>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to
welcome Bernie Carlson to the Microsoft research visiting speaker series. Bernie is
here today to discuss his book Tela, Inventor of the Electrical Age. Tesla was an
idealist inventor who sought the perfect experimental realization of a great idea or
principle.
This biography sheds new light Tesla's visionary approach to invention and the
business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Bernie Carlson is a professor at the University of Virginia. He is an expert on the role of
technology and innovation in American history. And his research focuses on how
inventors, engineers and managers use technology in the development of major firms
between the Civil War and World War I.
His publications include Technology in World History as well as Innovation as a Social
Process. In 2008, Technology in World History was awarded the Sally Hacker prize by
the Society of the History of Technology.
These join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Thank you, Amy, I really appreciate the nice introduction. And
thanks for coming out to spend a little time with me and with Mr. Tesla.
And welcome to all of you. I gather that there could be any number of people that are
watching me all over the Microsoft campus. So for those of who you are here virtually,
welcome as well.
I should tell you in truth and advertising that my -- I'm a professor in the engineering
school at the University of Virginia, although I'm a historian. And my students now have
decided that I have real street credibility because I was invited to come out to Microsoft.
The dean -- the dean of engineering has decided that I'm okay.
So thank you for the invitation.
We're going to talk about today, you know, many of you know the incredible cool car,
the Tesla car that Elon Musk has developed and is working on. And I'm going to talk
today not about the car but about the even cooler guy for whom the car is named. And
indeed I think as we go through the discussion, you may realize that whoever -- you
know, was on Elon Musk's team that decided to call the new Tesla electronic -- the new
electricity vehicle the Tesla, actually had a really brilliant insight in terms of marketing.
So I've been working on Tesla for over 15 years and had the chance, with support of the
Sloan foundation to go twice to Serbia and to spend a lot of time looking and digging
into Tesla's life.
Tesla is an interesting guy for a whole bunch of reasons. He is a 19th century inventor.
He's a rival with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, that's my area of expertise,
my criminal -- my criminal background, if you would call it that, is that I do the history of
dead white guys and particularly heroic and better. So I study Bell, I study Edison, and
so I had the chance with some -- with -- a number of years ago to start on this big
project on Tesla.
And pretty quickly I realized that Tesla is different than other inventors of his time
period. He's not northern European. Unlike Edison whose family is from the
Netherlands, Tesla comes from southeastern Europe from the Balkans and was born in
Serbia. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. So he comes from a
very unusual and interesting background. And I think as you'll see, that feeds in what
kind of inventor he becomes.
He is much more theoretical and less hands on, if you compare him to someone like
Thomas Edison. Edison was somebody that basically knew things because he fiddled
with them with his hands or he drew pictures. And that's how Edison knew and dealt
with the world.
Tesla in contrast was a theoretical inventor as -- the way he got ahead is he thought
about stuff and then he thought about it some more and then he would think about it still
again.
I actually went and heard a talk from the famous architect Frank Gehry, who was
discussing how he designed his buildings. He's the one that did the famous post
modern art museum in Bilbao, Spain. And he's done some other buildings. There's a
building I believe he's done at MIT. And he says every so often somebody comes in
and says can I come and watch you work, Mr. Gehry? And he says sure.
And, you know, he says I don't know what the guy's going to see because basically
Gehry has a great big model in his studio of the building that he's working on at that
point, and he takes various pieces and he puts it on the model, and then he steps back
and he kind of looks at it for hours.
And I have the feeling that if you went to watch Tesla in action, Tesla would just be
standing there sort of thinking or staring at the apparatus.
So he's very theoretical. Many people say that Tesla had no sense of business.
Wrong. Tesla actually had a very clear sense of how he was going to make money off
of his inventions. He wasn't going to do it like Edison did by manufacturing light bulbs or
generators of all of that. Tesla, his business strategy was patent, promote, sell. Get the
intellectual property, promote the living day lights out of the intellectual property, tell it to
the highest bidder, move on to the next -- move on to the next project.
So he had a business strategy. That business strategy meant that the guy had to be a
master show man. He had to be able to really get you excited, to get you to believe that
what he was going to do was the next really cool thing. And that was part and parcel of
the way that he approached creativity.
And unlike Edison, who invented towards the marketplace, in other words never
invented something for which he didn't already have worked out who was going to be
the customer, Tesla illustrates a very different sort of path that economists would call a
knowledge driven form of innovation.
So why study Nikola Tesla? Tesla did two big things in his life. He contributed two
technologies that disrupted the way that people did business, created entirely new
industries, changed the way people lived their lives every day.
The first one was the alternating current motor, which he worked on in the 1880s. And
then in the 1890s he worked on the wireless transmission of power. In other words he
was a rival in the first story with Thomas Edison, in the second story with Mark Koenig,
okay?
In both cases you got this wonderful opportunity Tesla in that you've got a wonderful
success story and then you have a disruptive technology that didn't turn out so well,
okay. So you got to balance those two things out if you're going to write a story about -write a book about him.
He offers an opportunity in truth and advertising. You know, most of the books -- truth
and advertising, I'm a methods guy, you know. You do the study -- study inventors
pretty quickly you come to a fork in the road. And down one fork you explain everything
that you see in the inventor's career, or any other kind of creative person's career. It's
genius. It's luck. They're just a brilliant guy.
And that I don't go down that path. I've done down the other path, which is to say that
people who are creative and particularly at the level of say an Edison or a Tesla, have a
methodology, they have a style, they have approach. And we can figure out what that is
and we can make sense of it, and indeed perhaps we can even teach it to future
students -- future inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs. Again, I work for an
engineering school. I planned -- I'm doing the best to train the next generation of
students for you people.
So God only knows whether I'll succeed or not. But, you know, Lord, I'm going to try.
Okay. All right.
So when I was studying Tesla's career and again his style, his way of approaching
invention and inventors have a style just like an artist does. A painter has a particular
way of creating building, Frank Gehry -- or paintings. Frank Gehry you know was a -has a very distinct style.
You see a Frank Gehry building you say, man, I know that's a Frank Gehry building. Or
it's Frank Lloyd Wright building, you know, that it's Frank Lloyd Wright.
But there's some similar style. In the book I suggested, and Amy mentioned this in
passing, but his style is a mix of ideal and illusion. And, in fact, had I had my choice -but probably is just as well, I would have called the book ideal and illusion, and the
publisher said oh, no, you're not going to call it that because nobody will ever
understand it's actually about Tesla.
So I, you know, have to tell you about what I mean by ideal and illusion, even though
that's what I thought the title of the book should be.
Tesla's approach to invention was to say that underlying everything out there in the
world, whether it is just out in nature or it's something that people made is a principle
what the Serbian Orthodox theologians would call the logos and that the role of the
inventor was to discover, discern that principle and build the invention around that.
So if you could come up with the kind of the kernel, the really, the heart, the idea of
what that technology was about, that's what you would build the invention around,
okay?
Now, this comes as, you know, straight out of philosophy, out of the thinkings have
Plato. If you read The Republic in college or in high school, you know that this is -- that,
you know, Plato believed that that is what philosophers did, that philosophers found that
kind of ultimate truth or underlying principle.
The problem is this is -- it's not everybody that surrounding the inventor or surrounding
the philosopher understands what the ideal is about. And so you have to give people
an approximation, sort of say well, it's kind of like this or it's kind of like that. And in my
-- the way I approach Tesla is this is -- I call those illusions.
Now, he's not trying to trick people, but he is trying to conjure up something in your mind
to get you excited so you want to buy the next new technology. Okay. So he could tell
you a story, he could use a metaphor, he could invoke certain values.
And the interesting part about his life, then, is this tension back and forth between ideal
and illusion. I can picture this wonderful new way of doing things, build an electric
motor around rotating magnetic field, but how do I then explain that to some
businessman who may not know anything about electricity? I've got to tell him a good
story, I got to -- I've got to engage that investor in some way.
So Tesla's tension -- the story of Tesla's life is a tension. And the question you have to
answer as I tell the story in the book is did Tesla's illusions eventually get in the way of
the ideals that he was going to do? Put another way, as one of my good friends said,
he said to me, Bernie, Tesla drank his own Koolaid. I said okay. That's an interesting
way of putting it. Thanks for letting me know. Okay. Well, you'll decide whether he
drank his own Koolaid.
So like I said, Tesla invented two big things, the alter alternating current motor and
wireless power. And so I want to talk a little bit about each kind of how he got there,
what these things were about, and to let you indeed decide for yourself how creative,
how powerful a thinker was Tesla. A lot of biographies that existed before you get to
the part about the motor and, you know, your -- you know, I'm a geeky kind of guy. So
you don't -- you know, I remember years ago reading one of the first Tesla biographies
that I came upon.
And I opened the book and it's like oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, he's going to tell me how
the motor works. Two pages later we're done. We're on to something else.
So there's page after page, probably too many pages about the alternating current
motors in my book, but I like the motors. I like the transmission stuff.
So how did Tesla develop the alternating current motor? Again, he was born in Serbia
-- or, excuse me, he was born in the Austrian Hungarian Empire to a Serbian family in
what is today Croatia. Okay? So all those different countries take credit for Tesla one
way or the other. But ethically speaking he was a Serbian.
His father was an Orthodox -- Serbian Orthodox priest. He hoped his son was going to
go to become a priest, go to the seminary as well at a certain moment Tesla convinces
his family that he really ought to go study mathematics and then engineering.
And so he goes to the Joanneum Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria. There he starts
learning about electricity, and he basically comes up with the idea, after watching a
demonstration in physics class that the thing that the world needed at that point was a
motor that did not spark, that had no commutator, that is to say no rotating switch in it,
and that that would be a much better motor, it would be an ideal motor.
How did he learn how to fully develop that motor? He went to work for several
companies related to the Edison organization, won first in Budapest, that was a
telephone company, then Paris, where they were installing electric lights.
He was a very good field engineer. He got transferred from Paris to New York City, and
he arrived in New York City with pennies in his pocket in 1884.
In 1880 -- he only stays at the Edison organization about six, eight months in New York
City and basically strikes out on his own in 1886 and starts up his own laboratory and
his own business with some very talented and smart business partners, a man named
Charles Beck -- Peck, and a man named Alford Brown. And Peck and Brown, I always
think of as being -- they were investors, they were Wall Street types. And I think that -- I
always imagine that they had this conversation with Tesla where they were looking at
him and they said we don't know what the hell you're talking about. But I love it and I'm
going to make you a star. And that Peck and Brown really did, particularly Peck, made
Tesla into a star. They really helped him figure out how to do that strategy I mentioned
a moment ago, of patent, promote and sell.
And indeed when Tesla successfully develops this motor, he sells -- they sell the patent
rights to Westinghouse in 1888, to George Westinghouse, and Tesla basically when
they do -- they basically get the money, he splits the money with -- with Peck and
Brown. And Peck and Brown walk away with five-ninths of the deal, and Tesla gets
four-ninths of royalties that come off that invention? Why? Because Tesla himself
knew that these guys, these business guys helped make him.
So Tesla comes up with a motor. And again, one of the features of his style is that he's
a Maverick. If everybody's going in that direction, Tesla is going to go in the opposite
direction, okay?
Up to that point, all the electric motors, whether it be direct current, whether they be
alternating current, basically relied on two pairs of magnets. And everybody up to the
time of Tesla said the way to make the electric motor work -- and an electric motor
works when you have two pair -- you have various -- you have sets of magnets, one set
of magnets is on the rotor or the shaft, the turning part, and one set is stationary.
And everybody said the way you make a motor work is you change the direction of the
magnetic field in the stator, in the rotating part of the electric motor.
Tesla's big insight was is to do it exactly the reverse. Change the magnetic field in the
stationary part of the motor and it will induce an electric field and hence a electric
current in the stator. Okay? So you can simplify electric motors.
Now, to get there he had to develop -- or he had to use alternating current.
In other words, to be able to produce that rotating magnetic field that rotates around and
around in that donut, this is the stator and this in here is the rotor, you feed two
alternating currents into that -- into that donut shaped -- well, that donut which has four
separate coils. And basically the magnetic field goes round and round and it induces an
electric current which in turn is in the opposite direction of the magnetic field, and that
forces the rotor to go spinning around.
Now, everybody looked at this and said holy cow, that's really pretty cool. But your
average electrical engineer at Westinghouse and his backers sort of said I got just one
question here about this. And Tesla said what's that? And they said, what's this four
wires business? You know, we only want two wires. Copper costs a lot of money. So
what are we doing here?
And so Tesla said, well, you're right. And Tesla went back to laboratory and he actually
hooked up a two-wire version of this. But I show you this four-wire version because this
is the preferred way, four, six, the more wires you have running between -- and I should
have told you this before, I apologize, this is the generator over here. This is the motor
over here.
The more wires you run in a Tesla system between the generator and the motor, the
more -- the more -- the more smooth the motor runs and the more torque you can
deliver. Of course, it's more expensive.
But Tesla said it's the ideal way of building a motor. And Westinghouse, I think, saw it
and said you know what, okay, kid, the best way to do it, that's fine, we'll do that, we'll
see what happens. And in the end the first motors that are installed are installed -Tesla motors are installed in very specific industrial applications like gold mine at
Telluride -- or the ut-oh, was it a gold or silver mine? I think it's a silver mine in
Telluride, Colorado.
And there they had a very specific problem, and they built a very specific system with a
water wheel turning the -- turning the generator and the motor at the mine head
basically to pull the ore up out of the ground. And they basically said this is such a
valuable mine, we'll put in as many wires as we need.
But Telluride demonstrated this was a great system. So in the end people arrived at the
fact that you should build the ideal system. But Tesla -- again to illustrate this motion of
idealism, he said the best way to do it is with four wires, well then I'm going to have four
wires.
Okay. That gives you a sense why at times people think he didn't have any business
sense. Okay.
So Tesla goes in 1888, sells the patents to the Westinghouse -- George Westinghouse,
goes to Pittsburgh for about six or eight months. Tesla had more good jobs than I'll ever
have. I mean, he quits Edison, he quits Westinghouse. I mean, this guy -- this guy
loves to quit jobs, okay?
So he stays at Westinghouse about six, eight months, and in 1889, he's ready to move
on. The engineers at Westinghouse sort of say, you know what, we love you, Nickie,
but you're not the guy to do the really serious development work, you're not the guy -I'm going to go backwards here a minute, to really figure out how to size all of these
parts, how to make this electric motor generator system into a full-blown product.
So there's a very happy part in other ways, and Tesla goes off. So what do you do?
You know, 1889, you're about 33 -- 32, 33 years old, you go off to see -- well, you don't
go off to see the circus, you go off to see the fair. So he goes to the World's Fair in
Paris in 1889.
And there he meets a graduate student who's just been working with Heinrich Hertz, a
physics student. And he hears all about how Hertz has discovered what we call radio
waves, what we should really call because radio isn't a word that isn't introduced until
1903, 1904, electromagnetic waves.
James Clerk Maxwell in his famous treatise on electricity and magnetism says if you do
the calculations, you look at my equations, they predict that there ought to be not just
light waves, waves that we can -- electromagnetic waves that we can see, but there
should be invisible waves.
So people think well, where are these waves? And the famous Von Helmholtz has -says to his top graduate student, he says to Heinrich, he says Heiny -- well, he probably
didn't call him Heiny, but he says Heinrich, go find me in radio waves. And Hertz was a
brilliant experimentalist, and by the mid -- late -- mid to late he, 1880s figures out how to
detect radio waves. Okay?
Tesla finds out that Hertz has actually demonstrated this and he's done it, Hertz has
done this. Sorry about that. I picked up the wrong piece of equipment. By basically
using a transformer battery, telegraph key. You open and close the key. You induce a
electric current in here and you get a spark across here. And at the same time you're
generating radio waves.
This little thing that looks like an earning down here was the resonator or the receiver.
So Hertz walked all around his laboratory holding this. And where he picked up a spark,
he knew that he had detected electromagnetic waves.
Well, Tesla thought this was just absolute the cat's pajamas. And so he returns to New
York City. Test spends most of his life living in New York City. He dies -- he's there
from 1884 to when he passes on in 1943. And in his laboratory in New York City, he
repeats Hertz' experiments, and he soups up -- scales up the Hertz apparatus to create
what we call a Tesla coil, okay, which is essentially a high voltage, high frequency
transformer which does its job by carefully matching the resonate -- you know matching
all parts of the circuits that they're proportioned properly so that you get a maximum
voltage jump across this transformer here.
Okay. So what do you do? You now have a souped-up apparatus, Tesla coil, and you
can start trying to figure out whether there's a market, there is a product that could be
built around your Tesla coil.
So Tesla looks around says the money that's being made right now on electricity is
about lighting. Okay? Edison has invented the incandescent bulb. General Electric is
selling light bulbs right, left, and center. Towns and cities all over the country are
installing electric light power plants.
Tesla thinks let's go into the lighting business. And to do so, he realizes that if you have
a glass tube, looks like a modern day fluorescent tube, but imagine that it's clear, and
you have a little bit of gas in it, say neon, you can take that tube and it was -- that was
called a Geissler tube in those days in the physics laboratories, and you can walk in,
and if you get close enough to a Tesla coil, the tube will light up.
I did a demonstration -- I didn't do demonstration, but they did a demonstration just
before I did a talk on Sunday, at the SPARK Museum in Bellingham, and it still gives me
a thrill when the Tesla coil's going off and they walk in with giant fluorescent tube and
wirelessly it lights up.
Tesla demonstrated that in 1891 to a lecture to completely fascinated the physics and
engineering communities. What he's doing here is this is the Tesla coil is all the way
over -- over here, kind of tucked on to this table. And at the right moment the lights are
going to be dimmed. These are two big zinc plates. And Tesla steps between the two
zinc plates, takes those big glass tubes, and rotates them in just the right direction so
they're aligned with the field and they light up.
People go oo, oo, holy cow. Now, remember this is the 19th century. This is the world
of mechanical engineering where things -- things were connected to each other. You
had wires that ran from your generator to your motor. You had gears or pulleys that
connected your steam engine to your machine tool.
So the idea that things operated magically at a distance really intrigued folks.
So Tesla decides he's going to patent the electric lighting equipment. He's going to
promote it through a series of brilliant demonstrations like the one I just mentioned.
He's going to bring over the rich, the famous, the mighty to his laboratory, like Mark
Twain. And Mark Twain there is indeed holding a coil and it's lighting up that bulb that's
basically at his belly button.
And he's going to -- and he does tons of newspaper interviews. So -- so he's doing all
the right things. He's learned the lessons from Charles Peck, his advisor on the motor
project. But Peck has died in 1890. So he's kind of trying to do this on his own.
Sadly in the mid 1890s, there was the panic of 1893, the economic was in a recession,
there was no -- there was no money around. So Tesla wasn't able to develop this
lighting system. Okay.
So Tesla also goes back and he starts thinking about this thing. And he says I don't
think it's a really great idea to basically build your Tesla coil and have it send radio
waves, electromagnetic waves all out in every direction, okay? And then you have your
light bulb over here.
Well, only one percent of all that energy that's coming off that coil is going to get to that
light bulb. He said this is a bad idea. He said we need to focus on the fact that we
should ought to minimize the electromagnetic waves, the radiation produced by my
circuits, and instead maximize the ground current because that way 99 -- instead of one
percent, 99 percent of the energy will get to the end user. Okay?
So everybody thinks -- or everybody in Tesla's time, like Marconi or Oliver Lodge
thought the way the top diagram is. Tesla thought in the bottom diagram. Again he's
doing it -- be thinking like a Maverick here. On the top diagram you have the
transmitter. You send up the radio waves to the antenna. The energy radiates off the
antenna, goes across space beep, beep, beep, beep, hits an antenna on the receiver,
the receiver detects the signal and to complete the circuit you have both the receiver
and the transmitter are grounded. Okay?
Tesla said no, no, no, no, no, we're going to do it exactly the opposite way. We're going
to pump energy into the ground, oscillating electric currents. They are going to travel
through the earth, come to a ground connection at the receiver send, and then they are
going to go back up to the receiver, the energy's going to be used to send messages or
run lights or motors, and you're going to have some sort of connection in the sky that
completes the circuit. So exactly the opposite of what everybody else was doing.
Okay. So to figure this out, Tesla leaves New York for again a short period of time, from
1899, to 1900. Goes to Colorado Springs and there builds a experimental station, the
largest -- probably the largest Tesla coil that was ever built.
It consisted of a primary which is on this fence that you see behind him. And that is that
fence is a basically a circle in the laboratory that's 49 and a half feet in diameter. And
the secondary, the other half of the transformer is in the middle, and that's there. Okay?
And he was able to get sparks off of this magnifying transmitter, this giant Tesla coil on
the order of about 100, 105 feet. Most books say 135 feet. I don't know where they got
the 135 feet.
Anybody here see The Prestige besides me? Remember the great scene, it's beautiful,
where [laughter] -- he's having fun with us today. Okay. So but there's this great scene
where there's this whole field of like 200 light bulbs in the snow. Okay? And the theory
is this transmitter beamed energy out to all of those light bulbs, okay? I wish it
happened. As near as I can tell it didn't happen.
Tesla did get one little light bulb to light up in -- off of this coil, which is out in one of the
-- in the pasture of one of the fields around the experimental station. And that's actually
his Pike's Peak in the background. Okay? So he did transmit power.
Now, Tesla, as far as he was concerned, if I could get one light bulb to light up, no
problem, I can get a hundred to work. And I'm not going to lose any energy. He
basically -- because he took the view that if I can imagine the ideal in my mind, I can
see it in my mind's eye, and I get just enough evidence from the real world that it's
working, I can get one light bulb to work, I'm home free, it's going to turn out.
Okay? So one of the scary parts about Colorado Springs -- and there's like 500 pages
of notes from Colorado Springs and you're going through them -- I'm going through
them and I'm reading all the newspaper articles from that time period, and I suddenly
realize there are no witnesses. Nobody saw anything other than Tesla and like one
assistant in Colorado Springs. Okay?
So he basically said I did it, but he has no proof. You know. Then again -- now the
lights are going to inflict on and off because it's like how dare you insult me. But it's like
Mr. Tesla -- never call him Nickie, Mr. Tesla, sir, you need a witness in Colorado
Springs. Okay.
So but he walked away convinced that he had sent power not only across the cow
pasture but around the world.
So. Okay. He goes back to New York City. And in 1901, he convinces the great
finance year J.P. Morgan to loan him $150,000. And he proceeds to use that $150,000
to build a laboratory on the north shore of long island at Wardenclyffe near what's now
today Shoreham, New York. And this building is the one that the oatmeal and a whole
team of people raised a million dollars to restore. Okay?
And it's remarkable that the building is still standing. It was designed by the famous
architect Stanford White, okay? So this was the power station. And this was the tower.
Okay?
Now, the key thing about this system was -- is since everybody -- everybody gets so
worked up about the tower. A secret is the hole, the well beneath the tower. Okay? So
under here is a hole, a shaft 120 feet deep. And at the bottom of the shaft were 16
pipes that he basically pushed out underneath the water table. And that was, as Tesla
said, was to get a grip on the earth and shake it. In other words, I'm going to deliver
electromagnetic energy into the earth, and this is how I'm going to send power all over
the world. Okay?
And, you know, he really assumed that if he got money from J.P. Morgan, he gave the
right sort of newspaper interviews, he built this fabulous laboratory, he lived at the
Waldorf Astoria, you know, did everything right, that the results were going to follow.
One of the things he didn't take into account was what -- as far as Tesla was concerned,
and upstart Italian named -- I can never say his first name, Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi
started working on radio in about 1895. And from the get-go, Marconi's insight was
what we're going -- what we're going to do here is we're going to do wireless telegraphy.
Focus on a communications application. And, by the way, focus on situations where
there are no competitors, like ship-to-shore signalling. All right?
So fall of 1901, Marconi -- and Marconi is always looking his shoulder, where is Tesla
going, where is Tesla going? Okay. And he decides that even though Tesla has
already predicted in 1899 that I, Tesla, am going to be the first to send a message
across the Atlantic Ocean, Marconi says let him fart around -- pardon me, let him mess
around with what he's doing on the north shore of Long Island, I'm going to get this
sucker done.
And he success in sending three -- three dots for the -- have I got that right? Anybody
here do Morse Code besides -- I've left -- thank you. So he sends three dots basically
the letter S in Morse Code and they detect it.
Again, an interesting piece of history that they don't tell you about in the history books,
which is there is Marconi just after he received a message. He heard the message and
his trusted assistant heard the message. And that's it. Okay? And they all trusted
Marconi. Okay. There's a story behind that. But it's the same sort of problem. Okay.
Okay.
So you took $150,000 from J.P. Morgan, you built this fancy laboratory with your -- by
your best friend, Stanford White, and, you know, and this guy, Marconi scoops you. So
what do you say to J.P. Morgan? Well, gee, Mr. Morgan I'm really sorry I took the
money. And it won't happen again. That's not Tesla.
Tesla basically comes back roaring January 1902. And he writes Morgan a letter. And
he says here's what we're going to do. We're going to have a world telegraphy system.
We're going to build a few power plants in major cities, like New York, and each one of
those is going to collect all sorts of information about stock prices, newspaper stories,
the Associated Press is already in existence, Reuters is already basically sending news
stories over the wires, over telegraph wires.
We'll do fax message, we'll do personal messages, we'll do telephone calls, we'll do
everything. Okay? And we're going to pump it into the earth. And those stations, as
fast as they receive the news, they're going to pour it into the ground, which will spread
instantly all over the earth. And everybody will have their own little receiver no bigger
than a pocket watch or a cell phone. Oh, what did I do with my cell phone? I ate it.
Okay. But we'll have a cell phone.
And to underline this, this 1904 story -- and I apologize if this is a little hard to see,
there's the tower that everybody liked. And it is basically getting power from Niagara
Falls. The power comes to the station. And then it is transmitted -- now, obviously
through the ground, but we'll give the newspaper reporters a little bit of license here, to
people that are out camping. The guy's holding up a great big pole, and the pole is
stuck if the ground. And because the energy travels from Tesla's station to the bottom
of the pole and then the circuit is completed back, he's able to get messages or
electricity or whatever he wants while he's out camping.
Same is true this guy was out on a sail boat. The antenna is the mast of the ship.
But my Alan time favorite one is the lady with the parasol. And so she's -- she's at
Saratoga Springs or at some nice resort and she wants to find out what the latest news
is in New York City, and she just holds up her parasol. [laughter].
So I thought it was a pretty good thing. Now, many people say, so why didn't this carry
the day with Morgan? So -- it didn't carry the day with Morgan because Morgan made
his money reorganizing railroads, building industrial organizations like General Electric
or United States Steel.
This was a guy who had a producer mind-set. You made your money by dealing with
what you guys -- you know, what we would call today -- you know, with other
manufacturers, selling capital goods, OEMs, okay? You didn't make money selling
devices, consumer electronics to -- you know, to every Tom, Dick, and Harry,
everybody. Okay?
So I think it just didn't compute for Morgan this idea of an information revolution that was
going to be personal information. And so Morgan just sort of says thanks but no thanks,
I'm not putting any more money into this. And so Tesla's left high and dry after 1903
with no additional money from Morgan.
The structure -- the deal structure with Morgan, if you want to ask me about this in the Q
and A is really interesting, and Tesla basically gets himself hoisted on a petard by giving
Morgan 51 percent of the patent rights when he does the original -- he structures the
original deal. And that makes it a mess for getting any other investors.
But would Warenclyffe have worked? This was a question that puzzled me for a long
time. And I finally learned to phrase the answer by having to answer another question,
which is from an electromagnetic standpoint, is the earth like an ocean or a water
balloon?
Okay. Tesla thought it was like a water balloon. Okay? Which is, imagine you have a
balloon filled with water -- he also did this with a football, but I like the water balloon
better. Okay? And you've got on one side of the water balloon you've got a little pump,
okay? In fact, you can kind of see in it this crummy picture. There is a little pump. This
is the water balloon. And all around the earth or around the water balloon you've got
little one-way valves. Okay.
If you -- if the earth is an inelastic fluid and you start pumping on one side, or the water
balloon, and you get the right rhythm, the right frequency, every stroke in results in a
little squirt out all around the water balloon. Okay?
Now, ideal -- brilliant idea if it was true. The problem is is the earth is not like a water
balloon. The earth, in an electromagnetic sense, is like an ocean. So if you stand on
the edge of the ocean -- and you grew up in New Jersey, and we used to talk about this
all the time, if you throw a rock in the Atlantic Ocean in New Jersey, would the waves
from your little rock carry all the way, propagate all the way over across the ocean to
Spain. Okay?
No. Because the ocean is an elastic fluid, and over time those waves dissipate
because the weight -- the nature of the fluid absorbs the energy. Okay?
Unfortunately if you're sending energy through the earth's crust, in most circumstances
it functions more like an elastic fluid than an inelastic fluid. Okay?
So you couldn't really grip the earth and shake it. And, you know, never mind what
exactly we're talking about about pumping energy down into the earth and making sure
that it kind of goes off in every direction through the earth's crust. That was -- those
pipes under ground gave Tesla major conniption.
Now, before you beat up Tesla too badly about this, Marconi wins the Nobel Prize in
1915 for his work on radio. And he devotes the Nobel Prize speech to basically saying
I'm -- anyway, they go through the atmosphere like this or maybe they go through the
atmosphere like that. He didn't really know. Okay? They didn't understand the
ionosphere what we understand today. Okay?
So what did Tesla contribute to radio? And, yes, the supreme court did hand down a
decision where they used Tesla patents to basically, in an antitrust case, stick it to RCA.
Okay? That doesn't mean that the supreme court decided that Tesla invented radio.
Okay? This is one of these little legal points that's worthy of just mentioning.
So what did Tesla actually do? Okay. If you want to talk about radio, like FM radio or
the radio that you have in your car or, you know, in your stereo at home or what have
you, or your clock radio, that's broadcast radio. Sorry. Tesla didn't invent that. Marconi
also didn't invent that. It actually was a whole team of people that did.
But if you want to talk about who looked at electromagnetic waves, radio waves and
said there's an opportunity there, Tesla's your guy. Okay? Well ahead of Marconi.
He's thinking about what to do.
And what he really underlines, which is I think an important lesson, is how hard it is to
just introduce an disruptive technology. Okay? We sort of, ah, well, the Wright brothers
invented the airplane in 1903. Ha. We're all set. You know, we're going to -- you know,
we're going to have commercial air travel, you know, just like that, okay.
There's a long way from the Wright brothers to passenger airlines. Okay? That -- the
work that engineers and entrepreneurs do to make that happen is real work. Okay.
Wireless power is -- has a couple of applications that are worthy of mention just in
passing. The navy, from the 1980s to the early 2000s used extra low frequency and
basically sent radio waves through the basically what's called the Schumann cavity
because extra long -- extra long waves would basically penetrate the ocean and so
submarines with nuclear missiles could not -- could basically get radio messages and
not have to surface to communicate back with headquarters.
At MIT, there are a number of researchers that developed how to use Tesla's ideas
about electromagnetic resonance to basically have a way of charging up your cell
phone because you'd have a new back on your cell phone, the cell phone would then sit
on a little tray and it wirelessly charges on that.
Tesla's life after 1905, when he's -- he's heartbroken, he can't make Wardenclyffe work,
he has a nervous breakdown. The rest of his life from 1905 to 1943 is fairly sad. One
colorful incident is that he does tell the US Government in the 1930s that he has come
up with a particle beam weapon that should be able to shoot down airplanes. As near
as I can tell there's nothing -- I mean, the one paper about it, I've looked at it pretty
carefully. I'm not -- I'm kind of with the MIT professor that reviewed it in World War II
and said, sorry there's nothing -- there's not a whole lot here.
Okay. So why did Tesla -- as I'm winding down now, not make it into the history books?
Well, until the car came along, there was no major corporation named after him. He
wasn't a useful hero in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Cold War era, two corporations
were to educators because he didn't really represent what people thought was at the
heart of innovation. Okay?
Yankee ingenuity. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, all those guys
clearly are good old American boys and they did it because of this -- whatever this
magical thing called Yankee ingenuity is. Tesla also is this kind of mystical intuitive guy.
He doesn't look like your standard empirical scientist, and the R and D that's being done
at that point in the 1950s, 1960s, the emphasis is on it as being science based. Okay.
So why is Tesla making a comeback today? Well, for one, he's tall, he's dark, he's
handsome, and he's mysterious. Okay? I mean, there is people walk in, and I've
watched them signing books and people were trying to -- it's not whether they're going
to buy the book or not, they don't open the book. I, of course, want them to open the
book and read a package.
They look at the picture and they're just like -- they're just mesmerized by the guy.
So there's something about -- he's a hand some guy. Tesla is a classic underdog. We
love underdogs in American popular culture. He's pushing against big business. He is
going to, if he succeeded with wire power in one fell swoop he's going to stick it to
General Electric, AT&T and all the major utilities. Okay? And he's going to give us free
energy. So he's really going to disrupt the status quo.
And for new age people, Tesla's often attractive because we want -- we want high tech,
but we don't want to be sucked into what we sometimes think are the hollow ideas of
corporate capitalism and the hollow -- hollow notions of rational science. Okay?
And so you'll be able to get -- with test you can have the high-tech, which you can also
be in touch with your inner mystical self, and I think that's that's -- that's what the
people, Elon Musk and the folks at Tesla Motors glommed on to. And on one website a
fan summed it up very well. He said, this incredible sports car is green, meaning that
it's an electric vehicle, with a bite. Goes from zero to 60 in no time flat.
So let me stop with this one. So test and disruptive technologies. So if I was going to
leave you just with one kind of big thought about, you know, Tesla and innovation and
what he means for the way we -- the way we bring about technology, is a couple of
thoughts here.
One is, as Tesla illustrates that at least for some creators of disruptive technology, the
arrow moves from the inside of the inventor out to the marketplace, out to the world.
Inventors like Tesla want to have an idea inside, and they want to order the world out
there. Okay? It's a subjective process rather than objective process where you go out
and you measure things and you study the marketplace, you studied the phenomenon
on the basis of what you see at the bench top or what you see in your market surveys,
you act on that.
Tesla's is moving in the opposite direction. We see time and time again that for him to
succeed with his major technologies he's got to get -- he's got to tell a good story. He's
got to invoke a metaphor. He's got to fire your imagination.
Many of you probably know Arthur C. Clark in the 1970s said any sufficiently developed
-- or any sufficiently advanced technology will always be perceived as magic.
Tesla understood that. And above all Tesla succeeded or failed because when he got
or didn't get the right kind of partnership. A partnership between technology, the stuff
that Tesla would do, and the business, the entrepreneurs that could help create and
advance that technology.
Well, I've talked long enough. I thank you for your time. And I'm happy to take
questions, both from the audience away and the audience that's right here. Thanks.
[applause].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Yes, sir?
>>: One quick comment regarding the Tesla coil. One paradox is now there's a car
called Tesla. All the gas cars have Tesla coils.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: That's right.
>>: And they have it more now that you have a coil for cylinder.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Yeah.
>>: He has been in every single car since Henry forward start.
>>: [inaudible] [laughter].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Actually it's a magneto. But you're absolutely right, electronic
ignitions, don't they, depend on being able to get that high voltage that you can get from
a Tesla coil. Yeah.
>>: So he needs the market department.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: He needed the marketing department in the worst way. But I
didn't actually know that. So good.
Yes, sir?
>>: You're making Tesla [inaudible] Marconi [inaudible] transiting megawatts to get
[inaudible] signal, and looks like [inaudible] see at least a few hundred kilowatts the
other end. [inaudible] competitors.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: No. Because not -- well, first off for Marconi to get across the
Atlantic, okay -- I wrote this footnote just for you, okay? In footnote I go on and I sort of
say look very carefully at the pictures of the Colorado station, Tesla station, then look at
the pictures, and I'll tell you which -- you know, I tell you in the footnote which book to
look at pictures of Marconi station in Cornwall, England.
And they are -- they are extremely similar in sort of scale, in terms of the actual circuits,
the whole nine yards. You know, so Tesla and Marconi are technical rivals.
Now, you're absolutely right, one decides to down the communications market and say
he only has to deliver, as you said, what, a few microwatts at the other end, okay,
whereas Tesla is betting I'm starting with megawatts and I'm going to finish with
megawatts because he was in the power business, because that's what he thought the
big market was, okay?
So they bet on two very different things. But then that's my point is this is -- is this
amazing new technologies, like Tesla coils, got to say, what's the -- what's the market?
What's the best thing to do with it? And one guy bet one way, and one guy bet the
other. But we don't necessarily always teach our children that there's contingency,
there's -- things are unsettled. So read that book.
Yes, sir?
>>: It's a very nice talk. But I have to say that the last 40 years or 50 years [inaudible]
what happened.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Sure. Okay. You know when you write a biography, you
know, you've got to decide how am I ever going to get out of this book. Okay? So
about 10 years in you're going oh, my God, how am I going to get out.
You know, so I had a sabbatical leave and I wrote and more. And the best thing that
happened from that sabbatical leave is I came back and I said I know the structure of
the book. And I made a conscious decision which I picked up, which is the store I want
to tell in details up to about 1905. And I'm going to compress, in this case, down to one
slide, everything that happens from 1905 to when he dies in 1943.
Why? Because again, I want people to be thinking about when he was really, really
good what was he doing. But what happens in 1905?
Okay. So 1905 he can't get any more money from Morgan because the deal has been
structured -- and any other Wall Street investor, because the deal has been structured
the wrong way.
He can't figure out how to actually get the energy into the earth to shake -- to basically
make Wardenclyffe work. Okay? The piece that I haven't told you about is Tesla up --
Tesla, as near as I can tell, was gay. He had a couple of boyfriends throughout his life.
And the boyfriend that he had at that particular point basically said, you know, he was a
hoe row in the Spanish American War. His name is Hobson, Richmond Hobson. And
Hobson decides he's going to run for congress and so he's got to look normal. See,
he's doing to go marry this woman.
And so Hobson goes off, and he marries Grizelda who was something on wheels, okay?
That's another story. Okay.
Anyhow, but Tesla can't get the money to work, can't get the technology to work, and
his -- you know, his closest friend that he really kind of hoped was going to be with him
for a long time or at least you know be out there, runs -- you know, decides he's going to
have a relationship with this woman.
Basically has a nervous breakdown in 1905, 1806. And he never really gets over that
breakdown. Okay? And he works on -- he works on a steam turbine. Most turbines are
axial. In other words, basically the steam comes in and kind of travels along the shaft.
He develops a turbine that works at right angles, in other words, the steam comes in
and due to viscosity between very, very small plates gets the rotary motion. Okay?
Really interesting idea there. Still people working on Tesla turbines that are not axial.
He works on that. He works on speedometers and develops those and sells a few
patents for those.
He does some consulting work on the side. He publishes his autobiography in 1919.
But essentially the guy -- the guy is broke and becomes more and more kind of
eccentric. And it's a very sad story. And at the end of the day I sort of said I don't want
people to get hung up on the sad story. I want them to -- I want people to sort of size up
what he did in his -- in the rich part of his career.
>>: Became very fond of pigeons, too, in the end.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Yes. Then the pigeon story, I have mixed feelings about the
pigeon story, okay. So one part of the pigeon -- and I should tell you why. The pigeon
story largely comes from a very interesting biography. If you enjoyed Tesla you should
most definitely read the biography. And you can get it I think now downloaded online by
John O'Neill who was a Pulitzer Prize winning science reporter for I'll say the New York
Tribune, but I could have the paper wrong. And he knew Tesla for the last 20 years of
Tesla's life.
So there's this closing chapter in the book -- he's kind of done, you know, the regular
biography, and then he has this sort of chapter which is kind of interesting things about
Tesla at the end of his life. And so all sorts of quirky things are in that chapter.
And everybody kind of goes and says, they must be true. But I only buy what's in the
chapter if I found it somewhere else, in another newspaper article or in a letter or some
other source.
So the story about the pigeons is is that there he is, he's -- he doesn't have a lot of
friends, he doesn't have a lot of money, he's living in New York City. He grew -- he
grew up the very early part of his life, before he was like five years old, he grew up on a
farm again in the country side in what's today Croatia, and he liked all the farm animals.
Well, the problem is you live in New York City, there aren't a lot of cows and pigs and
sheep or cats to talk to. So the only animals that he can really relate to, kind of go back
to what made him feel good as a kid are the pigeons.
So he feeds the pigeons. And indeed, you know, O'Neill is the one that tells us that he
had this pigeon with the laser eyes that was his true love. I don't know. I don't know.
There are days -- you know, there are people like Tesla you want to -- you know, you
want to take them out to dinner, you want to have a long conversation. Then there are
people you want to like -- like O'Neill, I'm sorry it's like you want to go up to him and say
what are you thinking? You know. Suggesting that Tesla's best -- you know, was in
love with a pigeon.
Anyhow. You get a little wrapped up in the -- you know, when you're in the character.
And all the previous biographers are either your friends or your rivals.
So did you have a question in the white shirt back there? Right behind this gentleman -yeah. No? Sierra, do we have somebody online?
>>: We do. They want to know how you became interested in Tesla.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Okay. So we're going to keep this short. So we're not going to
start with the dead battery collection when I was eight years old. Okay? So I was
interested in things about -- about invention and electricity and all of that from when I
was a kid.
But I went to graduate school and my graduate professor said -- he went around the
room one day in seminar, at least this is how I imagined it had happened, and he sort of
said, right, you're going to do German electrification, you're going to study the space
program, you're going to do this, you're going to do that, and he kind of got to the end
and he said you're going to do inventors.
And I can't believe my good fortune that I didn't get German electrification. But I got
inventors. Because I've been fascinated by inventors my whole career of 30 years.
And once you start studying inventors pretty quickly Tesla because the Mt. Everest of
inventors.
Because everybody knows him. And he did really important stuff. And everybody tells
you that he's crazy. Okay? So you got this like well, how am I going to deal with this?
So in the -- in the -- about 15 years ago I was working on inventors, I was thinking about
the -- about doing this, and Sloan Foundation which is -- which has a program for the
promotion of public understanding of science, was getting letters right, left, and
proposals right, left and center from various film makers and poets and novelists who all
wanted to popularize Tesla. And they said well, this is a pretty good idea to popularize
Tesla.
But all of them are back to that O'Neill biography, which is kind of problematic. They
said -- so they said kid, you want to write the definitive biography. I said okay. So that's
how I got into it.
But I've always -- it was a major challenge. Because I could tell that this was not going
to be -- this was not going to be the easy one to write. Yes, sir?
>>: What about Tesla's own electric car ventures?
>> W. Bernard Carlson: His own electric car ventures?
>>: [inaudible].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: You're going to have to tell me more about that. I didn't
encounter any Tesla's own electric cars. I mean, there is the story -- are you thinking
about the car that they -- that, you know, they tell you about on the Internet that is like a
pierce arrow in the in the 1920s which somehow they converted and put some sort of
coils in?
>>: Yes.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: As near as I can tell, I've note been able to find any stuff in the
regular newspapers, traditional historic records about it. So I don't know. It could be
true. But I never found anything.
I should also tell you that there's 150,000 pages of material in the Tesla museum in
Serbia. Okay? And Serbs -- the Serbs have been very kind to me, very generous, but I
never was actually allowed to see more than a tiny amount of material in the archives.
So somebody else gets to go -- talk their way into Serbia, talk there way into the
museum and maybe that's where the answer to it is. But not anything that I was able to
find in America about that.
Sir?
>>: Yeah, there's an attack today on the patent system and it's great to me that a guy
like Tesla probably wouldn't have been successful at all had he not been able to get
patents for these since he wasn't a builder, he was more of a dreamer.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Yeah. And a secret to his career in that first verb in the
strategy is patent. In other words, he had outstanding IP lawyers. In other words, they
really knew how to draw up broad patents that covered a lot of -- a lot of ideas and a lot
of territory. And with the motor he actually got very lucky that he had the broad patents
for a system of alternating current plus a series of specific motor designs.
So he basically just by -- and this is again not really Tesla, this is the business partners
and the patent attorney by dumb bunny luck delivers a portfolio of patents that
Westinghouse is label to leverage. No, he needed a patent system and indeed he is a
product of the patent system that is not first to file but is really based on priority. So you
can imagine if you're in the IP business, you know, you can probably work out that I'm
one that believes in having patents that are actually examined and have that process
confer value to the -- to the individual inventor. So ->>: In your slide you mention that after he passed, the FBI took all his paperwork.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Yes.
>>: What was the FBI interested in?
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Okay. So in the mid 1930s, Tesla -- well, throughout the
1930s Tesla has a birthday interview every July, and he calls the newspaper reporters
and he tells them all sorts of amazing stories about his career before. That's where he
tells the story about, you know, building the earthquake machine.
But in another point what's in kind of the headlines, the -- what people are worried
about, is long-range bombers that the Germans could be building and the Japanese
could be building that could fly across the ocean and bomb London or bomb New York
or bomb San Francisco.
So Tesla gets up in this interview, and he says got it all worked out. I'm going to build
this particle beam weapon, which is going to beam particles up to the airplane and
disable the plane. These guys are going to kill the pilot. But I'm going to develop this
weapon.
So everybody goes yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pearl Harbor occurs in 1941, Tesla's
a really old man. He calls one more newspaper interview and he says I'm telling you
the federal government needs to give me money and I'll build this thing. But don't send
any other scientists, just give me the money. Okay. So he dies in 1943. Not J. Edgar
Hoover, but J. Edgar Hoover's number -- you know, sort of number two and number
three in command look around, and they think we're not happy about this. Because the
guy who's going to get the papers now that Tesla's dead because he has no -- he never
married, he has no children, the family is somewhere in -- you know, in the remaining
kind of brothers and sisters and whatever, in Yugoslavia on a -- you know, they stay out
of touch, they're going to go to a nephew who is at that point, for all intents and
purposes a diplomat -- well, he is a diplomat. I was going to say for all intents and
purposes the ambassador from Yugoslavia but he's just a diplomat from Yugoslavia.
And they say -- the FBI says we don't trust this guy, the nephew. We think he's -- we
just don't trust him. We think he's trouble. Because we don't know whether he's a Nazi
sympathizer, whether he's a communist, he's going to fall in with the Soviets or he's
looking after his own interests.
So they say, god-dammit, we're not going to let the papers fall that his hands. So they
-- as soon as it's clear that the papers are now going to be owned by this nephew,
because Tesla becomes a citizen in 1890, the FBI walks in, there's an office -- a
separate government agency called the office of alien property. The office of alien
property says if the nephew is now the heir to the papers, because the war's on, we can
look at any alien property and seize it.
And so the FBI thinks, yes, we're out of this mess. So the -- but once the alien property
people have it, they send in a team of scientists, a guy particularly from MIT, who goes
through all the papers and comes to the conclusion that there is no -- there is no secret
weapon here.
But because there's still -- they still don't trust this nephew, the government decides to
hold on to the papers until 1951, when Truman decides -- it really I think comes -- the
nephew comes back now, is officially the ambassador to Yugoslavia and the Truman
Administration looks around, says, Yugoslavia could really go into the Soviet block or
maybe we could pull it back and have a relationship with it. And it is a diplomatic
gesture they give the papers to the people of Yugoslavia. So everything really gets
crated up, goes off to Yugoslavia, and it's there, you know, for the next 50 years and,
you know, still, you know, comes probably as close as anybody from the west that's
been able to build some trust with them and got to see some things.
But that's the story about the FBI. The FBI still gets questions like every day. So why
do you still have Tesla's papers? Don't have Tesla's papers. We gave them to the
Yugoslavs.
All the way in the back.
>>: Sometimes 19th century the US Patent Office stopped working for actually working
demos and [inaudible]. That's what makes the invention before or after that [inaudible].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: That decision comes in the early 1870s, okay? The patent
system periodically goes through a reform. We're just going through a reform period
right now and different people have different opinions about it. Okay.
But in about 1870, they basically -- they basically simplified the patent process. They
dropped the fees. They made it easy -- you know, they sort of said we still want the
drawings, we want the write-up to be a certain way. But we're going to waive the patent
model except for perpetual motion machines. Okay?
Now, the interesting -- one of the -- well, just a complete aside is there, as we were
saying, Tesla leverage -- puts the patents to some good use. But the guy who really
understands this set of changes that come in the early 1870s is Edison. If you look at
patent statistics like in the electrical field, you know, in the, you know, right from the -1865 to 1870, 1872, you know, if you're got five patents in your career, you were like a
prolific inventor. I mean, you were really a success.
Patent changes come through the very first year that those changes are in place, like
1872, 1873. Edison himself files like 40 patents. Okay? And he just -- he basically -he rides -- he rides that patent train, you know, to the end. And that's why he got in his
lifetime career of 1,093 patents.
In contrast, Tesla -- I've forgotten the exact number, but I'm going to say it's about 49 or
50 US patents. So these people that sort of say we had hundreds of patents, I don't
know what they're counting exactly.
So, I mean, because I've even seen lists of all the foreign patents. And it doesn't add
up to hundreds. So.
Yes, sir?
>>: So [inaudible] two types of creativities between Edison and Tesla and you say
especially [inaudible] promoted the Edison style.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Yeah.
>>: What are we doing, either at the University of Virginia, or in academia to enable
generations who obviously there's a ground swell in this type of dealing with technology.
Do you see that manifest in your classes? What is the fall -- what can we do to enable
science people want to approach it as a technology?
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Right. So I have -- and, you know, just Google it if you want
because ->>: [inaudible].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: What's that?
>>: We're bing. [laughter].
>> W. Bernard Carlson: Thank you for coming Microsoft in Redmond. The security
guards will see you out the door. My apologies. Okay. All right.
But I did a little story on -- which is -- was published on the daily dot this summer, and
it's about the Tesla Edison wrap video, okay, where they basically set up -- Edison is the
-- Edison is the custom bag and Tesla is the hero.
And the point that I make in this little essay is, as I say, the American economy thrives,
because we have different styles of inventors. We have Edisons and we have Teslas.
Okay? You know, and you need a mix. I mean, I think I'm going to use the J name in
the room, Steve Jobs. But, you know, the -- the economy that we have now is thanks to
Bill Gates and the stuff that Microsoft does and it also has to do with some of the things
that Apple and Steve Jobs got done. And they're different styles of invention. Okay?
So what we needed to -- and again, I'm now speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for
the dean of engineering. But I think we're -- your sympathetic. We need to continue to
develop the high analytical skills, the math and the rigorous analysis that we really
understand how to teach that to students in engineering, but we need to couple that with
the hands-on stuff that Edison really exhibits, which is and awareness of the materials,
as one of my old colleagues used to say, who used to teach the course in create. Do
we need to understand the diabolical nature of concrete? Materials do not do what you
think they're going to do.
Circuits do not do what they want to do. Software -- there's a reason why I -- I realized
pretty early on, I don't have the patience to make software do what it's supposed to do.
I mean, I was supposed to learn how to right in the '80s, right Fortran programs and I
was like, I don't think I'm going to do this. I think I'm going to go to history school.
Okay?
But all of those things illustrate, you know, that the devil is in the material details. And
one of the things that's really exciting, we have hands-on programs now that
complement the math, the high level math and science at the University of Virginia.
We're not alone in doing this. Would now have what's called experiential programs.
And, in fact, my department, engineering and society, may not only teach the history of
technology classes and the writing classes, but we actually have a laboratory building
where they build electric vehicles. And they -- you know, they can actually use big
dangerous tools. And this is great.
But, you know, when I arrived in engineering 20 years ago as a -- you know, as a junior
professor, it was all math and science. There was no sense of this hands-on.
And we see it with the students. The students are gung-ho to do internships as soon as
they can at companies so they begin to see what -- how companies take the science
and make it into products. And I run an entrepreneurship program where the kids are -they're absolutely convinced that, you know, they're going to be the next Mark
Zuckerberg. And I say we'll pray for you.
But it's a very interesting question, how do we get the right -- I grew what's the right mix
of Edison guys and Tesla guys in the American economy?
>>: Does that mean that you're seeing universities that were accepting now of
professors coming out of industry? Because for years to break into -- it was like, no,
you're a practical engineer, you're not a academia, you can't come into the university to
teach.
>> W. Bernard Carlson: I think you're beginning to see those barriers come down at -and, again, it's the high-end places that really understand this. I mean, a place like
Stanford or MIT, the boundaries between the classroom, if you will, and industry are
much more porous. And it's been, again, you know, in our particular university we're
school of engineering and applied science.
Well, is there people nodding in the room? They know why -- who cares about those
last three words, applied science. Okay? It's the academic kind -- the really academic
kind of guys.
So cutting-edge universities are making this boundary. We're about to make -- hire an
engineering leadership. And I've got colleagues that are like, what are they going to
have a PhD and some serious like, you know, esoteric academic field? And I'm like -you know, it's like I want to say, honey, they're going to have had real world experience.
And the academics go oo, oo. And I said don't worry, we'll make it work.
But, no, the change -- I mean, the change is coming. It's an interesting question which
again universities and companies are going to have to decide because the bargain that
was struck in the '50s and continues still to this day is this you teach them the
fundamentals, you teach them the science, we'll teach them -- once they get to a
company like Microsoft, we'll teach them the secret sauces. We'll teach them the
proprietary knowledge. And we actually want to keep that boundary. We want to keep
a Chinese wall between those two types of knowledge.
And that wall is becoming more porous. But I always emphasize we got to be aware
that a choice -- you know, some choices were made and it has -- you know, the choices
had some good side to engineering and innovation, it had some not so good sides.
So, Ms. Amy has come back. She's got this great big hook. So I'm around. I'm going
to sign some books. But thank you for your time.
[applause]