Great Scientist, Forgotten Genius Nikola Tesla

Scientific Paper
Title	Great Scientist, Forgotten Genius Nikola Tesla
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Oliver D Nichelson, Christopher Bird
Keywords	Tesla, Colorado Springs Experiments
Published	1977
No. of pages	18
Pages	36-44

Read the full paper here

Abstract

In New Age, pp. 36-44 (1977). In the Pike's Peak mountain range, overlooking Colorado Springs, an eccentric Serbian-born inventor began at the dawn of the twentieth century a series of experiments on electrical properties of the atmosphere in a newly built laboratory 8,000 feet above sea level...

Overview

This is a long-form magazine essay rather than a technical paper. Christopher Bird and Oliver D Nichelson set out to recover the parts of Nikola Tesla's work that the twentieth century absorbed and the parts it discarded. The first half is biography: the visionary child in Smiljan, the flash of insight in a Budapest park that produced the rotating magnetic field, the alternating-current generator and motor that made long-distance power distribution possible, and the 1895 transmission from the Niagara Falls turbines to Buffalo, 22 miles away, without intervening generating stations — a stroke that made Thomas Edison's direct-current scheme obsolete overnight.

The second half is the part that gives the article its dissident edge. The authors argue that Tesla's later Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe work — wireless transmission of power, the "magnifying transmitter," and a receiver for collecting atmospheric charge — was never refuted but simply abandoned, and that a succession of later inventors who claimed to draw usable power from the ambient environment were ridiculed, bought out or destroyed rather than tested. The essay's thesis is not a physical theory but a historical one: that a technically live line of research was closed for financial and institutional reasons, and that Tesla's estate of some 100,000 documents in Belgrade has never been properly worked through.

The argument

Tesla the visualizer

The authors lean heavily on Tesla's own 1919 autobiographical writing. As a child he saw spoken words materialize as phantom images, and learned to control them by deliberately constructing imaginary journeys. He came to regard this as an engineering faculty: he could "materialize mentally the design of any machine," take it apart, run it, and only then build it, whereupon "they operated exactly as he had foreseen." The same hypersensitivity gave him a nervous collapse in Budapest in 1881, during which he could hear a watch ticking three rooms away and felt a locomotive whistle thirty miles off as physical pain. The essay treats the sensitivity and the inventive power as one faculty rather than two.

Colorado Springs

At the 1899 laboratory, ringed with warning signs and topped by a 154-foot mast carrying a four-foot copper sphere, Tesla timed the arrival of electrical disturbances from receding thunderstorms and concluded that the Earth carries stationary waves. He built a Tesla coil of unprecedented size — 12 million volts, sparks over 100 feet long — which blew out the generator of the Colorado Springs Lighting and Power Company on first firing. The authors note that his supersensitive detector, patented as U.S. Patent No. 685,957, "Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy," was also the first man-made device to register radio signals of cosmic origin, more than thirty years before Karl Jansky. They report that he produced Ball Lightning in the laboratory, and that Robert Golka, working from Tesla's Colorado Springs diary at the Belgrade museum, reached 15 million volts at Wendover Air Force Base in the 1970s attempting to repeat it.

The World System

Tesla's operating premise was that the volume between the ground and the ionosphere behaves "like a conductor of limited dimensions" — an electrical cavity that, like a stopped string, will sustain only a particular family of frequencies and harmonics. Pump energy in at the right frequency and standing waves circle the globe, usable for signalling and for the wireless delivery of power. The article reproduces his 1900 summary of the World System, resting on three components: the Tesla Transformer, the Magnifying Transmitter ("Tesla's best invention — peculiar transformer specially adapted to excite the Earth"), and the Wireless System. He built a 75-million-watt magnifying transmitter that lit 200 lamps totalling 10,000 watts at a distance of 26 miles with no wires, claiming only 5% loss.

A second and stronger claim follows: the negatively charged Earth and the positively charged upper atmosphere constitute a standing potential difference that could be tapped directly, giving a "solar collector" with no moving parts, working night and day in any weather. Tesla also indicated in Liberty (9 February 1935) that the same plant could be turned into a defensive weapon able to "destroy anything, men or machines, approaching within a radius of 200 miles."

The successors

The essay's second thread is a chronicle of later claims of environmental power extraction, each documented from contemporary newspapers rather than from journals:

• Clemente Figueras (Las Palmas, 1902), a forestry engineer reported to have generated electricity without fuel; Tesla sent the clipping to Robert U. Johnson and claimed priority for the underlying principle.
• Alfred M. Hubbard (Seattle, 1920), whose "atmospheric power generator" — eight electromagnets with primary and secondary windings around a steel core, in a housing 11 by 14 inches — was reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to have driven an 18-foot boat across Lake Union with a 35 HP motor, at an output of 280 amperes at 125 volts.
• Lester J. Hendershot (Detroit, 1928), whose "fuelless motor" was demonstrated at Selfridge Field before Charles Lindbergh; the commanding officer, Major Thomas Lanphier, publicly stated it had "no hidden batteries or other phony business." Others disagreed sharply: Dr. Frederick Hoffstetter hired a New York hall to exhibit a model containing a concealed carbon pencil battery. Hendershot was badly shocked while demonstrating the device to patent attorneys, withdrew, and took his own life in 1961 after a failed Office of Naval Research proposal.
• T. Henry Moray (Salt Lake City), author of The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats, who by 1911 concluded the energy he was collecting "was not coming out of the Earth but that it rather was coming in to the Earth from some outside source," and whose 55-pound device was said to deliver 50,000 watts before a colleague destroyed it with a sledgehammer.

The authors record, without resolving, the recurring complaint that the Hendershot and Moray devices worked only in their inventors' presence — a fact Charles Fort read as evidence of "wild talents," and which the article links to contemporary psychokinesis claims.

Assessment

The article's strength is documentary. Where it deals with Tesla it is anchored in patents, published lectures, the Century and Liberty articles, O'Neill's Prodigal Genius, and the Belgrade archive, whose contents it inventories precisely (13,780 pages of biographical material, 34,552 of scientific notes, 5,297 of drawings). The historical claims it makes about Tesla are checkable and largely correct: the 1943 Supreme Court decision in Marconi Wireless Co. v. U.S. did find that features of Marconi's patent had been anticipated by Tesla, and the resonance of the Earth-ionosphere cavity is now standard physics. The observation that Tesla's storm detector registered extraterrestrial radio noise decades before radio astronomy is a fair one.

The weakness is that the second half applies nothing like the same standard of evidence. Hubbard, Hendershot and Moray are presented through newspaper reports and witness lists; in no case does the article supply a circuit diagram, a measured input, or an energy balance. Bird and Nichelson concede this — "the Seattle newspaper accounts do not provide sufficient data to allow us to reconstruct the Hubbard coil" — but continue to treat the sequence as cumulative support rather than as four independent unverified claims. The Hoffstetter demonstration of a hidden battery inside a Hendershot model is reported and then set aside without weighing. And the closing move, from unexplained motors to Uri Geller and psychokinetic children, abandons the evidentiary footing the Tesla sections had earned.

There is also an unresolved physical ambiguity running through the piece. Tesla's Earth-resonance scheme is a transmission proposal: energy is generated conventionally and delivered without wires, and its difficulties are efficiency and the inverse-square dilution of the radiated field, not conservation. The atmospheric collector is a harvesting proposal, drawing on the real fair-weather atmospheric electric field, whose global power budget is small and whose current density at the ground is of the order of picoamperes per square metre. The article slides between the two, and between both and the outright Free Energy claims of the later inventors, without ever separating them. Tesla's own 1892 phrasing that the energy of space is "kinetic" — quoted approvingly by Moray — is a rhetorical premise, not a measurement.

Taken as what it is, a 1977 popular essay written to reopen a closed file, the piece succeeds in its first aim and overreaches in its second. Its most durable contribution is the argument that the Belgrade archive remains largely unread, and that the Colorado Springs notes contain engineering that was never disproved because it was never repeated.

See also

• Nikola Tesla
• Oliver D Nichelson
• Christopher Bird
• Thomas Edison
• Ball Lightning
• Radiant Energy
• Free Energy
• Zero Point Energy
• Wilhelm Reich