Tesla Saw Radar First?

One logical contender has not been heard from — for the very good reason that he died a few months before the public announcement of Radar. Yet he described the action and application of the instrument in at least as much detail as recent releases, and did it, not in 1931 or 1922, but in 1900!

As you have no doubt guessed, that man was Nikola Tesla. In an article on the possible uses of wireless, published in the Century Magazine, June, 1900, he stated:

"That communication without wires to any point of the globe is practical with such apparatus would need no demonstration, but through a discovery which I made I obtained absolute certitude. Popularly explained, it is exactly this: When we raise the voice and hear an echo in reply, we know that the sound of the voice must have reached a distant wall or boundary, and must have been reflected from the same. Exactly as the sound, so an electrical wave is reflected, and the same evidence which is afforded by an echo is offered by an electrical phenomenon known as a 'stationary' wave — that is, a wave with fixed nodal and ventral regions. Instead of sending sound-vibrations toward a distant wall, I have sent electrical vibrations toward the remote boundaries of the earth, and instead of the wall the earth has replied. In place of an echo I have obtained a stationary electrical wave — a wave reflected from afar.

"Stationary waves mean something more than telegraphy without wires to any distance... For instance, by their use we may produce at will, from a sending station, an electrical effect in any particular region of the globe; we may determine the relative position or course of a moving object, such as a vessel at sea, the distance traversed by the same, or its speed."

Possibly, then, the whole problem can be solved by all parties agreeing to acclaim Tesla as the real "Father of Radar"!