Liza Tarbuck on Nikola Tesla
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actor and broadcaster Liza Tarbuck chooses the extraordinary life of the Serbian-American scientist, Nikola Tesla.
Nikola founded the Tesla Electric Light Company and was responsible for the introduction of the AC current in America - seeing off competition from his rival and former hero, Thomas Edison.
Liza explains to Matthew Parris how his inventions were ahead of their time.
Despite the fortunes and misfortunes of this brilliant and eccentric man, he died virtually penniless in a hotel room in New York.
With the help of Professor Iwan Morus from Aberystwyth University.
Producer: Maggie Ayre
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2018.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, |
| 0:24.6 | you're doing the wrong thing. |
| 0:26.0 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:27.8 | Listen to all episodes on BBC sales. |
| 0:31.4 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:35.0 | A brilliant man whose ideas and inventions were ahead of his time, |
| 0:40.0 | but whose tortured life ended in the shabby surroundings of the New Yorker Hotel in January |
| 0:45.8 | 1943, by then penniless and spending his final days in the nearby park watching the pigeons, before returning to his room where he spent sleepless |
| 0:56.3 | nights working on scientific problems and mathematical equations in his head. This is an extraordinary, barely believable life, the life of a tangled genius |
| 1:07.2 | so sprawling that I can tell you now we're not going to be able to knock it into any kind of shape, |
| 1:12.2 | we're going to leave loose ends and unanswered questions |
| 1:14.6 | sticking out all over the place. Hats off then to the actor, comedian and broadcaster Lisa |
| 1:20.5 | Tarbach for nominating the great life of the |
| 1:23.8 | sobian American scientist and inventor |
| 1:26.3 | Nicola Tesla. |
| 1:27.8 | Lisa a most unexpected choice. Why Tesla? |
... |
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