Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA It was with such stirring revolutionary thoughts in my head that I returned to the National Research Council after my year in England. I came down to earth, to Nikola Tesla. I was back in the present with a new problem in front of me. But had things really changed that much? I might have published a score or more papers and lectured before various scientific organizations, but in the end each new problem was a challenge and I was just as naked before this new challenge as I had been in that university library many years before. I went back to the papers on my desk and tried to make order out of them. I soon realized that the story would be difficult to piece together since the file itself was not the work of one author. In place of the usual proposal with summary, index, introduction, exposition, references and technical appendix were a series of letters, minutes of meetings, photocopies of old lectures, documents and patents and what looked like a scientific paper. The main proposal came from an international group based in Canada called PACE or the Planetary Association for Clean Energy, which had devoted itself to the study of Nikola Tesla's patents and writings. For his part Tesla was represented by some letters, copies of speeches, patents and drawings, most of which dated from the turn of the century. As I looked through this material I was puzzled as to why Tesla's name had escaped me, and why the Tesla coil was his only invention which had come to mind. I went over to my bookshelves and took down a standard textbook on electricity. Sure enough, the index contained the names Edison, Westinghouse, Farady, Ampère and a host of other scientists, but there was no entry corresponding to the name of Nikola Tesla. I went back to my desk and began to look through one of the documents written by the Planetary Association for Clean Energy. It contained predictions of the important consequences of broadcast power. It spoke of modifying the earth's weather, cleaning polluted atmospheres and repairing the ozone layer. The paper went on to describe plans for transporting fogs, disintegrating icebergs, mining the seabed, producing pure water from the oceans and fixing fertilizers from the air. The picture painted by these proposals was of an earth made fertile by the abundant power which could be broadcast across the globe. 21
