Nikola Tesla Books
PREFACE NIKOLA TESLA WAS either one of the most creative minds the world has ever known - or he was a blatant fraud. The alternatives seem extreme and dramatic, yet as I look through the patents and articles which cover my desk I am forced into this polarization. For Tesla was no ivory tower scientist who published cautious reports and qualified extrapolations from the security of some academic haven; rather he was a bold and original thinker who claimed that the discoveries he had made would lead to social revolution. On July 3, 1899, Nikola Tesla claimed to have tapped an 'inexhaustible source of power' which could be beamed across the globe. In the future which Tesla foresaw, the world would be linked by a net of endless energy, need would be abolished, the deserts would flower, Arctic wastes would become fertile, cities of the future would be clean and free from disease, war would be abolished and humankind would turn its eye outward to the civilization of the stars. These predictions sound like something from the pages of Jules Verne or his English counterpart HG Wells. But Tesla was an engineer and businessman who had already harnessed the power of Niagara Falls and taken the first steps in the construction of an electrical power network which would one day stretch across continents. Nikola Tesla was no impractical dreamer and his claim to have discovered an inexhaustible source of power was repeated over and over again in articles, personal letters and public letters. There is no element of doubt in these statements, no qualification, no element of caution until further experiments are performed. Tesla was emphatic. The man who had outstripped Thomas Edison in inventive power claimed an even greater victory: the ability to direct power without loss anywhere on the planet. If the claim is correct and has simply been ignored by conventional science then society has been robbed of an enormous crock of gold which sits 10
