Tesla: Master of Lightning Page #5

Everything is spinning.

Everywhere there is energy.

There must be some way of availing

ourselves of this energy

more completely.

In 1898 an unusual experiment

took place in Tesla's laboratory.

He attached a small mechanical

oscillator to an iron pillar.

Precisely timed pulses from the device

made the entire building tremble.

Windows started crashing

around the area

and he, being at the epicenter,

didn't notice anything happening

until some police came bursting

into his laboratory.

It was just at the moment where

he'd picked up a sledgehammer

and broken the oscillator.

He just said to the policeman that

Oh, too bad that they had just

missed an interesting experiment.

Tesla was, I would say, obsessed with

frequency, the notion of resonance.

The story where he takes the device

and puts it on the girder in his office

and, you know, gets the frequency

of the building and...

I mean, it's an apocryphal

story, I'm sure.

But it gets right at the core that

Hey! If I've got the right frequency,

I can move the world.

And indeed he wants... He talks

about the frequency of the Earth

and that if he can do that he can,

you know,

almost literally split the Earth in half.

Meanwhile, Marconi was doing

more practical things,

and succeeded in transmitting

a signal five miles on the

Salisbury Plain in England.

Not to be outdone, Tesla decided to

introduce an entirely new invention.

In a specially constructed pool,

potential backers were amazed to see

the inventor controlling the motions

of a small mechanical boat

with no wires attached to it.

This was the world's first

radio-controlled device.

The machine even seemed to think.

Someone threw out the question:

What is the cube root of 64?

and four flashes came back.

The audience was so surprised,

Tesla had to remove the lid

to prove no one was inside.

Tesla developed his

radio-controlled boat in 1898

and patented it and thought

it was an armament for war.

He rationalized this as

a means of ending war.

The military who looked at it thought

it was too complicated and vulnerable.

Soon after the demonstration,

Mark Twain wrote from Austria:

Dear Mr. Tesla,

Have you the Austrian and English

patents on that destructive terror

which you have been inventing and

thus make war henceforth impossible?

If so, won't you set a price on

them and commission me to sell them?

Sincerely yours,

Mark Twain

But I have no desire to be

remembered as the inventor

of a purely destructive device.

I prefer to be remembered as

the inventor who abolished war.

That will be my highest pride.

In the summer of 1899 Tesla moved

to Colorado Springs, Colorado

to conduct a series of

secret experiments.

He told curious local reporters that

he intended to send a wireless message

from Pikes Peak to Paris

for the Paris Exposition of 1900,

but his plans were even

more ambitious.

I came to the conclusion that

it would be ultimately possible,

with very little elevation,

to transmit electrical power

through the upper atmosphere.

Just outside the city, he

constructed an experimental

station with sliding roof panels.

A quote in Italian from

Dante's Inferno

hung by the entrance of

the strange wooden structure.

It read:
Abandon hope all ye

who enter here.

During the construction phase

Tesla studied lightning.

Now I can understand Tesla's

fascination with it,

because what happens in lightning is

that electricity is being transmitted

from one place to another.

Electric power, not just electric signals,

but real electric power, is being

transmitted from one place to another.

And the way it happens is that

the air itself breaks down, ionizes, and

becomes what is called plasma and

therefore for a moment it's a conductor,

and it's actually conducting electricity

the way a wire conducts electricity.

Inside the station,

he began to assemble the largest

Tesla coil ever built,

which he called the magnifying

transmitter.

An antenna rose 145 feet

above the building,

crowned with a copper-foil sphere.

The entire station was, in effect,

a machine to create lightning.

Late one evening, Tesla put

his transmitter to the test.

He signalled to an assistant

to close the switch.

Huge streamers of electricity shot out

of the coil and darted through the room.

The sound of the exploding

discharges was deafening.

Outside, above the building,

bursts of artificial lightning

more than 100 feet long

began to shoot out of

the ball atop the antenna.

Its thunder could be heard

20 miles away

in the small mining town of

Cripple Creek.

Suddenly the lightning stopped

and the entire city of Colorado

Springs was plunged into darkness.

The experiment had set fire to

and destroyed the local

power company's generator.

Residents were furious and began

to fear this mysterious stranger.

Undaunted, Tesla continued his wireless

power experiments for six more months.

Late one night, an unusual

event took place.

Tesla noticed a repeating signal

being received by his apparatus.

To his own amazement,

he believed it was an

extra-terrestrial communication.

In a letter to the American

Red Cross he wrote:

Brothers, we have a message from

another world.

It reads:
One... Two... Three...

The press had a field day.

If the mystical "One, Two, Three"

was impulsed from Mars, as Tesla says,

they certainly showed most excellent

taste in choosing Colorado Springs.

It is a rule in inventional science:

When you're going to tell one,

tell a good one

and men have become great in

this way. Colorado Springs Gazette

Though widely ridiculed

for his claim,

Tesla may have been the first

to detect radio waves from space.

I believed that Tesla could have

gotten these signals from space.

We are getting them today and

these are the radio telescopes.

That's what radio telescopes do

today:
receive signals from space.

They are not from

alien civilizations

but they are from the sun

and from the stars.

On January 7th 1900, Tesla boarded

a train back to New York City.

Perhaps he had mastered the

power of lightning.

Or, at least, that's what

he believed.

The law which I discovered

in Colorado is wonderful

and it means that results

undreamed of before will be possible

as soon as a large plant is constructed

in accordance with my plan.

See the excitement coming.

When Tesla arrived home

it was a brand new century.

Electricity was fueling the

tremendous growth of the city.

And now there was talk in the air about

the new art of wireless communication.

Marconi arrived in New York in 1900

to attract investors for his new

company, Marconi America.

He filed a US patent for a

system of wireless telegraphy.

But it was rejected because it

was similar to Tesla's invention.

It became obvious,

I think, to Marconi

as well as to other experimenters

of the time that the Tesla system

was an efficient,

powerful resonator that would

produce electromagnetic waves

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