The Unknown Tesla

Speculations on Unrealized Tesla Ideas

Besides many realized inventions, Nikola Tesla also provided a number of unusual ideas which he did not explain in detail. Many discoveries of our time, such as lasers, powerful microwave transmitters, infrasound generators and others, remind us of some of Tesla's ideas. That is, probably, the reason why Tesla's enigmatic personality has recently been attracting the attention of a wider public in the world. But, is that really what Tesla had in mind?

In any case, his main life idea – the wireless transmission of energy – is now on the path to being realized. In the USA, the construction of a solar satellite power plant is planned, from which a power of 10 thousand megawatts – equal to the power of five Djerdaps – would be sent to Earth by means of microwaves.

We are presenting an article from the magazine "Science Digest", which discusses unrealized Tesla ideas, as an example of the prism through which Tesla and his work are sometimes viewed in the world. Claims that someone has obtained data from Tesla's legacy and is trying to use it to create terrifying weapons should be accepted as pure fiction.

Among Tesla's projects were also the dispersion of fog, the transmission of energy without conductors, the creation of a curtain of electrified particles and the control of meteorological conditions. For him, all those projects meant only the application of one single new principle of the amplifying transmitter. The "TMT" (Tesla Magnifying Transmitter) so named because it multiplies the input voltage many times over.

What did that new, revolutionary principle consist of? Simply, in drawing an unlimited quantity of energy from the Earth's atmosphere. Even for a man like Tesla, that was too much and many believed that the great inventor had gone a little "crazy".

Tesla's answer was very convincing. In the Stevens Mountains, in 1900, he installed 200 carbon filament light bulbs, which consumed 10 kW and lit them with energy from a source 40 km away – without conductors! How he did it remained a secret, but it seems to have been based on one discovery. Between the Earth's surface and the upper layers of the atmosphere there is a potential difference of about two billion volts. Tesla claimed that it could be made to oscillate and that it would thus be possible, if the right frequency is known, using a receiver tuned to that frequency, to draw an unlimited amount of energy. When Tesla died, it was thought that the thousands of documents he left covered all his inventions. Recently, however, the assumption has been put forward that Tesla wrote much more than was believed and that all his notes did not reach his museum in Belgrade. Did some of them go to the other side?

Giant "Standing Waves"

In October 1976, radio and radar systems around the world were disrupted by a completely new type of interference. It was determined that their source was in Riga, and Western countries sent a protest to the Soviet Union. The Soviets responded that they had been conducting some experiments with frequencies and had just finished them. However, two months later, the interference repeated, this time much stronger. Giant "standing waves", with a length of 1600 km that pulsed from 4 to 26 times per second, were detected around the world.  

At the beginning of 1977, meteorologists reported a strange "blockade" that extended along the west coast of America and a similar one along the east coast, as well as along the Soviet-Polish border, all the way from Finland. These "blockades" stopped the normal circulation of meteorological phenomena.  

Scientists became alarmed when it was discovered that each of these "blockades" was associated with very long electromagnetic "Standing Waves". Does a real connection exist between these phenomena? Opinions differ, but one thing is certain: while they lasted, it was as if time had gone mad: snow fell in Florida, and floods ravaged Europe.

However, it was not only the weather that became strange. The American system for tracking submarines via satellite suddenly failed. The United States first announced that this had happened due to "natural causes", and then hinted that two American satellites had been damaged by "electron beam technology". Because of all this, it is believed that in many countries, publicly or secretly, work is being done on the discovery of Tesla's "lost secret". If any of these countries discovers that secret, it is unlikely that it will be used in the way Tesla would have wanted. The great Yugoslav saw only benefit for the human race in his inventions. In connection with his amplifying transmitter he wrote: "Humanity will be united. Wars will be impossible and peace will reign". Unfortunately, no one would bet on that today!

Wireless Transmission of Energy

Tesla built his first amplifying transmitter in Colorado Springs in 1899. Most modern transmitters use transistors to amplify the signal of a low-voltage oscillator circuit. Tesla's amplifier was built long before the invention of the electron tube, let alone the transistor, and in his case the oscillator circuit was composed of tuned coils. Two coils were wound on a cylinder 17 m in diameter, while one coil, 2.5 m in diameter, was located inside them. At full power (about 50 kW), the output voltage of the coils reached 12.5 million volts!

Unlike modern transmitters which are silent, Tesla's transmitter looked terrifying in operation. Lightning bolts up to 10 meters long tore through the air, and sometimes ball lightning would form. The room was filled with ozone. Outside, lightning flashed from a huge copper ball on top of a mast, high above the building. The entire grounds around the laboratory were electrified.

At the beginning of the 20th century Tesla returned to New York with plans to build a huge amplifying transmitter that would be capable of sending energy, music, telegrams, photographs and other information through the Earth. Soon the generators and other components of the transmitter were manufactured, and the construction of the facility began in Wardenclyffe on Long Island. However, it was never completed. It turned out that the costs far exceeded Tesla's predictions. When he ran out of funds in 1904, the economic crisis was already gaining momentum. In addition, Marconi had already succeeded with far more modest resources in sending signals across the Atlantic. Thus the work was halted and Tesla's idea of wireless energy transmission has not been publicly tested to this day.

Renewed Interest

The energy crisis, as well as shortcomings in the production and transmission of electrical energy, have led to renewed interest in Tesla's idea. The construction of Tesla transmitters is underway in several US states. Tesla's admirers working on this hope that they will soon be able to publicly demonstrate the practicality of the energy transmission system. They believe that Tesla has already proven its applicability. L. I. Anderson, who has the most complete collection of Tesla documents in the USA, doubts this. He points out that there is no data about it in the existing documentation, not even in Tesla's diary which is kept in Belgrade. And many other experts doubt that such transmission will ever succeed for anyone, because a huge amount of energy is inevitably lost in space, and the electrical properties of the Earth are far more complex. In addition, Tesla's theory depends on the resonant frequency of the Earth, which he determined during a thunderstorm in Colorado. According to some, these measurements were completely wrong.

Despite the failure of the Wardenclyffe project, Tesla continued to work persistently on this idea. In 1917, after much persuasion, Tesla accepted the Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. In his acceptance speech, he then described how his transmitter could be used to modify the weather. There is an opinion that this is now unrealized. However, experts point out that Tesla's transmitter creates waves of very long wavelength (the device in Colorado Springs produced waves about 6 km long). The exchange of energy between such long waves and individual air molecules is in principle impossible; moreover, such waves cannot be efficiently focused.

Impenetrable Energy Wall

In later years, Tesla spoke several times about a machine that would, in the event of war, produce an impenetrable energy wall around an entire country. Nothing could penetrate that wall. B. Parker, co-author of the book "The Tesla Factor", says that this device also originates from Tesla's favorite discovery.

In 1930 Tesla announced the discovery of a death ray obtained by an amplifying transmitter. He did not provide any details at the time. Last year, however, some people linked two phenomena with this discovery: explosions in the atmosphere above the east coast of the USA and pulsating radio signals picked up in Canada.

In December 1977 and January 1978, a good part of the east coast was occasionally shaken by mysterious powerful atmospheric explosions which obviously occurred over the Atlantic. Explanations were sought in breaking the sound barrier, explosion of accumulated gases, meteorites, gravitational waves and some other things. In addition to these, more or less probable causes, Tesla's transmitter was also mentioned: incoherent rays form coherent signals at a certain point. It was also called a heat bomb.

Recently, residents of some Canadian mining settlements complained of headaches, restlessness and similar discomforts. At the same time, strong very low frequency radio signals were recorded which were "accused" of unwanted effects on people, and supposedly originate from the TMT transmitter. However, the probability that the signals come from that source is very small, because the frequency of the carrier signal is several megahertz, which is too high for this transmitter.

"Project Tesla"

All the hopes placed on Tesla's transmitter on various sides rest on the assumption that its output basically differs from the output of any other type of transmitter tuned to the same frequency. Tesla believed in that, but is it really so?

Work on the "Tesla project", which was supposed to check this, began in 1970 when the Boston electrical engineer Robert Golka came to Belgrade to read Tesla's diary. Upon his return to the USA, he made a faithful copy of Tesla's device from Colorado Springs. After several years he managed to obtain an output of 25 million volts, twice as much as what Tesla had achieved. According to his claim, there is nothing mysterious in the device – everything can be explained by existing electromagnetic theory. The only difference between today's devices and Tesla's is that the latter uses a spark gap to increase the voltage, which causes loud noise. In that way, the special characteristic of Tesla's amplifying transmitter is only the signal! However, if the signal from this spark gap were "cleaned", the system could become a cheap alternative to existing transmitters in some areas of high-power transmission.

It can thus be concluded that the stories and speculations associated with the TMT have no serious basis.