Victor Hugo is often credited with the saying, “One cannot resist an idea whose time has come.” But, unfortunately, this saying does not apply to Nikola Tesla because his ideas and inventions were way ahead of their time.
The famed inventor envisioned devices that seemed to the common man and woman from the 19th and early 20th century to be the product of witchcraft or simply a fantasy.
While he was ahead of his time, Tesla was no sorcerer. The path he followed to get from where he was born and raised to the heights of his fame was arduous and full of risks. Yet, where others would have quit, he endured and did everything possible to further the development of our civilization.
Many believe that if Tesla wasn’t censored, today, we would be living in a Utopian society, powered by free unlimited energy, and our technological advancement would allow us to traverse the stars and explore other planets.
While there is still much mystery surrounding his life and death, perhaps the most intriguing mysteries lay in his inventions that never fully saw the light of day. With the intellect and creative prowess he possessed, we can only begin to imagine the thoughts and ideas he had but never shared.
What we do have, is a small fraction, a record of the incredible inventions that he either discussed, began building, or had actual working prototypes. These were never fully developed or deployed, at least not to the public knowledge, but had the potential to be world-changing… some for better and some for worse.
The Earthquake Machine
The steam-powered oscillator Tesla had been working on was as unassuming as could be. Nevertheless, he had applied for and been given a patent for it, and its purpose was to generate electricity.
The idea was to use the steam-powered oscillator to create various frequencies. If the frequency matched the resonance frequency, a receiving device should transform the mechanical oscillations back into an electric current. It turns out that electricity wasn’t the only thing it could generate.
While working on the steam-powered mechanical oscillator, one day, Tesla decided to tune the oscillator to the frequency of the building in which his laboratory was located in New York City.
Shockingly even to Tesla, the small oscillator shook the entire building, almost causing it to collapse! In Tesla’s own words,
“Suddenly, all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around… The building would have been down about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street, there was pandemonium.”
People in the area immediately called police and ambulance, fearing an earthquake was occurring.
Fearing for his life and the life of others, Tesla smashed the oscillator with a hammer, stopping it from shaking the building to pieces. Having destroyed the machine, he instructed his staff to say nothing of the incident. The police were called to investigate but found nothing suspicious.
Imagine the potential of a machine that you could tune to any frequency?
It spawned in Tesla the idea for a geodynamic oscillator, which would have the same effect but on the Earth. He imagined that it could, if appropriately tuned, prevent earthquakes or, if tuned improperly, accidentally or not so accidentally, cause earthquakes and be used as a tectonic weapon that can win many wars by causing earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, or other seismic events in specified locations.
A government possessing such a weapon could dominate any nation on the planet.
Tesla made sure this machine never materialized, but there are speculations that the United States possesses a device similar to Tesla’s oscillator and can use it to cause earthquakes in specific points of the planet. The potential of this invention is as powerful as catastrophic, so no wonder Tesla smashed his device with a hammer and stopped its development.
The Death Ray
On July 11, 1934, Nikola Tesla described a kind of new weapon for the first time in newspapers as being able to be used against invading armies, fleets, and aircrafts. In his own words, this was a “defense weapon that will end all wars forever.” However, newspapers around the country called it “death ray,” “death beam,” “diabolical rays,” and also “a device like bolts of Thor.”
The device was a particle-beam projector that the inventor intended to be used for national defense. He called his technology “teleforce.” With it, Tesla declared that a nation could bring total devastation upon invading armies and destroy fleets of aircraft at a distance of 200 miles. In his own words:
“My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist. The nozzle would send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.”
His idea was to accelerate mercury isotope to 43 times the speed of sound in a pressurized vacuum chamber via electrostatic repulsion and shoot it in a beam towards a target.
As an optimistic humanitarian as he is, Tesla believed this particle-beam projector could be used as a defense weapon that would bring end to war.
It’s believed that Tesla built his death ray at Wardencliffe on Long Island, and he decided to test it in 1908.
According to the story, Tesla’s plan was to project the particle beam of the death ray in the remote and uninhabitable parts of the Arctic, but for unknown reasons, the beam missed and crossed the Polar region over into Siberia, where it hit the area near Tunguska River.
After hearing about the unexplainable event in Tunguska, known as the “Tunguska event,” Tesla, thankful that no one was killed, dismantled his machine, as he felt it was too dangerous to keep it.
The Flying Machine
Any inventor of Tesla’s caliber always had their eyes towards the sky. The concept of being able to travel through the air at supersonic speeds was a dream for Tesla. The difference between what we have today and what Tesla saw was the manner of propulsion we use.
One of Tesla’s documents contains drawings of an antigravity ship, which seems to be using some sort of field propulsion.
This is what Tesla wrote in his journals:
“After these experiments, I planned to build a flying machine, which could fly not only in the air but within interplanetary space. The principle of operation of the flying machine is as follows: towards the flight direction, compression of the ether is to become weaker by the generator installed in the flying machine. As the ether kept pressing with initial intensity from all other sides, then the flying machine began moving. Being within this flying machine, you will not feel its speeding up as the ether is not to hamper your movement. I had to abandon my plans to create the flying machine. There were two reasons for it: first, I have no money to work in secret. But the main reason is that the great war began in Europe and I wouldn’t like my inventions used to kill! When on earth will these madmen stop?”
Apparently, Tesla was really fascinated by the idea of antigravity vehicles. As early as 1906, we can find a letter to the “New York Sun” newspaper, in which Tesla wrote:
“I have announced this in advance, and my patents and technical articles have fully exposed my methods and appliances and have given an account of my experiments about flying air crafts using transmitted power.”
Could this mean that Tesla was working on flying vehicles eight years before the first powered flight of the Wright brothers?
The only reason these antigravity ships did not become a reality was that Tesla planned to power them with his network of Wardenclyffe Towers that were going to broadcast wireless free energy to the entire planet.
Unfortunately, the world governments, and giant corporations, could not allow a network of towers transmitting completely free wireless energy to the planet. This would destroy billions of dollars of profits for fossil fuel companies. So in 1917, the United States demolished Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower, which was never to be built again, and that made the construction of antigravity vehicles impossible.
Wireless Energy (Wardenclyffe Tower)
This leads us to possibly the most well-known and popular invention of Tesla – his wireless energy generator. The world would be a completely different place today if free energy, harnessed from the Earth, could be transmitted wirelessly.
The most frustrating part of this invention is that the tower was actually built. Financed by J.P. Morgan and others in 1901, Tesla built the Wardenclyffe tower. But he seemed to have bigger and better plans!
“All people everywhere should have free energy sources – Electric power is everywhere present in unlimited quantities and can drive the world’s machinery without the need for coal, oil or gas.”
Tesla dreamed that he could create and perfect the ability to wirelessly transmit electricity, enough to power all of New York City. He needed to create a network of Wardenclyffe towers that would harness the energy emitted from the Earth and deliver free energy throughout the planet.
In his own words:
“When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.”
Of course, J. P. Morgan would never finance something that would bring a source of free energy to the world because that would destroy his monopoly on fossil fuels. For this reason, Tesla told him that his tower was a radio transmitting tower.
Later, when J. P. Morgan discovered Tesla’s true intentions, he pulled out all of his funding, and the project was shut down. It was torn down and sold for scraps to pay for the debts that Tesla defaulted on.
The media called it “Tesla’s million-dollar folly.”
Humiliated and defeated, Tesla’s dream of creating a new and better world was destroyed.
Remote Controlled Navies & Artificial Tidal Wave
- Remote Controlled Navies
In 1898, Tesla made a public demonstration in the Madison Square Garden, where he revealed a prototype for remote-controlled navy ships.
He also discussed the ability to remotely operate submarines and even missiles with the military.
The idea was that with ships being remotely operated, there would be no human life lost during naval warfare. Tesla thought this would save countless lives if implemented worldwide.
Regardless of what Tesla thought, the concept of remote-controlled navies seemed too far-fetched for even the top military brass at the time, and as far as we know, not one military contract arose from his discussions with them. They simply didn’t believe such a thing was possible, despite Tesla’s demonstration.
While this was a loss for Tesla, it simply shows how far ahead of his peers he was at the time.
Consider this. Today, all submarines and missiles are guided by GPS and are operated essentially remotely.
- Artificial Tidal Wave
But Tesla had one more idea of how to use these remote-controlled ships.
The artificial tidal wave was an invention that was dreamed up by Tesla to render opposing navy ships and naval invasion useless. He imagined that a fleet of remote-controlled ships, or “automatons“, as he called them, would get close enough to an enemy fleet to detonate an explosive charge.
By creating a sufficiently large enough detonation, you could create an artificial tidal wave. He had done the math and determined the size of the explosion that you would need to create a 100-foot-high tidal wave up to a mile away. This tidal wave would sweep through an enemy fleet and destroy or render inoperable all of the vessels.
In theory, this would save more lives by not allowing war to be waged, which was a goal Tesla strived for. He believed that if it could be done, he should use science to alleviate suffering and war.
The World of Tesla’s Inventions
These were just a fraction of the technologies the genius was envisioning and working on. It is believe he also worked on a vibrational healing device, a thought camera, an ozone producing device, and humanoid robots. He is even associated with research on time-travel technology, being part of the famous Philadelphia experiment.
No doubt, these inventions were ideas way ahead of their time.
And no doubt Tesla has one of the longest-lasting and impactful legacies of any inventor… ever.
He was a visionary. He envisioned a new, better world for humanity.
In his own words:
“A new world must be born, a world that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity. This new world must be a world in which there shall be no exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the good by the evil; where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall not be a world of the downtrodden and humiliated, but of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect.”