Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla
Born	(1856-07-10)July 10, 1856
Died	January 7, 1943(1943-01-07) (aged 86)
Residence	New York, NY, United States
Nationality	Serbian / USA
Known for	Alternating-current power systems, the induction motor, the Tesla coil, wireless transmission of power, Radiant Energy, rejection of Relativity
Scientific career
Fields	Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics

Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer whose work established the alternating-current electrical system on which modern civilisation runs. He is equally important to this wiki for a second reason: throughout his life Tesla held to a mechanical, aether-based conception of space, matter and energy, and in his final decades he publicly and repeatedly rejected Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and the notion of curved space. For that reason Tesla stands as the central historical figure for the free-energy, wireless-power and aether research communities documented here.

Biography

Tesla was born in Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, into a Serbian Orthodox family, studied engineering at the Polytechnic in Graz, and emigrated to the United States in 1884. In 1888 he patented the polyphase alternating-current induction motor and a complete system of AC generation and transmission – the basis of the electrical power system still in use today. He patented the resonant air-core transformer known as the Tesla coil in 1891 and demonstrated a radio-controlled boat in 1898. From 1899 his work turned to the wireless transmission of power, described below. He never managed his finances and died in poverty in New York on 7 January 1943.

Tesla and the aether

Tesla was trained in the physics of the 1870s and 1880s, and he never abandoned it. For him space was not empty and not geometrical: it was filled with a real, physical medium whose elasticity and density set the velocity of light and through which all electrical and gravitational action was propagated. He described his own high-frequency apparatus in exactly these terms, as machinery for setting the medium into motion rather than for radiating energy into a void.

In the article "Man's Greatest Achievement", published in the New York American on 6 July 1930, Tesla wrote that he had "long ago recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, of a tenuity beyond conception and filling all space – the Akasa or luminiferous ether". Matter, on this view, is a condition of the medium, not something ontologically separate from it; energy is not stored in matter but is exchanged with the surrounding medium.

This is the same conception that animates the Aether research tradition on this wiki, and it explains why Tesla's engineering intuitions differ so sharply from those of a field theorist trained after 1920. Where James Clerk Maxwell's successors gradually dropped the mechanical medium and kept the equations, Tesla kept the medium and treated the equations as a partial description of it.

Tesla's rejection of relativity

Tesla's opposition to Einstein was public, sustained and specific. His objection was not to the mathematics but to the physical picture: he held that space, having no substance, can have no properties, and therefore cannot be curved, bent or acted upon.

In an interview published in the New York Herald Tribune on 11 September 1932, Tesla stated:

"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view."

On his seventy-ninth birthday, in remarks reported by The New York Times on 11 July 1935, he was blunter still, calling relativity "a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science", declaring that "not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved", and adding the often-repeated image that the theory "is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king".

The fullest statement of his position is the prepared statement he issued to the press on his eighty-first birthday, 10 July 1937. There he argued that the relativists' curved space is self-contradictory on Newtonian grounds – if bodies curve the space around them, the curved space must react back on the bodies and straighten the curves, so that "the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible" – and that all attempts "to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena" are "futile and destined to oblivion".

The same 1937 statement contains the principle that matters most to the New Energy community: "There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment." Tesla applied this rigorously "to molecules and atoms as well as the largest heavenly bodies", and on that basis he rejected mass–energy conversion and the prospect of practical atomic power outright. This is a genuine and consequential disagreement with twentieth-century physics, and it has been vindicated on neither side to the satisfaction of the other: mainstream physics regards the nuclear question as settled against Tesla, while independent researchers point to his environmental-energy principle as the correct framing of where useful energy actually comes from. Either way, it is Tesla's own documented position, not a later invention, and it places him squarely in the tradition this wiki documents.

Wireless power and radiant energy

Tesla's wireless programme was never primarily about communication. From the mid-1890s onward his object was the transmission of industrial quantities of power without wires, using the Earth itself and its upper conducting strata as the circuit.

At Colorado Springs in 1899–1900 he built the magnifying transmitter: an extra resonant coil, driven at the resonant frequency of an elevated capacity, producing discharges tens of metres long and potentials in the millions of volts. He reported detecting stationary waves in the Earth – a result he regarded as the single most important of his life, because it implied that the planet could be excited as a resonator and power drawn from it at any point. Wardenclyffe was intended as the first operating node of such a "world system", combining global telegraphy, time signals and power distribution.

Closely connected is the "radiant energy" line of work (see Radiant Energy), including his 1901 patent on an apparatus for the utilisation of radiant energy, in which an elevated plate collects charge from the environment to charge a storage device. For independent researchers this remains a live experimental programme rather than a closed historical episode: the questions of whether longitudinal or non-Hertzian modes exist, whether the Colorado Springs results were correctly interpreted, and whether the environment can be tapped as Tesla claimed, are still actively pursued outside the universities.

Tesla in the modern dissident community

Tesla's posthumous standing among independent researchers is without parallel. The International Tesla Society, founded in Colorado Springs in the 1980s, ran Tesla symposia in even-numbered years from 1984 to 1998 and "Extraordinary Science" conferences in odd-numbered years, with proceedings edited by Steven R Elswick. That lineage continues today as Tesla Tech and its annual ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, the longest-running gathering of researchers working on Tesla-derived and other breakthrough energy technologies.

Researchers documented on this wiki who work directly in Tesla's tradition include:

• Eric P Dollard – electrical engineer who has reproduced Tesla's pancake-coil and wireless experiments and argues for the reality of longitudinal electrical waves.
• Robert Golka – rebuilt Tesla's Colorado Springs magnifying transmitter in a hangar at Wendover, Utah, from Tesla's own notes, and ran it through the 1970s and early 1980s in an attempt to synthesise ball lightning.
• Toby Grotz – engineer active in the International Tesla Society and in the Colorado Springs replication work.
• Jim Murray – researcher on Tesla-derived power and transforming apparatus.
• Steven R Elswick – editor of the Tesla symposium proceedings and organiser of the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference.

Tesla's aether physics also connects him to the wider heterodox cosmology community represented here by Electric Universe researchers such as Wallace Thornhill, for whom electrical phenomena rather than gravity dominate the cosmos.

It should be said plainly that Tesla's name is also attached to a great many claims he never made and never demonstrated – antigravity craft, death rays as popularly imagined, suppressed "free energy" devices, and a large volume of quotations circulated online that cannot be traced to any Tesla document. This wiki neither endorses those claims nor uses them to dismiss the real programme. Tesla's actual, documented work – the aether conception, the environmental-energy principle, the rejection of curved space, and the magnifying transmitter – is substantial enough to stand on its own, and it is that work which repays serious attention.

Abstracts

• 1994 - "World System of Wireles Transmission of Energy"
• 1984 - "The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media"

Books

• 2007 - "The Nikola Tesla Treasury" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "Nikola Tesla On His Work With Alternating Currents" (Read in full)
• 1998 - "Nikola Tesla Guided Weapons & Computer Technology (Tesla Presents Series, Part 3)" (Read in full)
• 1998 - "Nikola Teslas Teleforce & Telegeodynamics Proposals (Tesla Presents Series, Part 4)" (Read in full)
• 1996/2007 - "Universal Laws Never Before Revealed: Keelys Secrets: Understanding and Using the Science of Sympathetic" (Read in full)
• 1994 - "Nikola Tesla Lecture Before the New York Academy of Sciences - April 6, 1897: The Streams of Lenard and Roentgen and Novel Apparatus for Their Production (Tesla Presents Series, Part 2)" (Read in full)
• 1919/1998 - "Tesla: The True Wireless" (Read in full)
• - "Nikola Tesla Patent Collection" (Read in full)
• - "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy: With Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Sun's Energy" (Read in full)

See also

• Tesla Technology – Tesla's technical programme as pursued by researchers on this wiki, and the papers collected here
• Tesla Tech – the organisation and its ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference

External links

• Tesla Universe – archive of Tesla's articles, lectures, patents and press interviews
• Open Tesla Research – transcriptions of Tesla's articles and interviews, including the 1937 prepared statement
• TeslaTech – ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, successor to the International Tesla Society symposia