January 25, 2008
Part visionary, part mad scientist, and absolute genius, Tesla should be as famous as Edison – but he’s been largely forgotten. Kurt talks with Samantha Hunt about her new novel The Invention of Everything Else. Tesla is the protagonist, and despite the outlandish biographical details all through the book, there was very little she had to make up.
Tesla’s biggest innovation was introducing alternating current as the standard for modern electric power, breaking Thomas Edison’s monopoly on DC power. Mike Daisey is an author and monologuist who performs a one-man show about Tesla, and he tells us how AC/DC isn’t just a band.
A lot of us learned that Guglielmo Marconi invented radio, but Nikola Tesla transmitted electromagnetic waves before Marconi –- the Supreme Court decided the case in 1943. Jim Stagnitto, the Director of Engineering for WNYC, gives Kurt a tour at the top of the Empire State Building to check out a radio transmitter in action.
Kurt and Jim atop the Empire State Building:
Tesla was a flamboyant character who held salons where he played fast and loose with technology. Mike Daisey tells the story of Tesla, Mark Twain, and an X-ray gun.
Samantha Hunt describes the turning point in Tesla’s life when he began acting like a mad scientist, almost taking a page from the movies. And biologist Vincent Pieribone thinks that Hollywood’s most dangerous fantasy about “mad scientists” is that scientists have any power at all.
Much of science today is grant-dependent and discourages dreamy, out-of-box thinking –- because who wants to fund mistakes? Samantha Hunt warns Kurt that Tesla’s visionary approach to science is all but extinct.
Frank Polifka's "Tornado in a Can:"
Samantha Hunt reads from the end of her novel.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
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National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
