Nikola Tesla Fell In Love with a Pigeon

0:00Hello and welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens. I'm Hannah Fry and this is an episode of Field Notes, which is where Michael and I empty our houses of any old scientific linked crap that we've got lying around and bring it to you for your entertainment. You're welcome. I'm speaking out of turn here. These are all carefully curated objects that are genuine scientific interest. Very true. And today I'm bringing in an object that was given to me as a gift by Ramesh Ranganathan. Oh, the comedian. The comedian, the brilliant comedian. He gives a gift to every guest who appears on his podcast.

0:31This is what he gave me. I would say it is somewhere between extremely boring and potentially lethal. I love that. That's what we've got coming up.

0:50This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2 % of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave. It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

1:43For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Beer 52. A good international squad needs balance, depth and variety. So does a case in the fridge. With an incredible month of football ahead of us, our friends at Beer 52 have expertly curated a case of eight outstanding beers from eight different countries. We're talking Germany, the USA, Argentina, and of course, a bit of home representation with England and Scotland. And the best part? It's free.

2:22Go to beer52.com slash football and just cover£5.95 postage to get your free beers now. Inside, you'll get crisp lagers, juicy pale ales and rich creamy stouts, plus tasty snacks and ferment magazine. If dark beers aren't your thing, you can choose the light case instead. It's your squad after all. After the first box, it carries on as a subscription. That's£29.95 every 28 days. However, there's no minimum commitment and you can cancel after your free box. So that's beer52.com slash football to claim your free case of beers. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best.

3:07Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com slash bright summer ahead to learn more. See you this summer.

3:33Do you know what this is? It's a Tesla coil. It is a Tesla coil. I've seen many, many short videos about these where they're being used, but I don't know what it's doing or how it works. Have you ever played with one? I've never played with one. I've seen giant ones at science museums and I just watch and I go, oh, I better look that up someday to learn how it works. But I don't know. Maybe today is the day, Michael. Today might be the day. Maybe today is the day. Okay, so what it's doing is it's basically a transformer. So it's a way to step up the voltage from a current. So normal transformers, I don't know, if you buy something in America and then use it in the UK or vice versa, you need a transformer because it's 240 volts in the UK and 120?

4:18Yeah. What is it in the US? It's less in the US. Less. Anyway, less. But what this is doing is it has two circuits that are tuned to the same resonant frequency. So what it does is it sort of sloshes the electricity backwards and forwards between them to just really amp up, amp up, amp up the voltage. The voltage goes up. Right. But it doesn't add more. The current is the same. It's the voltage that is increased. I think the current goes down. Oh. Aren't they connected to each other? I don't know much about electricity, which is even more reason for us to play with this. Okay. I'll be honest. We're absolutely at the limits of my recollection from A-level physics.

4:58This is an important moment, though, to show that we're always learning. Yeah. Like, I'm still at the level of current is like the amount. It's like the flow amount, but then the pressure behind it is the voltage. Like, I have a Van de Graaff generator, And that produces extremely high voltages, like in the millions. And yet it can spark you and it's not pleasant, but it doesn't kill you because the current is small. It's high voltage, but only a few electrons. You can have a lot of electrons and barely a difference between two places and you'll get very low voltage. But that current can be really dangerous.

5:37Yeah, absolutely. That's the thing that you have to really worry about. The high voltage is the thing that looks really fancy. Yeah. But it's the current that is the dangerous thing. There are two lightning labs, actually, that I've visited at various points for different TV programs. One of which is like this kind has a massive Tesla coil, unbelievably high voltage, looks incredible. Lightning in the sky, right? It's amazing. And the other one, the high current lightning lab, looks pathetic. Extremely dangerous. Extremely dangerous. Extremely dangerous. The analogy actually that I liked, when I was doing physics at school, my whole class came up with this fun idea that actually electricity is just elves.

6:20They're like little elves who are running around inside the wires. Is that not true? I haven't seen it disproven. Exactly. And look, the whole point of science is it's falsifiable. So this is something. Maybe we should look into it, guys. Maybe we should. But the idea is that the current is the number of elves that you have and the voltage is how much water they're bringing with them in their buckets. Okay, cool. Yeah, that works for me too. For the purposes of this episode, we can keep it there. For the purposes of this episode, we'll do that. Okay, so what this is doing is caring about the voltage and reducing the current as a result.

6:48Okay, so for those of you listening, this box Hannah has brought, it's a plexiglass box. It's clear. You can see all the electronics inside, which there isn't much. There's mainly empty space in there. There's a couple transformers, and the box is maybe, I don't know, two inches tall, and then its depth and length is like maybe four or five inches. But on top, there's a golden disc and a needle is sticking straight up like a steel needle that gets gets quite sharp at the tip. And that's about, I don't know, three inches tall. Then there's two knobs. One says frequency and one says power and it's plugged in.

7:24All right. Should I turn it on? See what see what happens? Oh, I guess. Go ahead. Yeah. OK, let's go. I'll just move my laptop slightly. OK, that's probably a good idea. Is it going to work? No. whoa okay yes isn't that cool that's really cool it made it was frightened me yeah okay so we should describe what we just yeah what we've just witnessed yeah from the very tip of that needle the sharpest point there was an explosion of what looked like miniature lightning Yeah, lightning bolts in all directions, like a ball, you know, those the plasma things. Yeah, like a plasma ball. When you touch the plasma ball and there's like this lightning bolt that comes from the middle out to the edges.

8:15We saw those. It was almost like jellyfish like that describes the color. Well, it's like a fluorescent blue. Yeah. Oh, I would say even pinky almost. Oh, there's some pink in there, too, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So there's the voltage. What in that spike is getting so strong that the electrons are like, I got to leave. Yeah. But they have nowhere to go except into air, which they don't like to go through unless they really have to. That's why it's so explosive. Yeah. And I'm hearing pops. Right. That poppy noise is what? So what is happening is we are literally ionizing the air. Yeah. All of those little arcs that you see coming out, and the purple even, you are turning the air into plasma, literally as it happens.

8:56I mean, that is pretty cool. So you're stripping the electrons off the nuclei. Stripping the electrons off the nuclei in the air. So what if you lick it? I mean, you're welcome to. Am I? Do you really want that on your conscience? Because I'll do it. No, I won't do it. I think it's probably better not to. um but yeah you can uh because i think technically you can touch it but maybe don't i'm not going to no i mean that was both frightening and i didn't think it'd be so loud i know yeah the way that this is working though is it's it's using resonance so if you imagine a person on a swing right if you're pushing a child on a swing if you manage to get them at the right frequency they can go higher and higher and higher so what this is is effectively like two people pushing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in order to really elevate the voltage.

9:48I mean, you're getting like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of volts right at that very tip, enough to strip the electrons from the air. Yeah, because electricity doesn't like to move through air. It's got to have really high voltage to arc like that. So in this lightning lab that I went to in Germany, where they had a giant one of these, they put me in a Faraday cage. Ah, to protect you. To protect me and then electrocuted me. But you were okay. I was okay. So they shot bright blue arcs of electricity at you, but the Faraday cage protected you. Yeah. How much do you know about Tesla, by the way?

10:24Because he's a wild guy. Not as much as I should, so tell me. Okay, so he had these really quite bonkers ideas. One of the things that he really wanted to do was he wanted to sort of use these general ideas to broadcast electricity through the earth. oh right um so rather than having to use a wire yeah right just you could just everything would just work so um and he managed to get funding for this as well so he in 1901 he uh he was backed by jp morgan and he started to build something called the warden cliff tower on long island and the the pitch was that it was going to be wireless uh telegraphy uh but what he actually wanted to do was to build a sort of planet-sized tesla coil right and they would use the earth as this giant kind of resonant cavity.

11:11And then anyone would be able to just stick an antenna in the ground and then pull electricity kind of for free. Out of the ground. Yeah. And then Morgan found out about this. JP Morgan found out about this. And he was like, actually, I'm making quite a lot of money from metered utilities at the moment. So I'm going to go with no. So he shut off the funding. But would it have worked? So no, probably not. There's like all kinds of slight problems about how far this thing, the level of power that you would need to put into it would have been so absurd. Even if you did manage to get it to work, which you probably wouldn't have done, it would have had all of these repercussions.

11:45So like, you know, fences, for example, would start humming. Yeah, I was going to say anything stuck in the ground. Bathtubs. You know, you get a massive electric shock from your bathtubs. Probably your fillings and your teeth, they would like start to rattle. Yeah, this doesn't sound good. Birds also would have a terrible time. Birds would navigate using electromagnetic fields, essentially. Bees also, game over. Yeah, it would have been pretty bad. It also probably would have been strong enough to actually cook flesh in the immediate vicinity of the transmitter. Yeah, it's on Long Island. You know, it could be worse places.

12:19Tesla, though, he was really into resonance. Love this stuff. He claimed to have shaken a building off of its foundations using just a resonant device that was this kind of size. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, maybe not completely absurd. We do know that buildings can get taken down by resonance, right? There's the famous bridge. What's it called? The Tacoma Bridge. Yeah. Then there's the Millennium Bridge as well, which had problems with resonant frequencies, which ended up being very wobbly. And that one's here in London. That one's here, exactly. Exactly. There is something in it that if you find the resonant frequency of a particular structure, it can sort of shake itself apart.

13:06His story was that he had this oscillator, it was kind of shaking this building, tuned it to the resonant frequency of the steel structure. Then nearby buildings started shaking too, and then plasters started falling, and then windows started cracking, and then police were called. He was like, no, this is awful, and got a sledgehammer and smashed it to pieces. Then he later told the reporter that he could split the earth like an apple if he wanted to using resonance. I mean, look, he was a salesman. He was. That's definitely what we can say. He also, when you are in the room with one of these, if you have one of these, you can light up fluorescent bulbs without physically touching them.

13:42Yeah. Because there is just enough charge that is in the air. In the air for a fluorescent bulb to light up. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, this idea of like wireless charging, it kind of does sort of work. If you don't mind your teeth rattling around in your head. I do, though. I sort of do as well. The other things about Tesla, he's a kind of a sort of really strange guy. So he could recite entire books from memory. Okay. What a skill. He's ready for Fahrenheit 451. He's ready for it. Let's burn all the books. We'll just have Tesla memorized them. Exactly. Why not? But he was also really terrified of pearls.

14:26He would refuse to speak to any woman who was wearing pearls. I didn't know that. You've got a pearl right there on your laptop. I do. Sorry, Tesla. Sorry, Tesla. But, you know, yin and yang, they have to be together. Exactly. In fact, I put that there deliberately just to sicken him. I can tell. Just to sicken him. He also fell in love with the pigeon, but like for real, a white pigeon that he had in New York. and when the pigeon died in his arms in a hotel room, he wrote, I love that pigeon as a man loves a woman and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life. That's very sweet.

15:00It's very sweet, isn't it? I need to learn a lot about electricity. The thing is, I've got to be honest with you, they are sort of a novelty item. Yeah, I don't know what else you're going to do with it. You can stick flowers and stuff on the needle and watch them. They get damaged, possibly burned after a while from those arcs. I think what's worth saying is that this is a point in time when electricity is so exciting. You know, first you had Volta, who was the first person really to create a steady electric current. Then you have Faraday who comes along and manages to reliably create it and harness it in some ways.

15:39All of this stuff is going on. But this was really the point where it's like, actually, we can do stuff with this. You know, Edison is around. He's like looking at light bulbs and things. There's like there's there's telephone wires that are being strung up around the place. It's like this real age of excitement and thrill. And lots of people were were just totally enamored with with just the very power of electricity. That's a good point. I think we always have something like that in society today. Maybe it's AI before and until to this day, it was nuclear weapons, things where someone could threaten to rip the world in half with it.

16:19And it was changing society dramatically. And with electricity, that's a huge jump to go from, I can't speak to my cousin who's halfway across the country unless I want to wait. Suddenly with wires, with telegraphy, the world became so small so quickly. It was a Copernican shift. And there was a time when this was part of that. I mean, this was sort of witchcraft to the generations that existed before. That's right. It was unnatural. Yeah. And today we take it for granted. Yeah. Godlike powers, lightning in your room. Light at night. Cool light. Well, they were warm lights, but you didn't run out of oil.

17:02No, absolutely. I have actually heard people compare the invention of AI or I guess the advances in AI to the discovery of electricity. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, I think it probably is. The first time I heard it, I was like, come on. But actually as time's gone on, I think it probably is. actually as seismic as that in the way that now it's really difficult to imagine basically anything without our use of electricity and how we've managed to harness it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I really did. Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? We're going to be back after the break with some of your questions.

17:51This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins? In over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve, like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed it did, by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90 % lower than expected in women in their 20s.

18:33I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash rest is science. Snoring? Gasping during sleep? Feeling fatigued? Ask your doctor about ZepBound, Terzepatite, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, in adults with obesity. Z-Bound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA.

19:17Z-Bound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Z-Bound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZEP bound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pins or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZEP bound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction.

19:53Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experienced vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills, taking ZipBound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zipbound.lily.com. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

20:34Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

21:00Okay, Michael, first question is for you. All right. What is the oldest symbol that represented something when it was created and is still used today to represent the same thing? This is by Ethan, by the way, this question. I love this question. I've looked at things similar, like what's the oldest song that we all basically still know today? Oh, yeah. And the answer there, I think, a good one. We can't always be totally sure, but it's probably Greensleeves. Really? It's a very old song and people might not know the name of it, but they'll recognize it when they hear it. Is it this one? No, that's what's not.

21:39Wait, how does it go? Look at my green seeds, aren't they cool? No, if you play it, I'll know it. I think you were right. No, I don't think I was. That's it, that's it, that's it. I remember hearing that was written by Henry VIII. It may have been, I don't even know. Seems unlikely. But the question is, what's the oldest symbol that we still recognize today? And this, first of all, it really comes down to what you think a symbol is. So the definition I'm going to use is that a symbol is something that represents something else through an arbitrary or conventional connection. Okay. So, for example, a handprint, I'm not considering a symbol because that's an index.

22:26It iconically looks like a hand and it's a sign that a hand had been there, a footprint. These things are not, for me, symbols. Agreed. Alphabetic letters are symbols. A, the letter A, and then what it means, what it's referring to are really different. And it's through convention. It's through our social rules that we learn A means ah, A, those sounds. Anyway, I think that like gestures came before graphical representation. Animals have body postures and things and gestures, but those are also not really symbolic. They kind of biologically happen. Even this meaning yes and this meaning no, there are hypotheses that those actually come from infant behavior.

23:11That like to go like this is to reject a nipple. And that this is to like suck on a nipple. Give me the boob. Give me the boob. Again, this is just a guess. We can't really be sure. But it's not uniform, right? Because in India, this means yes. That's true. But they still have no. I mean, this doesn't mean yes. This means like I'm following. I think it sort of does though, you know. I think this is like more of the yes of like, yes, I hear you. Rather than the yes, I consent kind of. It can be all three apparently. Let us know in the comments, by the way, because we're clearly at the limit of our.

23:47Yeah, yeah, we are. But I can see the origins of things like no. Yes, I agree. And stop. And that is like you're actually stopping something's motion. I agree. If it's too tied to physical things, then I don't find it very symbolic. Sure. So I think my answer to the question is going to be the connection between a mark, like a notch, and the concept of number. One notch means one sheep. Like that is symbolic because that one notch doesn't have to mean oneness. and yet as soon as it did, notches could have meant days or how many sheep you moved here and you want to make sure that you get a notch for every sheep that comes back.

24:35But even before those notches, there were like tally counters, like a little stone. Every time you had a sheep walk by, you could put a stone in a bag and then when you brought the sheep back in, you would take a stone out for each sheep and you would know that they'd all come back because you were associating the pebble with one sheep. Like that is that coin being a symbol for the sheep is a big leap. Right. That to me, basically number any kind of symbol, a notch, a dot, a pebble, a stroke. I don't know which came first, but those representing a mount or representing an individual or any individual would probably be the first step in symbolic thinking.

25:19Yeah, I think that's probably right. actually i was thinking about i was thinking when the question came through i was thinking about sort of physical uh marks on paper i know and they may want an answer more like that i am talking about physical marks like like a dash for a one or or just a a slash for a one because if it is if it is which which letter slash symbol is the oldest i mean zero's got a good shout isn't it Well, why did the Romans neglect it so much? I mean, sure, but the Indians were weird. Yeah. So circles and squares and spirals we find in the most ancient cave paintings. And we find a lot more of those kind of like doodles than we do the more famous and well-known depictions of bison and other animals.

26:11so what i was hung up on with geometric shapes is that although as a shape it's been around forever as a thing that we doodle but as a symbol for something specific it's change and we don't really know what they were trying to represent with the spirals they drew right so what about in language is there a language what's like the oldest language or oldest letters that have continually been in use do we know because you could reasonably pick up some ancient greek text yeah and uh sure the words might be different ancient greek to modern greek yeah sort of there's a really big distinction in the languages but the letters have some commonality right yeah but i i think we need to go further back than greek letters i'm thinking that you can go back you know A hundred thousand years to just literally like these notches represent one thing that I gave you.