Nikola Tesla: Man of Three Centuries

Near midnight between the 9th and 10th of July, 1856, Nikola Tesla was born of Serbian parents in Croatia near Bosnia, an area that has known centuries of turmoil. From such a humble beginning came a Man Out of Time - almost literally - the title of Margaret Cheney’s 1981 biography of Tesla. The eccentric genius who would grow from this infant was a man rooted in the nineteenth century’s scientific revolutions of electricity and magnetism. His electrical creations would transform the twentieth century beyond recognition - widely distributed electricity that would dominate all aspects of life and a society pervaded by global “etheric wave” communication, radio, and television. Nikola Tesla’s legacy has not yet come to full bloom, but it surely will in this, the twenty-first century, which (one hopes!) will be much less recognizable to twentieth centurians than the twentieth century was to be to the Victorians.

We celebrate Nikola Tesla in this Infinite Energy, in large part by reprinting, with annotation and commentary, his astonishing prescient article, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy.” It appeared in the June 1900 issue of Century magazine, thus nicely demarcating with Tesla’s predictions the two centuries of his living reign. We offer brief eclectic tours of some of the better-known Tesla biographies, and we touch on a notable Tesla video documentary/dramatization.

Tesla had come to the U.S. in 1884 with a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison - from Charles Batchelor, the British engineer who ran the Continental Edison Company in Europe. The two towering figures, Edison and Tesla, had a very brief working relationship in America, but their manners, personalities, and approaches to commercializing the generation and transmission of the electrical “fluid” clashed dramatically. Edison would remain stuck with the problematic direct-current paradigm, while Tesla had long envisioned his polyphase alternating current approach, which he invented down to its many particulars. Tesla won, of course, yet in 1943 he died in the New York hotel room in which he lived, in debt and in abject poverty. He was a visionary scientific genius, not a savvy, cut-throat businessman. To this day, Tesla does not receive the credit he deserves. Though he was the true discoverer of the basic methods of radio communication (as later formally adjudicated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision following Tesla’s death), popular history grants the honor of radio’s invention to Marconi, who had used Tesla’s ideas. Tesla knew of that interference at the time, but he just smiled; he was too immersed in his other overarching plans for energy and communication.

The U.S. Smithsonian Institution to this day does not properly credit Tesla for the invention of radio! Tesla these days is not only “mystified” and mythologized by hordes of devotees, he is also maligned by the scientific bigots of CSICOP (the so-called Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). The CSICOPers cannot abide Tesla’s visions of the possible, so stuck are they in their archaic textbook understanding of basic physics, from which they refuse to budge.

The nineteenth century Tesla’s dashing persona and evident genius, his over six-foot tall, thin frame, his dark complexion, and fluency in many languages endeared him to many movers and shakers, artists, writers, and musicians of that period - among them J. Pierpont Morgan (a significant investor in the Edison Electric Light Company), George Westinghouse (who would make his fortunes from Tesla’s towering intellect), John D. Rockefeller, author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), and French Actress Sarah Bernhardt. And there was admirer Katherine Johnson, whose husband Robert Underwood Johnson ran Century magazine - the venue of Tesla’s 1900 exposition on the future of energy and many other technologies, including robotics and futuristic military machines.

It is a little over a century after much of our world began to have access to widely distributed electric power, thanks to the pioneering by Nikola Tesla of polyphase alternating current - the basic methods of its generation and transmission. This began in 1896 with the generation of electricity at Niagara Falls and its transmission to other parts of New York. New York City quickly became the intense luminous beacon that it remains today. But Tesla’s plans were far greater than could be contained in copper wires. He wanted to launch a world of free energy - one in which electric power could be tapped by anyone at any point on Earth via “wireless transmission.” Despite that great genius’s mostly unrecognized impact on civilization, an era of free energy did not break out in the twentieth century, though it might have; Tesla’s hopes were put on hold.

Tesla’s famous 187-foot Wardenclyffe transmission tower on Long Island was erected in 1903. Its’ ostensible purpose had been for global radio communication, but Tesla’s driving ambition for it had been to launch wireless power transmission as well. This was not to be, whether or not his technical ideas had merit - and in this case they may have been flawed. Financial reversals and other problems led to the tower’s destruction; it was sold for scrap in 1917. But the quest for free energy did not die. Just as there had been many failed aeronautical pioneers toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, so there were to be many failures in the quest for free energy - and some near-miss successes - throughout the twentieth century.

A little less than one hundred years ago, two bicycle mechanics showed that the scientific establishment was dead-wrong about the “impossibility” of heavier-than-air flight. Tesla was one of those in 1900 who believed that the airplane was coming - and soon. He was right. On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright burned their names into history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, though it took five more years - not until late 1908 with a flight demonstration at Ft. Myer, Virginia - for the Establishment’s media organs even to acknowledge that the Wrights had pulled off a scientific and technological coup. Even the great Tesla did not know of the Wrights’ accomplishment at the time (1903). Following the Wrights’ seminal achievement, the next hundred years witnessed a revolution in transportation and commerce. Then astronautics built upon aviation with explosive technology - giving rise to communications satellites, weather satellites, and voyages to the Moon, planets, asteroids, and comets. Space exploration has been severely hampered, to be sure, by the lack of an energy source much more potent than chemical combustion, and spaceflight has been saddled by a restrictive physics that is built on the shakiest of foundations. That is about to change, with a revolution in electricity that has a lot to do with the fundamental physics of the universe.

Though we have seen many dead-end detours on the road to free energy, it may be that 2003 will mark the beginning of a turning point in that journey. Victory is long overdue. Today, many solid strands of research in free energy are coming together, and the final triumph of limitless, clean energy is very much within reach. In fact, sad to say, the primary ingredient holding back a raging breakout of a new energy revolution is R&D money - in the right hands, of course! Foremost among the hopeful developments in new energy is the recognition of the work of Tesla himself, though free energy will not come in the way the great inventor had planned it. Most likely there will be no generalized wireless transmission of power, but there will be free energy tapped from the vacuum state - the aether - at countless distributed sites with compact free energy devices. Thus, the inevitable end of the power-grid - just as Tesla had envisioned. This is in the process of happening as legitimate dynamic aether physics is recovered by more and more investigators from the impending wreckage of Einsteinian relativity and its fiction of the “nothingness” of so-called “space-time.”

Let us review where things stand on the free energy front in early 2003. A good beginning is to examine our newly posted New Energy Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on www.infinite-energy.com, with its highlighted important scientific links. Here is a brief summary:

We have many times drawn the attention of those readers with a more mathematical physics bent to the compendious work of Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa on their www.aetherometry.com website. There one will find at least one coherent view of precisely how matters went astray, beginning in the nineteenth century, and continuing with the many limiting fictions under which physics still labors. If one does not care to probe the details, but wants to see prototype plasma power and self-sustaining aether motors in operation, there is now a 100-minute DVD, “From Plasma Power to the Aether Motor,” which can be ordered. Dr. Harold Aspden, an aether theorist himself and former director of IBM’s European patent operations (from 1963 to 1983), introduces the Correa technology by describing how electromagnetic theory went astray as early as the 1820s! Seeing the DVD may not exactly bring one to “believing,” but it is the next best thing. Testimonials based on hands-on testing and familiarity with the physics and its discoverers, is that this technology is for real - there is no hanky panky involved, no concealed batteries, etc. This is the first time in the quest for free energy from the aether that such pedigreed devices have appeared in accessible public view.

No less than three types of free energy technologies are displayed in operation and testing: 1) The mid-1990s patented pulsed plasma power Pulsed Abnormal Glow discharge (PAGD™) reactor devices, powering spinner motors and spinning up flywheels (50 watts of DC electricity in, 500 watts mechanical power out); 2) Patent-applied-for self-running Aether/ORgone Motor-Converter technology, stemming from the work of Nikola Tesla and Wilhelm Reich, but going far beyond - motors that are driven by aether energy captured with “orgone accumulators,” by vapor (evacuated) glass tubes, and even by ungrounded human bodies, and 3) Stirling motors driven not by fuel combustion, but operated anomalously from a hybrid orgone accumulator chamber during both daylight and deep into a cold Canadian night. The pioneering documentary is filled with simple demonstrations of massfree aether energy - from the vacuum, the ground, the atmosphere, and human bodies. This illustrates the existence of an energy realm which has heretofore been both ignored and grossly misunderstood. Yes, there is an intimate connection between physics and biophysics - as some of the more effective complementary medical approaches have long suggested. “Qi” energy is not just some “New Age” term; it’s for real, and its physics can increasingly be understood - and measured - qualitatively and quantitatively.

This is most important, for what is more necessary than a proper understanding of the true boundary conditions of biological systems - our existence? The current paradigm suggests this biology to be conceptually “exclusively biochemistry.” But is there really any mainstream research that confirms “biophysical energy” - an energy that attends and augments and interpenetrates “biochemistry”? There are significant controlled studies that substantiate the effectiveness of complementary medicine modalities, such as acupuncture and “healing touch”-type therapies. However, we are increasingly seeing Western medicine’s technological imaging and sensing devices being applied to prove that bodily effects without conventional biological explanation are occurring. To cite one of the best examples we have encountered, please examine: “Evaluation of Acupuncture Using fMRI and Ultrasonic Imaging,” by Chang Sok So (Dept. of Anatomy and Neurobiology), Joie P. Jones and David D. Kidney (Department of Radiological Sciences), University of California at Irvine; Takuso Saito, Tokyo Institute of Technology, a paper given at the Society for Scientific Exploration in June 2001 in LaJolla, California. But much of this is also published by the authors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 95, 1998, pp. 2670-2673. In this study, it is conclusively shown with scientifically blinded examination using ultrasonic and other stimulation of an acupuncture point in the foot of a subject (many subjects were used): 1) The acupuncture point on the foot, known by acupuncturists to help vision when stimulated, resulted in nearly instantaneous production of activation in the visual cortex of the brain of the subject - a completely reproducible effect that could be toggled off and on; 2) The acupuncture point was found to be highly localized (within a fraction of a millimeter); and 3) The speed of transmission of the information from the foot acupuncture point to the visual cortex of the brain, as measured by fMRI, was at least 1,000 times any known nerve transmission speed! Dr. Joie P. Jones explained, at a public lecture in June 2001 (Society for Scientific exploration Meeting, LaJolla, California), that because the functional MRI (fMRI) minimum time localization of measurement is about 80-microseconds, the actual transmission speed to the brain might be faster than even this astounding 1,000-fold figure. What kind of “only biochemistry” can do that?

A footnote, which illuminates the sad state of mainstream science today: The group’s technical paper, which is obviously of overarching importance, was submitted to Science, and then Nature, which both rejected without review - according to Dr. Joie Jones. Subsequently, five sympathetic Nobel laureates in the biological sciences, who were impressed with the paper, urged Nature to reconsider its decision. It did not. Therefore, the paper had to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which does not censor the work of its participants. Thus, a fundamental finding about the human body’s functioning, and the medical effectiveness of a disparaged technique - acupuncture - has been submerged, at least for now. Infinite Energy is bringing it to you.

Now for “cold fusion,” the indisputably verified - and most widely validated of the emerging free energy technologies. The field is more properly referred to as LENR - Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions. In effect, the science has become modern alchemy. The transmutation of heavy elements is shown to occur with remarkable ease in certain systems. Examine www.lenr-canr.org for the latest downloadable technical papers in this area. Though LENR technological energy devices appeared to be imminent in the mid-1990s, various materials problems with thin-film metal coatings in electrochemical cells produced a severe setback. Now new gas-type “catalytic fusion” cells are showing much greater promise. Furthermore, the off-shoot from cold fusion launched by Dr. Randell Mills in 1991, a kind of new hydrogen physics revision of modern quantum mechanics, appears to be blossoming at the well-funded BlackLight Power Corporation in New Jersey (see www.blacklightpower.com). Dr. Mills and his colleagues have just had an article published by the American Journal of Physics (December 2002) - a sign of the establishment cracking perhaps? The most noteworthy accomplishment of BlackLight Power is the highly reproducible excess heat phenomenon in gas plasma systems - much more reproducible, and predictable by gas component selection criteria, than LENR phenomena.

Though Randell Mills on the one hand and the cold fusion/LENR community on the other are convinced of their separate theoretical justifications, neither should be so self-satisfied and secure. An underlying new physics of some kind almost certainly straddles the whole of anomalous energy - the new energy field.

In “Eclectic Observer” in our last issue, we highlighted some marvelous developments by professors of physics and mathematics at the University of San Diego in what we will begin to call “Environmental Energy” - to be slightly “scientifically-politically correct,” rather than blurt out “macroscopic violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” The October 2002 article in Foundations of Physics by Professors Sheehan, Putnam, and Wright is “A Solid State Maxwell Demon.” Yes, the advent of possible Macroscopic Maxwell Demons is at hand. These harnessed Demons will terrorize the Physics Establishment, once it stops laughing in denial of the prospect. It is thrilling to realize that Nikola Tesla predicted the advent of this “cold hole” phenomenon even in his time: engines which could work by preserving against diminution a localized cold region, a “cold hole,” into which heat from the environment would “fall” with attendant generation of work. He wrote that he conceived this in 1883! In other words, if the carefully simulated Sheehan et al. device is realized, an “impossible” Perpetual Motion Machine of the Second Kind is possible. All hell will break loose when the unleashed Maxwell’s Demons run wild!

This completes a summary of the three-pronged assault on “business as usual” in science that new energy field represents. But do not forget that - with the exception of “cold fusion,” the basic form of which Tesla could not have foreseen, the great man anticipated it all, and it’s about time - 2003, a century after Tesla’s Wardenclyffe.