Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (67 page)
Read Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla Online
Authors: Marc Seifer
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Science & Technology
Margaret Storm’s supposition that Tesla was born on another planet to give us our entire electric power and mass communications systems stemmed from a colorful history of the inventor’s ties to the group-fantasy belief that life on Mars was a virtual certainty. Fueled by McCarthyism and the fear of Communist (alien) infiltration and also theosophical literature, Storm proclaimed that Tesla had descended from the sixth-root race, a new species of human that was evolving on the planet. To complicate matters, she was also friends with Arthur Matthews, author of
Wall of Light: Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Spaceship.
A bizarre electrician who had once written to Tesla in the 1930s, Matthews contended that he and his supposed employer, Tesla, had traveled many times to nearby planets aboard Venusian spacecraft and that Tesla, as late as 1970, was still alive, living as an extraterrestrial.
8
Relegated to occult status for many decades, Tesla has also been fictionalized as one of any number of mad scientists in science-fiction literature, as part of the composite New Age hero John Galt in Ayn Rand’s novel
Atlas Shrugged,
as a source for future technology in James Redfield’s 1996 bestseller
The Tenth Insight,
and as the extraterrestrial (played by rock star David Bowie) in the Nicholas Roeg movie
The Man Who Fell to Earth.
As a cult figure in the United States, Tesla has also seen a panegyric resurgence with the younger generation because of a rock band which goes by the same name.
In Japan, however, Tesla’s cult status is much more complicated. On the one hand, Dr. Yoshiro NakaMats, the world’s leading inventor, whose creations include the floppy disk, is a great proponent of Tesla and has created a celebration in Tesla’s honor. On the other hand, Tesla’s secret
weaponry work has also attracted the attention of one of the most dangerous cults of modern times.
Just one month after the January 1995 earthquake in Kobe destroyed the city and killed 5,000 people, followers of the “charismatic psychopath” Shoko Ashara, the man responsible for poisoning the subways with Sarin gas in Tokyo, flew into Belgrade to infiltrate the Tesla Museum with hopes of obtaining the inventor’s schematics for his supposed telegeodynamic earthquake machine. Ashara’s cult, known as Aum Supreme Truth, had an Internet of supposedly tens of thousands of members in a half dozen countries with access to state-of-the-art high-tech devices, a large data base of military secrets, firearms, and laser apparatus, and other more esoteric New Age weaponry systems. Seeking world domination, their plans were interrupted by the earthquake. Rather than seeing the event as a natural occurrence, Ashara suggested that the Kobe disaster was caused by electromagnetic experiments conducted by one of the Japanese megacorporations or by American or possibly Russian military tests of a top-secret Tesla telegeodynamic instrument.
Raised in a country that had seen its cities destroyed by the atom bomb, Ashara had been influenced by apocalyptic science fiction stories, by the book
Tesla Superman
written by Japanese author Masaki Shindo, and by such Teslaphiles as Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, whose model for the Tesla magnifying transmitter hypothesized that it could be used as an intercontinental “electrostatic scalar-wave” delivery system. Realizing that Armageddon was at hand, the Kobe earthquake being proof of the prophecy, Ashara now planned to seize the high ground by constructing his own “Tesla howitzer” while at the same time perfecting the death ray.
9
Christopher Evans, in his text
Cults of Unreason,
suggests that cults appear as “stop-gaps” for people in societyways for them to deal with life’s mysteries and also for the unsettling feeling associated with the rapid pace of our times.
10
According to Evans, cults exist in order to discover the “Holy Grail,” the supposed secret behind the universe. Tesla himself called his magnifying transmitter the “philosopher’s stone.” To him, it was the mechanism by which to transform society and interlink the entire globe. Following a Goethean path, Tesla’s weltanschauung suggested a hierarchy of intelligence to the universe. Not only were his creations derived from natural law, through them, humans could attain godlike status and communicate with other interstellar neighbors.
“According to the idea of esotericism, as applied to history,” says Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, “no civilization ever begins of itself.”
11
Esoteric schools involve other (higher) dimensions, says astrologer Dane Rudyar. Certain individuals, often referred to as avatars, Rudyar suggests, are actually “seed men” who one way or another have within their being knowledge that can lead a culture into transcendence.
Tesla had possession of certain knowledge which for various reasons was rejected by mainstream science and society or suppressed by powers that perceived his contributions as threatening. Yet the essence of Tesla’s work is available for the seeker. Described by popular New Age writer Robert Anton Wilson as an “illuminati,” Tesla remains a cult hero because of his esoteric status, because his life’s work has served as a template for numerous science-fiction characters and cinematic themes, and because he provides answers for those who study his work for its inner meaning.
12
Unlike so many other esoteric figures, however, Tesla is in a unique position because so many of his inventions
were
incorporated into our modern high-tech world. Had his ultimate world broadcasting plan actually coalesced during his heyday, there is no telling how history might have proceeded and how the quality of our lives might have changed.
The Tesla particle beam weapon. (© Lynn Sevigny 1995)
PPENDIX
A
T
HE
M
AGNIFYING
T
RANSMITTER
: A T
ECHNICAL
D
ISCUSSION
At the 1990 International Tesla Conference held in Colorado Springs, Dr. Alexander Marincic, curator of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade; Robert Golka, the only modern electrical engineer to construct large-scale magnifying transmitters; and I were engaged in a conversation on the viability of Tesla’s plan. Both Marincic and Golka concurred that Tesla’s ultimate plan, that of sending energy around the earth for industrial purposes, was not practicable.
Leland Anderson, an electrical engineer and Tesla expert for nearly forty years, agreed. Tesla’s experiments at Colorado Springs, according to Anderson, were probably a local effect caused by the fortuitous placement of his tower next to the Pikes Peaks range along a great plain. When Tesla detected lightning discharges and standing waves, he made the incorrect assumption that these waves would encircle the globe. In fact, Anderson wrote, the standing waves Tesla detected were probably “unrecognized reinforcement effects” rebounding off Pikes Peak, and his generated waves probably did the same thing. His conclusion was based on measurements that electronic scientist Ralph Johler made of thunderstorms occurring along the peak.
1
Two experts who have concluded that the Tesla apparatus was viable are Professor James Corum and Eric Dollard, both designers of transmitting equipment based on Tesla’s findings. Dollard writes that the invention (circa 1920) of the “multiple loaded flat top antenna” by “Steinmetz’s protégé, Ernst F. W. Alexanderson,” was really “fashioned after those developed by Tesla.” One such plant, located at Bolinas, California, sets up
a resonant transformer between two separate “earth plates” and an “elevated plate.” This arrangement produces three separate types of wireless frequencies: “atmospheric induction, antenna transmission, and earth induction.” Acting as a “virtual ground” the aerial transmitting energy down into the earth sets up standing waves that “continuously bounce back and forth between the earth and the reflecting capacitance at a rate tuned to a natural rate of the earth.”
2
A simple tuning fork experiment can be used to explain the importance of the ground connection. It resonates much more powerfully when the fork is attached to a ground, such as a table. Due to the conductive property of the earth, individualization of impulse transmission is also facilitated. The electrical energy “does not pass through the earth in the ordinary acceptance of the term, it only penetrates to a certain depth according to the frequency.”
3
Corum, who holds a doctorate in physics and is a former professor of electrical engineering at West Virginia University writes, “It has been common in the past to discard Tesla’s far-sighted vision as baseless. [I] believe that such depreciation has stemmed from critics that were uninformed as to Tesla’s actual technical measurements, and physical observation.” Having performed various experiments himself, Corum surmises that Tesla’s mathematical results written in his May 16, 1900, patent application “could have only been obtained as a result of authentic terrestrial resonance measurements.” In other words, he concludes that Tesla’s claims that he (
a
) measured a terrestrial pulse that rebounded off the antipode of the earth and (
b
) calculated the resonant frequency of the earth are essentially correct.
4
Looking at the wireless project from the technical point of view, most likely, Wardenclyffe was to be set up mainly for the purpose of distributing information and meager amounts of electrical power, just enough to run clocks and stock tickers, but not enough to charge factories. Each tower could act as a sender or a receiver. In a letter to Katherine Johnson, Tesla explains the need for well over thirty such towers.
5
Further, the magnifying transmitter was conceived to transmit electricity in a variety of ways. Tesla could utilize the carrier waves traveling within the earth (e.g., the Shuman cavity, and/or the earth’s geomagnetic pulse), he could transmit frequencies through the air, or he could beam a carrier wave up to the ionosphere and use it for transport:
I will confess that I was disappointed when I first made tests along this line on a large scale. They did not yield practical results. At the time, I used about 8,000,000 to 12,000,000 volts of electricity. As a source of ionizing rays, I employed a powerful arc reflected up into the sky…trying only to connect a high
tension current and the upper strata of the air, because my pet scheme for years ha[d] been to light the ocean at night.
6
Central towers, acting much like today’s wireless trunkline microwave transmitters for the phone company, could then be hooked up via conventional wires to numerous households within a given radius.
From what I can ascertain, I believe that Tesla’s magnifying transmitter in a completed state would have operated as follows: A transmission tower would have been constructed so that its height and ability to radiate electrical oscillations was in a resonant relationship to the size, electronic and geophysical properties of the earth.
Rather than utilize transverse electromagnetic waves exclusively, Tesla would be utilizing longitudinal waves (such as those found in the impulses transmitted by earthquakes and by sound).
7
The gigantic Tesla coil was also calculated to take into account the wavelength of light. In other words, the length of the wires wound in the transformer were in a harmonic relationship to the distance light would travel in a given time. With the production of standing waves resonant with the planet, “nodal points” on the earth’s surface were also plotted out.
8
A tremendous charge, in excess of 30 million volts and in a harmonic frequency to the electrical and/or geophysical state of the earth, would be driven down the tower, into the ground, and out to sixteen 300-foot- long iron spokes positioned in a spiral down the entire length of the 120-foot well. Thereby gripping the earth, this pulse would generate an electronic disturbance in a harmonic relationship with the naturally occurring geomagnetic pulse that would reach the other side of the globe and in turn would bounce back up the tower. By controlling the period of frequency, this pulse could be modulated and actually increased in intensity in the same way one can make a well-made bell resound in increasing loudness by tapping it at precisely timed faster and faster rates. Also, the energy would be stored at the top of the tower and in specially built condensers by the laboratory. Stationary waves in resonance with known earth currents would thereby be established.
9
Like a vibrating spring with a weight on it, this device enabled Tesla to determine and manipulate the electrostatic capacity (in analogy, like the pliability of the spring) and the inductance (analogous to the weight on the spring) of the carrier vibrations.
10
Tesla also maintained that the use of liquefied air (-197°F) would greatly augment the production and/or reception of very high frequencies while also reducing impedance caused by friction or heat.
11
By
transforming energy to higher frequencies on the rebound flow,
Tesla increased the efficiency of his towers. Each could act as both a
sender and receiver. One tower situated near a waterfall could “jump” energy to another tower situated at another point on the globe.