Starting in 1992, I’d begun filling up several thick folders with names and facts, leads and historical data springing from Tesla’s original research. I’d run into crackpots but also serious scientists and inventors who’d tried to follow up on his ideas. I’d found a book containing 100 free energy patents, with elaborate drawings and designs about as assortment of small machines that produced more energy than they consumed -- what Tesla had discovered nearly a century earlier with his own patents on "radiant energy" and the "magnification of energy." I’d driven to Colorado Springs and retraced the steps Tesla had taken nearly a century ago when conducting his wireless experiments just outside that city. I attended the International Tesla Symposium, held every other year in the Springs, and ventured into a dark auditorium, where the lights were turned off and engineers fired up huge Tesla Coils generating 1,000,000 volts of electricity. As the juice shot back and forth between them, it danced around the stage and set off a thunderous display, the black air charged with wild and hissing electrical currents, like drawings of jagged, purple men.
Afterwards, a scientist took him aside and said, “It’s absolutely amazing that for the past 90 years almost no one on earth has understood what Tesla was talking about when he discussed the magnification of energy.”
Despite this neglect, Tesla had laid the foundation for the wireless transmission of energy, which led to radio. And then to television, fax machines, cell phones, robotics, airplanes that could fly straight up on takeoff, and laser beams. He eventually held more than 700 U.S. patents, always leaping toward his next vision while more practical men were making money from recent technological breakthroughs.
He viewed science as the best way to improve the human condition because it would increase what people could do and decrease the work necessary to do it, but he often left money, envy, human spite, competitiveness, and naked aggression out of his grand equation. As soon as he’d invented AC, he began looking for new ways to replace it with something more efficient and cheaper. The scientific celebrity had met Hindu masters from the Far East, who had their own ideas about how the universe functioned. They intrigued Tesla because some of his own deepest intuitions were similar to theirs: his childhood visions had hinted that the atmosphere was filled with potential energy and if he could just find a way to tap into it, the world would have access to a never-ending supply of non-polluting, renewable energy -- there for the taking and available to all.
It didn’t occur to him that men like J.P. Morgan did not want free energy or to improve on AC, but to produce electricity and sell it like any other commodity. When Morgan or Astor loaned Tesla money to do something practical -- build a better light bulb, for example, than Thomas Edison’s -- they expected him to get the job done and on time. He took their money and began conducting wireless-transmission and free-energy experiments, constructing a huge transmitting tower on Long Island, called Wardenclyffe, designed to send signals around (or beyond) the globe.
As the inventor frantically tried to complete the half-built tower, Europe was sliding toward World War I. Instead of becoming more wealthy and celebrated, like Edison, he’d become more visionary and dangerous to the businessmen who’d supported him. When he ran out of funds to pay his bills, he thought others would pick up the tab, but they refused. The Waldorf assumed ownership of Wardenclyffe and days before a Long Island sheriff was to seize it and auction off the parts, Tesla took a lonely trip out to the tower and climbed it by himself, raising a hand and railing at the heavens against the forces that had stalled his dream of uniting mankind and providing it with free energy.
This modern Prometheus -- who’d given the world not fire but alternating current -- was symbolically chained to his doomed tower. When America entered the war against Germany in 1917, the U.S. military deemed Wardenclyffe a threat to national security and munitions experts blew it up. But he kept envisioning and inventing.
In the 1930s, on his 75th birthday, “Time” magazine featured him on its cover, yet he’d become little more than an aging curiosity, with his strange talk about life beyond earth and about nature holding an endless supply of energy. If this source could only be developed, he promised with characteristic idealism, never again would humanity be faced with a shortage of power. Big corporations and utility companies now controlled America’s energy sources and huge fortunes were being made in gas and oil. Europe and the Far East were preparing for a vast second world war, which would employ the latest technology not for peaceful ends but for human slaughter. Tesla had been relegated to the category of a dreamer, an old fellow who hung out with pigeons. Following his death in 1943, his reputation faded and began to disappear. Many engineers who graduated from major U.S. universities in the second half of the 20th Century had never read about him or even heard his name. But he still worried the American government.
When he died, World War II was at its height and his native Yugoslavia was becoming a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. The Yugoslavian government, which viewed Tesla as one of its greatest national heroes, desperately wanted the 11,000 pages of scientific writings and drawings he’d left behind. The FBI said absolutely not -- until they’d studied, edited, and microfilmed most of it. Some people may have come to regard Tesla as irrelevant to the modern age, but sophisticated minds knew better. The U.S. military was anxious to turn one of his concepts, the death ray, into a useful weapon and extremely worried about it falling into either Nazi or Soviet hands. At Tesla’s death, his treasure load of material was confiscated and taken to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where it was logged in as classified and viewable only with a top-secret clearance. At the start of the new millennium, it remained classified and a security problem for the American government. In those pages, Tesla put down his thoughts on death rays, space travel, and exploiting untapped energy sources.
Nearing death and with World War II on the horizon, the old man had written, “Out of this war, the greatest since the beginning of history, a new world must be born that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity, where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science, and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall be a world of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect.”
He died alone, in 1943. Fifty years later, an engineer told me, “Nobody wants to listen to Tesla. There’s still too much oil in the ground, it’s still affordable, and America is passing through a time of peace and prosperity. No one is ready to rock the energy boat -- yet.”
Fifteen years have passed since that statement was made and the United States is now conducting two wars in oil-rich regions of the world. Global warming, according to many credible scientits, is intensifying. Has the time come to consider visionary alternatives to fossil fuels? Or should we wait another century and hope for the best?