Even before many generations disappear, our machines will be run by a force available on every place in the universe? There is energy in the whole universe ? Nikola Tesla

Dr. Nikola Tesla was once counted in the most famous people on the planet. Today he?s disappeared from our science and schoolbooks. What did he discover, that resulted him falling into disfavor? ? Nexus Magazine

At the end of the 19th century, nobody of the upper crust of New York was so famous like the inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla, the Serb, who immigrated to USA, often received his guests in his laboratory, where his friends like Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, posed for the first photographs, which were illuminated by the electron tubes with gas discharge. They would stand wonder-struck in the middle of the room where long sparks flew from Tesla?s special high-frequency transformers. Sometimes their host would stand in the rain of sparks, while a glass tube shone in his hand, without being connected to any wires. Tesla?s creativity and intellect also attracted other stars of the cultural scene in the hotel dining rooms as well as in the private saloons, and the writer Rudyard Kipling, the architect Stanford White, the pianist Ignace Paderewski and the writer John Muir were among them. Tesla was a man of contradictions, self-controlled and distant, but charming. Although he was a loner, he knew how to attract people to him. Slim and tall, always perfectly dressed, he attracted attention with his aristocratic attitude and his elegance. His most noticeable feature was his magnetic captivating force ? the combination of a good-looking darker type, with intensive blue eyes and the mysterious aura. It seemed that the world would fall on its knees in front of him.

When Nikola Tesla passed away in 1943 in the age of 86, his inventions and theories were mostly forgotten or looked at with distrust. His plan To Whom It May Concern: supply the world with the free energy was put ad acta. Many of the later innovators in the field of energy, who admired Tesla, were confronted with the same problems like the financial shortage or the predominant opposition, which led to his downfall.

TESLA?S CONFLICT WITH EDISON

Thomas Edison met Tesla for the first time in 1884. At that time Edison was already a wealthy, powerful man, and Tesla had merely moved to USA with a little more than $20 in his pocket, and a recommendation letter from his superior in the company Continental Edison in Paris, where Tesla worked a few years earlier. Charles Batchelor wrote to Edison: ?I know two great men. You are one of them, the other is this young man?. Edison hired Tesla as his assistant. At first, Tesla admired Edison?s achievements based on trial and error and only with elementary school. Reversely, Tesla gained Edison?s unwilling respect by working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and by solving difficult technical problems.

But Edison lost his diligent assistant very soon. Tesla described him the way to improve the effect of Edison?s generator, and Edison answered him: ?If you do that, I?ll give you fifty thousand dollars?. But, when after a few months of work Tesla actually did it, and when he asked for his money, Edison?s statement shocked him: ?Tesla, you don?t understand our American humor?. And since Edison didn?t pay, Tesla left him. Three years later, after he?d worked as a construction worker for some time on one of the streets of New York to earn for survival, Tesla?s life headed for the better. He got an opportunity to develop a new system of alternating current, for which he designed a motor, a generator, and a transformer, and he took out a patent. And industrial and inventor George Westinghouse from Pittsburgh bought all Tesla?s patents for that system and signed a contract with which he obliged to pay an amount in cash and shares, plus compensation for three licenses of $2.50 by the produced horsepower.

Edison fought against the development of the alternating current. His lamps were powered by the direct current. In that process, the electrons flew in only one direction. Direct current can be sent through power lines on a distance of only few kilometers. Unlike that, Tesla?s alternating current, which vibrates in a regular rhythm back and forth, can be easily transported for hundreds of kilometers through the high-voltage power lines. When it gets to its receiver, the transformers reduce the voltage for the final user.

Edison didn?t even want to hear for the advantage of the alternating current. He invested a lot of money in the system of the direct current and he considered the alternating current a threat to his work. During this electricity war, in his strategy he included a public dog killing with the electric shock, and the publishing of the intimidating pamphlets, all in the effort to represent the alternating current as a deadly danger.

But, despite Edison?s attacks, Tesla and Westinghouse won the victory. For the illumination of the world exposition in Chicago in 1893, Westinghouse installed an alternating current system. Tesla was the star of the exposition. In white tails with the white tie, and with shoes, with the isolating cork soles he stood on the stage with one of his Tesla coils ? a device, which produces powerful electricity. The electric sparks flew and shimmered and made the lamps in Tesla?s hands shine. The spectacle thrilled the mob, and the success of the exposition brought to the construction of the project of Niagara Falls hydroelectric power plant. In the end, Tesla?s electricity grid delivered enormous amounts of electric energy across the continent.

Since the contract with Westinghouse was securing Tesla $2.50 per horsepower, Tesla should in fact have been receiving a nice income for the rest of his life. But, George Westinghouse suffered financial difficulties, since his rivals tried to put him out of the electricity business. And Tesla remembered that Westinghouse believed in him when nobody else did. So, although Tesla surely had nothing against a monetary property, it was more important to him that the Westinghouse firm survives. Because of that he tore the agreement, accepted severance pay, and gave up of millions of expected dollars, which were insured for him by the horsepower agreement.

GREED FOR PROFIT ? THE MAIN REASON FOR SUPPRESSING THE FREE ENERGY

While Tesla to re the lucrative agreement to help a friend, other people from his time just ran around to gather as much money as possible. Tycoons knew how to gain their fortunes with the energy supplying companies. These people wanted to supply the whole earth with power-transmission lines and transformers. In the end the companies for production of the electric energy congested the rivers and encouraged people to ?a better life with the electric energy?. On the other side, Tesla wanted to build the energetic system, which was supposed to carry the electricity over the whole world without any costs. His proposed system was not the system of the ?free energy? in today?s sense ? energy from an inexhaustible source ? but in the sense that it was supposed to carry the electricity to the customers for free. Unlike the electricity war, Tesla could not win this war.

TESLA?S PLANS FOR THE FREE ENERGY

Energy for everyone who sticks a certain receiver into the ground? Yes, Tesla?s plan was to transmit news as well as the energy wirelessly. Today we know this first case as the radio. That plan was radical enough to incite the Wall Street to slam their door in his face in the end. In these days, the electricity tycoons almost swam in their money; nobody wanted to wake up the wind of change. Financial magnates like the banker J. Pierpont Morgan had already bought the copper mines. Not many internal information were necessary to draw a conclusion that the power transmission lines will cover the biggest part of the earth with the copper cable grids.

As if he had become deaf to the planes of the tycoons, Tesla continued encouraging the astounding new idea ? transmission of the free electricity through the whole world. In 1893, the same year he blinded the society with the illumination of the world exhibition, Tesla talked about the earth?s resonance in the respectable Franklin- Institute in Philadelphia. The earth?s resonance was a part of his vision about the wireless electricity transmission. He talked about how electric impulses are transmitted with the suitable frequency, in other words, with the speed of the vibrations through the ground to produce the energy waves, just like when the piano string vibrating when that same tone, to which the string is adjusted, is produced on some other instrument in that room. Some Tesla, researchers, also believe that he could induce the air between the upper atmosphere and the ground to step into the resonance just like the air does in a sonorous body of a violin. That would send the energy waves too. Then this energy should be caught with the antenna.

That kind of resonance would mean the fulfillment of Tesla?s dreams he expressed during his lecture in 1897, where he spoke of electricity transfer from station to station with no use of wires. In his vision, he saw the approaching of the day, when that kind of system would speed up the news transfer, when it would control the time and transfer the limitless energy.

His glory and his series of connected lectures on the international level, would turn the common person away from at all thinking about these things, but ? Tesla was not common. His ideas and inventions were his passion, and in the next few years he asked for and got patents for the procedure for a seemingly utopian wireless transfer of energy and news, even at the cost to, by doing that, make his own prior inventions redundant.

TESLA?S WIRELESS ENERGIES

In 1899, Tesla went to the Colorado Springs Mountains to test his new ideas. He built a laboratory with the high voltage on a high pasture. That was a simple building, which was built around Tesla?s biggest coil in the world and from which an unusual mast protruded. There in the foot of Pikes Peak he worked on his new goal to send electromagnetic vibrations through the ground.

It is not known what exactly Tesla achieved during his stay in the mountains. He occasionally made skimpy notes, but he still saved a bunch of information about the principles of the functioning of such a device only in his head. Today his designs have to be translated into the present-day electro-technical concepts. But, legends about Tesla rise out of the facts from his experiments in Colorado Springs. Just like a Lightning God, he set his powerful coil of 16 meters in diameter to achieve the discharge of 12 million volts and to produce over 30 meters long lightning from the copper ball on top of his mast. Local population kept at the distance since the rumors spread that a famous inventor can create lightning which can kill a hundred people with just one hit. During the experiments, the rumble of electronic discharge could be heard at the distance of at least 25 kilometers.

Satisfied that he knows enough now to turn his vision of wireless transmission into deeds, in January 1900 Tesla came back to New York. He hired an architect, who made him a design of a 47 meters high wooden tower, which stood above a brick building on Long Island. With a copper mushroom-like electrode on top, the tower was supposed to serve as a giant transmitter. Tesla called that project Wardenclyffe, and imagined a station that was supposed to emit energy as well as news over more channels in all radio wavelengths. The tower and the square building with the lateral length of 30 meters, in which an engine-room and a laboratory were supposed to be situated, were almost finished in 1902. But, Wardenclyffe was never completely finished.

THE LIGHTNING LORD IS DEFEATED

Tesla?s vision of a wireless transmission convinced the financial magnates like Morgan that much, that they financed his research, but they didn?t realize that his intention in fact was to give the electricity to people everywhere for free. That part of his conceptions Tesla left out when in 1900 he talked to Morgan, his main financier, about the financing of Wardenclyffe. Instead, he mentioned possibilities Morgan would surely like, the monopolistic controlling of all radio stations. But, Morgan gave Tesla limited means to disposal. Three years later, during a desperate attempt to get more money, the inventor revealed his real intentions to the banker. We will probably never know how Morgan reacted to that news. In any case, that financial magnate invested into the industrial branches connected with the energy production, and he surely wasn?t known for his generosity. He left Tesla to fail. The business progressed only sporadically, while Tesla was desperately trying to find other financiers and to develop some commercial products with which he could pay his bills. The construction works were finally ended in 1906, and eleven years later, after Tesla has lost his mortgage on the Wardeclyffe, the tower was pulled down because of its value as waste.

A REAL FREE ENERGY GENERATOR?

There are indications that Tesla was also interested in the free energy in the modern sense of the word ? for the energy from and inexhaustible source which transforms into a useful form. In June 1902 an article was published in New York Times about a man from the Canary Islands called Clemente Figueras who claimed that he invented the electric generator which didn?t need the primary power, i.e. it didn?t need an outer energy source. One day, after that article had already been published, Tesla wrote to his friend Robert Johnson, the editor of the Century-Magazine, that he himself had already invented such a device. And in 1934 Tesla was cited in Times with the words: ?I hope I?ll live long enough to be able to put a device in the middle of this room and start it? with the energy from the media moving around us?.

Which of his many inventions did Tesla mean? Oliver Nichelson, a scientist and a historian from Utah studied that question in detail. He says that a device, which obviously fits in Tesla?s descriptions, is the device for using the radiating energy, for which the patent was granted. Nichelson?s research indicates that Tesla was probably already then working on his ?free energy? generator, before he elaborated a bigger article for publishing in the magazine Century from June 1900, and where he describes the wireless energy transfer. He writes that the device with which the energy is taken directly from the Sun isn?t efficient and therefore it?s not the best solution. Some researchers interpreted it in the way that, from his experience with the Wardenclyffe Tesla realized that the free market would always be closed for a ?free energy? device, such as his radiating energy device, and that the tycoons would only finance the wireless system which also promises profit. But, the article in Century still concentrates on the device, which wouldn?t only be capable of keeping itself in operation, but it would also absorb the energy from the surrounding air to illuminate cities. As the ?most probably candidate? for energy absorption from the cosmos, Nichelson identified Tesla?s unusual coil for electromagnets, for which Tesla was granted a patent number 512.340. in 1894. Nichelson explained that the shape of the coil would make possible to that system to deposit enormous amounts of energy, while only a little part of that energy would be needed for maintaining its own functioning. He compared that with a car with a very big tank, which spends only 2 liters per hundred kilometers.

TESLA?S DOWNFALL AND RISE

WHEN Tesla passed away, his great achievements from the last decade of the 19th century were mostly forgotten, and people mostly remembered his private eccentricity, like his extreme germ phobia or his predilection to give an unusual attention to a gentle dove and to observe a reflection of life, full of hidden mystical desires, in its eyes. Was Tesla?s expulsion from the historical books staged by those who felt threatened by his dreams of the free energy? Some believe it was. College students get the impression that he invented the Tesla coil, that one unit of measure was named after him, and that?s all. Tesla?s name is not familiar to the wider public.

If the tycoons really tried to erase the memory of Tesla?s genius in public, then that strategy didn?t completely succeed. Today almost every bigger bookstore has also Tesla?s biography on its shelves. And since the end of the sixties the interest of the inventors for Tesla was renewed. The technical information about his theories and inventions are distributed by the fax or the computer way of transferring the data, and many today?s inventors consider Tesla the father of the modern Movement of the new energy. They too feel the difficulties now, which he had to put up with because of his superior opponent.

TESLA LEFT IN THE LURCH

I believe that the saga of Tesla?s dizzying financial problems spins around his monument for the transfer of the free available energy ? around Wardenclyffe. In her classic biography Nikola Tesla - the inventor, the magician, the prophet, Margaret Cheney writes about the different reasons, which contributed to Tesla?s loss of luck. She says that before his downfall, Tesla told his associate that J. P. Morgan once gave him an unsigned blank check and told him to enter the amount he needed. After Tesla?s downfall, that banker allegedly didn?t answer to any of Tesla?s letters, and other financiers on Wall Street also turned their backs to this inventor, to the rest of his life. Maybe he was considered a dangerous dreamer ? one of the comments he wrote in one of the letters, with which he asked one of his associates for financial help, read: ?My enemies very successfully presented me as a poet and a visionary?. Other authors provided different explanations for Tesla?s downfall. A science historian Stephen S. Hall presumes that Tesla?s downfall could have been a counter-coup from the academic community. Tesla didn?t accept their game: he showed no interest of delivering any kind of article to any academic publication. Hall also thinks that Tesla?s talent, with which he gathered people around himself, his public exhibitions, along with the world exhibition 1893, maybe stirred the envy of his colleges. Other two historians of the new energy, Oliver Nichelson and Christopher Bird, think that Tesla was a big riddle to his contemporaries: ?His conceptions were so advanced that the science and industry of his age weren?t able to comprehend their essence and dimensions?.

TESLA?S MEDIATORS VERSUS SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE

WHILE SOME OF TODAY?S Tesla?s followers continue doing research about him, others try to make sure that the next generations don?t forget him. John Wagner, a teacher from Dexter, Michigan, takes care that the official history doesn?t remember only Tesla?s confusion, which was coming to the open more and more clearly, the older the inventor was. Until his retirement in 1993, Wagner lectured for 10 years about all what Tesla accomplished at his peak, instead of concentrating on the last years of that man. Wagner wanted that his classes in the third school year find out about the entire history, including the fact that Smithsonian Institute, the national museum in the USA in Washington, didn?t show the permanent Tesla exhibition.

His students have seen a double injustice not just in the fact that Smithsonian Institute didn?t show the Tesla exhibition, but also because in the framework of the big permanent Thomas Edison exhibition, they showed a multi-stage generator, which was in fact one of Tesla?s inventions. ?Tesla?s patent number is on it, but the public gets the impression that Edison is its creator.? The mutiny of these kids lead up to the campaign ?Bust the Smithsonian? ? the words Bust the Smithsonian were written on the shirts sold by Wagner?s students. But when they offered to donate one Tesla?s bust to the Smithsonian Institute, Barnex S. Finn, head of the electronic department in the museum, refused to accept the present, with the words: ?We can?t use it?. In 1979, Finn and his headquarters wrote a book under the title: Edison ? Lighting a Revolution. In one, seventeen pages long chapter, with the title Beginning of the Electronic Age it is written that they?ll mention all the people who were important for the beginning, even the technicians who were employed by Edison. But, there is not a word about Tesla in it.

Wagner?s students got and unexpected ally in the rock band Tesla, whose members could be seen on MTV waving around with the leaves of Tesla?s patent receipts. The teacher wrote a letter to that band, explaining the students? goal. That letter brought the Californian rock band to Michigan in 1989, and twenty-eight excited girls and boys crammed into the tour bus of that band, because of the field trip to the Michigan University in Ann Arbor. In the university engineering and science library, the kids showed to the musicians the bust of Nikola Tesla as a proud young man, which was built thanks to the money that class gathered the year before. The band agreed that that work of art should be cast in bronze and offered to help the kids in their efforts to put the statue in the Smithsonian Institute.

EDISON, AND NOT TESLA, IS CELEBRATED

Was it in a certain moment of time in this century decided that Tesla is not only financially boycotted, but also deleted from the historical documents of the United States of America, and that Edison is declared the official father of age of the electric power? I don?t want to harm Edison, who was extremely productive and who achieved magnificent things for the age of the electric power, by taking away the reputation that belongs to him.

But, I still believe that the huge difference In treating Edison and Tesla shows only one part of the bigger picture, which shows that one group tries to manipulate the public opinion because of its selfishness.

After the big actions in the area of public relations, the descendants raised Edison to the throne. In 1929 more than fifty members of the military and industrial elite, among which were also John D. Rockefeller Jr., Julius Rosenwald, Henry Ford, Harvey S. Firestone, Herbert Hoover and general John H. Pershing, founded a committee for celebrating the hundredth anniversary of light, to celebrate something what was then called ?expression of gratitude to Thomas Alva Edison from the whole world on the occasion of fiftieth anniversary of the invention of his light bulb?

As a part of that celebration, a popular song writer George M. Cohan wrote a song: Thomas A. Edison: the Wizard, with these verses: ?Oh, say, you can watch with the light he gave to you and me. / What a man, what a great old wizard?. The committee sent the letter with Cohan?s song to the prefects and educators, and in it read that the song is ?the dedication to the greatest living American? and you?ll contribute to that dedication if you sing it in every suitable occasion?.

The feelings of the public would maybe go in the other direction if the citizens were told that Nikola Tesla wanted to enable the free access to the electric energy. But, unlike the praise Edison got from the committee on the occasion of celebrating of the hundredth anniversary of light, Tesla was never celebrated by that kind of people. And while some referential literary works concentrate on his work, other turn their attention to his peculiarities. For example, the biographic encyclopedia of Isaac Asimov ? Biographic Encyclopedia of Science and Technology ? covers 25 years of his life with the sentence: ?The last quarter of his (Tesla?s) life was degenerated with the intensive eccentricity?. (To what one of today?s inventors said: ?We should all be that intense?.)

I believe that Edison wasn?t the only inventor who got the glory on Tesla?s expense. Why do, for example, the textbooks ignore the decision of the USA Supreme Court against Guglielmo Marconi to Tesla?s benefit? In 1901 when Marconi sent his famous radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean, Tesla said: ?He can go on. He?s using seventeen of my patents?. In 1943, after Tesla?s death, the Supreme Court rectified the mistake, by explaining that Tesla was one of three inventors on the turn of the century, who patented the radio transmitter circuits before Marconi, but Marconi is still presented as the father of the radio in the textbooks and other historical studies. A short publication of the Smithsonian Institute ? Book of Inventions ? contains a chapter about the radio. Despite the decision of the Supreme Court, nobody pays tribute to Tesla?s work.

THE REDISCOVERY OF TESLA

The legend of Nikola Tesla lives on, although the textbooks have overlooked him. A hundred years after his age of glory, appear many books about the new energy from the different viewpoints of his research, and the increasing number of young inventors and researchers in the whole world are going through his patents documents looking for important evidence. Tesla?s followers have organized themselves into different groups. The biggest is International Tesla Society, with the center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which sells books and videotapes, and runs Tesla-Museum. That group has more than 7000 members. Tesla also gave the encouragement to the series of newspapers and magazines (For additional information look at the literature index).

The Russians have shown a great interest for Tesla?s work. However, that research was mostly conducted in the conditions of the cold war. That is why there are only few published works about that.

It is reported that, for example, a world-class Nobel Prize-winner, Peter Kapitsa, spent his last years intensively researching Tesla?s records. According to Margaret Cheney, Kapitsa wanted to write a supplement to Tesla?s studies of the loptaste munje, about one part of his experiments for wireless energy transfer. At the beginning of the seventies, the scientists from the ex-Soviet Union rushed to the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade, to research Tesla?s notes and devices. While he was visiting the museum in 1975, the researcher of the new energy, Dr. Andrew Michrovski from Otava, found out about the extensive research of the USSR Science Academy. A museum manager, Professor Aleksandar Marinèiæ, showed Michrovski a fat book with small letters. ?You see, what you?ve found. That was just a temporary report?, said Marinèiæ. Michrovski believes that based on their Tesla research, the Soviets could run experiments with very futuristic techniques.

A Russian physicist A. V, Chernetskij unintentionally had also one of Tesla?s accidents, where in 1899 a generator of Colorado Springs hydro-electric power plant had blown. In 1971, Chernetskij, together with his college, ran an experiment where they made a large loptasta munja, from which the sparks flew. The electric energy shock, which went through the power lines of the Aviation Institute in Moscow in that moment, had too big a charge and it destroyed the electric substation. That happened in the attempt to construct a device, according to Tesla?s concept, which produces more energy, than it spends. Even today, there is an interest in Tesla?s concept of the wireless electricity transfer. It is the subject of discussion on the conferences for the new energy, and different groups like Institute for New Energy with the center in Salt Lake City, Utah, continue with the research.

Other researchers are interested in Tesla?s studies of the Earth resonance. Tesla?s successors observe with awe his tests with strong electromagnetic waves, which surround the Earth and should be growing stronger during the tests. The leading experimenter Ron Kovaè from Colorado discovered that Tesla?s equipment could in fact produce very strong waves for the Earth?s resonance, but he says that today?s experiments are just beginning to understand Tesla?s work.

Another Tesla?s invention, which today?s researchers continue eagerly developing, is his turbine without scoops. Turbines moved by the power from air, water, or steam, are usual components of the conventional systems for producing the electric energy. However, Tesla?s turbine is more efficient, simpler, and stronger. It can get additional energy from the unused warmth of the standard turbine or from other kinds of unused energies, which e.g. appear in oil or gas refineries.

The researcher Jeff Hayes indicates that the car salesmen could use the turbine without scoops as a replacement for thousand movable parts in a piston engine, with which the motor life span would be doubled. Jeff Hayes, the founder of the Association of the constructors of Tesla?s motors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, say that Tesla?s motor, with the energy that would be saved in the process of making the car, would also triple the fuel exploiting. He explains how a turbine fits in the concept of the super efficient electric car: as Tesla?s turbine without scoops, which runs Tesla?s high-frequency device for producing the alternating current, which then runs the electro-motor.

Hayes says that, when there would not be any political resistance to the marketability of that kind of system, that technology could be developed ?almost on the spot?. Still, he thinks that the government can?t support the machine, which destroys the gas consumption, since one part of the state?s income comes from the gas tax. Tesla?s turbine can also produce electric power when it is linked to the generator facilities.