Nikola Tesla

Much of science today is grant-dependent and discourages dreamy, out-of-box thinking – who wants to fund mistakes?

Tesla’s biggest innovation was introducing alternating current as the standard for modern electric power, breaking Thomas Edison’s monopoly on DC power. Author and monologist Mike Daisey performs.

A lot of us learned that Guglielmo Marconi invented radio, but Nikola Tesla transmitted electromagnetic waves before Marconi – the Supreme Court decided the case in 1943.

Biologist Vincent Pieribone traces how scientists have been portrayed on screen – from Dr. Strangelove to Independence Day. Pieribone thinks that Hollywood’s most dangerous fantasy about “mad scientists” is that scientists have any power at all.

Part visionary, part mad scientist, and absolute genius, Tesla should be as famous as Edison ? but he’s been largely forgotten. Kurt talks with Samantha Hunt about her novel The Invention of Everything Else. Tesla is the protagonist, and despite the outlandish biographical details all through the book, there was very little she had to make up.