Tesla
When Elon Musk spoke to podcaster Joe Rogan in February, their roughly three-hour conversation touched on everything from the notorious billionaire’s Hitleresque salutes and his federal shakeups at DOGE to what Rogan called “a funny narrative” that Musk “didn’t even create Tesla.” Musk’s account? “Tesla did not exist in any meaningful form” when he joined. “There were no employees. … There was no car, there was no nothing.”
Rogan looked skeptical.
In truth, it was Marc Tarpenning ’85, a Cal computer science grad, and Martin Eberhard, a Berkeley native, who incorporated Tesla Motors in 2003. After they pitched their startup to Musk, the then-ultra-millionaire went on to lead or co-lead successive rounds of funding and become chair of the board.
The relationship began to sour in 2006, after Eberhard, as CEO, unveiled Tesla’s first prototype to the public. While the press was positive, Musk felt slighted. He complained that the media portrayed him as “merely an ‘early investor,’” according to a 2014 Business Insider story.
Eberhard would be ousted a year later and Musk ultimately made the company’s fourth CEO. And in a 2009 settlement, he became a “founder” of Tesla—legally speaking.
“This is one of the things that I found kind of fascinating about [Musk] … [H]e’s actually accomplished some amazing things in his own right,” Eberhard later told CNBC. “He’s done some interesting things with Tesla for sure. I’m not sure why he also has to say he was a founder when he wasn’t.”
E-Readers
Tesla wasn’t Tarpenning and Eberhard’s first startup.
In the 1990s, they were brainstorming ideas for different products when they decided to build an e-book reader.
They founded NuvoMedia in 1997, but it wasn’t the only game in town. Just a few miles away, in Menlo Park, recently founded SoftBook Press raced against NuvoMedia to get its digital reader to market.
SoftBook’s would be first. In September 1998, it released the magazine-sized SoftBook Reader, with space for 1,500 pages of text. A few weeks later, NuvoMedia followed up with the slightly smaller Rocket eBook, capable of holding up to 4,000 pages.
Both e-book makers would be acquired by media company Gemstar in 2000, only to be shuttered three years later. The world wouldn’t be introduced to the Kindle until 2007. “You can argue that our market timing was off,” Tarpenning later quipped.
Still, the experience didn’t go to waste. For the second generation of the Rocket eBook, Tarpenning and Eberhard had switched the batteries from nickel-metal hydride to the superior lithium-ion. They pushed battery development even further at Tesla, and in 2008, the Roadster ushered in the modern age of Li-ion-powered EVs. “I was pretty convinced … that it was going to be possible to make the thing that made the car go,” Tarpenning told CNBC. “But I was very concerned we weren’t going to be able to make the car to go around it.”
Earliest known voice recording
With Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, society could finally record and play back sounds. But as these early recordings aged, they became brittle, fragile, and, eventually, mute.
Carl Haber was intrigued when he first learned this in 2000. An experimental physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Haber had spent years working on extremely precise detectors that could track the subatomic particles released in high-energy collisions. What if they could use the same techniques on the earliest sound recordings without ever touching them, he thought.
Working with Berkeley Lab post-doc Vitaliy Fadeyev, Haber bought a shellac disc of a 1950 performance of “Goodnight Irene” by The Weavers, led by the folk singer Pete Seeger (whose father, Charles Seeger, once chaired the music department at Berkeley). They scanned the surface of the disc, basically creating a digital map of its physical grooves, then used software to duplicate how a stylus would move across it. “Goodnight, Irene… Sometimes I take a great notion… ”
Since then, Project IRENE has recovered everything from the voice of Alexander Graham Bell, who invented wax cylinder recordings, to Native Californian songs and histories recorded under the direction of Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Yet it’s one of IRENE’s earliest projects that is the very oldest: “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête-moi,” the scratchy opening lyrics to “Au Clair de la Lune,” recorded on April 9, 1860.
The first sound recording device, it would seem, was not Edison’s phonograph, but rather the phonautograph, invented by a Parisian printer named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The phonautograph inscribed sound waves on soot-blackened paper.
The Frenchman, were he alive, would have been vindicated. He died shortly after learning of Edison’s innovation, believing that he had scooped the American by two decades. “Is it so difficult to recognize the original inventor?” he wrote.
To be fair to Edison, Scott de Martinville couldn’t play back his audio recordings. A man of letters, he sought simply to “write speech.” Phonautograph, after all, translates to “sound-self-writer.” It took the scientists at Berkeley Lab to read it.
Claymation™
For anyone who watched TV in the ’80s, the clay-animated R&B outfit, the California Raisins, need no introduction.
The Raisins’ creator, Will Vinton ’70, first started molding clay while studying architecture at Berkeley. Inspired by the “wonderfully organic” shapes of Antoni Gaudí, Vinton realized that if he really wanted to design like the Catalan architect, he “had to throw away the T-square and the straight edge and grab some plasticine clay. And I started basically molding and designing by way of sculpting.”
Continuing the long tradition of clay animation, which dates back to the early 20th century, he began filmmaking by way of clay, too. In 1975, he and codirector Bob Gardiner won an Academy Award for their short film, Closed Mondays. The eight-minute experiment, which had taken 18 months to create, brought so-called claymation, later trademarked by Vinton, to Hollywood. Soon, the California Raisin Advisory Board and ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding tasked Will Vinton Studios with bringing the medium to living rooms everywhere, in the form of a bunch of groovy dried grapes. Emulating The Temptations, Four Tops, and other Black musical talent of the ’50s and ’60s, the California Raisins conga-lined to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” for their debut commercial in 1986.
The Raisins were officially retired in 1994, but not before inspiring their own Emmy-nominated mockumentary, Saturday-morning cartoon series, and merch ranging from fan club watch sets to Valentine’s Day boxer shorts. Even Michael Jackson got turned into a raisin.
The Raisins weren’t the last anthropomorphized food product that Vinton, who died in 2018, would animate—trying out CG, he also created the Red, Yellow, and Blue M&M spokescandies in 1995. But they remain his most beloved. “I’ve often worried that’s all I’m going to have on my tombstone,” he once said. “‘Here lies the Raisin King.’”
