Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER NINE I began to wonder if Andrew had been right after all about international interest in Tesla. We discussed several more details about the transmitter before I came to my final question. 'There's one thing I'd like to know, Tim. Did you build this tower so that you could transmit power? What do you think of power transmission?" Tim Richardson was silent for a moment. 'Tesla claimed that he'd done that at Colorado Springs. He said a lot of things and so many of them were right and ahead of his time... But...I don't really know. I'm going to try some experiments along that line but I don't know if they will work. The reason I'm building the tower is to study how it works and to try to produce very high voltages.' Tim Richardson, a fairly level-headed man, was open-minded about Tesla's theories. I realized that his experiments at Timmins could be valuable. I wished him the best of luck with his transmitter and asked him to keep me in touch with the progress of work. I looked at my watch and saw that it was close to four in the afternoon. I had been very intrigued by Tim's mention of a Tesla tower which had something to do with the U.S. Air Force. Would it be possible to trace this Dr Golka in what remained of the afternoon? I had very little to go on - simply a name and connection with the Air Force. I began with directory enquiries for New York, Boston and Washington. After some juggling with all the Golkas in those cities, I began to trace the relatives of the man I wanted and a little later the telephone number of the scientist himself, located at Wendover Air Force Base. The final telephone call connected me with Dr Golka and 'Project Tesla' at the Air Base. It turned out that Dr. Golka was even more reluctant to talk to me than Tim Richardson had been. He was particularly worried about any publicity for his project and told me that he wanted to avoid getting pestered by cranks. In the end Dr Golka confirmed that he had built a Tesla transformer capable of generating twenty million volts. The device operated in short bursts at two thousand two hundred amps and the coils resonated at two frequencies simultaneously. I asked Golka what the purpose of the tower was. Did the Air Force have an interest in power transmission, for example? He refused to be drawn on the topic of power transmission beyond the fact that the explanations put 80
