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- August 28, 1990
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-
- Oliver Nichelson
- 333 N 760 E
- Am. Fork, Utah 84003
-
- Nikola Tesla's Long Range Weapon
-
- Oliver Nichelson
- Copyright 1989
-
- The French ship Iena blew up in 1907. Electrical experts were
- sought by the press for an explanation. Many thought the explosion
- was caused by an electrical spark and the discussion was about the
- origin of the ignition. Lee De Forest, inventor of the Audion
- vacuum tube adopted by many radio broadcasters, pointed out that
- Nikola Tesla had experimented with a "dirigible torpedo" capable of
- delivering such destructive power to a ship through remote control.
- He noted, though, Tesla also claimed that the same technology used
- for remotely controlling vehicles also could project an electrical
- wave of "sufficient intensity to cause a spark in a ship's magazine
- and explode it."
-
- It was Spring of 1924, however, that the time seemed best for
- "death rays," for that year many newspapers carried several stories
- about their invention in different parts of the world. Harry
- Grindell-Matthews of London lead the contenders in this early Star
- Wars race. The New York Times of May 21st had this report:
-
- Paris, May 20 - If confidence of Grindell Mathew (sic),
- inventor of the so-called 'diabolical ray,' in his discovery
- is justified it may become possible to put the whole of an
- enemy army out of action, destroy any force of airplanes
- attacking a city or paralyze any fleet venturing within a
- certain distance of the coast by invisible rays.
-
- Grindell-Matthews stated that his destructive rays would operate
- over a distance of four miles and that the maximum distance for
- this type of weapon would be seven or eight miles.
-
- "Tests have been reported where the ray has been used to stop
- the operation of automobiles by arresting the action of the
- magnetos, and an quantity of gunpowder is said to have been
- exploded by playing the beams on it from a distance of
- thirty-six feet."
-
- Grindell-Matthews was able, also, to electrocute mice, shrivel
- plants, and light the wick of an oil lamp from the same distance
- away.
-
- Page 1
-
-
-
-
-
- Sensing something of importance the New York Times copyrighted
- its story on May 28th on a ray weapon developed by the Soviets. The
- story opened:
-
- News has leaked out from the Communist circles in Moscow
- that behind Trotsky's recent war-like utterance lies an
- electromagnetic invention, by a Russian engineer named
- Grammachikoff for destroying airplanes.
-
- Tests of the destructive ray, the Times continued, had began the
- previous August with the aid of German technical experts. A large
- scale demonstration at Podosinsky Aerodome near Moscow was so
- successful that the revolutionary Military Council and the
- Political Bureau decided to fund enough electronic anti-aircraft
- stations to protect sensitive areas of Russia. Similar, but more
- powerful, stations were to be constructed to disable the electrical
- mechanisms of warships.
-
- The Commander of the Soviet Air Services, Rosenholtz, was so
- overwhelmed by the ray weapon demonstration that he proposed "to
- curtail the activity of the air fleet, because the invention
- rendered a large air fleet unnecessary for the purpose of defense."
-
- Picking up the death ray stories on the wire services on the
- other side of the world, the Colorado Springs Gazette, ran a local
- interest item on May 30th. With the headline: "Tesla Discovered
- 'Death Ray' in Experiments He Made Here," the story recounted, with
- a feeling of local pride, the inventor's 1899 researches financed
- by John Jacob Astor.
-
- Tesla's Colorado Springs tests were well remembered by local
- residents. With a 200 foot pole topped by a large copper sphere
- rising above his laboratory he generated potentials that discharged
- lightning bolts up to 135 feet long. Thunder from the released
- energy could be heard 15 miles away in Cripple Creek. People
- walking along the streets were amazed to see sparks jumping between
- their feet and the ground, and flames of electricity would spring
- from a tap when anyone turned them on for a drink of water. Light
- bulbs within 100 feet of the experimental tower glowed when they
- were turned off. Horses at the livery stable received shocks
- through their metal shoes and bolted from the stalls. Even insects
- were affected: Butterflies became electrified and "helplessly
- swirled in circles - their wings spouting blue halos of 'St. Elmo's
- Fire.'"
-
- The most pronounced effect, and the one that captured the
- attention of death ray inventors, occurred at the Colorado Springs
- Electric Company generating station. One day while Tesla was
- conducting a high power test, the crackling from inside the
- laboratory suddenly stopped. Bursting into the lab Tesla demanded
- to know why his assistant had disconnected the coil. The assistant
- protested that had not anything. The power from the city's
- generator, the assistant said, must have quit. When the angry
- Tesla telephoned the power company he received an equally angry
- reply that the electric company had not cut the power, but that
- Tesla's experiment had destroyed the generator!
-
- The inventor explained to The Electrical Experimenter, in
- August of 1917 what had happened. While running his transmitter at
-
- Page 2
-
-
-
-
-
- a power level of "several hundred kilowatts" high frequency
- currents were set up in the electric company's generators. These
- powerful currents "caused heavy sparks to jump thru the winds and
- destroy the insulation." When the insulation failed, the generator
- shorted out and was destroyed.
-
- Some years later, 1935, he elaborated on the destructive
- potential of his transmitter in the February issue of Liberty
- magazine:
-
- My invention requires a large plant, but once
- it is established it will be possible to
- destroy anything, men or machines, approaching
- within a radius of 200 miles.
-
- He went on to make a distinction between his invention and those
- brought forward by others. He claimed that his device did not use
- any so-called "death rays" because such radiation cannot be
- produced in large amounts and rapidly becomes weaker over distance.
- Here, he likely had in mind a Grindell-Matthews type of device
- which, according to contemporary reports, used a powerful ultra-
- violet beam to make the air conducting so that high energy current
- could be directed to the target. The range of an ultra-violet
- searchlight would be much less than what Tesla was claiming. As he
- put it: "all the energy of New York City (approximately two million
- horsepower [1.5 billion watts]) transformed into rays and projected
- twenty miles, would not kill a human being." On the contrary, he
- said:
-
- 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 be thus transmitted by a stream
- thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist.
-
- Apparently what Tesla had in mind with this defensive system was
- a large scale version of his Colorado Springs lightning bolt
- machine. As airplanes or ships entered the electric field of his
- charged tower, they would set up a conducting path for a stream of
- high energy particles that would destroy the intruder's electrical
- system.
-
- A drawback to having giant Tesla transmitters poised to shoot
- bolts of lightning at an enemy approaching the coasts is that they
- would have to be located in an uninhabited area equal to its circle
- of protection. Anyone stepping into the defensive zone of the coils
- would be sensed as an intruder and struck down. Today, with the
- development of oil drilling platforms, this disadvantage might be
- overcome by locating the lightning defensive system at sea.
-
- As ominous as death ray and beam weapon technology will be for
- the future, there is another, more destructive, weapon system
- alluded to in Tesla's writings.
-
- When Tesla realized, as he pointed out in the 1900 Century
- article, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," that economic
- forces would not allow the development of a new type of electrical
- generator able to supply power without burning fuel he "was led to
-
- Page 3
-
-
-
-
-
- recognize [that] the transmission of electrical energy to any
- distance through the media as by far the best solution of the great
- problem of harnessing the sun's energy for the use of man." His
- idea was that a relatively few generating plants located near
- waterfalls would supply his very high energy transmitters which, in
- turn, would send power through the earth to be picked up wherever
- it was needed.
-
- The plan would require several of his transmitters to
- rhythmically pump huge amounts of electricity into the earth at
- pressures on the order of 100 million volts. The earth would
- become like a huge ball inflated to a great electrical potential,
- but pulsing to Tesla's imposed beat.
-
- Receiving energy from this high pressure reservoir only would
- require a person to put a rod into the ground and connect it to a
- receiver operating in unison with the earth's electrical motion.
- As Tesla described it, "the entire apparatus for lighting the
- average country dwelling will contain no moving parts whatever, and
- could be readily carried about in a small valise."
-
- However, the difference between a current that can be used to
- run, say, a sewing machine and a current used as a method of
- destruction, however, is a matter of timing. If the amount of
- electricity used to run a sewing machine for an hour is released in
- a millionth of a second, it would have a very different, and
- negative, effect on the sewing machine.
-
- Tesla said his transmitter could produce 100 million volts of
- pressure with currents up to 1000 amperes which is a power level of
- 100 billion watts. If it was resonating at a radio frequency of 2
- MHz, then the energy released during one period of its oscillation
- would be 100,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy, or roughly the
- amount of energy released by the explosion of 10 megatons of TNT.
-
- Such a transmitter, would be capable of projecting the energy of
- a nuclear warhead by radio. Any location in the world could be
- vaporized at the speed of light.
-
- Not unexpectedly, many scientists doubted the technical
- feasibility of Tesla's wireless power transmission scheme whether
- for commercial or military purposes. The secret of how through-
- the-earth broadcast power was found not in the theories of
- electrical engineering, but in the realm of high energy physics.
-
- Dr. Andrija Puharich, in 1976, was the first to point out that
- Tesla's power transmission system could not be explained by the
- laws of classical electrodynamics, but, rather, in terms of
- relativistic transformations in high energy fields. He noted that
- according to Dirac's theory of the electron, when one of those
- particles encountered its oppositely charged member, a positron,
- the two particles would annihilate each other. Because energy can
- neither be destroyed nor created the energy of the two former
- particles are transformed into an electromagnetic wave. The
- opposite, of course, holds true. If there is a strong enough
- electric field, two opposite charges of electricity are formed
- where there was originally no charge at all. This type of trans-
- formation usually takes place near the intense field near an atomic
- nucleus, but it can also manifest without the aid of a nuclear
-
- Page 4
-
-
-
-
-
- catalyst if an electric field has enough energy. Puharich's
- involved mathematical treatment demonstrated that power levels in a
- Tesla transmitter were strong enough to cause such pair production.
-
- The mechanism of pair production offers a very attractive
- explanation for the ground transmission of power. Ordinary
- electrical currents do not travel far through the earth. Dirt has
- a high resistance to electricity and quickly turns currents into
- heat energy that is wasted. With the pair production method
- electricity can be moved from one point to another without really
- having to push the physical particle through the earth - the
- transmitting source would create a strong field, and a particle
- would be created at the receiver.
-
- If the sending of currents through the earth is possible from the
- viewpoint of modern physics, the question remains of whether Tesla
- actually demonstrated the weapons application of his power
- transmitter or whether it remained an unrealized plan on the part
- of the inventor. Circumstantial evidence points to there having
- been a test of this weapon.
-
- The clues are found in the chronology of Tesla's work and
- financial fortunes between 1900 and 1915.
-
-
- 1900: Tesla returned from Colorado Springs after a series of
- important tests of wireless power transmission. It was during
- these tests that his magnifying transmitter sent out waves of
- energy causing the destruction of the power company's generator.
-
- He received financial backing from J. Pierpont Morgan of $150,000
- to build a radio transmitter for signaling Europe. With the first
- portion of the money he obtained 200 acres of land at Shoreham,
- Long Island and built an enormous tower 187 feet tall topped with a
- 55 ton, 68 foot metal dome. He called the research site
- "Wardenclyffe."
-
- As Tesla was just getting started, investors were rushing to buy
- stock offered by the Marconi company. Supporters of the Marconi
- Company include his old adversary Edison.
-
- On December 12th, Marconi sent the first transatlantic signal,
- the letter "S," from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland. He did
- this with, as the financiers noted, equipment much less costly than
- that envisioned by Tesla.
-
- 1902: Marconi is being hailed as a hero around the world while
- Tesla is seen as a shirker by the public for ignoring a call to
- jury duty in a murder case (he was excused from duty because of his
- opposition to the death penalty).
-
- 1903: When Morgan sent the balance of the $150,000, it would not
- cover the outstanding balance Tesla owed on the Wardenclyffe
- construction. To encourage a larger investment in the face of
- Marconi's success, Tesla revealed to Morgan his real purpose was
- not to just send radio signals but the wireless transmission of
- power to any point on the planet. Morgan was uninterested and
- declined further funding.
-
-
- Page 5
-
-
-
-
-
- A financial panic that Fall put an end to Tesla's hopes for
- financing by Morgan or other wealthy industrialists. This left
- Tesla without money even to buy the coal to fire the transmitter's
- electrical generators.
-
- 1904: Tesla writes for the Electrical World, "The Transmission of
- Electrical Energy Without Wires," noting that the globe, even with
- its great size, responds to electrical currents like a small metal
- ball.
-
- Tesla declares to the press the completion of Wardenclyffe.
-
- 1904: The Colorado Springs power company sues for electricity
- used at that experimental station. Tesla's Colorado laboratory is
- torn down and is sold for lumber to pay the $180 judgement; his
- electrical equipment is put in storage.
-
- 1905: Electrotherapeutic coils are manufactured at Wardenclyffe
- for hospitals and researchers to help pay bills.
-
- Tesla is sued by his lawyer for non-payment of a loan.
- In an article, Tesla comments on Peary's expedition to the North
- Pole and tells of his, Tesla's, plans for energy transmission to
- any central point on the ground.
-
- Tesla is sued by C.J. Duffner, a caretaker at the experimental
- station in Colorado Springs, for wages .
-
- 1906: "Left Property Here; Skips; Sheriff's Sale," was the
- headline in the Colorado Springs Gazette for March 6th. Tesla's
- electrical equipment is sold to pay judgement of $928.57.
-
- George Westinghouse, who bought Tesla's patents for alternating
- current motors and generators in the 1880's, turns down the
- inventor's power transmission proposal.
-
- Workers gradually stop coming to the Wardenclyffe laboratory
- when there are no funds to pay them.
-
- 1907: When commenting on the destruction of the French ship Iena,
- Tesla noted in a letter to the New York Times that he has built and
- tested remotely controlled torpedoes, but that electrical waves
- would be more destructive. "As to projecting wave energy to any
- particular region of the globe ... this can be done by my devices,"
- he wrote. Further, he claimed that "the spot at which the desired
- effect is to be produced can be calculated very closely, assuming
- the accepted terrestrial measurements to be correct."
-
- 1908: Tesla repeated the idea of destruction by electrical waves
- to the newspaper on April 21st. His letter to the editor stated,
- "When I spoke of future warfare I meant that it should be conducted
- by direct application of electrical waves without the use of aerial
- engines or other implements of destruction." He added: "This is
- not a dream. Even now wireless power plants could be constructed by
- which any region of the globe might be rendered uninhabitable
- without subjecting the population of other parts to serious danger
- or inconvenience."
-
- 1915: Again, in another letter to the editor, Tesla stated: "It
-
- Page 6
-
-
-
-
-
- is perfectly practical to transmit electrical energy without wires
- and produce destructive effects at a distance. I have already
- constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible...
- When unavoidable, the [transmitter] may be used to destroy property
- and life."
-
- Important to this chronology is the state of Tesla's mental
- health. One researcher, Marc J. Seifer, a psychologist, believes
- Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown catalyzed by the death of one
- the partners in the Tesla Electric Company and the shooting of
- Stanford White, the noted architect, who had designed Wardenclyffe.
- Seifer places this in 1906 and cites as evidence a letter from
- George Scherff, Tesla's secretary:
-
- Wardenclyffe, 4/10/1906
- Dear Mr. Tesla:
-
- I have received your letter and am very glad
- to know you are vanquishing your illness. I
- have scarcely ever seen you so out of sorts
- as last Sunday; and I was frightened.
-
- In the period from 1900 to 1910 Tesla's creative thrust was to
- establish his plan for wireless transmission of energy. Undercut
- by Marconi's accomplishment, beset by financial problems, and
- spurned by the scientific establishment, Tesla was in a desperate
- situation by mid-decade. The strain became too great by 1906 and
- he suffered an emotional collapse. In order to make a final effort
- to have his grand scheme recognized, he may have tried one high
- power test of his transmitter to show off its destructive
- potential. This would have been in 1908.
-
- The Tunguska event took place on the morning of June 30th, 1908.
- An explosion estimated to be equivalent to 10-15 megatons of TNT
- flattened 500,000 acres of pine forest near the Stony Tunguska
- River in central Siberia. Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed.
- The explosion was heard over a radius of 620 miles. When an
- expedition was made to the area in 1927 to find evidence of the
- meteorite presumed to have caused the blast, no impact crater was
- found. When the ground was drilled for pieces of nickel, iron, or
- stone, the main constituents of meteorites, none were found down to
- a depth of 118 feet.
-
- Many explanations have been given for the Tunguska event. The
- officially accepted version is that a 100,000 ton fragment of
- Encke's Comet, composed mainly of dust and ice, entered the
- atmosphere at 62,000 mph, heated up, and exploded over the earth's
- surface creating a fireball and shock wave but no crater.
- Alternative versions of the disaster see a renegade mini-black hole
- or an alien space ship crashing into the earth with the resulting
- release of energy.
-
- Associating Tesla with the Tunguska event comes close to putting
- the inventor's power transmission idea in the same speculative
- category as ancient astronauts. However, by looking at the above
- chronology, it can be seen that real historical facts point to the
- possibility that this event was caused by a test firing of Tesla's
- energy weapon.
-
-
- Page 7
-
-
-
-
-
- In 1907 and 1908, Tesla wrote about the destructive effects of
- his energy transmitter. His Wardenclyffe transmitter was much
- larger than the Colorado Springs device that destroyed the power
- station's generator. His new transmitter would be capable of
- effects many orders of magnitude greater than the Colorado device.
- In 1915, he said he had already built a transmitter that "when
- unavoidable ... may be used to destroy property and life."
- Finally, a 1934 letter from Tesla to J.P. Morgan, uncovered by
- Tesla biographer Margaret Cheney, seems to conclusively point to an
- energy weapon test. In an effort to raise money for his defensive
- system he wrote:
-
- The flying machine has completely demoralized
- the world, so much so that in some cities, as
- London and Paris, people are in mortal fear from
- aerial bombing. The new means I have perfected
- affords absolute protection against this and
- other forms of attack... These new discoveries I
- have carried out experimentally on a limited
- scale, created a profound impression (emphasis added).
-
- Again, the evidence is circumstantial but, to use the language of
- criminal investigation, Tesla had motive and means to be the cause
- of the Tunguska event. He also seems to confess to such a test
- having taken place before 1915. His transmitter could generate
- energy levels and frequencies that would release the destructive
- force of 10 megatons, or more, of TNT. And the overlooked genius
- was desperate.
-
- The nature of the Tunguska event, also, is not inconsistent with
- what would happen during the sudden release of wireless power. No
- fiery object was reported in the skies at that time by professional
- or amateur astronomers as would be expected when a 200,000,000
- pound object enters the atmosphere. The sky glow in the region,
- mentioned by some witnesses, just before the explosion may have
- come from the ground, as geological researchers discovered in the
- 1970's. Just before an earthquake the stressed rock beneath the
- ground creates an electrical effect causing the air to illuminate.
- If the explosion was caused by wireless energy transmission, either
- the geological stressing or the current itself would cause an air
- glow. Finally, there is the absence of an impact crater. Because
- there is no material object to impact, an explosion caused by
- broadcast power would not leave a crater.
-
- Given Tesla's general pacifistic nature it is hard to understand
- why he would carry out a test harmful to both animals and the people
- who herded the animals even when he was in the grip of financial
- desperation. The answer is that he probably intended no harm, but
- was aiming for a publicity coup and, literally, missed his target.
-
- At the end of 1908, the whole world was following the daring
- attempt of Peary to reach the North Pole. Peary claimed the Pole
- in the Spring of 1909, but the winter before he had returned to the
- base at Ellesmere Island, about 700 miles from the Pole. If Tesla
- wanted the attention of the international press, few things would
- have been more impressive than the Peary expedition sending out
- word of a cataclysmic explosion on the ice in the direction of the
- North Pole. Tesla, then, if he could not be hailed as the master
- creator that he was, could be seen as the master of a mysterious
- new force of destruction.
- Page 8
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-
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-
-
- The test, it seems, was not a complete success. It must have been
- difficult controlling the vast amount of power in transmitter and
- guiding it to the exact spot Tesla wanted. Alert, Canada on
- Ellesmere Island and the Tunguska region are all on the same great
- circle line from Shoreham, Long Island. Both are on a compass
- bearing of a little more than 2 degrees along a polar path. The
- destructive electrical wave overshot its target.
-
- Whoever was privy to Tesla's energy weapon demonstration must
- have been dismayed either because it missed the intended target and
- would be a threat to inhabited regions of the planet, or because it
- worked too well in devastating such a large area at the mere
- throwing of a switch thousands of miles away. Whichever was the
- case, Tesla never received the notoriety he sought for his power
- transmitter.
-
- In 1915, the Wardenclyffe laboratory was deeded over to Waldorf-
- Astoria, Inc. in lieu of payment for Tesla's hotel bills. In 1917,
- Wardenclyffe was dynamited on orders of the new owners to recover
- some money from the scrap.
-
- The evidence is only circumstantial. Perhaps Tesla never did
- achieve wireless power transmission through the earth. Maybe he
- made a mistake in interpreting the results of his radio tests in
- Colorado Springs and did not produce an effect engineers, then and
- now, know is a scientific impossibility. Perhaps the mental stress
- he suffered caused him to retreat completely to a fantasy world
- from which he would send out preposterous claims to reporters who
- gathered for his yearly, copy-making pronouncements on his birthday.
- Maybe the atomic bomb size explosion in Siberia near the turn of the
- century was the result of a meteorite no one saw fall.
-
- Or, perhaps, Nikola Tesla did shake the world in a way that has
- been kept secret for over 80 years.
-
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
-
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- consideration, interest and support.
-
- Jerry W. Decker.........Ron Barker...........Chuck Henderson
- Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet
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