a couple of years ago and my ears are still ringing

[@bodhisattva9762]

James Maxwell deserves all this attention that they give this average scientist Tesla. Einstein said, 'I stand on Maxwell's shoulders' and had it not been for Maxwell, there wouldn't have been an Einstein and a mediocre inventor like Tesla wouldn't have become the poster boy of Tinfoil heads.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

Did you see my video on Maxwell? And how about Faraday? (Einstein had drawings of both guys on his wall)

[@sphakamisozondi]

Oliver Heaviside is an unsung hero. The current expression of Maxwell's equations were simplified by him from 20 ugly equations to the four that we know.

[@tapanisydanmetsa6714]

That Alleluya praise of Tesla has got also me suspicious so I thank you very much for showing that the reasons for lifting him up as a mistreated genius are very obscure. The blaming of Edison did hurt me personally because my first school lecture (nearly sixty years ago) was about just the great inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

[@greencertifiedweb]

4:24 I believe I need to take issue with your conclusion that Tesla "... didn't independently invent AC poly-phase current." Just because 2 people had the same idea and came to the same conculsion at the same time, doesn't mean they didn't do it independently. I'm an Electronic Engineer and Software engineer with 12 published video games. I can't tell you how many times I've seen code by others that matched the code I wrote. Or the times I've been working on a problem at the same time as others and 2 of us had the exact same idea and execution. It's more common in the world of electronics, because in software, the possibilities are as boundless as your imagination, in this case, their conclusions are limited by Faraday's law of induction among other things. It's disingenuous to not give credit to Tesla for "independence" of thought without direct evidence. Also, on the patent, it doesn't matter who built it "first" what matters is who registers it "first." That's also the basis of copyright law.

[@Tmanaz480]

What a great example of how history can become twisted over time.

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

Half that shit was twisted right off the bat! Still happens these days: People believe what they want to believe, truth be damned!

[@carlosgaspar8447]

perhaps, history as it is taught, cannot be trusted unless there are also counterpoints?

[@testurenergy]

@@CharlieSolis oh dang! Dropping fact bombs!

[@worldpeaceplz3333]

I think geniuses are perceived in many different ways. I understand these are facts regarding Tesla and his life. Tesla wasn't scientific and he obviously got many of his ideas from predecessors. However, we know that Newton, one of the most scientific geniuses in history, spent much of his secluded hours searching for irrational riddles in the Bible and Einstein's still dominant ideas directly derived from Newton's work. I think the point is, Tesla, as an egotistic and unscientific man and as you stated at the ending, was without a doubt "a wizard in electricity".

[@ClaudioMalagrino]

Thank you. I'm really tired of hearing these web tales about Nikola Tesla being a Physics genius, wronged by the greed of Edson and capitalism. He was a great engineer, but he lacked a theoretical basis. And he also had a disturbed personality.

[@Koisheep]

> Upon learning Edison was self-taught, Tesla wondered whether he wasted years of his life in college. > Tesla's understanding of physics was very bad. You did waste your time in college but because you didn't study lol

[@NondescriptMammal]

Your presentations are so excellent and thorough and cover the interesting facts so coherently. I have always admired Tesla for his electrical engineering prowess, and believed in some of the myths until reading further about him and discovering some of what you reveal here. I think he is still to be admired as having a genius years ahead of his time in some respects, but it is good to have a realistic view of his contributions rather than myth.

[@MariaMartinez-researcher]

Not surprisingly, the very same BBC in its channel BBC Reels just uploaded a video in the praise of Tesla which echoes the "facts" debunked here. I linked this video to that one in case someone is interested in well researched history of science. Thanks, Kathy.

[@billygamer3941]

I, too, did some biographical research into Tesla last year and came away understanding that he, at best was great at self promotion or, at worst, he was a charlatan. A collection of his articles in a thin volume entitled "My Inventions" left me knowing that the only real invention was himself! Thank you, Kathy, for your excellent line of videos.

[@grahamstevenson1740]

Sebastian de Ferranti, British, has as much a claim over AC as anyone else and designed the *world's* first electricity generating station (1887, completed 1891, Deptford in London) that's recognisable as being similar to today's (with 11kV to substations) but never gets a mention.

[@davidexequielpalavecino]

Gracias. Lo voy a buscar y trataré de difundirlo

[@Transient901]

AC current was Not Invented. It already existed in natures grand architecture. It was discovered. The same applies to all forms of electricity and other phenomena of nature and its associated physical laws and preexisting conditions.

[@roberthigbee3260]

I just can’t understand how the name “Tesla” had more panache and historical staying power than “Zipernowsky-Blathy-Deri”.

[@susilgunaratne4267]

Power of the propaganda machines work on social media. Distorting the truth & magnifying the small truth out of proportion to make their chosen hero to a worshiping grade.

[@rayotberg4089]

I thought it sounded fishy that Tesla has become a cult like status figure. A lot of revisionist history. But that seems to be par for the course in a lot of areas these days. Thank you for a great, informative, video.

[@Dr.Reason]

I always appreciate people who ACTUALLY study rather than THINK they study by just reading what others believe. And isn’t it just like our modern era to put fools and buffoons and thieves and liars upon pedestals, and vilify the real producers and genius. Great report.

[@theklaus7436]

Surprised how wrong I also were. So thank you for enlighten me with real facts and not all these myths. The importance of fact check can’t be overstated.🎸😊

[@Neil-Aspinall]

This vid was debunked Klaus

[@tedrobinson372]

@@Neil-Aspinall debunked by who. The whole Tesla myth needs to be debunked.

[@Neil-Aspinall]

@@tedrobinson372 Mr. Robinson I will not do your research for you. Good day to you Sir!

[@tedrobinson372]

@@Neil-Aspinall I have done the research and the information cited in this video was accurate. Tesla's accomplishments have been overblown. Cheers.

[@Neil-Aspinall]

@@tedrobinson372 The authorities want Mr. Tesla written out of invention history and you are buying into it Edward.

[@theanimerican]

Years ago, Tesla wasn't really in the public concious and not heard too much by the general public, it seemed. When the myths started coming up, I was young ate it up and assumed he was decades ahead of his time. However, at some point, I got the impression that Tesla's accomplishments was probably a collaborative effort since the stories of him only started coming out relativiely recently. Thank you for this video. I now feel more informed and see who credit should be given to for certain discoveries. Although, I find it funny that of all the myths that got busted, it was the pigeon one that was the only one that apparently was not a myth.

[@justinforder2835]

Thank you very much for this. At the moment the link to your wordpress site for the associated article just takes me to a "Coming soon" placeholder page. I'd like to read the article, if only to get to the references.

[@zackerythomas3675]

I am glad that I came across your video in my feed. I appreciate the factul nuances of history. I did buy in to the popular notions between Edison and Tesla most likely due to pop culture. With channels like yours and others it is vitally important to keep factual reality accessible to the public. Thanks much for your contribution to reality.

[@ppol4264]

Thank you for this very accurate video. I have myself read a lot about this subject and I aggree with all that you said.During the 70s and the 80s, Tesla was completely forgotten in the history books. (Well at least he had a the unit of magnetic fields named after him) and all the glory was for Edison. I was always saying, "Don't forget Tesla he invented the AC motor and built a strange" tower. But today is the opposite : everybody speaks about Tesla and seems to ignore the genius of Edison.

[@SlavicCelery]

Because Edison has become the "colonizer", in much of public perception. People forget that someone who aggregates data can be just as important as the people who have the initial breakthrough. How often is a chemical or idea formulated, and then sits unused for years before the genius is realized?

[@rsmith02]

Not many on KZbin go back to primary sources and go beyond the retelling of well-told stories. Thanks for the depth and insight into who Tesla was and was not.

[@clivebaxter6354]

Mostly lies- Tesla rejected a Nobel prize (never awarded) Tesla was cheated- when he charged Westinghouse $170k for his patent which did not even work well, then the old somebody once asked Einstein what it was like to be a genius- ask Tesla nonsense. Plus his time machine, death ray and being responsible for just about everything today including mobile phones and the internet. The Tesla fan boys just want somebody to identify with as a 'cheated' genius.

[@jerryfacts9749]

Very well presented. My education is in electrical engineering from during the late 1960s. I read a lot about N. Tesla. I was very fascinated with his theories and what he accomplished. There are many myths and misconceptions about N. Tesla.

[@MICLGz]

I applaud you for getting the fact that Tesla wanted to transmit through the earth and not the air!

[@JimEast123]

Which turned out to be impractical.

[@arnesaknussemm2427]

Thus debunking the ‘online fact’ that Tesla predicted the internet.

[@majakovacic]

Being Tesla's compatriot I need this sort of eye-opening lecture because I heard too many times about how many inventors stole his ideas but another misconception I must add is that Tesla was Serbian. He was Croatian according to Vladimir Muljević and other researchers, worth looking into.

[@majakovacic]

Yes and humans and apes are the same thing because they share most of the DNA. Yugoslav people exist in fairy tales and I am not sure if you are trying to provoke or just being ignorant.

[@morganlee2806]

Thank you for this video. I thought I was taking crazy pills reading through some of the other videos and the comments section. Tesla has went from being underappreciated during and after his time to being flat out mythologized today.

[@ELECTRICMOTOCROSSMACHINE]

Thanks for taking the time to set it strait. Your contribution to history is absolute.

[@kzisnbkosplay3346]

I think a lot of the Internet hype comes from only hearing the cool stuff, and little things getting ramped up to make it cooler. This is the story I heard first. That said, I think that the seed of the stories is that if his underground transmission worked, even if the intention was not to make it free, how would it be monetized? With wires, it is possible to track to amount of electricity a home uses, how do you do that when it's going through the ground? That is why people jumped to "free". I think Tesla was in it for the discovery and didn't care so much about that part.

[@JeffBehary]

This is brilliant Kathy. It has been a nonstop battle to tell the world who the real Tesla was because of all of the blind faith people have in the endless nonsense that has been published. Even the most successful and unique of Tesla's ideas were brought to light by other people who were inspired by him and that had the wherewithal and focus to develop something to completion. He was an important person in history - I have an entire museum based around him - but the serious advances were made by other people who simply honed in on any one of those ideas and made them practical. The more you dig into this history, the more interesting it gets - and especially with GE, I even have letters of Edison promoting AC because of Elihu Thomson's work, post GE of course, but in complete contradiction of the "popular stories" or fairy tales littering the place...

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

Thanks Jeff, I have to see your museum some day. Have. To.

[@BartdeBoisblanc]

Nice work I always thought after reading many books on Tesla both Esoteric and Pedestrian that people were conflating Tesla's inventions with Mysticism. Thanks for confirming he was not a fake but an eccentric who held on to ideas that had be proven wrong. His actual contribution to the modern world is something to admire.

[@backslash68]

esoteric and pedestrian people turned Tesla's biography into a cult of personality

[@susilgunaratne4267]

@@backslash68 Exactly, well said. This gullible people ultimately doesn't know genuine inventions that have been contributed much our society today since all are being eclipsed by the fake image promoted by the social media propaganda.

[@JesterAzazel]

Glad to see someone dispelling these myths. I really do get tired of hearing them. The more views this video gets, the better.

[@leedobson30]

Super interesting and informative. Unvarnished truth is always better than myth. Well done

[@vukknezevic4258]

Im Serbian and I've had enough of this senseless Tesla myths! In Serbia we are tough in schools that he invented EVERYTHING and was destroyed by power hungry rich people.. I see that thanks to the internet this Myth has spread all over the world. Thanks for telling it how it is.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

I actually think the myth started with a American documentary that was shown on PBS in 2000 so it’s mostly Americans fault. By the way, have you heard of the Serbian scientist Michael Pupin? I find him to be fascinating person and he wrote an autobiography and how much America that I found delightful.

[@vukknezevic4258]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics Ofcourse i have. Mihajlo Pupin, my mother lives in a street named after him.

[@crnimacak4333]

Tesla did not invent everything, of course, but he is involved in many things we see today. The Internet and the World Wide Web, for example, both run on alternating-current electricity. The alternating current existed, but it meant nothing until Tesla came. He was an expert in electrical engineering and that's all. He was not a genius, the word genius does not exist in science. But he is still one of the greatest inventors of all time, no doubt. The fact that new age fools and believers create myths about him cannot diminish him as an inventor. I don't believe that physics professors in Serbia are such idiots to claim that Tesla invented EVERYTHING. So what did you learn in physics class in Serbia (those seven years), only Tesla every day, if he had already invented EVERYTHING? 😁 Mada verujem da u Srbiji o Tesli pričaju i na času veronauke, srpskog jezika, istorije, geografije, umetnosti... 😁

[@ludost5178]

although in his biography he said he did invent the AC motor,it was when his university or whatever got an electromotor that had brushes,and the brushes would spark,so tesla said:"what if we remove the brushes?" and the professor at the university said that it was like a perpetuum mobile,and that it was impossible,a few years after that he was reciting a song and he got his schizoprenia or epilepsy thing where he saw flashes of light and weird stuff,and he drew the motor in the sand.

[@susilgunaratne4267]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics Tesla's life is a gold mine for the documentaries, dramas,..... because of his events full life of ups,downs, tradigies,.... so easily one could make a sensational one that evokes compassion & heroism..... to make larger than life & blown out of proportion image of the Tesla to fascinate the gullible audience from start to end.

[@champagne.future5248]

It’s crazy how many major misconceptions are endemic about even recent and well documented history. If we can’t get this right, how can we expect to understand ancient history?

[@punditgi]

Kathy is awesome! ❤😊

[@rexmyers991]

Thank you for separating fact from fiction. I’ve often wondered WHY a car company would go so far as to name their company after him when, in my observations, few if any components of the car sprung from his mind.

[@karenryder6317]

I think it's because Tesla is a cooler name than Farraday.

[@socksumi]

I never understood this over hyping of Tesla. When I was young Tesla was not portrayed anywhere near the fanfare and adoration he gets now. He was seen as a a significant contributor to electrical theory but with many strange and often flawed ideas which either never worked in practice or which never saw the light of day. He was also plagued by many mental breakdowns especially in his later years.

[@MrAbarrett]

OMG! I’m an electrician, most of what I believed about Tesla was wrong. Thanks for your research and posting. Knowledge is power.

[@david203]

This should be required viewing in public schools, to reverse the misconceptions so rampant in the world today about Tesla. And once having rejected such misguided thinking, perhaps young people would reverse the current popularity of believing every claim they read and every advertisement they see. We need more critical thinking and less ignorance, to make best use of our lives and especially of government by representative democracy.

[@noam65]

I take a large point of view. The injustice regarding Tesla isn't that we misunderstand the context of his influence in specifics. No, the injustice is that he was intentionally forgotten and dropped from the public awareness. He only came roaring back into awareness because of an electric car company named for him, and its eccentric billionaire who keeps the name in the public mind. Tesla is a giant. He had patents on other areas, as well, and was an participant in the area of quantum physics, though maligned and ignored there also. Had Westinghouse been allowed to fail, or if Tesla merely gave half his licensing fee, when Westinghouse went broke, Tesla could have funded his own research. It would be a vastly different world, if he had.

[@animalntelligence3170]

I recall a quote from Tesla that was somewhat critical of Edison's trial-and-error approach to development of technology which he attributed to Edison's lack of formal training.

Edison was more of a thief than anything else.

[@kev3d]

It should be noted that the animals killed in the War of Currents demonstrations were largely, if not entirely, performed on condemned animals. The common way of disposing of dogs at the time was by strangulation or drowning. Thus a quick zap was seen as being much more humane. In fact it was the SCPA which provided at least some of the animals, and it was the SPCA that suggested (though not to Edison) that "Topsy" the Elephant (who had killed at least one, possibly other people) should be killed quickly. Edison had nothing to do with Topsy's electrocution, which occurred more than a decade after the War of Currents concluded.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

Very interesting. However, I am pretty sure that Brown's electric deaths were pretty gruesome as he specifically did them to demonstrate how horrible AC was (there were reports of how viewers were appalled). But as you said (and I think I included in the video) the elephant was not killed by Edison and had nothing to do with the war of the currents. Also, the electric chair was pushed because a doctor thought it would be more humane.

[@jamespfitz]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics What we consider a quick humane execution would certainly be considered shocking to someone who had never seen death administered so instantaneously and certainly.

[@clownplayer7265]

@@jamespfitz Besides, the times were different. Our understanding of how painful a zap can be was still somewhat limited and humans are always in constant learning.

[@johngellard1187]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics Kathy,I believe topsy was killed by Edison,Edison even filmed it.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

@@johngellard1187 Nope, but that is easy to be confused about. Topsy was killed by his owner as the elephant had killed a person. Edison's film company then decided to film it as they knew people would like to watch an elephant die (gross). Edison didn't kill Topsy nor did he get involved in the decision to make that film and it didn't have anything to do with the war of the currents. However, Edison put his name on the film so it certainly seemed that way to many people.

[@clonecypher8888]

Thanks for your research. This was very interesting and well made. I just wanted to say that I hope these hundreds of aggressive comments attacking and mocking you don't affect you. You should ignore those, since the writers don't even put 1min of effort into them, and are aimed to just ridicule. Be proud of what you have done here!

[@mauriceupton1474]

You are spot on with the fact Tesla didn't invent AC single phase. Westinghouse I feel ripped Tesla off over the $2.50 per hp generated agreement. Westinghouse should have agreed to reduced payments or resumed payment after things improved. Eventually Westinghouse got into trouble and I think he also lost his electrical company to JP Morgan. If you look at Tesla's version of a ray gun you'll see it is exactly the same as the plasma arc cutting torch used today for cutting steel. Tesla also invented an electric remote control boat. He was a typical genius...hopeless with money.

[@MARK-gp9hb]

actually remote control was already demonstrated before by many people including Oliver Lodge, Jagadish Bose and Guglielmo Marconi, Tesla as always took credit for it while mocking the crowd he was showing the boat to. Perfect example of how Tesla was the opposite of what his modern public image wants him to be

[@jimprice1959]

George Westinghouse treated his employees very well. He was one of the first to give employees all of Saturday off. He provided low cost housing for his employees. He also purchased life insurance for his employees so that if they died their widow would have her house paid for. These things were unheard of at the time.

[@HMV101]

A cursury examination of Tesla's 'ray gun' shows it has little in common with a plasma cutting torch. He 'remote control' boat was simply a toy, the rudder position of which could be changed when a burst of radio wave was received. The technology involved goes back to the 'coherer detector' of Marconi and Lodge.

[@Lilyene0]

I wished you mention all the pseudo science hipsters that back themselves calling it science with tesla's so called 369 secret of universe, it honestly frustrated me how they just Ignorantly see tesla as the greatest scientist of all time and everything he ever did or said was the word of god Great video nevertheless

[@siddharthnandi3995]

Agreed.

[@starfishsystems]

There is a peculiar sensation, part intellectual horror and part morbid curiosity, in observing the kind of people who gravitate to Tesla as a misunderstood genius, not noticing his various crackpot ideas. Perhaps they too think of themselves as misunderstood geniuses concerning their own crackpot ideas.

[@tookitogo]

@@starfishsystems People love thinking of themselves as possessing insider knowledge. Alas, many people fulfill that need by latching onto nonsense.

[@iskandarsyah9624]

You have no clue what so over.. and i truly hope you will remain so forever..

[@MarienFournier]

Thank you very much for this video. It helps to put Tesla in a real perspective. He was an outstanding engineer, and he had great accomplishments but the Tesla legend did more harm than good to him. You are the only one that I know of that demystifies him. good work.

[@russlehman2070]

As I understand it, many of the primitive radio transmitting and receiving circuits used early in the development of radio worked much better if grounded. I suspect this was a major factor in leading Tesla to conclude, erroneously, but not unreasonably, that the signal was transmitted through the ground, rather than by electromagnetic waves.

[@baruchben-david4196]

That is a good point. Still, engineers at the time quickly discovered that the Earth isn't such a great conductor after all. I think Tesla simply ignored this because it didn't agree with his ideas.

[@21stcenturyfossil7]

The radio circuits themselves don't need to be grounded. Antennas for the very long wavelengths used for early communications were grounded so the earth be used as the other element in the antenna, in a manner similar to the way that the earth was used to as the return conductor for telegraphs and power lines. Antennas for AM broadcast radio are still made this way. Tesla was sure the electrical resistance of the earth could be somehow tuned out if he could broadcast power at the earth's resonant frequency. It doesn't, and can't, work that way.

[@joshicune]

Common, how he made wireless remote controlled boat? Obviously he was aware of how signal is transmitted. And he made Tesla's coil, so again he is absolute aware what's going on there.

[@SianaGearz]

@@joshicune it's fundamentally possible to get a lot of mileage out of brute force and ignorance. A lot of accomplishments we have today, the insight was gained due to incessant tinkerers from centuries ago discovering something unexpected, and eventually science caught up with an explanation.

[@GoCoyote]

Tesla was just like many other brilliant people who did not work or play well with others. However there are still many single-wire ground-return grid systems used worldwide, especially in rural areas, that use a single insulated high voltage transmission wire with individual pole mounted transformers at their service drops, and that use the ground as the return path for the other half of the circuit. It definitely looks odd seeing a single conductor on the utility poles! The reason for grounding all electrical circuits, but especially communications, is to prevent the buildup of static charges that can reach thousands of volts and cause damage to equipment and signal interference.

[@robertheim352]

Nice Job. I agree that he was a wizard and exceptional mind in the early field of synchronous machines and resonant circuits. He was a gifted inventor. He certainly enjoyed the limelight. As an electrical engineer I wondered of Tesla's command of mathematic modeling. Regardless, like many creative people that I've worked with, he did advance the practices and machines of the time by his inventions; great achievements for an individual.

[@nehemiahmarcus308]

I was such a fan of Tesla, now I feel crushed.Time to cry in the corner and get over it.