Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (72 page)

Unknown to most Teslaphiles, the inventor was not always based in New York during those hidden years. For example, around the year 1925
to 1926 he was in Philadelphia working on the turbine design, and in 1931
he was in Massachusetts working with the head of U.S. Steel in an attempt to put his turbines in the steel mills.
Seifer says a 300 page book was written about Tesla's turbine, but it has not surfaced since the inventor's death.

CAR RAN ON EREE ENERGY?

Tesla kept a much lower profile regarding another invention. The story— seemingly impossible to document, generations later—is that when he was around sixty-five, Tesla or his helpers pulled the gasoline engine out of a new Pierce-Arrow and stuck in an 80 horsepower alternating current electric motor. But no batteries! Instead, he bought a dozen vacuum tubes, wires and resistors. Soon he had the parts arranged in a box which sat beside him in the front seat of the car. One account says the mysterious box was two feet long, a foot wide and six inches high, with two rods sticking out of it. From the driver's side, Tesla reached over and pushed the rods in, and the car took off at up to 80 miles per hour. He is reported to have test-driven the loaned Pierce-Arrow for a week. If this story is true, the secret of his power source died with him.

There are clues that indicate he could well have driven a car on "free energy." For example, Tesla wrote to his friend Robert Johnson, editor of Century magazine, that he had invented an electrical generator that didn't need an outside source of power. In the early 1930s, Tesla announced that he had, more than twenty-five years earlier, harnessed cosmic rays and made them operate a moving device.

Trying to discover what he had been talking about, today's researchers comb through his patents, such as "Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy," U.S. Patent No. 658,957, 1901. The research indicates Tesla was working on his "free energy" generator before he hammered out a major article for Robert Johnson's June 1900 issue of Century, in which he describes sending power wirelessly. He writes that a device for getting energy directly from the sun would not be very profitable and therefore would not be the best solution. Researchers such as scientist Oliver Nichelson of Utah read this to mean that Tesla had learned that a "free energy" device would never be allowed to reach the market, but a system in which someone could still profit by selling power delivered wirelessly had more of a chance of being allowed by the financial tycoons.

Today's creative-edge physicists may be vindicating Tesla's so-called free energy invention with their theories about the possibility of tapping incredibly abundant—estimated to be the energy equivalent of 10-to-the94th-power grams per cubic centimeter —supply of energy from the vacuum of space that Adam Trombly spoke about.

GOVERNMENT AGENTS TAKE HIS PAPERS

According to his biographers, Tesla died in genteel poverty in a hotel room in 1943 at age eighty-seven. His memory was honored in a funeral service at St. John's cathedral, attended by more than two thousand people including the elite of the day.

Although Tesla had become a United States citizen in 1899 and valued his citizenship highly for the next fifty-nine years, he was strangely treated like a recent immigrant at the end of his life. After his death the public was told that his papers had been shipped back to Yugoslavia, and that authorities in Washington had sent in the Custodian of Alien Property to deal with his belongings. U.S. government agents reportedly had first crack at his safe and other papers. Later a Tesla museum was built in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, to house whatever Tesla memorabilia survived the events after his death.

When biographer Margaret Cheney looked into the military's possession of Tesla papers taken from the Office of Alien Properties, the trail led to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The response from WrightPatterson AFB under the Freedom of Information Act in 1980 was that "The organization (Equipment Laboratory) that performed the evaluation of Tesla's papers was deactivated several years ago. After conducting an extensive search of lists of records retired by that organization, in which we found no mention of Tesla's papers, we concluded that the documents were destroyed at the time the laboratory was deactivated."

Believe that or not, the fact remains that a great discoverer was left out of our history books but is known among researchers of alternative technology. Does the military own Tesla technology information which could be used for cleaning up the planet instead of for destructive purposes? Did those industrialists who have monopolies on coal and oil also try to control Tesla's legacy? Consider his claim of inventing an electrical generator that would not consume any fuel. "Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe," Tesla said. ". . . Throughout space there is energy." If that energy had been harnessed, those who profit by the myth of scarcity would not have been able to drum up support for their oil wars.

Whether he died of natural causes or was deliberately given arsenic, the story of Nikola Tesla is clouded by the actions of those who lacked his dedication to improving the lot of humanity.

The man softly crying as he sat beside me at the Tesla symposium may have been a finely-tuned receiver for the prevailing mood in the room. His fist clenched when Adam Trombly said, "Thomas Edison was promoted and promoted, but Nikola Tesla was a genius who was orders of magnitude greater."

REFERENCES
Bearden, Tom. Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Vol. 8 (1995), p. 10.

Bird, Christopher, and Nichelson, Oliver. "Great Scientist, Forgotten Genius Nikola Tesla," New Age Magazine (1967).

Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man Out of Time. New York: Dell Publishing, 1981.

Farnsworth, Elma G. Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier. Salt Lake City: PemberlyKent Publishers, 1990. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New. Oxford University Press,1988.

O'Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius. California: Angriff Press, 1978. Peterson, Gary. "Nikola Tesla, Man with Many Solutions," Journal of Power and Resonance. Colorado Springs, 1990.

Quinby, E.J., USN Commander (ret). "Nikola Tesla, World's Greatest Engineer." Proceedings of Radio Club of America Inc., Fall 1971. Rauscher, Elizabeth. Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Vol. 8 (1995), p. 9.

Seifer, Marc. Nikola Tesla & John Hays Hammond Jr., A History of Remote Control Robotics. Fall River, Massachusetts.

Tesla, Nikola. "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla," Electrical Experimenter Magazine, 1919. (Vermont: Hart Brothers, 1982). Tesla, Nikola, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (New York, June 1900).

The Tesla Journal. (Lackawanna, New York, 1989/90).

Wohleber, Curt. "The Work of the World," Invention & Technology (Winter, 1992).

Wright, Charles. "The Great AC/DC War," 1988 International Tesla Syposium, Colorado Springs.

Transmission
of Electrical
Energy Without
Wires

Nikola Tesla

It is impossible to resist your courteous request extended on an occasion of such moment in the life of your journal. Your letter has vivified the memory of our beginning friendship, of the first imperfect attempts and undeserved successes, of kindnesses and misunderstandings. It has brought painfully to my mind the greatness of early expectations, the quick flight of time, and alas! the smallest of realizations. The following lines which, but for your initiative, might not have been given to the world for a long time yet, are an offering in the friendly spirit of old, and my best wishes for your future success accompany them.

Towards the close of 1898 a systematic research, carried on for a number of years with the object of perfecting a method of transmission of electrical energy through the natural medium, led me to recognize three important necessities: First, to develop a transmitter of great power; second, to perfect means for individualizing and isolating the energy transmitted; and, third, to ascertain the laws of propagation of currents through the earth and the atmosphere. Various reasons, not the least of which was the help proffered by my friend Leonard E. Curtis and the Colorado Springs Electric Company, determined me to select for my experimental investigations the large plateau, two thousand meters above sea-level, in the vicinity of that delightful resort, which I reached in May, 1899. I had not been there but a few days when I congratulated myself on the happy choice and I began the task, for which I had long trained myself, with a grateful sense and full of inspiring hope. The perfect purity of the air, the unequaled beauty of the sky, the imposing sight of a high mountain range, the quiet and restfulness of the place—all around contributed to make the

CommunicatedtotheThirtiethAnniversaryNumberoftheElectricalWorldandEngineer,

March 5, 1904.

Experimental Laboratory, Colorado Springs.

conditions for scientific observation ideal. To this was added the exhilarating influence of a glorious climate and a singular sharpening of the senses. In those regions the organs undergo perceptible physical changes. The eyes assume an extraordinary limpidity, improving vision; the ears dry out and become more susceptible to sound. Objects can be clearly distinguished there at distances such that I prefer to have them told by someone else, and I have heard—this I can venture to vouch for—the claps of thunder 700 and 800 kilometers [roughly 400 to 500 miles] away. I might have done better still, had it not been tedious to wait for the sounds to arrive, in definite intervals, as heralded precisely by an electrical indicating apparatus—nearly an hour before.

In the middle of June, while preparations for other work were going on, I arranged one of my receiving transformers with the view of determining in a novel manner, experimentally, the electric potential of the globe and studying its periodic and casual fluctuations. This formed part of a plan carefully mapped out in advance. A highly sensitive, self-restorative device, controlling a recording instrument, was included in the secondary circuit, while the primary was connected to the ground and an elevated terminal of adjustable capacity. The variations of potential gave rise to electric surgings in the primary; these generated secondary currents, which in turn affected the sensitive device and recorder in proportion to their intensity. The earth was found to be, literally, alive with electrical vibrations, and soon I was deeply absorbed in this interesting investigation. No better opportunities for such observations as I intended to make could be found anywhere. Colorado is a country famous for the natural displays of electric force. In that dry and rarefied atmosphere the sun's rays beat the objects with fierce intensity. I raised steam, to a dangerous pressure, in barrels filled with concentrated salt solution, and the tin-foil coatings of some of my elevated terminals shriveled up in the fiery blaze. An experimental high-tension transformer, carelessly exposed to the rays of the setting sun, had most of its insulating compound melted out and was rendered useless. Aided by the dryness and rarefaction of the air, the water evaporates as in a boiler, and static electricity is developed in abundance. Lightning discharges are, accordingly, very frequent and sometimes of inconceivable violence. On one occasion approximately twelve thousand discharges occurred in two hours, and all in a radius of certainly less than fifty kilometers from the laboratory. Many of them resembled gigantic trees of fire with the trunks up or down. I never saw fire balls, but as a compensation for my disappointment I succeeded later in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially.

In the latter part of the same month I noticed several times that my instruments were affected stronger by discharges taking place at great distances than by those nearby. This puzzled me very much. What was the cause? A number of observations proved that it could not be due to the differences in the intensity of the individual discharges, and I readily ascertained that the phenomenon was not the result of a varying relation between the periods of my receiving circuits and those of the terrestrial disturbances. One night, as I was walking home with an assistant, meditating over these experiences, I was suddenly staggered by a thought. Years ago, when I wrote a chapter of my lecture before the Franklin Institute and the National Electric Light Association, it had presented itself to me, but I had dismissed it as absurd and impossible. I banished it again. Nevertheless, my instinct was aroused and somehow I felt that I was nearing a great revelation.

It was on the third of July—the date I shall never forget—when I obtained the first decisive experimental evidence of a truth of overwhelming importance for the advancement of humanity. A dense mass of strongly charged clouds gathered in the west and towards the evening a violent storm broke loose which, after spending much of its fury in the mountains, was driven away with great velocity over the plains. Heavy and long persisting arcs formed almost in regular time intervals. My observations were now greatly facilitated and rendered more accurate by the experiences already gained. I was able to handle my instruments quickly and I was prepared. The recording apparatus being properly adjusted, its indications became fainter and fainter with the increasing distance of the storm, until they ceased altogether. I was watching in eager expectation. Sure enough, in a little while the indications began again, grew stronger and stronger and, after passing through a maximum, gradually decreased and ceased once more. Many times, in regularly recurring