In the Footsteps of Genius Page 7

logically, only a kind of automaton. Hence it follows that for everything a human being can do, a machine can be made which will faithfully imitate him in it, including reasoning based on experience.

Throughout his life Tesla did not give up this idea.

The connection with the Martians

Almost at every moment in his mature creative period Tesla was working simultaneously on several ideas. Some he was bringing to an end, and was already working on his “visual” experiments, while other ideas were only just being born. Thus many devices which will never “meet” again jointly lived through a happy part of their childhood in the “parental home,” under the wing of Tesla’s broader and great ideas.

At the time when he was thinking about remote control he also began to sketch his first system of wireless communication over great distances.

The first tests were encouraging. On the Hudson River he set a model of a boat. He was able to control its movement from his laboratory, at a distance of 40 kilometers. But that too was only a fraction of what the devices promised.

In 1898 his patent application number 613,809 was granted, in which he described remote radio-control for the steering of vehicles. This was the first practical result of wireless transmission. Tesla, as many times later, did not consider it necessary to patent radio separately, and then the first realization in automation. He demonstrated the one and the other together, and thus opened the possibility for many to appropriate his ideas.

Messages through the Earth

In Buffalo, a year earlier, on the occasion of the opening of the power plant at Niagara Falls, he announced his hope that he would soon be able to realize his greatest dream as well, “the transmission of energy from station to station by wireless means”…⁸

Industrialists, engineers, financiers followed his efforts with divided feelings. This mad and gifted inventor threatened to make “obsolete” a system which had only just begun to function and to bring in the first significant profit. Soon, newspapers throughout the world announce that Tesla has invented a device by which energy and messages can be transmitted through the Earth to a distance of some fifty kilometers, and that such transmission is realizable over much greater distances and through the air as well.⁹

Tesla was already so convinced of his efforts that he claimed he would in a short time make communication with Mars possible.

The magazine Electrical Review then carries an article on Tesla’s work. “Tesla intends, without the use of wires, to realize the transmission through the natural medium — earth and air — of enormous quantities of energy over distances of thousands of kilometers. This seems to us like a dream, like a story from the ‘1001 Nights.’ However, Tesla’s exceptional discoveries during the last years of strenuous work… confirm that his