Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER THIRTEEN built and Tesla again claimed to have transmitted power across the globe. The next step in his plan was to build a magnifying transmitter at the Niagara Falls power plant and begin the full-time transmission of energy around the world. From this tower, Tesla planned to beam a system of global time, news, stock market reports, music, secret Government communications, international banking services, marine navigation and printing data. He even conjured with the possibility of communicating with beings on other planets. This new project never materialized. The private financing Tesla sought was totally insufficient to match his unpaid bills and, in 1905, his Long Island laboratory was closed down. Although Tesla continued to think up new inventions, his fires had burned out. From our perspective at the end of the twentieth century, it is a little easier to see why Tesla's genius was eclipsed. In 1900, Max Planck suggested that energy existed in finite units or quanta. In 1905, Einstein published his first paper on relativity and showed that matter and energy are interconvertible. The first decades of the century were alive with staggering advances in physics. In a revolutionary surge of intellectual power, the foundations laid down by Isaac Newton were totally overturned. Then, the eyes of the scientific world turned to the Solvay conferences, where Einstein, Curie, Planck, Lorentz, Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg, de Broglie, Born and Bohr sat round a single table and discussed the secrets of nature. Tesla was never a participant in such meetings; in all probability he was never invited for the inventor already belonged to a forgotten age of Newtonian physics. A careful reading of Tesla's patents and articles shows that, in his later life, he anticipated many of the discoveries of the twentieth century. In 1917, for example, he proposed using short wavelength radio waves to detect ships at sea. Reflections of these high-frequency waves by the ships were to be picked up and displayed on cathode ray tubes - a striking anticipation of radar. Yet, in the same year, Einstein wrote his paper on the 'Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity'. The difference between the two incidents is profound: both are, in a sense, speculations yet Einstein's paper was to have the greater scientific impact. The reason is not difficult to understand. Tesla's idea was a com112
