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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello 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 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. This is what he gave me. I would say it is somewhere between extremely boring and potentially lethal. I love that. So that's what we've got coming up.
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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.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Tesla coils in electricity?
Morgan, and he started to build something called the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. And the pitch was that it was going to be wireless telegraphy. But what he actually wanted to do was to build a sort of planet-sized Tesla coil, right?
Yeah.
They would use the earth as this giant kind of resonant cavity. And 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, kind of the level of power that you would need to put into it would have been so absurd.
Yeah.
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. So like, you know, fences, for example, would start humming. Yeah, I was going to say anything stuck in the ground. Bathtubs. Yeah. You get a massive electric shock from your bathtubs. Probably your fillings in your teeth. They would 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 could be worse places. Tesla, 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. 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... Yeah, the Tacoma... Tacoma Bridge. Bridge.
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Chapter 3: How did Nikola Tesla envision wireless electricity?
Yeah. Maybe no infinity either. Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing is real. Maybe no thing is real. Maybe. I'm not sure.
Maybe there's no zero and there's no infinity. And there's also no seven.
Yeah.
That should be its own belief system. I'd like that one.
It certainly should. Well, okay. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Rest of Science. As ever, you can send us your questions, therestofscience at goldhanger.com. And we'll see you next time. Certainly will.
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