Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER SEVEN sistors, printed circuits and the like. I could walk into any electronics shop and buy kits containing all manner of exotic things like digital counters, oscilloscopes, microprocessors, memory circuits and high-speed measuring devices. These were standard equipment in every physicist's laboratory and now within the price range of any enthusiastic amateur. The point was that none of this equipment would have been available to Nikola Tesla. At Colorado Springs the great inventor was denied the high-speed electronics which our modern age takes for granted. By contrast his own equipment must have been crude and fairly insensitive. Yet Tesla claimed to have sent bursts of electrical power through the earth and to have detected and measured the returning signal. Electrical power moving at the speed of light could circumnavigate the globe in a tiny fraction of a second. How, then, had Tesla been able to measure such time intervals with any accuracy? Was the returning signal really a wave which had been reflected from the Antipodes or simply some local power surge produced in his own laboratory? I thought yet again how the Tesla story had so many different faces. The man and his experiments were so hard to pin down: each time I felt that the book on Nikola Tesla was about to close, a new chapter would open up. This time it involved the laboratory he had built. With all that massive equipment around, it seemed perfectly possible that once the Tesla transmitter was in action some transients might have occurred. Following each burst of power from the transmitter, smaller transient current flows might have been registered in the laboratory. Possibly, in his enthusiasm, Tesla then took these readings as evidence that his power pulses had travelled around the earth and returned with undiminished power. When I reached my office later that morning, the secretary told me that a Dr Microwski had been trying to reach me. Since Andrew Microwski was a member of PACE, I called back at once and after a short chat over the phone we agreed to meet for lunch at the end of the week. I told him that I was keen to talk about Tesla and find out exactly what happened at Colorado Springs. Just as I was putting the phone down, one of my colleagues put his face round the door. 'Hey, what've you been doing all these weeks? I thought you were dead.' 64
