History reveals: Tesla totally awesome!

Helen A.S. Popkin

Circuit-bending YouTube star Bre Pettis doesn’t want you to know that before making his History Channel pilot, he hadn’t seen “The Prestige.”

It’s not that he purposely failed to catch Chris Nolan’s 2006 adaptation of the steam punk novel about rival magicians starring Batman (Christian Bale) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).

It seems Pettis never got around to it. And by the time he started putting together “History Hacker,” premiering Friday Sept. 26 at 8 p.m. and midnight, it was too late.

Not too late to ever see “  The Prestige,” mind you. But “History Hacker’s” premise is to focus each episode on the life and innovations of one inventor, and the pilot is about Nikola Tesla.

Pettis didn’t want to infect his flow by watching David Bowie’s critically-acclaimed portrayal of “The Father of Physics,” a pivotal — albeit fictionalized — character in the film. 

Perfectly reasonable. Lots of these creative types censor their sensory input for just that reason. What’s funny here is that in a recent interview with Technotica about his “History Hacker” pilot, Pettis kind of, sort of wanted his missing “Prestige” experience left off the record.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love David Bowie,” Pettis said via VoIP. “Please don’t tell anybody.”

Mind you, Pettis is a guy who can reverse engineer Tesla creations, and he's worried it wouldn't look right if people found out he didn't see some movie that introduced many a modern layperson to Tesla’s existence.

Whatever. It's amusing. So with Pettis’s reluctant permission, I’m sharing.

Meanwhile, if you came away from “The Prestige” wanting to know more about the real guy behind Bowie’s portrayal of an enigmatic inventor who walked through storms of electric current of his own creation, the truth is at least as cool as the fiction.

“At the turn of the century, electricity was magic, and really, it still is today,” Pettis says.

“This (TV show) is for all the curious people out there who want to learn about the electricity that comes out of your wall. You can run a hair dryer from the electricity in your wall generated from a power plant far, far way. That blows my mind.”

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