Lies! The Truth About the Tesla vs Edison Feud

If there’s two things the internet knows about Nikola Tesla, it’s that he was a genius scientist vastly ahead of his time, and that thanks to a many decades long feud with Thomas Edison which included Edison stealing some of his work and otherwise keeping his former employee on the black balled list, Tesla died in poverty and was largely forgotten by history until relatively recently… The thing is, other than the part about Tesla being a genius, literally none of the rest of what I just said is true. In fact, most of what popular history remembers about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison both individually and with regards to their relationship is pure myth. Ringing in on this, historian Keith Nier very aptly stated of Thomas Edison, "He is actually one of the least well known of all famous people, and much of what everybody thinks they know about him is no more reliable than a fairy tale." And as for Tesla? That’s even more of the case for him than Edison. To a pretty shocking degree actually. In fact, in the couple decades we’ve been researching and writing to the tune of several thousand videos, we’ve never come across two individuals that popular history gets so incredibly wrong. Unfortunately for us, who were once major Tesla fanboys, this meant facing some rather harsh truths about the man and his work and ideas… which were… ya… we’ll get into it all. But as for Edison, turns out kind of an incredible human when you throw out all the myths that largely came about thanks to becoming the devil to god Tesla in the popular narrative of Tesla’s life. So, without further ado, let’s welcome in my co-host Gilles with his vast engineering knowledge to get to the bottom of it all so that you, too, can now smugly walk around knowing the true story of Tesla and Edison, while fanboys and haters on the interwebs continue to sling their myths and misconceptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices