Our seventh episode features CEO & President of the Spark Museum, John Jenkins. Jordan and Dr. Regina talk to Mr. Jenkins about the history of electricity and the people involved such as Tesla, Faraday, Edison, Maxwell and Franklin. To view the demos discussed in the show, click on the link on the left called “Electricity and its Roots -DEMOS”.
[Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious feat. Cut Chemist]
Regina: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff and I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University, WWU. And here today is my cohost Jordan Baker, my husband’s childhood fishing partner. And how are you doing?
Jordan: I’m well. That’s how you’re going to introduce me?
Regina: Yeah.
Jordan: Husband’s fishing partner?
Regina: From childhood. Yeah!
Jordan: Well I’m Jordan Baker. I’m from the Upfront Theater. And today we’re talking with president and CEO of Spark Museum, John Jenkins.
John: Hi.
Jordan: Thank you for joining us.
John: My pleasure. Great to be here.
Regina: So we’re excited to discuss today basically the history of electricity in the home and the people that made that happen.
John: Yeah. And it ends up being more than just the home because electricity actually leaks out and goes other places too.
Regina: Yeah I know. I guess we are using electricity now and we don’t live in the Spark Museum.
John: That’s right. Maybe you don’t but . . .
All: [Laughing.]
Jordan: Let’s start with electricity out in the wild. How did they start to wrangle that?
John: Yeah, well . . .
Jordan: How did they domesticate it, like a wild dog.
John: Well the first observations of electricity of course go back to really 2 different forms. Really, really big forms in terms of lightning where people saw lightning. That probably goes back to cavemen. So those were the big powerful form of electricity. And lightning has been observed since, for a long time.
And the other form is the really tiny form, which is static electricity. We know the ancient Greeks wrote about that. That when they were polishing amber to make jewelry, they noticed that little bits of the fur would cling to the amber. And that would have strange effects.
One of the artifacts we actually have in the museum is a book that was written in 1560 that describes the amber effect, which is static electricity with the lodestone effect, which is magnetism and compares those two things.
Regina: They’re like, it seems like there’s some similarity between them.
John: Yeah. It is. There is a lot. But there are.
Regina: We will get to electromagnetism because I know something about that. A little bit. But before we do that, I want to go back, and I want to talk about the Spark Museum a little bit because we somewhat mention that we are broadcasting out of the Spark Museum but I want to know somewhat of the history of this museum that you are now CEO of.
John: Okay. This museum came from the combination of the efforts of two individuals: myself and Jonathan Winter. Jonathan had a small, very dense museum over on Railroad Avenue called the Bellingham Antique Radio Museum. By dense, meaning that you had to walk kind of sideways to get in there and down the halls or the aisles rather. It was floor to ceiling. I think he must have had 10 – 12 foot ceilings in there and it was just floor to ceiling stacked with radios. And that’s the way Jonathan liked it.
Regina: Oh wow. How many rooms?
John: It was one room.
All: [Laughing.]
Regina: So that’s what you mean by 10.
John: Yeah, so the two of us met. I was already a collector at the time. I grew up in Bellingham. I moved away to go to school and to work. I worked for Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.
I was still working at Microsoft. I was very busy. I was running worldwide sales and marketing so I was traveling all the time. So when I retired in 2001, I got together with him and we thought, you know, we should probably do something great with what we had. Because his collection starts in the 1920s and it’s pretty much radio and goes forward up through the golden age of radio and into the 1950s, just at the beginning of television.
And my collection ends in the 1920s, but it goes back basically to the beginning of time. I’ve traced the roots of electricity all the way back to the, you know, 16th century. So, by combining these two, we pretty much cover the entire history of electricity and radio.
Regina: Right.
John: So we decided, okay, we’ll create a board. We’ll buy a building. I bought the building that we’re in now.
Regina: Wow, you’re a good friend.
John: Well it sounded like a cool idea.
Regina and Jordan: [Laughing.]
John: I had just retired, you know.
Regina: Jordan, buy me a building.
All: [Laughing.]
Jordan: Okay.
Regina: Thank you.
John: So I did that and we thought, well, we’ll go out and raise about $5 million and create this world-class radio museum here in Bellingham. At the time we were thinking radio museum. We did everything except raise the $5 million.
All: [Laughing.]
Jordan: Yeah.
Jordan: It turned out that there’s not that many people interested in funding radio museums. Even if you got really cool radios. It doesn’t really matter.
Regina: How dare they? That’s terrible.
Jordan: Yeah. So then, we went through a couple of iterations, without going into all the sordid details, but we ended up really emphasizing the electricity portion of what we’re doing. And instead of being a museum really about kind of the old dusty radio, it’s more about the wonder and mystery and awesomeness of electricity. Focusing more on families. Having lots of interactive things, lots of really cool things to get kids excited about science. And that’s where we are today.
Regina: I just saw your Theremin, which I think is amazing.
John: The original?
Regina: I don’t know. It was like sitting up on something.
John: Yeah that’s the original RCA Theremin. It was built in 1929.
Regina: That’s like the original?
John: Well it’s one of the originals. There’s very few. They’re very rare. There’s very few of them. The story behind Theremin himself is pretty fascinating. He was actually hired by the Russians to build the bug that was put in the US Embassy in Moscow. So he was an interesting guy.
Regina: Wow.
John: [Laughing.]
Jordan: So that’s what he came up with? Was the theremin? [Laughing.] He was like, here’s a bug. Never mind! Here’s a musical instrument instead.
John: Yeah.
Regina: I was always ashamed of myself because, you know, you go through all these years of school in physics and then I find out what a theremin is on Yo Gabba Gabba!, a children’s show a couple years ago from my child. So, I felt kind of ashamed by that. Which I’m telling all of our listeners about.
That is an interesting story because we were talking earlier. How old is the Spark Museum?
John: Yeah so it would be about 14 – 15 years now.
Regina: Teller from Penn and Teller just tweeted like being here for like 20 minutes right before a show here in Bellingham, Washington. Why Penn and Teller came to Bellingham, Washington, I don’t know.
Jordan: That’s right. That was a couple of weeks ago.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Yeah that was a fantastic evening because not only did Teller come to the museum but we got to show him some really cool stuff. And I can’t repeat what his first words were. I’ve never heard Teller speak.
Jordan: Yeah I was going to say, did he actually talk?
John: But we filed off our singing Tesla coil that plays Purple Haze. I play it with a six-foot long fluorescent tube.
Regina: Wow!
John: And it’s really something to see! And after the music stopped there was a silence and then he said, “Holy ” [Laughing.]
Regina: Wow.
Jordan: Explicative!
Jordan: Yeah.
Regina: That’s why he doesn’t talk, because it’s only sewers.
John: Yeah that may be.
Regina: No. Let’s go back to where Jordan asked you about like the taming electricity . . .
Jordan: Taming the wild electricity.
Regina: Right. So, this idea of static and lightning and then who was like the first person or peoples to kind of harness that?
John: Well there were a lot of players in all this. And the interesting thing about the history of science is that most of what we learn about the history of science, we learn about in elementary school unless you happen to, you know, further study the history of science. You learn that Marconi invented the telegraph and Bell invented the telephone, Edison invented the lightbulb, Franklin discovered electricity. And that’s pretty much it, you know, so there’s only a few players.
When you actually start drilling down, there’s hundreds and hundreds of individuals over, you know, hundreds of years that are involved in the process.
Regina: They were the ones that got the best, you know, advertisement or, you know, marketing in where we live in the western world.
John: Yeah that’s true. Someone said that the winners write history and that’s definitely true. But all those statements by the way that I just made are actually false.
All: [Laughing.]
John: None of those statements are true.
Jordan: We’ve been duped!
John: But, you know, they’re true depending on how you define a telegraph and things like that.
Regina: Or truth.
John: Yeah, or truth. Yeah, what is is and all that?
Jordan: Yes. [Laughing.]
John: But going back to harnessing electricity, so probably the person who stands out early on as being really important in recognizing the characteristics of electricity was Benjamin Franklin.
He was the guy who looked at the lightning, compared it with an electrostatic charge that you get from walking across a carpet and by doing some experiments, not the least of which is his famous kite experiment, he showed that those two are the same thing. And he also showed at the same time that lightning isn’t personal, you know? When lightning strikes it’s not personal.
Regina: Right.
John: It just happens. It goes to the place where it goes. And if you happen to be in the way then, you know, it hits you.
Regina: Right. It’s not because you were a bad person.
John: Yeah. I guess in the development of electricity there was some kind of major milestones related to the technology and the science and I would say that, you know, one of the major ones is of course Franklin’s discovery or that electricity — lightning is electricity.
He also made a number of other interesting observations including inventing the lightning rod, which is a fun demonstration that I do here at the museum, particularly for advancement placement science physics high school students. Because I always ask, you know, was the lightning rod, do you think when he invented it, was he trying to attract the lightning or prevent the lightning from striking? And of course everyone says, oh he was trying to attract the lightning.
Regina: No.
John: You’re right! Yeah, you’re a physicist.
Regina: He was not.
John: Yeah and we can demonstrate that here at the museum where I can create artificial lightning and I can stand 3 feet away with a needle and make the lightning stop. Just by pointing it at the source of the lightning. And there’s some fun mathematics to describe that, the equation for charge density that describes all of that.
Regina: Conductors.
Jordan: Don’t spoil it!
Regina: I know! Sorry. I’m just nodding.
John: Yeah, but it’s all fun. The best thing about it is that you can show how mathematics describes something you’re actually seeing in the real world and explains it and that makes it really fun, especially for the kids. But it makes it fun for me to.
Jordan: It’s like seeing The Matrix.
Regina: Yeah. It’s exactly like that.
Jordan: Yeah!
John: Yeah. Now just so that people know that lightning today, lightning rods don’t prevent lightning from striking. The problem is that, you know, in a laboratory when you have a small electric field, you can discharge that electric field with a point. And discharge it to the point where it won’t arc. If you have an electric field that’s acres across, you can’t discharge that with a needle or a little point in your hand. You just can’t discharge it fast enough. So eventually, most likely what will happen is it will discharge to the lowest potential point, which is the ground, and it will discharge through the lightning rod.
So both people are really kind of right in that case. Although he was, in the laboratory, he did believe that it would prevent the lightning from striking because of his experiments.
Regina: Right. And now you have the metal-like casing of the house, right? So if you have lightning hitting a house then it’s going along the frame and not going to hit you.
John: Right. Then you also have the Faraday cage.
Regina: That’s what I was eluding too. [Laughing.]
John: According to [inaudible] law, getting back to mathematics again, that when you have a [inaudible] surface —
Regina: Of metal.
John: Yeah of metal —
Regina: Of a conductor.
John: Right. A conductor.
Regina: I’m looking at Jordan. I’m like . . .
Jordan: Right! Please describe it with your hands. Make sure everybody sees it.
Regina: It’s spherical! Like your guys’ Faraday cage is spherical, right?
John: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be spherical
Regina: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be.
John: But you want smooth curves. What you don’t want is small diameter radii. Is that a word?
Regina: Radii. No, that’s right.
John: Yeah radii.
Regina: Diameters.
John: Small diameters.
Regina: [Laughing.] We’ll go further.
John: Yeah because then you get back to that lightning rod effect and you get discharges off of those. But if you have a big rounded surface and it doesn’t even have to be closed. It can be a mesh. It can be a fairly large mesh. But the reason why the safest place to be in a lightning storm is inside a car, a metal car at least, is because it’s not — it’s not because a lot of people think . . .
Regina: Not your wood car, Jordan.
Jordan: Dang it! [Laughing.]
John: We had a wood car when I was a kid. You had to stick your feet out through the bottom. I wish I had some coconuts to make the sound.
Regina: Right.
Jordan: [Laughing.]
Regina: Like Monty Python.
John: Yeah. It’s not because of the rubber tires. A lot of people think that. But if you think about the fact that that lightning bolt has traveled tens of miles to get where it is, it’s not going to mind jumping over 6 inches of tire. It’s because of the Faraday cage caused by the metal car. And that electricity will always be on the outside surface.
You can even have your finger on the inside, right where the lightning hits it, and you won’t feel a thing. Which we demonstrate every weekend in our show at the museum.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant]
Jordan: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Jordan Baker with my cohost Regina Barber DeGraaff. And today we’re talking with John Jenkins, president and CEO of Spark Museum.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant]
John: For many years, all anyone knew was static electricity.
Regina: Of course.
John: Static electricity, one spark and it’s gone. It got to the point where they could store it in these jars called leyden jars, which we call capacitors today.
Regina: Right.
John: So they could store it and they could use it using friction. And they could play games with it and they could manipulate it but there wasn’t really much practical you could do with it until 1800. So, all that time, people were playing with static electricity. They were also using it for medical therapy, which didn’t really do anything but it did line the doctor’s wallet. It did successfully do that.
Regina: Placebos.
John: Yeah. In 1800, Alessandro Volta invented what we would call the battery, the electrochemical cell which produced electricity. Before that, all we were doing was storing electricity. But the electrochemical cell — and when you connect multiple cells together, you get a battery — that was producing electricity. So it’s actually providing a source. And when you recharge a battery, you’re restoring it’s ability to produce electricity again.
Regina: Because it was chemical reactions, right?
John: Yes. It’s a chemical reaction.
Jordan: So, Volta, is that where we get volts?
John: Yes.
Jordan: Excellent. Yeah! Making the connections.
All: [Laughing.]
Regina: Good job Jordan! [Laughing.]
John: And actually, another interesting anecdote that ties Franklin to Volta is that Franklin actually was the first one who come up with the term battery. He was referring to multiple leyden jars connected together. He had made the discovery that when you connect multiple leyden jars together, that the discharge was so powerful that it reminded him of military artillery, so he called that a battery.
Regina and Jordan: Oh!
John: After he completed that experiment, he used that to kill a turkey. And he said —
Regina: Benjamin Franklin.
John: Franklin killed a turkey with electricity.
Regina: With is foreshadowing talking about Edison.
John: Yeah that’s true. There is a connection there. [Laughing.]
So now, for the first time we have continuous electricity. As long as you have the battery hooked up, you get direct current. You get voltage current out. So you’d think, wow, everyone’s been waiting for this. This is a big deal. But it turns out, not much happened for a long time. [Laughing.]
Regina: Yeah like they were totally okay with like lanterns, right? They were just like, we’re good. Oil is good.
John: Yeah and no one really knew what to do with the electricity. It was like well this is a new thing no one really knew.
Now Humphry Davy, he was active in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He used electricity to discover several elements, new elements to the periodic table.
Regina: He was a chemist.
John: Yes.
Regina: Yeah.
John: And he was, by the way, the mentor to Michael Faraday, who we’ll talk about later.
Regina: Who is my favorite by the way. He’s my favorite.
John: Yeah he’s a fantastic guy. In 1820, a Danish professor was doing a demonstration for his class and he connected a voltaic pile, which is what we call the first batteries, to a piece of wire on his laboratory bench.
Regina: He’s trying to make a circuit.
John: He was making a circuit, yep. And probably demonstrating how the wire got hot or something like that. The thing he noticed was there was a compass happened to be on his table and the needle rotated when he connected the battery. And he thought, well that’s odd. And he disconnected the battery and the needle rotated again. And so he stopped his lecture and he did some further experiments and published a little brochure, which was nothing more than a brochure.
And it just took everyone, the world, by storm. So we have in 1820, the discovery of electromagnetism.
Regina: Right. All of a sudden, people were like electricity and magnetism what? They’re somewhat related? It was mind blowing at the time.
John: Yes it was.
Regina: Yeah. It still is for a lot of people now.
John: It still is. Yeah. But now we know when you run electricity, an electrical current through a wire, through a conductor, it produces a magnetic field around that.
Regina: Right. Or in his time, it acts like a magnet, right?
John: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s true the concept of field was not there yet. So it acts like a magnet.
And the magnet, the magnetic field actually — well, actually we’re getting really really close to the idea of a field because it was Michael Faraday who was confirming the ideas of Oersted that this magnetic effect went in a spiral around the conductor.
Regina: Right.
John: He built a little device called the rotating wire experiment that proved that. And not long after that, he laid iron fires on a piece of paper that had a wire underneath it and he saw the effect for the first time, what we call today the magnetic field. And that was in probably 1830 or so.
Regina: You’re very good with these dates!
All: [Laughing.]
Regina: I have no idea! Like when I’m talking about this.
So I just want to take a second and give like Michael Faraday some due. And we will talk about Maxwell for my one listener who I know is listening to this and is like, what about Maxwell? We will!
But Michael Faraday, he’s one of my favorite scientists from history because he came from nothing. This is back when, you know, in England where there’s a definite class system. His family was fairly, I mean not hugely large; I think he was one of 4 kids. But his parents where very poor. Poor blacksmith father. He had very little schooling. He got an apprenticeship with the bookbinder and just read a whole bunch of books. He’s basically Good Will Hunting in the 1800s.
John: That’s right.
All: [Laughing.]
Regina: And he had to deal with a lot of classist stuff. He tried to get an apprenticeship with Davys [sic] and he did eventually by bothering him and bothering him and bothering him. But he was this really religious guy so he was very humble and, like really, you know, nice about it even though people were not being so nice to him.
John: Right.
Regina: And yeah, he had to defend himself a lot and he wasn’t allowed to be in the royal — what was it called?
John: The royal society.
Regina: There we go. Because he wasn’t of high birth and he didn’t have a title. And he’s just a really cool guy.
John: Yeah. And even when he went to work for Humphrey Davy, he was hired as basically a butler initially.
Regina: Right, he cleaned the test tubes.
John: Right.
Jordan: Sounds a lot like a movie I saw kinda 8 Mile.
All: [Laughing.]
Regina: 8 mile? [Laughing.] [Inaudible.] Was it exactly like that?
Jordan: It was pretty much just like that.
All: [Laughing.]
Regina: Well the cool thing I like about Faraday though is that he just kept on pushing. He just kept on pushing and even though he didn’t have a good, or none, no math background really, he tried very hard. And he’s just this great underdog story, you know? We in America, we love underdog stories.
He just is that story. More biographies are written about him at that time than any other scientist because people loved his story, his like Cinderella story.
John: Plus, he never left that behind. He was a scientist for the people. And he would do these demonstrations. When he was accepted finally at The Royal Society, he became the chief experimenter there and he would do these incredible, wonderful experiments in front of the public and loved explaining things in lay terms so that people could understand. And that was a really important thing, which we’ll probably come back to when we talk about Maxwell.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Is the importance for Faraday to be able to explain complex scientific topics in lay terms that anyone could understand.
Regina: Right. Because he knew what it was like to learn it that way.
John: Right. Yeah.
Regina: Yeah.
I brought in a couple of demos. I know the Spark Museum has lots of great things but I wanted to show Jordan actually some of these demos from work. And right here, I mean again, this is radio so this is wonderful for our listeners but a magnet is in this device and as I turn the magnet, as I rotate the magnet, I’m changing the magnetic field in this closed loop. And I’m creating a current.
So I’m lighting. See?
Jordan: Ohhhhhh!
Regina: There we go. Thank you Jordan.
Jordan: It looks like one of those little electric candles.
Now if you could only do that the whole time I’m eating.
Regina: Right!
Jordan: It would make the proper ambiance.
Regina: Well the crank part I think — what did you describe it as?
Jordan: It looks like a pencil sharpener.
Regina: Yeah. It looks like a pencil sharpener.
Jordan: It’s like the magnets are like the body part.
Regina: Right.
John: That’s what used to be an old telephone to power them just like that one.
Regina: Oh really?
John: Yeah.
Regina: I did not know that.
John: Yeah that’s what makes the bell ring when you turn that.
Regina: Wow. That makes sense. I remember seeing pictures like that. And so I bought in these hand generators so like I think —
Jordan: Yeah it looks like those little slot cards you would have as a kid except it’s human powered.
[whirring]
Regina: Right, right. So, I think they have those for flashlights.
Jordan: For flashlights, yeah.
Regina: The hand cranked flashlights. Yeah.
John: Now what’s really fun with that, which you’ve probably done is you take the two and you hold onto them and let someone else turn the crank.
Regina: Yeah. Hold on to that. Or just hold onto the handle. And then you turn.
[whirring continues]
Jordan: Which way?
Regina: It doesn’t matter.
[all talking over one another.]
Jordan: Resistance.
John: Here try this.
Jordan: Oh he’s going to touch the electricity. He’s going to die.
John: No I’m not going to; you are. Just turn it very slowly.
[whirring continues]
Regina: You shouldn’t be able to feel that much right?
[inaudible]
John: Go faster.
Jordan: I feel a little something.
John: This one will wake you up. The big one!
[all laughing]
John: The big one that’s on the table.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant]
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science, I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff with my cohost Jordan Baker. And we’re talking to the CEO of the Spark Museum, John Jenkins, about inventions in electricity and magnetism.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant continues]
Regina: Tell us more then. Tell us more.
John: Well the demonstration you just gave is a great segue to what Faraday’s next big discovery, which was now we know that we already know from Oersted that when you pass electric current through a wire it creates a magnetic field. Or, magnetism. Or what we call electromagnetism.
Faraday and actually coincidentally with Faraday, Joseph Henry kind of made the same discovery, Joseph Henry being an American that if you take a coil of wire and you pass a magnet through that wire, it produces a current in the wire. And when you pull the magnet back out, it produces a current in the opposite direction.
So if you take the magnet and you run in and out of that coiled water back and forth, you’ll producing an alternating current.
Regina: And the same can be done with a rotating magnet?
John: Yes. Exactly.
Regina: Because basically what he discovered and he was looking for is that okay, if electricity can create magnetism, can magnetism create electricity? And he was really depressed if he put just the magnet in and not moved. It didn’t create electricity and he realized you had to actually have some change in magnetism to get electricity.
John: Yeah. And that’s exactly what happened. The first time he put the magnet in he was like “Oh, okay, this is going to be big.” You know, “Here we go.” Nothing happened.
Regina: Sometimes reverse engineering is hard.
[all laughing]
Jordan: That was anti-climactic!
Regina: Right!
John: So because of Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry, we were able to create electrical generators that produce alternating current, or direct current. Later they were more direct current than alternating current. The first ones were alternating current.
Regina: Because you had this rotation or you had this movement back and forth.
John: Right. Yeah. Yep.
Regina: Yeah.
John: There’s some actual work that needs to be done to make them produce direct current, which is kind of ironic, but we’ll get to that later.
Regina: Right. We were going to say we were going to talk about Maxwell and basically at the end of Faraday’s life, again, he wasn’t super great about math. He had all of these ideas about field and all this stuff but he really couldn’t like articulate them in like physics and a way that was really understanding what was happening physically in the world.
And so Maxwell came along, who was like the exact opposite from Faraday. He was high class, noble, kid. But a really nice guy and really looked up to Faraday and after awhile. And but was a genius in his own right and just basically thought up a way to mathematically represent electromagnetism, which we revolutionary. It’s a whole subject that all physicists have to learn.
John: Yeah.
Regina: You know, Maxwell’s equations are basically all of electromagnetism.
John: It’s one of the most important discoveries in the history of science, without a doubt.
Regina: Right.
John: A really, really big deal. And it’s kind of a tragic story too in a sense because Faraday, early on, started to develop these ideas. And in the moment he saw the iron filings on the paper, he knew there was something going on there.
And so he began to develop these theories about that eventually resulted in kind of a theory of the electric field, of magnetic fields and electric fields. And as you said, he couldn’t put that into mathematics, which is of course what all the scientists wanted it in in order for it to be real.
Regina: [laughing]
John: So after awhile, they began to kind of think he was a bit of a nut, talking about this stuff. And he’d bring Kauai up and his friends would say, “Hey, Michael ixnay on the ieldtheoryfay.” You know?
Regina: Right.
John: So he’d say, “Okay, I won’t talk about it anymore.”
Regina: Plus he wasn’t, you know, he wasn’t high class either, right? So that was just something on top of that.
John: Yeah. I mean, although by that time he was a very highly regarded member of the royal society, but he still had those roots. I’m sure there were Always people who were waiting, looking for an opportunity to kind of pull the rug out from under him.
But the interesting was Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin is his other name that we know him by. Sir William Thomson was the mathematician who actually first applied mathematics to Faraday’s field theory and put it into a language that scientists could understand at least to that extent.
And Thomson had a student at Cambridge that was looking for a project. And he came to Thomson and said, “Hey I’m looking for something interesting to work on. What should I do? And Thomson said, “Well why don’t you take a look at this field theory by Faraday. Here’s the papers I write on it. You know, take that and see if you can do something with it.”
And now we know that student was James Clerk Maxwell. So it’s really amazing the little project turned into be one of science’s greatest discoveries.
Regina: Right.
John: Or contributions.
And a lot of people also don’t know, even people who’ve studied the equations in detail don’t know that originally there were 12 equations. And reducing those down to the 4 we have today was done by about 4 or 5 scientists from the time who are really the only ones who really understand what Faraday was doing — or Maxwell was doing.
Regina: Maxwell was doing. Yeah.
John: And they were called the Maxwellians and they reduced these 12 equations down to 4, which simplified things. So, what we call Maxwell’s equations, they’re not really Maxwell’s equations. But he still deserves the honor.
Regina: These are Maxwell’s [inaudible]
Jordan: Oh! Those are hieroglyphs.
Regina: Yeah! [Laughing.]
John: Now one of those is [inaudible] law, which is why it’s safe to be in a car in a lightning storm.
Regina: Exactly. The first one. Yeah.
So, I think a lot of our listeners, maybe a lot of them know this, maybe a lot of them don’t, but like this idea of electricity and magnetism together, we can think of instantly the electromagnetic waves or electromagnetic spectrum where if they’re listening to us on the radio right now, that’s a form of light. You know, the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light. Ultraviolet, radio waves. Microwaves. All of it’s light. And all of it is really explained by Maxwell’s equations.
John: Yeah. And I can actually explain those in Faraday terms.
Regina: In Faraday. Sure! Go ahead because I don’t think I could.
John: Before I do that. Let me close the loop on this tragedy.
Regina: Yes. That’s true because you started with the tragedy and this story so far is great.
[all laughing]
John: If this is tragedy, wow!
Regina: Yeah!
John: So Maxwell produces these equations and hardly anyone can understand them, including Michael Faraday. Of course he has no clue what any of it means. So he looks at it and he tries to study it. He knows that these equations somehow describe his field theory.
Regina: The iron filings.
John: Yeah. But, you know, how? So he talks to a number of people and no one can really help him, so he writes a letter to James Clerk Maxwell and he says, “I’ve spent my life studying science and science making discoveries in ways that I can explain them to the common man.” He said, “Surely there’s a way that you can explain your theories without mathematics.” And Maxwell replies back, “Nope!” He said, “Sorry but it is mathematics. Mathematics is the language that describes this; there is no other way.”
So Faraday died without understanding the scientific basis for the theory that he developed, which is kind of a sad thing. I think.
Regina: Well there’s a lot of physicists these days that would say the exact same thing. [Laughing.]
John: [Laughing.] Yeah, well I think Maxwell was wrong because I think you can describe it.
Regina: All right, you want to try?
John: I’ll try.
Jordan: Yeah.
John: I’ll give it a shot.
Jordan: I don’t want to die without knowing.
John: I’m going to do it differently since we’re on the radio.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Rather than go through each one of the equations, I’m just going to net it all out. Basically what it means.
Regina: Great, that’s even better.
John: And what the theory of the electromagnetic wave really means. And how electromagnetic wave, once it starts, it can just keep on going.
From Maxwell’s equations we know that if you create a spark, that will create an electric field that will expand. I’ll just say it expands horizontally like this. I’m making opening movements with my hands.
Jordan: [Laughing.]
Regina: He’s one dimensional expansion horizontally.
Jordan: Like a horizon.
John: Yeah. So the electric field expands but when that electric field collapses, which it will due, that’s a moving electric field. And when that collapses it produces a magnetic field, which expands in the opposite direction. So now it’s vertical. When the magnetic field collapses, it creates an electric field, which expands back horizontally again. And that just continues.
We know that a moving electric field creates a magnetic field. A moving magnetic field creates an electric field. And together, they form an electromagnetic wave that travels at the speed of light, and that’s what Maxwell’s equations say.
Regina: Absolutely. I say this all the time in class. I don’t know. Did you get that Jordan?
Jordan: So there’s a lot of clapping in there . . .
[all laughing]
Regina: No I mean, I basically say this same thing in class. My friend and colleague Dr. Seth Rittenhouse, who better be listening to this show now, has this really awesome animation where it has, like you just said, you have this moving charge and that’s going to create related to an electric field. And you have moving charges create magnetic fields. And if there is a changing magnetic field that’s going to create an electric field and it just keeps on going and going and going.
Yeah.
John: Right. Yeah.
Regina: So you don’t need — you know, when we think of waves like in the ocean, it needs a medium. Like the waves need the water to exist. You know? Like a wave on a rope needs the rope that wave needs to exist. But an electromagnetic wave doesn’t need a medium to exist. It propagates itself.
John: That’s right. Even though at the time they thought it did. I mean, they thought there —
Regina: Right exactly.
John: — a concept of the ether.
Regina: The ether. Yes.
John: Yeah. Mickelson and Morley went off to prove that and actually ended up disproving it. [laughing] and showed that there wasn’t an ether.
Regina: Which sometimes happens.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant]
Jordan: If you’re just joining us, this is spark science, I’m Jordan Baker, with my cohost Regina Barber DeGraaff and today we’re talking to John Jenkins about early electricity and magneticism.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant continues]
Regina: So we were talking about Maxwell and we started this show off saying we’re going to talk about electricity in the home and we’ve kind of talked about batteries and like lightning rods but let’s talk about like how do we get from like Maxwell to like kind of a modern electricity? So like radios and lightbulbs and stuff like that. So let’s start with radios.
John: Okay. Well there’s a natural progression from Maxwell to radio because in Maxwell’s equations, in order to get his equations to work out he had to put a little term in there that actually ends up being radio. [Laughing.]
So the next step in that would be probably to go to Heinrich Hertz. And Hertz was a student of a professor in Germany named Helmholtz and a similar kind of thing. He was looking for a project and so he went to the professor and his professor said, “Well, you know, I think these equations, Maxwell’s equations, are interesting and this concept …” they called it under a different name but it essentially was radio.
You know, “This concept is interesting and why don’t you do something with that?” So Hertz went off to his laboratory and created some apparatus to do this. And basically two pieces of apparatus. One was a device that had a little spark that produced a continuous spark off of an induction coil. An induction coil being a device that just produces high voltage or produces a continuous spark. That was what he called the radiator.
And then he had another device that had a little spark gap — it was basically just a loop of wire that came up, a continuous loop with a gap in it. And with a little ball on each side of the gap. And he called that the resonator.
And when these were right next to each other, he noticed that even though they weren’t touching, when the spark was operating on the radiator, there would be a tiny little spark on the resonator, even though they weren’t touching. This was interesting but it wasn’t too surprising because there are other electrical effects that can cause that when things are close together, capacitance and inductance and things like that.
So he moved it further apart and he noticed the further he moved them apart down his long workbench, the spark on the resonator got dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. Until finally it was extinguished.
And someone might have stopped then but he continued moving it further down the bench and the spark reappeared and it got brighter and brighter and brighter. And as he continued, he realized this is a difficult thing to describe for a radio. I’ll do it visually and then maybe you guys can translate.
[all laughing]
Regina: He’s moving his arms!
John: Yeah, I’m moving my arms. So essentially what he was seeing was the spark would get brighter and brighter and then dimmer and dimmer and then brighter and brighter and dimmer dimmer and brighter and brighter.
Regina: Right, it would be like a wave.
John: It was a wave.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Yeah it was a wave.
Regina: Like the intensity would be represented by some sort of wave or sinusoidal kind of thing.
John: Yes exactly. So this was an exciting moment for him because he knew at this point he was witnessing a new phenomenon. Because this was happening at a fairly long distance from the source, from the radiator.
Jordan: About how long would you say?
John: Probably about 20 meters.
Jordan: Huh.
Regina: That’s pretty far.
John: Yeah. No sorry, 10 meters.
Jordan: 10 meters. At 10 meters it disappeared? And then 20 meters it reappeared?
John: Yeah I’m not sure exactly how far he went with it.
Jordan: Geez!
Regina: [Laughing.] It was a large room.
John: Yeah sorry Jordan. But it was long, it was really long. It was longer than a hot dog.
Jordan: Okay. Got it.
John: It was like 10 hot dogs.
Regina: [laughing]
Jordan: Of course, the standard unit of measurement.
Regina: It’s hot dogs.
John: So the next thing he needed to figure out was Maxwell had said that this wave would travel at the speed of light so the next thing he had to figure out was well, how fast is this thing going? Well it turns out, if you know the wavelength and you know the frequency of the wave, then you can calculate the propagation speed.
Well the wavelength was really easy because he had it right there on his bench.
Jordan: 10 hot dogs.
Regina: Yeah. [laughing]
John: Yeah it was 10 hot dogs. So, okay, we’ll put that in the equation. 10 hot dogs.
Regina: Right!
John: And he was able to calculate the frequency that his induction coil was operating at based on the characteristics of the coil and the apparatus. So he takes these two equations, these two values, and he plugs them into the equation. And you can see, you can imagine him sitting there with his quill pen and he’s working out this mathematics.
And he comes out with the answer is 300 kilometers per second. And at that moment he knew he was seeing something no one had ever witnessed before and he was confirming Maxwell’s prediction that this is what would happen. This is a new phenomenon we call radio waves. And he understood in that moment how significant that was.
I mean that wasn’t like, “Oh that’s interesting.” He knew it was a really big deal. And he had confirmed and discovered radio, essentially.
Regina: Is it 300 kilometers? 3 times 10 to the 8 meters per second, so thats …?
John: Oh I think I got that right. I always screw up the . . .
Regina: That’s 30,000 kilometers.
John: Oh 30,000 kilometers. Yeah. Well it’s 186,000 miles per second.
Regina: I have many numbers in my head but it’s 3 times 10 to the 8 meters per second.
John: Yeah you’re right. Yeah.
So, then this kind of took the physics world by storm and people starting doing experiments and reproducing these experiments. They’re called the Hertzian waves. And there were all kinds of apparatus. We’ve got a lot of apparatus in the museum here that were designed for doing experiments with Hertzian waves and playing with Hertzian waves. We’ve got toys that use Hertzian waves. We’ve got a remote controlled pistol, [inaudible] pistol, that was made before the turn of the century. The late 1800s.
Regina: Wow.
John: That is fired by Hertzian waves. Really, really fascinating. And that was really what started the whole thing. And then you have people like Marconi, for example. If you followed the radio thread, that takes you off in that direction.
But, to hop back to electricity. So we essentially want to go back to Faraday. So we took a little branch there off to Maxwell and to Hertz to talk about radio.
Jordan: We’re forming a tree.
Regina: Yeah.
John: Yeah and we’re working our way down the branch.
Jordan and Regina: Yeah.
John: We’re back down to the main branch that follows electricity. And I have here that I brought with me a little piece for show and tell. In this case it’s just tell.
Regina: I think I’m going to take pictures of this and post them on our Facebook.
Jordan: Yeah. It kind of looks like a — it’s a circle and it’s got two like little horns on there.
Regina: Wire horns.
Jordan: Yeah, wire horns that are sticking straight up and then maybe two little tinier fiber covered wires like arms. So it might be like a little devil emoticon.
Regina: Yeah!
John: Yeah. That’s actually . . .
Regina: Yeah totally.
John: That’s actually a very good description.
Regina: Good job.
Jordan: Yeah.
John: I would probably describe it slightly differently. I’d probably describe it as a steel ring with a large gauge copper wire around one side and a smaller gauge copper wire on the other side with many more coils on the secondary than the primary.
Jordan: Look, this isn’t a competition.
[all laughing]
Jordan: You’re the professional; that’s why you’re here.
[all laughing]
John: So this is what we would call the first transformer. This allows an alternating current to pass from one circuit to another without any direct electrical connection. It’s actually because of the electromagnetic field that is carried between the two coils.
Regina: Right. So, I mean, you have this bigger coil you have this other coil and they’re not physically touching.
John: Correct.
Regina: Yet somehow, electricity can get from one to the other.
John: Yeah.
Regina: And as a kid, there’s tons of transformers that exist on our streets.
Jordan: As automobiles.
Regina: As automobiles. [Laughing.]
Jordan’s getting to what I’m saying here. When I was a kid a transformer would blow and your power would go out. And in my mind, I would imagine what are they talking about? How did a transformer explode or stop working? And then suddenly that relates to my power in my house. I imagined Optimize Prime breaking down.
Jordan: He exploded into the man Optimus Prime.
Regina: Right! And I’m like can the electricity people handle this? And you don’t know. It seems kind of extreme. But when we think of the word transformer, it’s totally co-opted by children’s cartoons.
Jordan: They’re not just for children!
Regina: They’re not just for children.
Jordan: Go on.
Regina: So explain to us what a good definition of what a transformer is.
John: Okay. Well probably the best place to start is just what Faraday was trying to show. Because he had, as we talked about earlier in his latest experiment, had shown that if you run an electric current through a wire it produces a changing magnetic field if it’s a changing current. And then if you take that changing magnetic field and you run that through another coil of wire, it will produce a changing electric current.
Regina: An electric current. Yeah.
John: And that’s essentially all this does. In a transformer you have one side called the primary and that’s where the electricity comes in. The other side is called the secondary, where the electricity goes out. And all that’s happening in between is an electromagnetic field is rising and falling and creating an electric current in the secondary.
Interestingly enough, if you have a one-to-one percentage in the number of windings on the primary as on the secondary —
Regina: The number of turns in your coil.
John: Yeah the number of turns on the coil, you’ll get the same voltage on the output as you have on the input. So, if you put 12 volts alternating current on the primary, you’ll get 12 volts alternating current on the secondary. However, if you double the number of windings, the number of turns on the secondary, then you put 12 volts alternating current in, what do you get on the output?
Regina: Let me think. I’m thinking of like used current equals change in [inaudible]
Jordan: Wow!
John: You can think about it intuitively. You’re doubling the amount of windings, you’re doubling the voltage.
Jordan: Sure.
Regina: Jordan got it!
John: Yeah.
Jordan: So everybody has one of those in their house?
John: Not in the house necessarily — well you do have them in your house also because transformers are all over the place. You have them in your little wall warts frequently. The little wart that plugs into the wall that you run your little appliance off of. Those have transformers in them typically. The place where you always have them is on the telephone pole on the outside. And that’s taking the 15,000 volts that’s on the power lines outside and converting it down to the 220 or 440 that runs into your house.
And that is the essence of the huge battle that occurred between the Westinghouse Tesla camp and the Edison camp.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant]
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science, I am Regina Barber DeGraaff with my cohost Jordan Baker. And we’re talking about electricity and magnetism with John Jenkins.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant continues]
Regina: Let’s talk about Edison and Tesla. But we want to preface this with, we are not on one side or the other. We’re not interested in the giant rivalry of one is evil and one is good.
John: Right.
Regina: But let’s go ahead and talk about it.
John: Yeah we can just talk about the facts.
Regina: Yeah. [Laughing.]
Jordan: When did he start making cars?
John: [Laughing.] That actually goes way back.
Regina: The flying ones? Or? Okay.
John: Yeah. I was going to say the flying ones very early on but it was destroyed by the government.
Jordan: Yeah, it happens.
Regina: Yeah. The aliens did it actually.
Jordan: I know people.
John: Yeah.
Regina: I did want to tell a story.
Jordan: Oh, story time!
Regina: Yes story time! Have you ever seen the northern lights Jordan?
Jordan: No! I’ve woken up time and time again, every time they’re supposed to be around —
John: Last week!
Jordan: Yeah exactly. They were supposed to be here for an entire week. And apparently I’m blind to them.
Regina: So you’re really interested in seeming them though?
Jordan: Yeah! Of course I want to see a crazy light in the sky.
Regina: Right. So this all relates to induction and electricity and magnetism and I’ll get there in a second. Jordan and I, like I’ve said many times in this show, we both grew up in Lynden. I’ve seen them only once and it was in Lynden.
Jordan: What?!
Regina: Yeah. So I was driving north towards Lynden and it was in December and it was one of the very clear nights. Like there were no clouds or anything. And I’m looking straight at Lynden; I’m driving down the Hannegan. And I see a giant, kind of hazy greenness in the sky. And it almost looks like green smoke. Or just it looks like, I don’t know, there’s something wrong with my eyes or something.
And then I look away and I’m talking to Jake and then I look back and the haze has slightly moved. And I couldn’t believe it. And I looked up that there was a solar storm earlier during that day and that’s what I’d seen. I’d seen the northern lights in Lynden.
Now, what’s awesome is there was a giant solar storm in 1859, I believe. And if I’m wrong, please listeners tell me. In 1859 it was so large that the northern lights woke up campers. They thought the sun was rising. It was so bright.
And it was so energetic. The earth has a magnetic field. And what happens is these solar storms can actually alter the magnetic field. And if the magnetic field is changing then that’s going to create an electric field, right?
Changing magnetic field creates current, creates electricity, and it created electricity along telephone lines. And it actually burned up paper. And these two telegraphers, you can go on Wikipedia and look up this storm, and they have transcripts from two telegraphers talking to each other. And they’re like, “Turn off the battery, the electricity just from the solar storm is powering our communication.”
John: Wow.
Regina: And that happened for two hours.
John: Amazing.
Regina: So that’s another natural example of induction. This changing magnetic field creating electricity. It actually burned some telegraphers. I was looking at that too.
John: Yeah.
Regina: So anyway we were talking about electricity and we keep on eluding to electricity in the home so let’s talk about lighting in the home.
John: Okay. One of the first places to start is who invented the electric light?
Regina: Right.
John: That’s always the question you get.
Regina: It was Edison, right? [Laughing.]
John: Well actually it wasn’t.
Regina: Right. Back to our history books.
John: Yeah so, we go back to Humphrey Davy who we mentioned a little while ago. Humphry Davy in 1802 saw — Edison invented his electric light in 1879.
Regina: That’s a lot of time between 1802 and 1879.
John: Yeah there’s an awful lot that happened between 1802 and 1879. So Humphrey Davy was doing some experiments with voltaic piles, which of course we call batteries. And he was using platinum. And noticed that the platinum would get really, really bright when electricity went through it. So he was doing some experiments, trying to create electric light using platinum. But the platinum required a lot of current because platinum was a really good conductor of electricity so it takes a lot of current.
Regina: And it’s expensive!
John: And it’s expensive. And it burns up really quick.
Regina: Right.
John: So you know, not a really great combination if you’re trying to make light bulbs. Unless you’re selling them really expensively.
Regina: Right. At those fancy stores.
John: Yeah. Those stores didn’t exist then.
Jordan: Sharper Image did not.
[all laughing]
John: No. And Davy, as visionary as he was, never thought of that. So then in 1806 he tried it with carbon. And he used carbon electrodes and it produces incredibly intense bright light. So that was the invention of what today we’d call the carbon arc lamp, which is what the kind of lamps you see at like movie primaries and auto dealers opening and stuff. Those big spotlights.
Regina: Oh! Oh cool. I did not know that.
Jordan: Oh yeah!
John: Those are actually produced by an electric arc occurring between two carbon electrodes. And the electrodes burn down after a while. But the real breakthrough came in 1880 when a guy named Charles Brush invented a new kind of dynamo, which is a way to produce electricity, in this case direct current, and a regulator that would keep the voltage out of the dynamo constant.
And he invented a new kind of arc lamp that had self-regulating carbon. So as the carbon burned down, it would automatically move the carbon closer together.
Regina: Oh wow.
John: So it kept the gap constant. And that was a major breakthrough. He took that all over the country and convinced municipalities all over the country to install these arc lighting systems.
As an example, there are still remnants of those. If you go to Austin, Texas they have what they call — moon towers is what they’re called — moon towers. They’re these big towers that don’t have anything on them now. But back in the 1880s they had arc lamps on them that would light up the whole downtown area. It was just really, really intense white light.
When they installed them in New York they called it the great white way because it was so bright. And you had these incredible visual effects with incredibly bright light and then completely black, dark shadows. It’s just really, really interesting.
Regina: Astronomers would love that.
John: [Laughing.] Yeah! So that happened throughout most major cities in the United States had these arc lamps installed. And it really changed. It began to change the way that people lived and that social life happened. It began to create the opportunity for a night life. Where in the past, you wouldn’t go out after dark. Now in these areas you could. And there were things that started to happen in the evenings. Restaurants would be open and there would be things happening.
Regina: Yeah I never thought about that. How lighting really affected social life and, you know, like safety.
John: Yeah it was a big deal. These arc lamps were so intense you couldn’t have one in a house. It would just be way too bright.
Regina: Right.
John: And even in factories, unless there was a really large factory, they were really, really bright.
So they wanted to find a way to subdivide the light so they could run multiple lamps off of one dynamo and have them be lower intensity.
Edison began his work in really the late 1870s after he’d been inspired by seeing an arc lamp at someone’s factory and thought he could do something with that.
So he began working on it. And by that point, Edison was already world famous. He was the wizard of Menlo Park. He’d already had a number of inventions but people were just waiting for him to do the next big thing and when word got out that he was working on a light bulb, it was just a foregone conclusion. You know, okay, it’s coming, it’s going to happen.
So he worked on it and during 1879 he did successfully put the pieces together that produced a light bulb that would burn for about 15 hours or so. So he announced to the public that he would invite the public to Menlo Park for a demonstration of the electric lamp.
Regina: He shows everybody what he did.
John: Yeah so he made about 50 of these lamps and he hung them on hooks around Menlo Park. They had to run special trains up to Menlo Park because it was such a huge deal. Everyone wanted to see it. The natural gas stocks crashed because the other form of lighting was natural gas. People came to see these lights.
Today, there’s only two of those original lights with the hooks on them that survived and we have one here.
Regina: Oh my gosh! Was that hard to get?
John: Yeah. Of all the —
Jordan: Do you still have your kidneys?
[all laughing]
John: So Edison developed a whole system of electricity. The dynamos that produced the DC, the lightbulbs that used the DC, and the cables and all that. And he built a power station at Pearl Street New York that he opened in 1893 and he had these special wires that they called Edison tubes. They were like 2 inch diameter steel pipes that ran out to where his customers were.
Regina: Oh geez.
John: Because he was using DC, he had to be really close to his customers. The dynamo couldn’t be very far away. So he only powered a square mile of Manhattan with this power station. You had 500 customers and 10,000 light bulbs when the system was up and running.
Regina: Wow.
John: And he really believed that DC was the way to go. And he invested a lot. His whole infrastructure was built around DC. Meanwhile, you’ve got some guys in England that are experimenting with alternating current. And you have a guy who’s just come to the US by the name of Nicola Tesla who has some interesting ideas about how alternating current can be used.
Regina: [Laughing.]
John: You’re laughing because I’m making a crazy sign.
Regina: Right.
John: I’m actually thinking alternating current but I’m actually doing the crazy symbol.
Regina: Right. He’s not saying he was crazy.
John: [Laughing.]
Jordan: Like wheels spinning.
Regina: Wheels spinning. Wheels spinning.
Jordan: Ideas.
John: Yeah. Wheels spinning. So he had these ideas. At one point he worked for a short time for Thomas Edison. Suggested to Thomas Edison that maybe the problems that he was having with his dynamos could be solved if he used alternating current. And Edison just said, “No way, it’s too dangerous. I won’t consider it. And I never want to hear about it again.”
Regina: That nicely?
John: Yeah.
[all laughing]
Regina: Probably.
John: And by the way, there’s also of course the incident which I probably should mention or the people who know the Tesla story will criticize me later. Is that Edison said, “If you can fix the problem I’ve got with my dynamos without making them alternating current, just make them work better, you know that’s a $50,000 deal there.” And so Tesla went off and did it and came back and said, “I’d like my $50,000.” And Edison said, “Oh I was kidding. You just don’t understand American humor.”
At which point, Tesla said, “I’m out of here.”
Regina: Alternating current lives on.
John: Yeah. Tesla was a guy who had very high standards. He was a dreamer and a genius. And he would formulate these ideas in his head, plan them all out visually in his head without drawing anything, and then build them and they would work. He was an amazing guy.
And he really didn’t compromise on his beliefs. So he always went for the ultimate. So, he would never consider the idea of using direct current because he knew that his idea of using multiple alternating currents was more elegant. So he quit, left. He actually worked digging ditches for awhile.
Regina: I did want to mention that I sent you — and I think a lot of other maybe some of our viewers have seen the Drunk History Funny or Die video which is hilarious and kind of does encompass this whole story in a funnier kind of cruder way.
John: Yeah. And with the Tesla story you have to be really careful because there have been a lot of biographies in the past that have been written about Tesla that are not accurate. And other books have been written about Tesla that used those biographies as sources. And so you end up with this kind of perpetuation of a lot of things that aren’t really accurate. That’s not to say that the guy wasn’t a great guy. And he deserves credit for an awful lot, but you have to be careful.
The best source if you want to read about Tesla is Bernard Carlson’s book.
Regina: Right.
John: And what is it called? I think it’s just called Tesla. It’s really the only scholarly work that’s sourced, you know, scholarly work that’s been done on Tesla as a biography.
Regina: And now we’re using AC current. I mean that’s what we use now a days.
John: Yes. It is. And that’s as a result of George Westinghouse primarily. Westinghouse wanted to compete with Edison and he was an entrepreneur and he thought, well he’d just read an article about alternating current that these guys in England were working on. And he said, “Well I’m not going to compete with Edison on DC; I’m going to go a different direction.” There were a bunch of other companies working on DC so he started looking for patents for alternating current.
Regina: And once you get the patent, you get the money.
John: Yeah exactly.
Regina: I want to end this with if you could see only a couple things at the Spark Museum name me the two couple things that are the best things at this museum. And then we’re going to —
Jordan: Maybe not the best things in the museum.
Regina: The most interesting.
Jordan: Or maybe the most interesting or the most near and dear to your heart.
John: Well that’s a question that’s like asking somebody to —
Regina: I know it’s a terrible question, right?
Jordan: My favorite child?
John: Yeah who’s my favorite child? Oh it’s Larry! But no, there isn’t really a way to answer that other than focusing on this topic. I could say within this topic the best thing, if you want to see something awesome, is to come see the mega zapper and go sit in the cage and get zapped with 4 and a half million volts.
Regina: So the Faraday cage?
John: Yeah. Do the Faraday cage. Witness high frequency alternating current invented by Nicola Tesla. And experience what it’s like to have 4 and a half million volts literally inches from your fingertips and be safe. And in terms of awesomeness, that’s off the scale. It’s the only place in the world where you can do that.
Regina: Oh in the world?
John: Yeah there isn’t any other place you can do that.
Regina: That’s definitely something to advertise.
John: Yeah, you can go see Tesla coils but there isn’t anybody else who lets you get in the cage and get zapped and all that.
Jordan: It doesn’t sound very —
Regina: For legal reasons.
Jordan: Hey bring the kids down and get zapped by 40,000 volts.
John: Yeah 4 and a half million volts!
Jordan: 4 and a half million volts.
Regina: Wow. You were close. You were close.
Jordan: Yeah.
John: But in terms of artifacts, of course the Edison electric lamp is awe inspiring to see that. And right next to it we’ve got two other experimental lamps that he made that are really, really amazing.
We actually have also down there is a piece of original Edison tube, the power cable that was dug up after 9/11 when they were excavating after 9/11 they dug up this pipe.
Regina: Wow.
John: And it had been found. So I got that here.
Regina: Yeah because he was in Manhattan.
John: Yeah a lot of people don’t know who Joseph Henry is but he’s a really, really important figure in electrical history. He invented the first practical electromagnet and the first practical electric motor that actually performed work. And we have one of his electromagnets down here also. There’s one other one that’s at the Smithsonian.
Regina: Oh wow.
Jordan: Wow.
John: By the way, the Smithsonian doesn’t have the light bulb.
Regina: Oh! We have something that the Smithsonian doesn’t have.
John: Yeah so ours has been on loan to the Smithsonian in the past.
Jordan: Boom!
Regina: Yeah! We’re awesome.
All right, well I want to thank you for coming to talk to us. You told us so many things. I want to thank you for coming.
John: My pleasure.
Jordan: Yeah thank you very much.
Regina: And listeners, come to the Spark Museum.
John: Yeah.
Jordan: Check it out.
[Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant]
Regina: Thank you for joining us. We just spoke to president and CEO of the Spark Museum, John Jenkins. If you missed any of the show you can go to our website at KMRE.org and click on the podcast link.
This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff.
Jordan: And I’m Jordan Baker. We’ll be back again next week.
Regina: Listen to us Sunday at 5pm, Wednesday at 9pm, and Saturday at noon.
Jordan: If there’s a science idea that you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science.
Regina: If you liked our show and would like to help out, go to KMRE.org and click on donate.
Jordan: Today’s episode, electricity and its roots, was produced in the KMRE Spark Radio studio located in the Spark Museum on Bay Street in Bellingham. Our producer is Suzanne blaisand engineer is Erik Faburrietta.
Our theme music was Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monáe. Our featured song today was electric avenue by Eddy Grant.
[Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious feat. Cut Chemist]