Questioned further, he would only say that such power would come from an entirely new and unsuspected source, that for all practical purposes it would be constant day and night and at all times of the year. The apparatus for manufacturing this energy and transforming it would be of ideal simplicity with both mechanical and electrical features.
Tesla said the preliminary cost might be thought too high, but this would be overcome, for the installation would be both permanent and indestructible. “Let me say,” he emphasized, “that [it] has nothing to do with releasing so-called atomic energy. There is no such energy in the sense usually meant. With my currents, using pressures as high as 15 million volts, the highest ever used, I have split atoms but no energy was released….”
Pressed to reveal his new source of energy, he politely declined, but promised definitely to make a statement on the subject “in a few months, or a few years.”
His eyes glowing beneath the black brows, he said that he had already conceived of a plan for transmitting energy in large amounts from one planet to another—absolutely regardless of distance.
“I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication,” he said. “It will certainly come some day and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling, like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind and will build the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.”
When? He was unsure.
“I have been leading a secluded life, one of continuous, concentrated thought and deep meditation,” he replied. “Naturally enough I have accumulated a great number of ideas. The question is whether my physical powers will be adequate to working them out and giving them to the world….”7
Also in the seventy-fifth year of his life, Everyday Science & Mechanics carried detailed designs of two of the inventor’s more down-to-earth proposals—a plan for extracting electricity from seawater and another for a geothermal steam plant.8
The geothermal steam plant was designed to draw upon the almost inexhaustible heat of the deep earth, with water circulating to the bottom of a shaft, returning as steam to drive a turbine, and then returned to liquid form in a condenser, in an unending cycle. Such ideas were not original with Tesla, having been speculated upon for at least seventy-five years, but he was among the first to draw up detailed designs.
His seawater power plant would utilize heat energy derived from the temperature differential between layers of ocean water to operate great power plants. He even went so far as to design a vessel to be propelled by energy derived from this source.
But his research into the matter was at best preliminary. He still had to overcome the same problems that earlier pioneers had experienced— great technological difficulties and costs far out of proportion to the greatest possible returns; yet he continued to work and improve the design, substituting for pipes hung in submarine abysses a sloping tunnel lined with heat-insulating cement. His associates, he said, had made studies in the Gulf of Mexico and Cuban waters where temperature contrast would be adequate.
Tesla explored several variations—one that operated without storage batteries; one that operated without water pumps—but he was still unsatisfied with his seawater plants, finding their performance too small to be competitive with other sources. Undaunted, he continued to predict that the technical problems were soluble and that one day such plants would be major producers of power.
Tesla did not live to see such a plant built, except in his mind. But in the 1980s the federal government has authorized a crash program of research on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plants in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and wherever temperature contrasts are adequate. A small army of university scientists appear to be employed on these joint ventures of government and private utilities.
Professor Warren Rice of Arizona State University, an authority on Tesla’s work in turbines and fluid mechanics, has analyzed his anticipation of OTEC ideas and of geothermal energy recovery and finds them “thermodynamically sound.” But he adds that he, personally, is pessimistic about the economic feasibility and practicality of OTEC and of terrestrial energy recovery on a large scale. “I hope that I am wrong,” he adds.9
In his old age Tesla was gratified to hear his invention of electrical oscillation devices for medical therapy receive high accolades. At the American Congress of Physical Therapy in New York on September 6, 1932, Dr. Gustave Kolischer of Mount Sinai Hospital and Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, announced that high-frequency electrical currents were bringing about “highly beneficial results” in dealing with cancer, surpassing anything that could be accomplished with ordinary surgery.10
Modern cancer treatment has, of course, progressed even farther and the full medical implications of Tesla’s techniques are still being explored. Most recently, in the 1980s, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced promising research in the electromagnetic stimulation of cells for the regeneration of amputated limbs. And studies at various universities have also indicated that pulsed current is superior to direct current in the healing of fractures.
As is typical of so many of Tesla’s inventions, scholars still do not know the whole range of their possible applications or, in some cases, even their full theoretical significance.
26. CORKS ON WATER
George Sylvester Viereck was a German immigrant, the child of an illegitimate offspring of the House of Hohenzollern. He came to America in his youth, stirred the avant-garde with his precociously brilliant poetry, and became a controversial figure in politics and journalism. Intellectuals considered him a genius. But as his interviews with the rising stars of fascism, Hitler and Mussolini, betrayed his strong partiality for dictators, the poet’s reputation was damaged, much as Ezra Pound’s would be a few years later. The issue came to a head during World War II when Viereck was imprisoned for disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda.
He and Tesla became friends between the wars, the inventor as usual being politically uncritical. They often corresponded and met socially in New York. Viereck wrote insightful articles about Tesla, and the two exchanged their own poetry. The German’s tenuous claim to royalty and his literary talent may have appealed equally to Tesla, who addressed some of his most revealing correspondence to this new confidante.
The only sample extant of the inventor’s own poetry, called “Fragments of Olympian Gossip,” and written in his distinctive hand, was dedicated to Viereck, “my Friend and Incomparable Poet,” on December 31, 1934. Tesla was then seventy-eight years of age. The poem begins, “While listening to my cosmic phone / I caught words from the Olympus blown,” which gives a fair indication of its literary merit. It is a crotchety work, but not without humor and occasional nice turns of phrase.
On April 7 Tesla wrote to Viereck, urging him to stop taking the “poison” of opium tincture, lest it make his precious brain sluggish. It appears that Viereck also was seeking escape from financial anxieties, for Tesla added: “It is too bad that the greatest poet of America is no better situated than a struggling inventor. How about writing a little article on Spiritism and drawing on my experience as told in a letter to you? The spiritists are so crazy that they will claim I got the message all right but as a crass materialist I was prejudiced….”1
He added a P.S. that his admiration for Viereck was so great that his handwriting had even begun to resemble the poet’s.
In December he wrote a long, strange letter to Viereck going back over the death of his brother Daniel so long ago, and the death of his mother. He attempted to explain away his precognition and discussed his affliction with partial amnesia. The letter was written as if from different time frames, without transitions, and with confusing errors as to Daniel’s age when he died and the date of his mother’s death. It is almost as though Tesla were describing dreams rather than reality.
He spoke of periods of tortured concentration driving him to fear a blood cl
ot or atrophy of the brain, and of how he struggled to “drive out of the mind the old images which are like corks on the water bobbing up after each submersion. But after days, weeks or months of desperate cerebration I finally succeed in filling my head chuckfull with the new subject, excluding everything else, and when I reach that state I am not far from the goal. My ideas are always rational because I am an exceptionally accurate instrument of reception, in other words, a seer. But be this true or not I am always mighty glad when I get through for there can be no doubt that such a surtax of the brain is fraught with great danger to life.”2
Viereck’s writings—not so much in his correspondence as in his published work—also give us an interesting impression of what Tesla might have been thinking about at this time. In a 1935 magazine article entitled “A Machine to End War,” Viereck reported on what Tesla believed the world would be like in the years 2035 and 2100.
“Man in the large,” said the inventor, “is a mass urged on by a force. Hence the general laws governing movement in the realm of mechanics are applicable to humanity.”3
He saw three ways in which the energy determining human progress could be increased: first, the improvement of living conditions, health, eugenics, etc.; second, reduction of the intellectual forces that impede progress, such as ignorance, insanity, and religious fanaticism; third, the enchaining of such universal sources of energy as the sun, ocean, winds, and tides.
He believed his own mechanistic concept of life to be “one with the teachings of Buddha and the Sermon on the Mount.” The universe was “simply a great machine which never came into being and will never end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When the functioning ceases, the ‘soul’ or the ‘spirit’ ceases likewise.”4
Tesla pointed out that he had expressed these views long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and Watson in the United States, and stated that such an apparently mechanistic view was not antagonistic to an ethical or religious conception of life. In fact, he believed that the essences of Buddhism and Christianity would comprise the religion of the human race in 2100.
Eugenics would then, he believed, be firmly established. In a harsher time survival of the fittest had weeded out “less desirable strains,” Tesla reasoned. “Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature,” and the unfit were kept alive. “The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane.”
How much of this pitiless doctrine was the aging Tesla and how much pure Viereck, one cannot say. Whoever was responsible, he was only just getting into his stride. “This is not sufficient,” according to Tesla. “The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.” By 2035, a Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture would be more important than a Secretary of War.
Sounding rather more like the real Tesla, the putative Tesla goes on to foresee a world in which water pollution would be unthinkable, in which the production of wheat products would be adequate to feed the starving millions of India and China, in which there would be systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources, in which there would at last be an end to devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. And of course, the long-distance wireless transmission of electricity from water power would end the need to burn other fuels.
In the twenty-first century civilized nations would spend the greater part of their budgets on education, the least on war. He had at one time believed that wars could be stopped by making them more destructive. “But I found that I was mistaken. I underestimated man’s combative instinct, which it will take more than a century to breed out. . . . War can be stopped, not by making the strong weak but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself.”5
Here he was referring to a “new discovery” that would “make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes, and other means of attack.” It would require a large plant, but once established, it would be possible to “destroy anything, men or machines, approaching within a radius of 200 miles. It will, so to speak, provide a wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression.”
He explicitly stated, however, that his invention was not a death ray. Rays tended to diffuse over distance. “My apparatus,” he said, “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. This wonderful feature will make it possible, among other things, to achieve undreamed-of results in television, for there will be almost no limit to the intensity of illumination, the size of the picture, or distance of projection.”6
It was to be not radiation but a charged particle beam. Almost half a century later the two most powerful nations in the world would be racing to perfect such a weapon.
Tesla also predicted that ocean liners would be able to cross the Atlantic at great speed by means of “a high-tension current projected from power plants on shore to vessels at sea through the upper reaches of the atmosphere.” In this connection he alluded to one of his earliest concepts: such currents, passing through the stratosphere, would light the sky and to a degree turn night into day. It was his idea to build such power plants at intermediate points, such as upon the Azores and Bermuda.
The deepening political turmoil in Europe in the mid-1930s did not spare Yugoslavia. The Serbian ruler, King Alexander, who had established a Yugoslavian dictatorship following a move toward separatism by Croatia, was assassinated at Marseille in 1934 by a Croat terrorist.
Tesla promptly wrote to The New York Times in defense of the “martyred” monarch. Seeking to minimize the historic differences separating Serbs and Croats, he described King Alexander as “a heroic figure of imposing stature, both the Washington and Lincoln of the Yugoslavs . . . a wise and patriotic leader who suffered martyrdom.”7 It was true enough that there had never been unification of the Slaves until Alexander forced it upon them, but it would take another strongman (Tito) to make it stick.
Alexander was succeeded by his son, the young King Peter II, under the regency of Prince Paul. Tesla accordingly transferred his loyalty to the boy king, who would grow up prematurely in a world aflame.
Meanwhile, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected President of the United States. Proclaiming a New Deal and calling Congress into a special session (the famous “100 Days”), he achieved passage in a short space of time of more long-lasting social legislation than had ever before been undertaken. In doing so he fused the rage of political opponents and drew charges of wanting to “pack” the Supreme Court. Tesla was one of those who, having voted for Roosevelt, soon found his socialistic whirlwind alarming.
More than ever, the inventor seemed obsessed with his mysterious new defensive weapon. In a last poignant appeal for capital to J. P. Morgan, he wrote: “The flying machine has completely demoralized the world, so much so that in some cities, as Londo
n 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 which I have carried out experimentally on a limited scale, created a profound impression. One of the most pressing problems seems to be the protection of London and I am writing to some influential friends in England, hoping that my plans will be accepted without delay. The Russians are very anxious to render their borders safe against the Japanese invasion and I have made them a proposal which is being seriously considered.
“I have many admirers there,” he continued, “especially on account of the introduction of my alternating current system…. Some years ago Lenin made me twice in succession very tempting offers to come to Russia but I could not tear myself from my… work.”8
Tesla went on to say that words could not express how he ached for a laboratory again and for the opportunity of squaring his account with the senior Morgan’s estate. “I am no longer a dreamer but a practical man of great experience gained in long and bitter trials. If I had now $25,000 to secure my property and make convincing demonstrations, I could acquire in a short time colossal wealth. Would you be willing to advance me this sum if I pledged to you these inventions?”
He closed with an attack upon Roosevelt’s program, no doubt calculated to soften Morgan: “The ‘New Deal’ is a perpetual motion scheme which can never work but is given a semblance of operativeness by unceasing supply of the people’s capital. Most of the measures attempted are a bid for votes and some are destructive to established industries and decidedly socialistic. The next step might be the distribution of wealth by excessive taxing if not conscription….”9
Morgan, who had his own Depression problems, failed to rise to the bait. For a nonscientist it was virtually impossible to tell whether Tesla was talking sense or nonsense.
Tesla: Man Out of Time Page 32