La Historia de la Electricidad. La era de los inventos
Los desarrollos tecnológicos que produjeron la Primera Revolución Industrial no hicieron uso de la electricidad. Su primera aplicación práctica generalizada fue el telégrafo eléctrico de Samuel Morse (1833) —precedido por Gauss y Weber, 1822—, que revolucionó las telecomunicaciones.26 La generación industrial de electricidad comenzó partir del cuarto final del siglo XIX, cuando se extendió la iluminación eléctrica de las calles y de las viviendas. La creciente sucesión de aplicaciones de esta forma de energía hizo de la electricidad una de las principales fuerzas motrices de la Segunda Revolución Industrial.27 Más que de grandes teóricos como lord Kelvin, fue el momento de grandes ingenieros e inventores, como Gramme,28 Tesla, Sprague, Westinghouse,29 von Siemens30 Graham Bell,31 y, sobre todo, Alva Edison y su revolucionaria manera de entender la relación entre investigación científico-técnica y mercado capitalista, que convirtió la innovación tecnológica en una actividad industrial.3233 Los sucesivos cambios de paradigma de la primera mitad del siglo XX (relativista y cuántico) estudiarán la función de la electricidad en una nueva dimensión: atómica y subatómica.
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00:00Electricity is one of the great forces of nature.
00:11In the middle of the 20th century, our domain over it allows us to illuminate and supply energy to our world.
00:20We have come this far thanks to years of inventions and scientific discoveries.
00:28But it had to be the eccentric ingenuity of a man,
00:31which ended up discovering to us the true potential of electric energy.
00:36In the winter of 1943, Nikola Tesla contemplated the horizon of Manhattan for the very last time.
00:46Tesla was born in a world powered by steam and lit by gas.
00:52But before his eyes, he saw a new world, a world transformed, a world powered by electricity.
01:01His world.
01:08Frail, lonely, and distressed by the death of his beloved pigeon,
01:13this extraordinary and eccentric genius knew that his life's work was done,
01:20and laid down his body on the bed in which he died.
01:24It would be three days before they found his lifeless body.
01:40About 200 years ago, the first scientists discovered that electricity could be much more than a simple static charge.
01:50And that it could be made to flow in a constant current.
01:59But they were about to take that knowledge further,
02:03and discover that electricity is related to magnetism.
02:08The domain of that relationship between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world,
02:15and would allow us to generate quantities of electricity apparently unlimited.
02:27This is the story of how scientists and engineers decrypted the nature of electricity,
02:34and then applied it in an extraordinary century of innovations and inventions.
02:40But before that, one of the most virulent battles between rival geniuses in history had to take place.
02:51The History of Electricity
02:57Episode 2. The Age of Inventions.
03:00Our history begins in London at the beginning of the 19th century,
03:05with a young man who would drive our knowledge of electricity much further than any other.
03:11On the 29th of February, 1812, a 20-year-old self-taught young man called Michael Faraday,
03:18came here, to the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
03:23He was surrounded by the most illustrious figures of the academic world,
03:28and he was about to listen to one of the greatest scientific minds of the age.
03:36Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, finished compulsory education,
03:41and he was given a job as a blacksmith.
03:44Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, finished compulsory education,
03:49Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, finished compulsory education at the age of 12,
03:54and he never went to university.
03:56But the fact that he could not continue his studies,
03:59was not enough to make him fascinated by science.
04:05Faraday worked hard all day, writing books.
04:10And in the evenings, he would read as many scientific books as he could.
04:16He loved learning new things about the world,
04:19and he had this constant desire to understand why things were the way they were.
04:30Reading specialized magazines was not bad,
04:34but to really satisfy his desire for knowledge,
04:37Faraday needed to see the experiments in person.
04:41And he eventually got this chance,
04:43when he was given a teacher's invitation to attend one of the last lectures
04:46of one of England's greatest chemists, Sir Humphrey Davy.
04:54It was to change young Faraday's life forever.
05:01After watching Davy always smiling, full of ideas,
05:05Faraday knew what he wanted to do with his life.
05:08He was determined to dedicate himself to furthering science.
05:14And that was exactly what he did.
05:17A year later, Davy appointed him assistant of the Royal Institution of London.
05:24With Davy as his mentor, as well as his boss,
05:27Faraday studied chemistry in all its forms.
05:33But what would inspire his great discoveries?
05:36Well, the invisible forces of electricity and magnetism.
05:44In 1820, a Danish scientist, Hans Christian Ørsted,
05:48was in charge of their study.
05:51He had made an extraordinary discovery.
05:56It was Ørsted who applied electric current to a copper coil
06:00that approached the magnetized needle of a compass,
06:03making it rotate.
06:06For Ørsted, it was remarkable.
06:10He'd shown for the first time
06:12that an electric current creates a magnetic force.
06:17He'd bound electricity and magnetism together,
06:21which today we call electromagnetism,
06:24and it's one of the fundamental forces of nature.
06:29Ørsted's discovery sparked off a whole new aspect
06:33of inventivity around and about the field.
06:37It seemed as if his experiments were competing with each other
06:42in their quest to establish bonds
06:45between electricity and other forces of nature.
06:51At the Royal Institution of London,
06:53Faraday was ready to recreate Ørsted's work.
06:56That marked his first steps towards fame and fortune.
07:01Through a rigorous investigation process,
07:04Ørsted came to the conclusion
07:06that there should be a flow of forces
07:08acting between the copper wire and the needle of the compass.
07:11The device he designed to demonstrate this
07:14would change the course of history.
07:18Faraday created a circuit using a battery like this,
07:22a pair of wires, and a mercury bath.
07:26The circuit carried copper posts like this
07:29and a wire that really dangles into the mercury.
07:32Now, thanks to the mercury's conducting matter,
07:36it became a complete circuit.
07:39When the current runs through the circuit,
07:44it generates a circular magnetic force field around the wire.
07:49Now, this interacts with the magnetism
07:51from a third magnet that Faraday had placed in the middle of the mercury.
07:56Together, they forced the wire to move.
08:00Faraday had proved that this invisible force really existed
08:05and that its effects were visible in the form of circular motions.
08:09This beautiful device was the first to convert
08:12the electric current into continuous motion.
08:16Basically, it was the first ever electric motor.
08:21But Faraday was going to take his experiment even further.
08:26One of the lasting effects of Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic rotation in 1821
08:32was that it showed that there was a relationship
08:35between the electricity of magnetism and motion.
08:39Faraday investigated this relationship in detail.
08:43In the end, his obsession, his hard work, and his determination were worth it.
08:51The breakthrough came when Faraday discovered
08:55that the magnetic field of the electron
08:59could be used to generate electricity.
09:03Faraday had discovered that the magnetic field of the electron
09:07could be used to generate electricity.
09:11The breakthrough came on the 17th of October, 1831
09:16when Faraday took a magnet like this
09:20and moved it in and out of the coil of wire.
09:24He was able to detect a tiny electric current in the coil
09:30going one way and then the other.
09:36Faraday knew he was going to discover something.
09:41A few days later, instead of moving the magnet through the conducting wire coil,
09:46he set up a computer experiment by moving a conducting copper plate
09:51through the magnetic field.
09:58At that moment, he didn't know,
10:02but a rotating disc was floating in the magnetic field.
10:06Thousands of millions of negative electrons were deviating from their original circular course
10:11and started to move towards the edge.
10:15A negative charge was accumulating on the outside of the disc,
10:19leaving the center of it positively charged.
10:23Once the disc was connected to the copper wires,
10:27the electrons were flowing in a stable current.
10:31Faraday's discovery of Faraday's discovery was extremely important
10:36and had profound effects for the understanding of electricity
10:41and the technology of the rest of the 19th century.
10:46For Faraday, it would have been a great success
10:51if he had been able to use this technology
10:56to carry out his research.
11:09While Faraday continued his work
11:13trying to understand the essential nature of electricity,
11:17the inventors of the rest of Europe were much less interested in science
11:22or in the way of getting rich with it.
11:26What's actually quite remarkable, except from a contemporary perspective,
11:30is that by and large nobody seems to question what electricity is.
11:35You know, there really seems to be quite a lot of theoretical debates
11:40about whether it's a force, or a principle, or a power.
11:44But what they're really interested in is what electricity can do.
11:49Faraday, born in a world moved by steam,
11:52introduced the scientific community to the nature of electricity.
11:57But at the same time, another great advance was being made
12:01in terms of how we could use it.
12:05We're talking about the first device that would actually
12:08take electricity out of laboratories
12:10and put it in the hands of ordinary people.
12:13The telegraph.
12:19The key to understanding the operation of the telegraph
12:22is to understand a special kind of magnet, an electro-magnet.
12:26Basically, a magnet created by an electric current.
12:34The first electro-magnets were developed independently
12:37by William Sturgeon in Britain and Joseph Henry in America.
12:41And just as Faraday discovered that by curling the wire
12:46he could increase the current induced by the movement of the magnet,
12:50Henry and Sturgeon discovered that by adding more coils
12:54to the current, they could make a more concentrated magnetic field.
12:59Basically, the more coils and wires they used,
13:02the bigger the magnetic field.
13:04So if I pass a current through this electro-magnet,
13:08you can actually see the effects of the magnetic field.
13:13This is the typical school experiment
13:16of sprinkling iron filings on top of a magnet.
13:19If I give it a little tap,
13:21we can see the iron filings follow the course of the magnetic field.
13:25This allows us to visualize the effects.
13:32To further increase the power of the electro-magnet,
13:35Henry and Sturgeon discovered that they could place
13:38certain types of metal inside the electromagnetic coil.
13:42The reason iron is so effective is fascinating.
13:45It's as if it's been made up of lots of tiny magnets
13:49pointing in random directions.
13:51At the moment, this is not a magnet.
13:54The tiny magnets inside are aligned
13:56similar to the shape of the needle of this compass.
13:59They're all pointing in different directions.
14:02But when we apply a magnetic field,
14:06they all combine together
14:09and accumulatively add to the strength of the electromagnet.
14:15So what Henry and Sturgeon did
14:18was place two electromagnetic coils on each arm of the compass
14:23to create something infinitely more powerful.
14:32And we can see the power of this forceful electromagnet.
14:36If I turn it on,
14:38I'll use something slightly bigger than the iron filings.
14:41These little pieces of iron.
14:44Look at the strength of the magnetic field
14:47if you put it in a fixed place.
14:50What's important to remember, of course,
14:52is that this electromagnetic field
14:54only works when the tiniest current passes through it.
14:58As soon as I turn off the current,
15:01the magnetism disappears.
15:06Previous experiments have shown this ability
15:09by lifting metal weights.
15:11Henry managed to build one big enough
15:14to lift a ton and a half of metal.
15:17Impressive, but not world-changing.
15:20But if we place the magnet much further away,
15:23at the end of a wire,
15:25we can make something happen in response to our commands,
15:28in an instant.
15:31This ability to control a magnet from a distance
15:34is one of the most useful ever discovered.
15:41If electricity can be made visible
15:44a long way away from its source of power,
15:47then we have an instantaneous source of communication.
15:54In the mid-18th century,
15:57Samuel Morse developed a message sending system
16:00based on the time that an electrical circuit
16:03remained on or off.
16:06A long electrical impulse
16:08was equivalent to a script,
16:10and a short one to a dot.
16:13This allowed the sending and receiving of messages
16:16through a simple code.
16:20Contemporary Victorian commentators
16:23took as reference the fact that electricity
16:26and the telegraph were literally making
16:29the world smaller, but you very often get a sort of rhetoric
16:32describing how people in the 19th century
16:35were talking about the telegraph,
16:38and how with it there would be more understanding,
16:41leaving wars obsolete,
16:44because we would all understand each other better.
16:47In retrospective terms,
16:50this is hopelessly utopian.
16:54In the 1850s,
16:57Europe and the United States were crossed
17:00from one side to the other by infinite telegraph cables,
17:03but the dream of an instantaneous world communication
17:06seemed to be frustratingly out of reach.
17:09The reason was none other than the non-existence
17:12of a cable capable of transmitting messages
17:15between two of the world's largest powers,
17:18the United States and Great Britain.
17:21Many experts were convinced that it would be impossible
17:24for the Atlantic cable to work,
17:27but those who disagreed knew that if they could solve
17:30this problem, they could make a lot of money,
17:33and in 1850, British engineers and entrepreneurs
17:36joined forces to prove that it was possible.
17:42The subsequent attempts seemed to end irrevocably
17:45in disaster.
17:48The cables broke again and again
17:51by the force of the sea and the storms.
17:54Finally, on the 29th of July, 1858,
17:57two parts of the cable were spliced together
18:00in the mid-Atlantic.
18:03You see, a single cable was simply too big
18:06to be transported by ship.
18:09Then one end was taken to Terranova,
18:12and the other end to the southwest of Ireland.
18:15One of the world's most powerful celebrations
18:18was in place.
18:21The project was a resounding success,
18:24and Queen Victoria herself sent a formal message
18:27of congratulations to President Buchanan.
18:33But before the celebrations were over,
18:36things started to go wrong.
18:39This is the original notebook of the great engineer Bright.
18:42In it we can read the original message
18:45of Queen Victoria, of just 98 words,
18:48which took 16 hours to transmit.
18:52The telegraph operators on the other side
18:55had a very hard time deciphering the message.
18:58The electrical signals that they were receiving
19:01were blurred and distorted,
19:04so they kept asking for words to repeat
19:07over and over again.
19:10Repeating the shipment, sending again,
19:13waiting for reception, there was no signal.
19:16Clearly, the transmission across the Atlantic
19:19was not going to be as direct as people expected.
19:22During the days that followed,
19:25several hundred messages were transmitted
19:28from one side to the other,
19:31but those that reached Terranova
19:34were practically impossible to decipher,
19:37and even worse.
19:40The 1858 cable never fully repaired,
19:43and the end finally came
19:46when the British engineer Wilman Whitehouse
19:49mistakenly believed that increasing the voltage
19:52could cause the messages to reach Terranova.
19:55Then the cable stopped working.
19:59At that time, increasing the voltage
20:02using more powerful batteries made sense.
20:05Most experts believed that the electrical current
20:08flowed through the cable,
20:11like the liquid through a pipe.
20:14Increasing the voltage, therefore,
20:17was equivalent to increasing the pressure
20:20in the system, pushing the current
20:23to the other end.
20:27But the telegraph transmitted impulses
20:30or current waves through the cable,
20:33not a continuous flow,
20:36and through long distances
20:39those impulses were distorted,
20:42making it increasingly difficult to differentiate
20:45between what was a point and what was a line.
20:48Studying the effectiveness of submarine cabling,
20:51scientists began to realize
20:54that the electrical current
20:57did not always flow like water,
21:00but also created invisible electromagnetic waves.
21:03This great discovery was the one
21:06that propelled a new branch of research
21:09that would deepen the electromagnetic spectrum
21:12and that would solve the problems
21:15of the Atlantic telegraph.
21:18In effect, the transatlantic cable
21:21was a giant, ambitious,
21:24hugely expensive experiment.
21:27The failure of science to keep pace
21:30with technology had been exposed,
21:33and a new, more theoretical,
21:36and for me, much more exciting,
21:39approach to understanding electricity
21:42began to unfold.
21:46Thanks to the new knowledge
21:49about the movement of electrical impulses
21:52through the cable,
21:55it was possible to develop its composition,
21:58its design, and its tending.
22:01It would take another eight years
22:04of joint work of scientists and engineers
22:07for the first useful cable
22:10to finally become a reality in operation.
22:15On Friday, July 27, 1866,
22:18a message was sent from Ireland to Terranova,
22:21clear and concise.
22:27Austria and Russia had signed a peace treaty.
22:32At last, the dream of transatlantic communication
22:35had come true.
22:40The success of the 1866 cable
22:43did manage to shorten distances in the world,
22:46yet again.
22:49The transformation of a world
22:52in which days, weeks,
22:55and even months were needed for information to travel
22:58to another in which minutes or seconds were enough.
23:01I think it is one of the deepest changes
23:04that have taken place in all of history.
23:07The appearance of the cable
23:10changed the lives of ordinary people.
23:13But it would be the advances in the mode of use
23:16of direct current
23:19that would really have an impact on society.
23:22Because inventors were developing
23:25a new way of using electricity
23:28to get what they wanted
23:31from the world.
23:38The electric light.
23:46Until the 19th century,
23:49we only knew one way to make our own light.
23:52Burn things.
24:02And by the middle of the 19th century,
24:05we perfected a very effective way
24:08of lighting our homes, using gas.
24:15A typical British home in the 1860s
24:18would have been lit like this,
24:21highly flammable gas
24:24would have gone directly into people's houses
24:27through a network of pipes.
24:30But the light from these gas lamps
24:33was too weak to illuminate large open areas.
24:36This is how railway stations
24:39and streets began to be lit
24:42with more powerful sources,
24:45the electric arch lamps.
24:48The first electric arch lamps
24:51were demonstrated for the first time
24:54by Michael Faraday's mentor, Sir Humphrey Davy,
24:57at the Royal Institution in London back in 1808.
25:00This was a continuous electric pulse
25:03that went through two graphite electrodes.
25:06But its intense brightness
25:09was too much to illuminate houses.
25:12For the electric light to be a true rival to gas,
25:15it would have to be subdivided into less powerful lamps,
25:18smaller and more pleasant.
25:21Whoever succeeded in bringing electric light
25:24to every home on earth
25:27and by the early 1880s,
25:30the most famous, the most prodigious,
25:33the fiercely competitive inventor in the world
25:36had taken on the challenge.
25:39The American Thomas Alva Edison.
25:42Edison was a passionate inventor.
25:45He loved being in the lab.
25:48The first thing that drove him to do this
25:51was that it was a lot of fun.
25:54And that was the thing that we found most exciting.
25:57This was something he did well
26:00and it allowed all the creativity to come forth.
26:05Edison is the master of electrical inventions.
26:10He's the man they trust.
26:13He's the man that they think would do anything.
26:16He's also the man who has his
26:19carefully cultivated connections
26:22willing to invest his money
26:25where Edison put his hands
26:28and back him up, so to speak,
26:31in any type of project.
26:34For Edison, money was the least important reason.
26:37For him, money was only important
26:40because it allowed him to embark on the next project.
26:43Edison brought together a group of young and talented engineers
26:46in one of the most modern laboratories in New Jersey
26:49about 40 kilometers from Manhattan.
26:55Menlo Park would become the first center
26:58of development and research in the world.
27:01The place that allowed Edison and his team
27:04to invent on an industrial scale.
27:07They worked non-stop for days.
27:10One of them talked about how he never saw his children
27:13because he was always in the lab.
27:20But they knew they were in the middle of something important.
27:23If Edison was successful, they would be successful too
27:26and they would secure their futures.
27:36Edison's dream was to bring electricity
27:39to all homes.
27:42And backed by his team of engineers
27:45and driven by the idea of an electric future,
27:48he launched a campaign.
27:51The race to bring electricity to the world
27:54took place in the big cities of the time.
27:57New York, Paris and London.
28:02Edison's Menlo Park team
28:05took on the task of developing
28:08a totally different form of electric lamp,
28:11the incandescent light bulb.
28:14In fact, Edison's light bulb design
28:17had been invented by French, Belgian and Russian inventors
28:20for 40 years.
28:26One of them, an Englishman named Joseph Swann,
28:29had been working on his own version
28:32of the incandescent light bulb.
28:35Both Swann's and Edison's light bulbs
28:38operated through the transmission of electric current
28:41through a filament.
28:44The filament is a material
28:47through which the electric current flows
28:50with more difficulty than through the copper wire
28:53of the rest of the circuit.
28:56Its secret lies in the resistance.
28:59Now, inside this jar I have a filament made out of graphite.
29:02And we can see what happens
29:05as the current passes through it.
29:08Down at the atomic scale,
29:11the current passes through
29:14and the energy is deposited in the filament
29:17in the form of heat.
29:20As it heats up, its resistance increases
29:23its temperature until it generates white light.
29:26Now, one of the first materials
29:29that Edison used to fit his filaments
29:32was platinum.
29:35With its relatively high melting point,
29:38platinum could heat up
29:41until it generated white light without melting.
29:44It could also be stretched in thin threads
29:47and the thinner, the more resistance
29:50it would offer to the current that passed through it.
29:53But platinum was expensive
29:56and its resistance was not enough.
30:01The race was to find a better alternative
30:04and the solution came when Menlo Park's team
30:07opted for a method that had also been developed by Swan.
30:10It was about using the vacuum
30:13to prevent the cheapest carbon filaments
30:16from burning too fast.
30:19Edison and Swan tested all kinds of different materials
30:22for their filaments,
30:25from silk and parchment to cork.
30:28Edison even tested the beards of his engineers.
30:31In the end, it was decided to use bamboo fiber
30:35while Swan used a cotton thread.
30:38Edison and Swan's light bulbs were very similar.
30:41Eventually, they came to an agreement
30:44and worked together to commercialize the invention
30:47together in the UK.
30:50Today, many people still believe that Edison
30:53invented the light bulb alone,
30:56leaving Swan in a secondary place in history.
31:05But this incandescent light bulb
31:08was only part of Edison's strategy.
31:11He also came up with a complete electrical system
31:14of current takes and meters to accompany it.
31:18And as a brilliant businessman,
31:21he also developed a revolutionary circuit
31:24to distribute electricity.
31:27Edison knew that the key to making money
31:30with this system was to generate electricity
31:33in a power station and then sell it
31:36to as many customers as possible.
31:39It seems obvious to us now, but until then,
31:42anyone who wanted to use electricity
31:45needed to have their own noisy generator at home.
31:49Edison had a great ambition.
31:52He wanted to illuminate the most prosperous
31:55and frantic city in the world.
31:59New York.
32:04In the summer of 1882,
32:07Edison stood in a unique position
32:10in the world of science and invention of the 19th century.
32:13He'd patented a cutting edge incandescent light bulb.
32:16He'd amassed an unprecedented knowledge
32:19of electrical engineering.
32:22And above all, he'd cultivated a reputation
32:25among the American public,
32:28a reputation of genius of invention
32:31capable of fascinating the journalists of that time.
32:34And the financial muscle of Wall Street
32:37was always willing to go after his new ideas.
32:40His vision of electrifying Manhattan
32:43and then the rest of the world seemed to be within his reach.
32:50Because Edison and his team were about to launch
32:53the most expensive and risky project to date.
32:56The first American power plant
32:59that would generate direct direct current.
33:05Just before 3 p.m. on September 4, 1882,
33:08Thomas Edison,
33:11surrounded by a group of bank officials,
33:14dignitaries and reporters,
33:17entered the JP Morgan building right behind me.
33:20To launch one of Edison's patented switches,
33:23100 incandescent light bulbs began to glow.
33:26Then he turned to a novice journalist and said,
33:29I have accomplished all that I promised.
33:36Less than a kilometer from Pearl Street,
33:39Edison's new power plant,
33:42which had cost a million dollars and four years of hard work,
33:45was coming to life.
33:48The current arose through the buried cables
33:51and was transmitted in all directions.
33:54Although today it seems obvious to us,
33:57in the city of New York in 1880,
34:00the idea of burying electric cables
34:03seemed like an unnecessary expense.
34:06This street would be covered by a network
34:09of hundreds of telegraph cables,
34:12telephones and high voltage cables.
34:15You would see hundreds of black spaghettis
34:18blocking out the light.
34:21Edison knew that this dangerous situation had to change,
34:24and for him to be able to amass a fortune
34:27as large as possible,
34:30electricity had to be subject to revision.
34:33It had to be considered safe.
34:36Edison argued in favor of greater safety
34:39for a lower voltage system
34:43Edison argued that he had a safer system
34:46than high voltage cables on the streets
34:49or gas for home lighting.
34:52There was no need to worry about fires and electrocutions
34:55because being installed in the basement,
34:58this system was much safer.
35:04Burying each cable was not only very expensive,
35:07it was also a logistical nightmare
35:10because it consisted of one of the surfaces
35:13with the most activity per square meter in the world.
35:16Edison chose this area for a simple reason.
35:19Wall Street was rich, important and influential.
35:22And to generate wealth,
35:25he decided to place his power plant
35:28a kilometer and a half from his wealthy clients.
35:35The reason was that Edison had calculated
35:38that the electricity that would be allowed
35:41would only provide a constant amount of direct current
35:44to the residents within that radius.
35:47This meant a great advance
35:50because for the first time,
35:53a single station could supply energy to hundreds of clients.
35:56But there was a big problem.
35:59Edison's network would never be cheap
36:02to illuminate the new American residential neighborhoods.
36:05They did not have the necessary number of clients
36:08for the construction of these expensive power plants
36:11to be profitable.
36:14If we had stayed with Edison's system
36:17to generate and distribute electricity,
36:20the world would be a completely different place.
36:23It was necessary to have power plants
36:26just a kilometer and a half away,
36:29even in the center of the city.
36:32It would be extraordinarily expensive
36:35to provide power to the smallest communities.
36:41But someone who held the solution to these problems
36:44was about to enter history.
36:47Someone who would help create the modern world
36:50and who would play an integral part
36:53in one of the biggest war acts in the history of science.
36:56His name was Nikola Tesla
36:59and he became Edison's shadow.
37:08Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor
37:11born in Croatia who worked for Edison
37:14for a short time after his arrival in New York at the age of 28.
37:19European, introverted and reflective,
37:22he was everything Edison was not.
37:26Edison and Tesla could not be more different
37:29in the way they created their public image.
37:36Edison could care less about his good Sunday dress
37:39and he was a kind and disaligned guy.
37:46Tesla, however, being a man in his mid-twenties,
37:49gave a lot of importance to his appearance
37:52to how people looked at him,
37:55to his clothes.
37:58He cared about his manners
38:01and even how he looked in the pictures
38:04trying to always capture his good profile
38:07and not his pointed chin.
38:13The life and death of Nikola Tesla
38:16was one of the most fascinating and tragic stories
38:19of scientific brilliance,
38:22cut-throat business and shocking installation stunts.
38:31Edison may have left the American public
38:34with his new direct current plants
38:37but Tesla was not so impressed.
38:40He had a dream in which electricity
38:43could be transmitted from one city to another
38:46or even from one country to another
38:49and he believed he knew how to make it come true
38:52using different types of electric current.
38:59Electricity experts knew that the shorter
39:02the current sent through a cable,
39:05the less force is lost through the resistance
39:08and the longer the cable can be.
39:11Tesla proposed to use a method of conducting electricity
39:14by which the currents could be shortened
39:17without reducing the amount of electric power
39:20at the other end,
39:23which was called alternating current.
39:26The alternating current is as its name indicates
39:29an electric current that alternates
39:32its movements in two opposite directions at high speed
39:35while the direct current moves
39:38in only one direction.
39:41Tesla was interested in alternating current
39:44because like other electrical engineers
39:47in the late 1880s, he realized that
39:50as we increase the voltage of any current
39:53that moves from point A to point B,
39:56it becomes more efficient to have a higher voltage.
40:00As the amount of electric power in a cable
40:03is equal to the voltage multiplied by the current,
40:06increasing the voltage meant that
40:09the cables could be shortened
40:12so that the losses through the resistance decreased as well.
40:16However, we do not need voltages as high as,
40:19for example, 20,000 volts to power a house,
40:22so it is necessary to decrease the current
40:25that households receive from the power plant
40:28and for this it is necessary a converter or transformer.
40:31Alternating current allows the use of a converter
40:34that transforms the current,
40:37to the power of 46 degrees of consumption.
40:44Perfecting the technology to drive electricity
40:47hundreds of kilometers from where it was generated
40:50would mark a great step on the road to modernity.
40:54And a wealthy businessman and industrialist
40:57was already working on the solution.
41:00His name, George Westinghouse.
41:03Westinghouse believed that alternating currents
41:06were the future.
41:09But he had to face a deep setback.
41:12While this theory was true for electricity,
41:15there was no useful motor that could move with it,
41:18unlike direct current.
41:21And nobody believed that it would ever exist.
41:24Nobody except Nikola Tesla.
41:27Tesla, as a good inventor, used to say that
41:30before building something, you had to imagine it,
41:34he had what psychologists today would call
41:37adetic memory.
41:40He was able to remember everything he saw
41:43and visualize it in three dimensions.
41:46And they often say that people with this ability
41:49can see objects at this distance,
41:52in three dimensions, in space,
41:55and everything indicates that Tesla had that ability.
41:58This is a Tesla egg.
42:01It's a replica of the one that Tesla used
42:04to demonstrate his greatest discovery.
42:07And one of the most important inventions of all time.
42:10It showed how rotary movement
42:13can be produced directly from an alternating current.
42:16Crucially, one that could be generated
42:19for thousands of miles a week.
42:22This was something that Tesla used
42:25to demonstrate his greatest discovery.
42:28This was something that had never been done before.
42:39When Tesla was working on the alternating current motor,
42:42he was thinking big.
42:45And he was not just trying to make adjustments
42:48to small components of the motor,
42:51Tesla was working on a higher system
42:54with a generator and wires
42:57that were connected to the motor and the motor itself.
43:00He was a complete fan of his own ideas
43:03with a way of doing things totally different
43:06from other inventors of his time.
43:09Tesla's solution was ingenious.
43:12He fed more than one alternating current
43:15into his motor and programmed them
43:18to work in sequence with each other.
43:21The alternating current provided energy
43:24to a coil of wire inside a motor.
43:27This created a magnetic field
43:30that attracted the central part of the motor
43:33and then the current disappeared.
43:36The second superimposed current
43:39fed the next coil, dragging even more
43:42the motor part before disappearing as well.
43:45And the same with the third and fourth currents.
43:48Tesla designed a complete electric system
43:51around this transmission that he called polyphasic.
43:54This meant, in practice,
43:57that noisy and smelly electric power plants
44:00generating such useful alternating currents
44:03could be built far from the populated areas.
44:06And for the first time in history,
44:09it was possible to build large electric power plants
44:12anywhere, whether on the periphery
44:15of a city or in Niagara Falls,
44:18being able to supply energy
44:21at long distances and serve the people
44:24of the big cities.
44:27Tesla's discovery was the last piece
44:30of a puzzle. But he still had to convince
44:33the world that his solution was better
44:36than the direct current led by Edison.
44:45Edison continued expanding his direct current system
44:48and building power plants
44:51throughout the state of New York.
44:56But then, Tesla met George Westinghouse,
44:59the man who would make his dreams come true.
45:04In July 1888,
45:07Westinghouse made an offer to Tesla's patents,
45:10which became part of the mystery
45:13and the anecdotes surrounding the history of Nikola,
45:16in which it is difficult to separate reality
45:19from fiction.
45:22Tesla received $75,000
45:25for the patents of his alternating current
45:28and was offered $2.50 for each horse of steam
45:31that his engines could generate.
45:34This should have given him enough wealth
45:37to comfortably live the rest of his life.
45:40It's clear to us now
45:43that the current AC system
45:46was a much better method
45:49to transmit electricity.
45:52And we think that with Tesla's breakthroughs
45:55nothing could stand in the way of the success
45:58of AC electricity.
46:01But there was a man who believed blindly
46:04in his inventions of direct current.
46:07And he was not at all willing
46:10to spend millions of dollars to change them.
46:13We are talking about Edison.
46:17The battle lines were already drawn.
46:20Westinghouse and Tesla faced each other with Edison
46:23when the contracts for the lucrative lighting
46:26of New York were presented.
46:29Two completely different systems
46:32battling for one ultimate prize,
46:35to light America and then the world.
46:38A battle known as
46:41the War of the Currents.
46:46Both sides tried to improve
46:49the profitability of their opponent.
46:52But Edison was convinced
46:55that his precious direct current
46:58was better than the alternating current
47:01because it was safer.
47:04But relatively harmless.
47:07While alternating current cables
47:10could be lethal to contact.
47:14So what Edison was trying to do
47:17was to define his direct current system
47:20as the safe system.
47:23Better than high voltage cables on the streets.
47:26Better than gas.
47:29And now better than AC lights.
47:33If Edison's system was adopted,
47:36there would be no risks.
47:41Edison claimed that the alternating current
47:44was a more dangerous system
47:47and he highlighted all the accidents
47:50that the Westinghouse workers had suffered
47:53as well as the fires caused by short circuits.
47:57It was a powerful message
48:00because in the 1880s
48:03many people were still terrified by electricity.
48:06It could shock and even kill instantly
48:09and the reason why still weren't fully understood
48:12for many the idea of piping
48:15this invisible killer into their homes
48:18was utterly ridiculous.
48:21So the weapon used in the war
48:25of the currents was fear.
48:32And an almost unknown electrical engineer
48:35called Harold P. Brown
48:38was about to bring the fight against the alternating current
48:41to a completely new dimension.
48:45He was going to put into practice
48:48one of the most radical and negative advertising campaigns in history.
48:52Brown had devised a unique and theatrical way
48:55of demonstrating the deadly power of AC
48:58and he was eager to share it with the world.
49:05So on a warm summer afternoon in July 1888
49:08he gathered together 75 of the country's best engineers
49:11and reporters
49:14to witness a spectacle they would never forget.
49:22Brown's plan was extremely macabre
49:25he'd paid a team of street vendors
49:28to collect together stray dogs from Manhattan
49:31for their demonstration.
49:34Out on stage he addressed his audience
49:37I have asked you here gentlemen
49:40to witness a demonstration
49:43of the application of electricity to a number of brutes.
49:47His demonstration
49:50involved electrocuting dogs
49:53with AC and AC power
49:56in an attempt to show that AC power killed them more quickly.
50:01And it wasn't just dogs
50:04Brown continued to represent public shows
50:07in which he killed lambs and even horses.
50:11And he moved from dogs to larger animals for a reason
50:14he wanted to show that AC power
50:17was so dangerous
50:20that it could kill any large mammal
50:23including humans.
50:34Brown's experiments
50:37managed to convince American politicians
50:40that the most humane method to execute
50:43death was AC
50:46generated by Westinghouse machines.
50:50Edison's lawyers came up with a new term
50:53to describe electrocution death
50:57their proposal was to die at Westinghouse.
51:01And at 6.32 am
51:04on August 6, 1890
51:07a 45 year old man named
51:10William Kembler was tied to a wooden chair
51:13and connected to two wet electrodes
51:16carefully attached to his body.
51:19In front of the expectant eyes of 26 officials and doctors
51:22who were watching from a room next door
51:25Kembler said goodbye to his time in the Chaplin prison
51:28and waited.
51:32The execution of William Kembler
51:35marked the lowest point in the current war
51:38because Nikola Tesla
51:41was about to do something never seen before
51:44something so wonderful and bold
51:47that it would remain forever in the memory of those who saw it.
52:08Tesla had been developing a system
52:11to generate alternating currents of very high frequency
52:14on May 21, 1891
52:17in a meeting with the most reputable electrical engineers
52:20he demonstrated the efficiency of his invention.
52:28In an almost magical demonstration
52:31of energy and magic
52:34Tesla demonstrated
52:38and without any kind of clothing or safety mask
52:41hundreds of thousands of volts
52:44produced by Tesla's coil
52:47crossed his body until it reached the lamp he was holding.
52:57Tesla's alternating current
53:00reached such a high frequency
53:03that it crossed his body without causing major injuries or pain.
53:08His demonstrations proved that when handled correctly
53:11the alternating current at extremely high voltages
53:14was safe.
53:17The battle of the currents
53:20was won in favor of Westinghouse and Tesla.
53:24In 1896 the new power plant of the Niagara Falls was finished
53:27which used the alternating current generators
53:30of Westinghouse to produce
53:33Tesla's polyphasic current.
53:36In the end it was possible to transmit large amounts of energy
53:39from the falls to the neighboring Buffalo
53:42and a few years later the plant of Niagara
53:45was supplying energy to New York itself.
53:50Today, almost all the electricity generated in the world
53:53is through the system designed by Tesla.
53:56But Tesla's story
53:59did not end with fame and fortune.
54:03Although he continued to make great contributions
54:06in many other areas of science and innovation
54:09to save George Westinghouse from the ruin
54:12after the crash of the stock market
54:15he withdrew his claim of his rights
54:18on his polyphasic inventions.
54:21Nikola Tesla had a unique talent
54:24and humanity owes him a lot.
54:27But he was also a very complicated man
54:30and sadly over time he became more and more complicated.
54:33He was fixated with the number 3
54:36and he would not stop telling it when he walked.
54:39He also developed a phobia of women
54:42who wore hoodies and were wearing tights
54:45and he would not stop telling it.
54:48He also developed a phobia of women
54:51who were wearing pearl jewelry.
54:54In many ways his brilliant mind
54:57simply spun out of control.
55:02As Tesla's life underwrote
55:05he withdrew from people
55:08and found emotional comfort elsewhere.
55:11He became obsessed with pigeons
55:14and was regularly seen feeding them here
55:17He even fell in love with a particular
55:20and unusual white dove
55:23and when it died his heart was destroyed.
55:37As an old man, Tesla was left alone and ruined
55:40and he lived almost secluded in this hotel.
55:47His last years were spent here
55:50in the room 3227 of the New York Hotel
55:53sad, confused, destitute.
56:02Edison would become the American hero
56:05and his company would be part of General Electric
56:08which until today remains the company of Tesla.
56:12In January of 1943
56:15the story of Nikola Tesla came to an end.
56:22But looking out across the Manhattan skyline
56:25for the very last time
56:28he saw a sky filled with sparkling lights
56:31and a million lives transformed.
56:34The ability to generate and emit electricity
56:37and the invention of the electric current
56:40and the invention of the electric current
56:43were the most important elements
56:46of Tesla's life.
57:04The machines he used have changed our world
57:07in ways you couldn't possibly have imagined.
57:34We are the electric pioneers
57:37who lived in an extraordinary era of innovation.
57:40Today we give electricity for granted
57:43and we have forgotten the magical and wonderful force
57:46that it really is.
57:49However, there is something we should never forget.
57:52Without electricity
57:55the modern world would collapse around us
57:58and our lives would be very, very different.
58:04TESLA
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