Tesla: Master of Lightning Page #7

and Edison was conveniently

away on business.

They found Tesla across the street

by the New York Public Library

feeding the pigeons.

Later that night he was persuaded

to accept his medal and announced

that he had finally completed his

invention to transmit wireless power.

The energy goes to a distant place

and you will see something like the

Aurora Borealis.

To conclude, we are coming

to great results.

The audience thought Tesla was

losing touch with reality.

I refuse to accord to some

small-minded and jealous individuals

the satisfaction of having

thwarted my efforts.

These men are nothing more to me

than microbes of a nasty disease.

Well, by that time, you know, Tesla

had ceased to have any

financial means.

He was virtually dependent on being

helped by hotels and people that he knew.

He began to bring injured birds

back to his hotel room to nurse them.

He had more companionship with

pigeons in that time of his life

than with human beings.

Working as a consulting engineer,

Tesla managed to maintain a small office

and laboratory in the Metropolitan Tower.

To change his thoughts, he frequently

attended movies in Times Square.

Here he could see his futuristic

ideas appearing on the screen.

But his ideas were only accepted in

science-fiction movies and magazines.

In 1924, there was a news report

that while at Colorado Springs

Tesla had invented a death ray

machine that shot bolts of lightning.

The inventor was strangely

quiet on the topic.

Meanwhile, a new scientific star,

Albert Einstein,

had captured the world's

attention with his theory of relativity.

Tesla continuously attacked the

validity of Einstein's work.

Scientists today wander through

equation after equation

that have no relation to reality.

If we were to release the energy of

atoms, instead of a blessing

it might bring disaster to mankind.

But no one took him seriously.

I think that every generation

of scientists

feels that the new ideas that come

along that replace their own ideas

represent a loss rather than a gain.

Tesla believed that Einstein was taking

us intellectually in the wrong direction.

Rejected by traditional science, Tesla's

interest again turned to the esoteric.

His intellect seemed to embrace a

lot of different areas quite easily.

What he lacked were the social skills.

And that's an enormous shame

because it interfered with his ability

to use that genius to be practical.

Though nearly a recluse, he would

occasionally attend dinner parties

at the home of the German poet

and mystic George Sylvester Viereck

and he always intrigued the guests.

While we were in the midst of talking,

an apparition seemed to come

into the room.

He walked so softly and he struck us

as almost an unearthly creature.

And he talked of all sorts of, seemed

to me at that time, unreal things

more in the nature of the psychic

rather than scientific.

Tesla wrote a strange poem called

Fragments of Olympian Gossip

and dedicated it to Viereck.

While listening on my cosmic phone

I caught words from Olympus blown...

The latest tells of a cosmic gun.

To be pelted is very poor fun.

The meaning of the poem

would soon be explained.

I inherited from my father

an ineradicable hatred of war.

But war can be stopped, not

by making the strong weak,

but by making every nation, weak

or strong, able to defend itself.

Thomas Edison, America's

best-known inventor, died in 1931.

That same year, Tesla

came back to life.

His friends threw him a 75th

birthday celebration.

Time magazine put his picture

on the cover.

Letters of admiration poured in

from scientists around the world,

including a generous Albert Einstein.

I congratulate you for your great

success on your lifetime task.

Basking in the attention, Tesla

announced at a press conference

that he had discovered a

completely new source of power.

The idea, when it first burst

upon me, was a tremendous shock.

And let me say that it has nothing to do

with releasing so-called atomic energy.

I think that a lot of the proposals

that he made in his later life were

so esoteric as to be impractical

in that time, and even

in the current time.

When the Nazis rose to power

in Germany,

Tesla decided that the time was right

to reveal his new source of power:

a man-made form of lightning

called teleforce

that could shoot an airplane

from the sky.

Nikola Tesla, electrical wizard

and radio pioneer,

announced that he was working on

a machine to create a powerful

electrical death beam

which could wipe out armies in a flash

and destroy huge fleets of ships or planes.

The concept of using lightning

bolts as a weapon certainly is

millennia old; it goes back at least

to the ancient Greeks.

Think of Zeus throwing lightning bolts.

The main contribution that Tesla had

was to come up with a true

scientific rational...

at least concept... of coming up with

controlling these lightning bolts and

projecting them over long distances.

Tesla had experimented with this

idea while at Colorado Springs.

Now he intended to build it

on a large scale.

His plan was to charge small

particles of tungsten or mercury

then accelerate them with lightning

force through a special gun

with one end open to the atmosphere.

Tesla's death beam stirred the

public's imagination

when it was featured in a Superman

cartoon, the Electrothanasia-Ray.

But the idea was more than

science-fiction.

Tesla tried to sell this concept

to various governments:

England, the Soviet Union and

the United States

all allied powers and

against Germany.

He offered his system to England for

$30 million and they entered negotiations.

When Tesla demanded payment before

sending the final plans,

the deal fell through.

The British attempted to build

their own death beam

but the project was soon

abandoned.

As the Nazis surrounded Yugoslavia,

Tesla attempted to sell a beam

weapon system to his former country.

There should be needed nine stations.

Four for Serbia, three for Croatia

and two for Slovenia, and it will

protect our dearest homeland.

At this point, even Tesla's countrymen

thought he was just a crazy old man.

One day in 1937,

Tesla started out from his hotel room

to feed his pigeons.

Suddenly, a few blocks from the hotel,

he was hit by a taxi and

thrown to the ground.

Three of his ribs were broken.

He was 81 years old.

Remembering what he did for their

company, Westinghouse executives

agreed to pay his room and board

for the rest of his life.

The inventor also received a small

stipend from the Yugoslav government.

During the Christmas season of 1942,

Tesla's death was imminent.

Again he attempted to interest

the United States in his

beam weapon concept.

At the recommendation of two

government engineers,

a meeting of high-level officials

was scheduled at the White House

for January 8th 1943 to

consider his plans.

But the meeting never took place.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes