Oh, thank you, Berkeley, thanks for having me, honored to be here.

Today I get to tell you the story, the 3,000 year back story to the Tesla electric car,

but the story does not start in Silicon Valley.

For that story, we need to cross the country to America's epicenter of innovation in the

1740s to New England, to all places, into the time of Benjamin Franklin and his lightning

rod for an electrifying story filled with lightning and thunder that I get to share with you tonight.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, churches built steeples high into the sky, and within

those steeples, they put bells.

And on those bells, I was often inscribed some form of the Latin phrase, Fulgura Frango.

Basically, I break up the lightning flashes.

Church bells did many things, including suppressing thunderstorms.

It became a common practice beginning in the medieval age and extending into the 17th

and 18th centuries during a major thunderstorm for local bell rangers to climb up into the

church's steeple to ring the church's bells loudly.

And thereby, doing so would perhaps, perhaps, would ward off the divine wrath and the devilish

invasion in the skies.

That was the theory, but the theory had two major design fails built into the plan.

First of all, the bells were cast metal.

And second of all, those cast metal bells hung in the steeple, which was usually the town's

high point.

So you can imagine how well this worked out for the bell rangers.

In France and Belgium alone, over the span of just three decades, 30 years, nearly 400

...