Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. LII, Number 2, Second Quarter 1996)

COMPLETING a tour of the major scientific institutes in America, Tesla expected to retire for a season of rest in New York once again. News of his advancements however, flooded every technical trade journal. The name Tesla was everywhere once again. First polyphase and now radiant electricity. He was the “darling” of the press. Tesla captured the public eye once again. People everywhere were thrilled with the projected future visions which Tesla freely provided. He was a model European immigrant, suave and debonair. These are probably the qualities which first attracted Anne Morgan. Irresistible, wealthy, unattached, and warm. Tesla was her obsession.

Despite his great personal charm and magnetic personality, he maintained his serious tone and poise wherever he went. The vision of the future was far more important than the attentions of a young and flirtatious lady. In anticipation of these forthcoming events, Tesla often invited other socially esteemed guests to his laboratory for special demonstrations. In this manner, it was noised abroad that what he claimed was in fact real. Anne often attended these gatherings, breathing silently in the shadows of his large loft laboratory.

There were others who, although not attending these demonstrations, were equally watchful of Tesla’s newest radiant energy developments. Several of these persons, shall we say, were interested in his new discovery and its implications.. .because their fortunes were threatened. Tesla had swept the world once with polyphase. He wiped out Edison’s Direct Current System overnight. J.P. Morgan, Edison’s recent “patron”, had lost a considerable sum during that fiasco. It was certain that Tesla would soon sweep the world again with broadcast electricity. This destabilizing influence would not be tolerated. Anne complicated the affair considerably. She was in love with Tesla. Obsessed in fact. Too obsessed and desperate to let go.

ROYAL SOCIETY LECTURES

In the very midst of all these national attentions, Tesla received an invitation from Lord Kelvin. He was formally requested to address the Royal Society, his latest findings were earnestly desired. The English, usually extremely conservative, were sure that Tesla would change the course of world history.

Tesla, adjourning from his daily researches now prepared himself for the lectures which would start the world-change. He packed nearly every piece of delicate equipment one can imagine. Vacuum tubes, Transformers, strange motors, and equally strange wireless apparatus. All were carefully crated and personally brought to Europe by Tesla himself. His beloved elder and personal mentor, Sir William Crookes, greeted him.

In the opening portions of his Royal Society lectures Tesla first described his preliminary work with high voltage high frequency alternating currents in some length. He explained that these devices embodied the very last investigations and improvements of his Polyphase System. He demonstrated several of the first small high frequency alternators and iron-core induction coils in order to prepare his audience for a final announcement.

In this very last dramatic demonstration Tesla revealed to British Academia the disruptive electric discharge and the properties of electric rays. Tesla made a rare and complete “full disclosure” of the electric ray effect at the very end of his lecture. It was the very last time he would ever do so again in academic circles.

Tesla showed that the new radiant electricity was distinctive, having been openly proclaimed during the London Royal Society lectures. Tesla deliberately compared and contrasted the potent impulse radiance to his previous weak effects produced by alternating currents (February 1892). Fluorescent lamps and other luminous wonders held his audience spellbound. All the while his voice, tenor-like by excitement, rang throughout the silent awestruck hall.

He demonstrated wireless lamps, lit to full brilliance by radiant electricity. He ran small motors at sizable distances for his audiences to see. This last lecture represents the only recorded instance in which Tesla openly announced his discovery of the electro-radiant impulse. He tells the personally revolutionizing aspect of his discovery and how it virtually eradicates his previous work. He went to great detail verbally describing and disclosing the exact means for eliciting the phenomenon.

In his closing time Tesla quickly demonstrates special “electrostatic” motors and lamps made to utilize the radiant effect. Examination of these first lamp and vane-motor devices reveals their primitive and initial state. Tesla modeled the motor after the Crookes radiometer, stating this fact publicly for the benefit of his revered mentor. Tesla finally stated the vast implications of the discovery. He pointed their minds toward the establishment of true power transmission. He prophetically announced the new civilization which would emerge from these first devices and systems. The world would be completely revolutionized by this new principle. Tesla described beam-transmission of electrical energy, and the possibility of harnessing the radiant energies of space itself.

Those who had witnessed Tesla’s entire demonstration were completely enthralled at his results, but misunderstood his new announcement completely. This became apparent to Tesla a short while after he, highly decorated and honored, departed for his Parisian tour. British Science was yet delving into Teslian high frequency alternations. Tesla had already disposed of these discoveries as mere preparatory introductions to impulses.

Tesla showed by way of comparison that disruptive field impulse transcendently exceed all other electro-inductive effects by several orders. He expressed difficulty in discerning whether the effects were electrostatic or electrodynamic in nature, preferring to associate them more with electrostatic effects. We deduce that he had only recently begun developing the electric impulse effect because of his hesitance in identifying the phenomena properly.

Tesla was stringently exact in all his statements. This seems uncharacteristic of his scientific nature. But he did this in true scientific openness. Tesla did not know exactly what was occurring in the electric impulse at that time, desiring only to share the discovery openly and candidly. Academic disapproval of his personal semantics came swiftly in journal after journal.

It is clear that Sir William Crookes completely grasped the significance of Tesla’s entire demonstration and realized the closing formal announcement of the new electric force. Crookes could not contain the thrilling implications. He was also sure that the new force would completely revolutionize the scientific world.

Crookes upheld Tesla thereafter as the true discoverer of an unrecognized electrical force. Tesla continued correspondence with his mentor after his departure from England. He had hoped that his dramatic announcement and demonstration would produce a new regime of electrical engineering, and that others would now reproduce the radiant electric effects as described. His hopes would be strangely dashed to pieces in the coming years when the derisive academic attacks began.

To European academes, the lecture series was astounding. It was a glimpse of the future, so clear that few could find time to argue with Tesla at all. Tesla concluded his tour of England and France, everywhere heralded in typical Victorian heroic style. One night, while in Paris, a telegram informed him that his mother was on point of death. Rushing to her bedside, he managed a few hours of final conversation.

He always referred to her as the one who completely understood his strange abilities. Was she not the woman who had encouraged him when he first remarked about his childhood visions? When siblings and friends derided him, she was his support. Early the next morning, in an adjacent house, he was abruptly awaken by a vision. What he beheld changed his life. A seraphic host surrounded his mother. She was ascending into bright clouds. Several minutes after that, the announcement came. His mother had quietly passed away. He spent a torturous week in his native land for her funeral, and fled back again to New York.

REVERSALS

When English engineers wrote, asking the means for generating his impulse effects, Tesla gave them very strict descriptive parameters. He never failed to openly disclose the secret by which his spectacular effects were obtained. He had learned to freely share what he knew with all. He was surprised to discover that the academic societies who so warmly addressed him in Europe, were gradually losing interest in his discovery. Being utterly incapable of duplicating his specified parameters, most believed the effects to be “dubious”.

The impulse effect had very stringent requirements before its manifestation. Care in constructing impulse generators was the basic requirement. Engineers wanted equations. Tesla gave them descriptions. A few experimenters succeeded in later duplicating Tesla’s broadcast electricity effects. But these systems were direct descendants of Tesla’s earliest and less efficient designs.
It is often in the nature of academes to forgo empirically evident facts and argue personal differences, especially when foreign personalities are given excessive adulation. Fixated on issues having to do with words and personal poise, Tesla’s audiences found several acrid voices whose equally vile publications dared tamper with Tesla’s character.

New critics were everywhere, even at home. Dolbear, Thomson, and even Pupin found time to criticize and deride Tesla. Because most younger academes relied entirely on schooling and less on empirical method, they were easily swayed by academic opinion. Tesla underestimated the power of media and of opinions in underrating his abilities. He quickly found that public opinion could actually sway scientific opinion. He failed to see who was behind the media campaign.

Tesla disregarded his antagonistic colleagues. Crookes always deferred to Tesla, whom he admired and loved as a younger protégé. Tesla revered the aged Crookes, upon whose confidence he came to rely during more difficult years. Crookes had been given a true Tesla Transformer when Tesla had given his lectures. The small device was potent, giving the uncharacteristic effects which Tesla had always claimed. This single piece of evidence was left in England for all to see. Remarkably, this evidence did not silence the critics.

Tesla could see no reason in all of this. Something did not quite “add up”. Even Tesla could see that there was a missing part of the “equation”. Discovering this part would explain his own reversals. As if these personally devastating events were not enough for him, the insolent young Anne continued haunting him at his every turn. He continued being “polite” to her, but never more than this.

Crookes wrote many times to the Royal Society and to Tesla concerning this fact. Sure that Tesla was a modern Faraday, Crookes continued espousing the belief that Tesla had discovered the next historically important electrical advancement. He was encouraged to continue research despite his protagonists. Few academes trusted Tesla’s methods now. Fewer yet listened any longer to his statements.

Losing credibility as quickly as he had found it, financiers were slow to trust investing in his new systems. His inventions continued their steady march into electrical history. Each new device chronicles a new step in the technology which should have changed the world. He plunged himself headlong into work. Only work would vindicate him. Opinion would fade when others gradually saw the astounding developments which he would produce. In these actions, Tesla revealed his noble and naive nature. The world had changed, but changed toward a more brutish rule.

BROADCAST POWER

He set to work developing more powerful embodiments of his initial Transformers. In order to make a Broadcast Electrical System possible it would be necessary to devise more efficient transformers. He set to work on this very task, examining and dissecting every fundamental part of his existing Transformers.

Tesla discovered that excessive sparking, though impressive to observers, were actually “lossy instabilities”. The distant radiant effects he desired were interrupted and distorted whenever sparking occurred. Both sparking and brush discharges actually ruined the distant broadcast effects of radiant electricity, a situation which had to be remedied. Tesla sought elimination of the discharges now. Tesla had already found that metals could focus radiant electrical effects. Additional stability in his Transformers could be achieved with the addition of large copper spheres to the active terminals. Tesla considered copper spheres to be “aether gas reservoirs”, providing his transmitters with an additional aether gas supply.

Copper spheres attached to Transformer terminals reduced the required electrical levels for an efficient electric radiance. Copper spheres significantly reduced the injurious instabilities of visually spectacular brush discharges, but did not eliminate them entirely. What Tesla required was a new means for transmitting the radiant electricity without loss.

Tests with elevated copper spheres facilitated efficient transfer of radiant power between the Transformer and surrounding space. Now, Tesla Transformers became true Tesla Transmitters. Tesla found it possible to broadcast harmless radiant electricity with great power to very great distances. Numerous subsequent patents recorded his progressive conquest of the broadcast power principle.

He succeeded in making radiant electricity safe for human use. It would simply travel around conductors if made to impulse quickly enough. Only specially entuned receivers could properly intercept the radiant power for utility. Not three years before he had accidentally discovered the radiant electrical effect. He dreamt of safely sending electrical power without wires in 1892. Now, in 1895, he had realized his dream. Would the system work across the vast distances which he envisioned?

He took his more portable Transmitters outdoors, away from the confines of his South Fifth Street laboratory. Both in northern Manhattan and Long Island, Tesla tested his radiant broadcast systems without restriction. He measured the distant radiant electric effects of these designs in electrostatic volts. Broadcast power could be converted back into current electricity if so desired, the harmless high voltage becoming current in appropriate low resistance transformer coils.

He found to his very great surprise that very distantly positioned vacuum tubes could be lit to great white brilliance when the primary system was operating. The requirement for this action was twofold. First both the system and the receivers had to be grounded. Second, specific volumes of copper had to be connected to the receivers. When these two requirements were satisfied, lamps maximized their brilliance, and motors operated with power.

Copper in the receiver had to “match” the copper mass of the transmitter in a very special equivalence, otherwise radiant transfer would not be efficient. The requirements differed very much from those of ordinary radio antennas. He also found that elevated copper spheres more powerfully enhanced the broadcast radiant power from his transmitters. This was Tesla’s means by which his transmitters and receivers could be better “connected” despite their distance.

Tesla believed that these electrical beams invisibly linked both his transmitter and receivers together. He considered each as “disconnected terminals” to ground. Electrical radiance spread out in all directions from the elevated copper sphere of his transmitter. The secret in receiving a maximum signal was to match the transmitter’s copper mass with the receiver mass. Then, the aether streams would actually focus into the matched receiver. This affinity would take time, the transmitter energy “searching” for better ground sites. Radiant electricity evidenced curiously vegetative “growth characteristics”.

Receivers now were outfitted with small copper spheres. These provided a more efficient affinity and absorption for the radiated power. The additional copper spheres which surmounted Tesla transmitters effectively lowered the input electrical power for the production of focused aether discharges.

Tesla took the gas dynamic analogy to another level when he found that both low pressure gaseous and vacuum tubes could replace copper. Electro-radiant effects from gas-filled globes were projected with less electrical loss and even greater power. Large low pressure argon gas filled globes were empirically found to broadcast tremendous radiance when used atop his transmitters. Additionally, he found that argon gas at low pressures could serve as an equivalent receiver as pure copper spheres. The gas filled globes would be less costly than copper spheres to disseminate in public use. He was approaching a totally efficient system. Numerous personages were invited to observe these historic tests. J.H. Hammond Jr. was one such individual. Enthralled with Tesla’s developments, he and his wife invited Tesla repeatedly to their home in later years. Tesla was their honored guest for months at a time. Later in years, after World War I, both Tesla and Hammond worked on robotics and remote control.

Tesla envisioned small power units for both home and industrial use. The installation and maintenance of these units would require a small monthly fee. Through these wireless units one could draw sufficient power to operate factories and homes alike. Electrical usage could be metered. The superiority of this new broadcast power system was obvious to all who observed it in operation.

Tesla also described the use of these power units for transportation. Transatlantic ships could simply draw their motive power from continental power broadcast stations. Trains and automobiles could be operated by drawing their power. The potential fortunes would soon stimulate financiers to invest heavily in the “coming activity”

In keeping with his publicity-mindedness, several investors were always invited to Tesla’s private demonstrations. Tesla knew that their urge to support his new world-shaking venture would become irresistible when once each had beheld his small broadcast power system. The demonstrations were deemed by these individuals as “entertaining”, in their typical dry tone. But, he rarely heard from these people again.

Here was a new change. Shy moneymen. A true contradiction.

Their reticence left Tesla in a state of bewilderment. Once, in a ditch, his conversation alone was sufficient perfume to attract the bees. Now? None would dare leap into the new world sea. Why? What sharks were there besides themselves? Tesla could simply not understand this new “dearth”, this incredulous conservatism and lack of imagination on the part of New York investors.

Eager to begin, Tesla patiently waited for the messengers to call. Had he known more of the world around him, however, he would have stopped waiting. Shortly after Tesla’s private demonstrations were concluded, Morgan’s agent approached Tesla with a “business proposition”. The bribe being sizable, contracts would have placed Morgan in control of Tesla’s new system. Tesla laughed at the pale little Mr. Brown in his pinching-tight tails, informing him that he himself was already a millionaire. Why should he need such an affiliation at all? He was escorted very graciously by the amused Tesla.

While dining in the Waldorf several hours later, a rude interruption informed him that his laboratories were ablaze. The connection between his refusal to bow and the flames which now reached skyward was not made until all was consumed. That night, the world changed completely for Nikola Tesla. He lost everything of his past. Everything. The totality of his technological achievements were burned into vapor. Books, priceless souvenirs, delicate equipment, patents, models, drawings, new pieces of apparatus. Everything was burned. He read the message well.

There was a two week period where he simply vanished. No one could find him. Kolman Czito, his trusted technical foreman and machinist feared for Tesla’s life. Katherine Underwood Johnson was beside herself with anguish. She was the wife of a close friend, the only real love of Tesla’s life. The fire was meant to kill. It was a message as clear as anyone would need. The assassination attempt failed to kill the intended victim. It certainly did not kill his dreams.

Wherever he was for those two weeks, the dreams were with him. But a part of Nikola Tesla died in the fire. It was the part which was tied to the past. His eyes on the future, Tesla developed his discovery into a major technology which the world seems to have forgotten. Of all those who prayed and wept over Tesla’s disappearance, one person was no longer concerned. Never again would Anne need to be troubled by the thought of Nikola Tesla. His love was already sealed. Tesla recovered from the flames.

His subsequent discoveries and inventions surpassed his former works for forty more years; special radiation projectors, self-acting heat engines, power transmitters, remote control and robotics, the “World Broadcast System”, Beam Broadcast transmitters, “aetheric reactors and aetheric engines”, cosmic ray motors, psychotronic television: the list of astounding inventions is truly awe-inspiring. Tesla demonstrated each of these systems for a select group of witnesses.

Furthermore, despite rumors of his public and scientific demise, Tesla maintained two penthouse suites atop the Hotel New Yorker in a time when such extravagance was otherwise unobtainable. One of these suites was converted into a complete radio laboratory, several accoutrements of which having been retrieved by antique radio enthusiasts. Tesla was an indefatigable researcher.

Indeed, the biography of Nikola Tesla is replete with truly mysterious designs and developments. But these are parts of his biography which must be told in other volumes…

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) was a visionary, inventor, and engineer, most commonly known today for his revolutionary contributions to the field of electromagnetism, including alternating current and radio, but, as we on the Borderlands know… that’s not all he did for us!

Interested in Nikola Tesla? Want to read more about his own research and the research his work has inspired? Check out our Nikola Tesla books, including the incredible Tesla technology research of Eric Dollard and George Trinkaus, all available through our Borderland Research Catalog.

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. LII, Number 2, Second Quarter 1996)

TRANSFORMERS

Tesla operated the magnetic arc system at higher power levels, experimenting with various impulse lengths and repetition rates. He measured the mysterious electrical current which apparently flowed through space from this system. These radiant fields operated at far greater power than before. Strange effects were suddenly appearing at certain distances from the magnetic impulser. For one thing, Tesla noticed that metallic surfaces near the impulser became covered with white brush-like corona discharges. While the sparks played in trails across the metal surfaces, Tesla observed physical movement among the metal objects. Tensions and rocking motions. Both phenomena occurring simultaneously, he was utterly fascinated. The sparks themselves seemed alive. The moving metal objects seemed to suggest new motor effects. What was this strange coalition, this synchronicity of phenomena?

Brilliant white coronas came forth with a gaseous “hissing” sound from metal points and edges. Metal plates were soon poised all around the device for observation. Tesla recognized at once that these effects were not identical with those obtained earlier while using high frequency alternating currents. These new discharges were white, energetic, and strong.

The electrical behavior of copper plates, rods, cylinders, and spheres near his primary impulser brought forth a great variety of white fluidic discharges. Strong discharge brushes appeared from the ends of copper plates. These came in prodigious volumes, hissing and arcing wildly in all directions, especially from sharp points. Tesla tried copper discs. These seemed to produce more stable discharges. He observed the curious manner in which these white discharges seemed to “race” around the disc edge at times, blending and separating with all the other sparks. Here was a greatly magnified example of Reichenbach’s Od force perhaps!

He noted the manner in which white brush discharges appeared from copper conductors of different shapes. Each form, poised near his impulser, gave a characteristic corona distribution. This coronal correspondence with specific geometric form greatly impressed him. With certain metal forms the discharges were very fluidic in appearance. Smooth, fluidic sheaths covered copper cylinders of specific size. This absolutely fascinated Tesla. There was an aerodynamic nature inherent in radiant electricity.

Copper cylinders produced remarkable volumes of white discharges. The discharges from certain sized cylinders were actually larger than those being applied. This inferred that an energy transformation effect was taking place within the cylinder. This reminded him of his initial observation with the shock-excited wires. Those which did not explode gave forth far greater voltages than were initially used. He had never understood why this was occurring. Here was another instance in which applied energy was seemingly magnified by a conductor. Why was this happening?

The key to understanding this bizarre phenomenon might be found here, he thought. He observed the discharges from copper cylinders of various diameters. Each became edged with white brush discharges when held near or actually placed within the conductive copper strap of the impulser. The discharge effect was most pronounced when cylinders were placed within the periphery of the copper strap.

Tesla noticed that white corona sheaths were actually covering the outer cylinder wall at times. These would appear, build in strength, and disappear on sudden discharge with a surprising length. The sheathing action was repetitive when the cylinder had a critically small volume. Very small cylinders behaved like rods, where discharges only appeared at their edges. The stability of these strange sheath discharges varied with cylinder diameter and length.

Tesla noticed that not every cylinder performed well near the impulser. Only cylinders of specific volume produced stable and continuous white electrical sheaths. If the cylinders were too small; then the sheaths were intermittent and unstable. There was an obvious connection between the supplied impulse train and the cylinder volume. But what was it?

Tesla surveyed the entire range of his recent discoveries. Impulses produced a radiant electrical effect. Radiant electricity, was mysteriously flowing through space. As it flowed, it focused over metal conductors as a white fluidic corona. When the shape and volume of the metal conductors were just right, the energy appeared as a stable white corona of far greater voltage than the impulse generator supplied. More questions. More discoveries.

Rods produced sparks from their edges, but not as long as copper cylinders did. Tesla selected a cylinder which worked very well, and placed several horizontal “cuts” all around its surface. He was totally surprised when, on testing, the spark discharge from the cut cylinder was notably larger than before. Increased spark length means increased voltage. But why did this diminished conductivity force the voltage up?

The cuts diminished conductivity in the cylinder by forcing the energy into a tighter “squeeze”. He had noted that electrical impulses displayed a tendency to traverse the outer surface of metal conductors. Certain cylinders were often ensheathed in a fluidic white discharge which smoothly traveled between coil ends in a tightly constricted layer. Here was something truly notable. His input voltage was far less than that produced from the upper coil terminal. But why from end to end?

The essential reason why current preferred outer surface conduction was precisely because they were impulsing. The sudden shock which any conductor experienced produced an expansive effect, where the electrical charge was rejected by the conductive interior. This “skin effect” was a function of impulse time and conductor resistance. Highly resistant objects forced all of the impulse energy to the surface.

Now he was getting somewhere. Frustrated radiant electricity constricted into a tighter surface volume when encountering metal surfaces. This intense surface focusing effect brought the voltage up to tremendous values. Here was a new transformer effect! He believed it was an electrostatic transformation. Impulse currents each possessed an electrostatic nature. The bunching of charge in the impulser brings this electrostatic field to a peak in a small instant of time.

Constricting this field volume produces a greatly magnified voltage. Placement of any conductor in the field space alters the field by constricting its shape. When symmetrical conductors of special shape, volume, and resistance are placed in this space, the field is greatly constricted. Because the impulsing electrostatic field is very abrupt, it “snaps” over the conductor from end to end.

Tesla knew that here is where the secret lies. If resistance in the conductor is great enough, the snapping electrostatic force cannot move any charges. It is forced to “grow” over the conductor surface until it discharges at the end point, where greatly magnified voltages are obtained. When the wire diameter is small enough, the wire explodes under electrostatic pressures which exceed those seen in dynamite.

In effect, Tesla had managed to interrupt a high voltage direct current several thousand times per second. In doing so, he had discovered a way to completely separate electrostatic energy from current impulses. Tesla pondered these facts, wondering if it was possible to force the magnification effect beyond the limits of standard electromagnetic transformers. In other words, how high could voltage be raised? Was there a limit to the process?

In order to achieve such enormous voltage levels, he needed a conductive shape which offered so much resistance to charge movement, that all the applied energy would become electrostatic. In effect, Tesla wanted to convert a quantity of supply power into a pure electrostatic voltage. This phenomena suggested that his goal was not impossible.

Tesla extended his idea of the cut copper cylinder to coils. From the viewpoint of electrostatic impulses, flat copper coils appear to be “continuously cut” cylinders. The electrostatic field focuses over the coil as it did with the cylinders, from end to end. A simple magnet coil of specific volume would offer so much resistance that it would be difficult to predict the actual resultant voltage which results without an empirical test.

WHITEFIRE

Constructing several of these, he was ready for the test. When each copper magnet coil was impulsed, Tesla saw tremendous white brushes leaping from their free ends: discharges approaching one million volts! But his supply power was nowhere near these voltages, and the coil was not wrapped in thousands of windings. These previously unexpected voltage magnifications were the result of an energy transformation, one which took electrical power and converted it completely into pressure. Watts into Volts, an unheard thing. It was the key to a new and explosive technology.

Tesla also found that such coils required very thin coil forms. He ceased using cellulose and cardboard forms, preferring “squirrel cage” type forms made of thin end-braced wooden rods. Wire was wound about these cylindrically disposed rods, producing the very best effects. Spacings were also tried between successive coil windings with excellent results. Spaced windings reduced sparking to a minimum.

Tesla remarked that the electrostatic potentials along the coil surface (from end to end) could be as much as ten thousand volts per inch of winding! A ten inch coil of proper volume could produce one hundred thousand volt discharges. In addition, and in confirmation of his suspicions, no current was ever measured at the free terminals of these coils. A “zero coil current” condition! It was simply another paradox which would occupy the academicians for several more argumentative decades.

Tesla suddenly realized that coils represented a truly special and valuable component in his quest. The instantaneous resistance which any coil offered to an applied impulse was so immense that current could not flow through the wire length. As a phenomenal consequence, no current flowed through the coil windings at all! But sparking was observed, traveling from coil end to end. Here was yet another anomaly!

He began placing these “secondary” coils within his “primary” impulser circuit. The strap which connected his magnetic arc to the capacitors formed the “primary”. He made necessary distinctions among his Transformer components. Few engineers actually appreciate these distinctions. The “primary” and “secondary” of Tesla Transformers are not magnetic inductors. They are resistive capacitors. Coil-shaped capacitors! Tesla Transformer action is electrostatic induction.

There were conditions for the most efficient manifestation of the effect. Maxwell could not predict these values. Tesla empirically discovered most of the rules for impulse behavior. He found that the transformative abilities of these smooth copper coils were maximum when the coil mass equaled the mass of the impulser’s conductive copper strap. It did not matter how thin the coil windings were. The equality of copper masses brought maximum transformative effects. When this equal mass condition was fulfilled, Tesla said that the coil-capacitors were “in resonance”. Electrostatic resonance.

Tesla found it possible to produce millions of electrostatic volts by this method. His first Transformers were horizontal in orientation, both free ends of the secondary coil-capacitor producing unidirectional impulses of great power. White discharges from each of these free ends had very different characteristics, indicating the unidirectional flow. Electropositive terminals always appeared brushlike and broad. Electronegative terminals always appeared constricted and dart-like.

His next Transformer series employed vertical cylinders with the base connected directly to ground. Free terminals stood quite a distance above the primary capacitor strap, spouting a brilliant white crown. These marked a turning point in his theories concerning electricity, since it was possible for him to develop well over one million volts impulse power in a device scarcely taller than a child.

These discharges were of an intense white coloration. Whitefire. Very sudden impulses color discharge channels with the brilliant whitefire because Tesla Transformers separate the effusive aether from electrons. Tesla Transformer conduct tether, not electrons. The whitefire brilliance is the distinctive aetheric trademark of Tesla Transformers.

During this time, Tesla discovered the peculiar necessity for streamlining his Transformers. Cylindrical secondary capacitors suddenly became conical forms. These presented the most bizarre appearance of all. Tesla used cone-shaped secondaries to focus the impulses. Whitefire discharges from these forms evidenced real focusing effects, the discharges themselves assuming inverted conical shapes. Their greatly intensified nature is seen in photographs which were taken under his own intrigued supervision. The magnified voltages were reaching those thresholds in which his laboratory enclosures were far too small to continue making industrial scale progress on radiant energy systems.

The fact that whitefire discharges pass through all matter, notably insulators, revealed the aetheric nature. Tesla saw that whitefire discharges could permeate all materials in a strangely gaseous manner. This penetration scarcely heated matter. In fact, the whitefire brushes often had a cooling effect. The sparks themselves, though violent in appearance, were “soft” when compared to all other forms of electricity. He had successfully removed the hazard from electricity. In blocking the slow and dense charges, he had freed the mysterious effusive nether streams inherent in electricity. Because of this, new and intensified radiant effects were constantly making their appearance across his laboratory space.

Tesla found that as these new “Impulse Transformers” greatly magnified power supplied to them, so also their radiant electric effects were equally magnified. He found it possible to wirelessly project electrostatic power to very great distances, lighting special lamps to full candlepower at hundreds of feet. In these experiments, he also conceived of signaling systems. It would be possible to switch radiant effects in telegraphic fashion. Distant vacuum tube receivers would then light or dim in corresponding manner. Tesla experimented with a special breed of telegraphic wireless in 1890.

He also found it possible to wirelessly operate specially constructed motors by properly intercepting this space-flowing energy stream. He had made his own polyphase system obsolete! The new vision was vastly more enthralling. The world would be transformed. He discovered ways to beam the energy out to any focus, even to the zenith. His plan to illuminate the night sky with a radiant energy beacon captured the minds of all who listened.

Tesla now possessed the means by which the radiant electricity could be greatly magnified and transmitted. He could transform the very nature of the radiance so that it could carry increasingly greater power. Now he could begin developing a new technology which would completely revitalize the world order. Power could be broadcast to any location without wire connections. Radiant electricity could be utilized in completely new appliances. A new world was about to be released!

SPACE FLOWING CURRENT

Understanding the analogue between these electrical impulse effects and the behavior of high pressure gases was of paramount importance. This gaseous aspect of impulse electrical radiance was perhaps the most mystifying aspect of these new-found energies. Those who sought out Tesla’s every lecture were very aware that a new electrical species had been discovered.

While yet a student, Tesla had became aware of certain scientific imperatives enunciated by Johann von Goethe. One of these was the preservation and extension of all activities-natural. Goethe implied that when natural conditions were preserved during experimentation, then nature itself was in the best configuration to reveal more unified phenomenal exhibitions to qualitative observers.

Tesla recognized that his new discovery of impulse, the result of an accident, was a total departure from polyphase alternating current. While his original vision of the vortex was applied by him to the designing of motors and generators, Tesla now realized that this was not its primary message. In fact, taken from the viewpoint which Goethe expressed, polyphase was a most unnatural form of energy.

Natural activity is suffused with impulses, not alternations. Natural activity is initiated as a primary impulse. Nature is flooded with impulses of all kinds. From lightning to nervous activities, all natural energy movements occur as impulses. Impulses were now seen by Tesla to fill the natural world. But, more fundamentally, Tesla saw that impulses flood the metaphysical world.

The mysterious flow of meanings during conversation occurs as a sequence of directed impulses in space. Though inert air vibrates in alternations with sounds uttered, the flow of meaning remains unidirectional. Intentions are also impulses. The unidirectional flow of intentions appear as impulses. Motivations proceed from the manifestation of sudden desires. Overtly expressed as actions, the initiating impulses are then fulfilled.

Tesla wished to comprehend where this “motivating force” came from, and where it went during the expressed actions. In all of this, he was very much the wonderful stereotype of the Victorian natural philosopher. His scientific pursuits followed these considerations until the last. Those who study his announcements recognize his metaphysical foundations, the basis of all his subsequent scientific quests.

Tesla observed the amazing “coordination” of new phenomena which daily seemed to bring new technological potentials before him. This wonderful synchronicity, this vortex, revealed his new and fortunate position in nature. Having somehow “broken” his fixation with the unnatural…with polyphase…he re-entered the natural once again. Impulses. Could it be that the induction of electrical impulses summoned the other impulse characteristics of nature? Was he producing a metaphysical vortex, into which all the impulse phenomena of nature would now flow? Was this the real sunset message which seized him in Budapest, so many years ago? Was electricity the fundamental natural energy. ..the motivator?

Victorian Science was not exactly sure what electricity was, there being so very many attributes associated with the term. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century natural philosophers conjectured on the nature of both electric and magnetic forces. Gilbert and Descartes shared the belief that these forces were a special kind of “flowing charge”, a space radiant stream which took place in tightly constricted lines. Some equated the electromagnetic forces with a “dark light”, which Karl von Reichenbach later proved in part.

Faraday adopted and modified the view that electromagnetic forces acted through space because they were a special flow of charge. This effusive charge movement changed when traveling through conductors, becoming more densified and retarded in velocity. Faraday’s “lines of force” were not conceived by him to be mere static tensions as modernists view them. Faraday envisioned these force lines as radiant, streaming lines. They were mobile, moving longitudinally into space.

Others would change the names, referring to electric force lines as “dia-electric” or dielectric flux, but the view remained essentially as conceived by Faraday. Young James Clerk Maxwell also believed that force lines were dynamic, longitudinal lines of flow. But flowlines of what substance? Here lay the principle problem which occupied physicists throughout the Victorian Era.

Victorian researchers and natural philosophers wished to discover the exact nature of the “flowing charge” of which force lines were composed. Most agreed that the mysterious flowing “substance” had to be an effusive, ultra-gaseous flux. This flux was composed of infinitesimal energy particles which effected the various pressures and inductions observed.

Henry and Faraday struggled with the idea of deriving usable electric power from static charges. The notions was that, since forcelines were made of a “flowing charge substance”, then fixed contacts placed on charged masses would supply electrical power forever. No one was able, however, to derive this flowing charge. Lossy discharges preceded every contact. Most researchers, whose attempts with highly charged Leyden-Jars failed, sought a more benign source of concentrated charge. The quest shifted to magnets, but the attempt remained as futile as ever. There remained no available way to derive power from the individual flowing charges of a forceline.

J.J. Thomson discovered electrons in vacuum discharges, assuming that these “electric particles” operated in all instances where electrical activity was observed. Victorian researchers did not accept this view completely. Thomson’s “electrons” were viewed as the result of violent collisions across a vacuum acceleration space. It was not possible to ascertain whether these same “Thomson currents” were active within electrical conductors operating at small voltages.

Very reputable experimenters besides Tesla continued claiming that “space flowing electricity” is the real electricity. Tesla’s classic demonstrations proved that rapid electrical impulses actually exceed the ability of fixed charges to transmit the applied forces. Charges lag where electrostatic forces continue propagating. One is compelled to see that electrostatic forces precede the movement of charges.

Tesla saw that electrostatic impulses could flow without line charges. His “zero current coils” operated simply because the charges themselves were immobilized. Electricity was shown to be more in the nature of a flowing force rather than a stream of massive particles. But what then was this “flowing current”?

In Tesla’s view, radiant electricity is a space flowing current which is NOT made of electrons. Later Victorians believed that there was a substance which both filled all space and permeated all matter. Several serious researchers claimed to have identified this gas. Notables, such as Mendeleev predicted the existence of several ultra-rare gases which preceded hydrogen. These, he claimed, were inert gases. This is why they were rarely detected. The inert gases which Mendeleev predicted formed an atmosphere which flooded all of space. These gaseous mixtures composed the aether.

Tesla and others believed that both electrical and magnetic forces were actually streams of nether gas which had been fixated in matter. Materials were somehow “polarized” by various “frictive” treatments by which an nether gas flow was induced in them. Most materials could maintain the flow indefinitely, since no work was required on their part. Matter had only to remain polarized, transducing the nether flow. The nether gas contained all the power. Unlimited power.

This ether gas power manifested as the electromagnetic forces themselves, adequate reason to pursue the development of an nether gas engine. Such an engine could run forever on the eternal kinetic energies of the aether itself, it being both generated and driven by the stars.

Tesla believed that radiant electricity is composed of aether gas. He based this belief on the fact that his zero current coils were not conducting the “slow and dense” charges usually observed in ordinary electrical circuits. Abrupt impulses produced distinctive and different effects … fluidic effects. The qualities ascribed by Tesla to “electricity” or things “electrical” in his numerous patent texts and press interviews are those which refer to the nether gas. Tesla did not refer to electron currents as “electricity”. He did not equate “electricity” with electron flow. Whenever Tesla spoke of “electrical” effects he always described their effusive, gaseous quality.

Tesla referred to space as the “ambient or natural medium”. Space, he claimed, was that which “conducts electricity”. He had found a means by which this gaseous electrical flow could be greatly concentrated, magnified, and directed. He saw that this radiant electricity was, in reality, a gaseous emanation. An aetheric emanation. This is why he made constant reference to fluidic terminology throughout his lectures.

Resistance, volume, capacity, reservoir, surface area, tension, pressure, pressure release: these were the terms upon which Tesla relied throughout his presentations. The terminology of hydraulics. Tesla also recognized that because aether was a gas, it had aerodynamic requirements.

Aether, in Tesla’s lexicon, was space flowing electricity: a gas of superlative and transcendent qualities. Aether was the electricity which filled all of space, a vast reservoir of unsurpassable power. Motive, dynamic, and free for the taking. Aether gas technology would revolutionize the world. Aether gas engines would provide an eternal power source for the world. Science, industry, corporations, financial alignments, social orders, nations— everything would change.

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. LII, Number 2, Second Quarter 1996)

THE drama of Twentieth Century Science and its intriguing relationship with financiers and governments unfold together in the remarkable life of Nikola Tesla. His is a biography replete with all the elements of tragedy. Tesla, a great discoverer of unsurpassed force, became the focal point of old insidious forces intent on destroying the future for the selfish sake of the status quo. Tesla remains a focal point of wonderment, of dream, and of worlds which yet should be to those who are familiar with his biography. For them, Tesla stands astride the quaint past century and the gleaming future. He is a technological Colossus, pointing the way to a new dawn.

The biography of Nikola Tesla should be the very first chapter in every child’s science text. Yet, we find his name stricken from the record in every avenue of which he alone holds priority. This conspicuous absence prompts wonderment. What the world does with discoverers determines the world course. In the life of Nikola Tesla we see the portrayal of our own future, the fate of the world. The achievements of this researcher were lofty. The world has not yet implemented his greatest works. For a time, all the world’s dramatis persona focused on Tesla. He remains the legend, the theme, the archetype of all Twentieth Century scientists.

But who was Nikola Tesla, and where was he from? How did he reach such a mighty stature, and what did he actually invent? Tesla was born in 1856, the son of an illustrious Serbian family. His father, an Orthodox priest, his uncles noteworthy military heroes of highest rank. He was educated in Graz, and later moved to Budapest. Throughout his life he was blessed, or haunted, by vivid visions. In the terminology of Reichenbach he would be termed an extreme sensitive. It was through these remarkable visions that Nikola Tesla invented devices which the Victorian world had never seen. Indeed, his visionary experiences produced the modern world as we know it.

He attended various Universities in Eastern Europe during his early adulthood. While delving into his studies, he became aware by the new and insidious scientific trends which questioned the validity of human sense and reason. An impassioned soul, Tesla felt the pain of modern humanity in its intellectual search for a soul. Finding no solace in any of his classes, he sought refuge in a more romantic treatment of science and nature. None could be found. Professors dutifully promoted the “new view” by which it was, declared that the natural world was “inert …dead …a mere collection of forces”.

This quantitative regime was mounting force among academes, who were then attempting the total conversion of scientific method. Those who would not accept the new order were compelled to depart from academic pursuits. Tesla totally rejected these notions on the strongest of inner intuitions. Most of his instructors would have said that he was not University material. Tesla, sensitive to every such dogmatic wind, rejected their thesis and sought some better means for knowing nature. If he was to excel in engineering, there could only be cooperation with natural force, never violence. It was clear to him that the new scientific world-attack would ultimately lead to violent responses from nature itself.

His inner conflict expressed itself openly and candidly, bringing young Tesla into certain disrepute among rigid University authorities. Universities were more like military academies than places where original thinking was conducted in open forum. Tesla challenged too many persons of esteemed rank with probing questions for which he was given rebuke but no real answers.

A gifted researcher and voracious reader, he chanced upon some forgotten volumes of natural science written by Goethe. He had not been aware that Goethe, long before he chose poetry for the vehicle of his scientific themes, had written several magnificent tomes on the natural world. Tesla found to his wonder that Goethe had experienced the very same emotions. When the new scientific dogma was just in its infancy, Goethe caught wind of it and reacted violently, even as one who stands watch in the night.

Goethe was well aware of the new scientific trend and its implications. The reduction of nature to forces and mechanisms was utterly revolting to Goethe. Now, Tesla found a notable compatriot in his experience. He secured a thorough collection of Goethe’s scientific texts and read these to the exclusion of all other philosophies. It was through this window that we may comprehend all of Tesla’s scientific methods and later statements. For in Tesla we see the quest for communion with nature, one based on the faith that mind, sensation, consciousness, and ordained structure form the world foundations.

The sense-validating Qualitative Theme again appears in Nikola Tesla. Armed with this foundation, he was able to filter and qualify every other new study with which he was presented. In addition, he was irresistibly drawn into the study of electricity, the “new magick”. In the following months, he absorbed the electrical engineering courses so rapidly that he no longer attended classes. He had taken a technical position in Budapest. Several new intuitions had seized him. Tesla became fascinated, obsessed with alternating current electricity. The problem he faced was considered insurmountable. Tesla was sure that he could devise an engine which was turned, not by contact-currents, but by magnetic field actions alone.

The struggle toward designing such a device, begun as a puzzling amusement, was now completely consuming his strength. The answer, tantalizing and near, seemed elusive. Undergirding all these efforts was the strongest desire to achieve something original, and by this, to attain financial independence for the sake of pure research. His only dream was to have a laboratory facility of his own.

The excessive labors and mental exertions nearly drove him to the brink of madness. He was, for as time, seized with strange maladies and sensitivities which physicians could not address. Reichenbach accurately describes these symptoms, characteristic of extreme sensitives. There come times when the neurological sensitivity of these individuals literally transforms and processes through their being. The emergence of these rare sensitivities affects such persons for the remainder of their lives.

Tesla found that his senses were amplified beyond reason. He was terribly frightened at first, nervous exhaustion permeating his frail being. Eventually learning to manage these rare faculties, he again resumed his life. But the visions which began in his youth were now more vivid and solid than ever before. When they came, unbidden, he could literally touch and walk around them. Now also, he was equal to receiving them. He was waiting for the revelation by which his alternating current motor would appear.

Tesla’s life came into a new focus while walking in a park with some friends, the year 1881. It was late afternoon, and Tesla became entranced with the sight of a glorious sunset. Moved to indescribable emotions, he began quoting a verse from Goethe’s “Faust”:

“The glow retreats, done is our day of toil;
it yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring,
ah, can no wing lift me from this soil…
upon his track to follow, follow soaring?”

As he reached this last line of verse, Tesla was suddenly seized by an overwhelming vision. In it, he beheld a great vortex, whirling eternally in the sun and driving across the earth with its infinite power. Completely absorbed in this glory, he became catatonic and irresponsive… to the great fear of his companions. His mind and body buzzing with the power of the vision, he suddenly blurted out, “see my motor here… watch me reverse it”. They shook him, believing he had lost his mind completely.

Rigid and resisting all of their efforts, he would not move until the vision subsided. When he was finally led to a bench, he seemed completely transformed. The remainder of the day was spent in a grand and joyous celebration, Tesla’s remaining funds supplying the feast. Throughout the long hours of that night he shared with his friends the great sight he had beheld. They spoke of the sure implications portended for the world’s future, and departed with very great expectations.

Moving to Strassburg, he was employed as an engineer in a telephone subsidiary of the Continental Edison Company. It was in a small machine shop that he constructed the world’s first brushless motors. He called them “magnetic vortex motors”. Their whirling magnetic fields baffled electrical engineers. Now, Tesla’s professors were studying his work. Goethe was absolute in his judgment of science and human nature: nature leads humanity to “follow, follow soaring”.

Tesla’s strange whirling devices worked on their very first trial. There were no connections between the rotors and stators, no sparking, lossy brushes. The motion was smooth and efficient. Numerous alternating current generators, transformers, and “brushless” motors, all were developed by Tesla in quick succession. The vision in material form. Himself a professional draftsman, he mapped out his entire Polyphase System. Tesla emigrated to America with a full portfolio of plans. America would be the place where his dreams would find fulfillment.

Continually attracted to engineering problems which none could master, his sudden visualization of the solutions became his normal mode of operation. In this respect, as well as others, he remained the wonder of all his technical assistants. He worked for Thomas Edison in New Jersey for a very short time period until securing a laboratory and financial supporters of his own.

In his first independent venture he developed arc lamps and lighting systems. When his financial supporters betrayed his trust, they left him bankrupt overnight. He became a ditch digger, suffering all the indignities which immigrants faced in America during the 1880′s. He learned the value of publicity after his incessant mention of polyphase and alternating current managed to attract the attention of certain new financial supporters. They drew him out of the ditch, but not before he demanded his own laboratory, a machine shop, and a sizable personal percentage “up front”. The result was our present day electrical distribution system.

Tesla did not invent alternating current. Tesla reinvented alternating current in the form of Polyphase Current. His Polyphase System was a novel means for blending three identical alternating currents together simultaneously, but “out of step”. The idea was similar to having three pistons on a crankshaft rather than one. Tesla’s method had wonderful advantages, especially when motors were to be operated. Formally, no one could make an alternating current motor turn at all simply because no net motion could be derived from a current which just “shuttled” to and fro.

Polyphase applied a continuous series of separate “pushes” to rotors. Tesla’s Polyphase System made brushless motors and brilliant lighting methods possible. Polyphase made it also possible to send electrical power to very great distances with little loss. Alternating electrical currents vibrated in the line. Current did not flow continuously from end to end, as in Edison’s flawed system. Edison’s direct current system could not supply electricity beyond a few city blocks before current virtually disappeared.

In efforts to discover a more efficient kind of polyphase, Tesla explored higher frequency alternating currents. During this research, he built and patented several remarkable generators. Higher frequency polyphase was found by Tesla to perform with far greater efficacy than the common sixty-cycle variety which we still use. He fully intended on implementing these special generators in the system which his patron and friend, George Westinghouse, had proliferated. The business arrangement rendered Tesla fabulously wealthy at a young age.

Tesla extended his generator frequencies in multiples of sixty until reaching some thirty thousand cycles per second. These very high frequency alternating current generators became the marvel of all the academic and engineering world. They were copied and modified by several other subsequent inventors including Alexanderson. Remarkably driven at excessive speeds, they constituted Tesla’s first belief that high frequency alternating current generators would supply the world’s power.

High frequency current phenomena were new and exceedingly curious. A line of experimental research was conducted in order to evaluate new safe and possibly more efficient ways for transmitting power along long elevated lines. Tesla stated that the transmission of such safe currents across very long powerline distances in the future would be a certainty, seeing their wonderful new qualities.

Tesla found that high frequency currents were harmless when contacted by the human body. Discharges from these generators traversed the outer surface of materials, never penetrating matter with depth. There was no danger when working with high frequency currents. He also observed their very curious and beautiful spark effects. They hissed and fizzled all over wire conductors, could stimulate luminescence in low pressure gas bulbs, seemed to traverse insulative barriers with ease, and made little pinwheels spin like delicate little fireworks displays.

Though curious, the effects were weak and furtive. They seemed to intimate some future technology which he was yet unable to penetrate. Tesla learned that his intuitions and visions were infallible. What he guessed usually proved true.’ This very personal revelation, he later claimed, was his greatest discovery.

As the safety of all personnel was his main concern, he was consumed with the idea of making his High Frequency Polyphase System completely safe for human operators and consumers alike. An extensive examination of each System component was undertaken with this aim in mind. Tesla was thorough and relentless in his quest for safety and efficiency.

But, his involvement with alternating currents would come to an abrupt and unexpected end. During a series of experiments which followed these high frequency tests, an amazing seldom-mentioned accident occurred in which Tesla observed a phenomenon which forever altered his view of electricity and technology.

SHOCKING DISCOVERY

Tesla was an avid and professional experimenter throughout his life. His curiosity was of such an intense nature that he was able to plumb the mysteries of an electrical peculiarity with no regard for his own comfort. Whereas Edison would work and sleep for a few hours on the floor, Tesla would never sleep until he had achieved success in an experimental venture. This marathon could last for days. He was once observed to work through a seventy two hour period without fatigue. His technicians were in awe of him.

The Victorian Era was flooding over with new electrical discoveries by the day. Keeping up with the sheer volume of strange electrical discoveries and curiosities was a task which Tesla thoroughly enjoyed …and preferred. His Polyphase System in perfect working order, the pleasurable occupation of studying new gazettes and scientific journals often fascinated his mind to the exclusion of all other responsibilities. A millionaire and world heralded genius before the age of thirty, Tesla sought the pure kind of research he had so long craved.

Whenever he observed any intriguing electrical effect he immediately launched into experimental study with a hundred variations. Each study brought him such a wealth of new knowledge that, based on phenomena which he observed, he was immediately able to formulate new inventions and acquire new patents.

Tesla’s New York laboratories had several sections. This complex was arranged as a multi-level gallery, providing a complete research and production facility. Tesla fabricated several of his large transformers and generators in the lower floors, where the machine shops of this building were housed. The upper floors contained his private research laboratories. He had attracted a loyal staff of technicians. Of all these, Kolman Czito was a trusted friend who would stand by Tesla for the remainder of his life. Czito was the machine shop foreman in each of Tesla’s New York laboratories.

Tesla observed that instantaneous applications of either direct or alternating current to lines often caused explosive effects. While these had obvious practical applications in improvement and safety, Tesla was seized by certain peculiar aspects of the phenomenon. He had observed these powerful blasts when knife-switches were quickly closed and opened in his Polyphase System. Switch terminals were often blasted to pieces when the speed of the switchman matched the current phase.
Tesla assessed the situation very accurately. Suddenly applied currents will stress conductors both electrically and mechanically. When the speed of the switch-action is brief enough, and the power reaches a sufficiently high crescendo, the effects are not unlike a miniature lightning stroke. Electricity initially heats the wire, bringing it to vapor point. The continual application of current then blasts the wire apart by electrostatic repulsion. But was this mechanistic explanation responsible for every part of the phenomenon?

The most refractory metals were said to be vaporized by such electrical blasts. Others had used this phenomenon to generate tiny granular diamonds. Yes, there were other aspects about this violent impulse phenomenon which tantalized him. Sufficiently intrigued, he developed a small lightning “generator” consisting of a high voltage dynamo and small capacitor storage bank. His idea was to blast sections of wire with lightning-like currents. He wanted to observe the mechanically explosive effects which wires sustain under sudden high-powered electrifications.

Instantaneous applications of high current and high voltage could literally convert thin wires into vapor. Charged to high direct current potentials, his capacitors were allowed to discharge across a section of thin wire. Tesla configured his test apparatus to eliminate all possible current alternations. The application of a single switch contact would here produce a single, explosive electrical surge: a direct current impulse resembling lightning. At first Tesla hand-operated the system, manually snapping a heavy knife switch on and off. This became less favorable as the dynamo voltages were deliberately increased.

He quickly closed the large knife switch held in his gloved hand. Bang! The wire exploded. But as it did so, Tesla was stung by a pressure blast of needle-like penetrations. Closing the dynamo down, he rubbed his face, neck, arms, chest, and hands. The irritation was distinct. He thought while the dynamo whirred down to a slow spin. The blast was powerful. He must have been sprayed by hot metal droplets as small as smoke particles. Though he examined his person, he fortunately found no wounds. No evidence of the stinging blast which he so powerfully felt.

Placing a large glass plate between himself and the exploding wire, he performed the test again. Bang! The wire again turned to vapor…but the pressured stinging effect was still felt. But, what was this? How were these stinging effects able to penetrate the glass plate? Now he was not sure whether he was experiencing a pressure effect or an electrical one. The glass would have screened any mechanical shrapnel, but would not appreciably shield any electrical effects.

Through careful isolation of each experimental component, Tesla gradually realized that he was observing a very rare electrical phenomenon. Each “bang” produced the same unexpected shock response in Tesla, while exploding small wire sections into vapor.

The instantaneous burst produced strange effects never observed with alternating currents. The painful shocking sensation appeared each time he closed or opened the switch. These sudden shock currents were IMPULSES, not alternations. What surprised him was the fact that these needle-like shocks were able to reach him from a distance: he was standing almost ten feet from the discharge site!

These electrical irritations expanded out of the wire in all directions and filled the room in a mystifying manner. He had never before observed such an effect. He thought that the hot metal vapor might be acting as a “carrier” for the electrical charges. This would explain the strong pressure wave accompanied by the sensation of electrical shock. He utilized longer wires. When the discharge wire was resistive enough, no explosion could occur.

Wire in place, the dynamo whirred at a slower speed. He threw die switch for a brief instant, and was again caught off guard by the stinging pressure wave! The effect persisted despite the absence of an explosive conductor. Here was a genuine mystery. Hot vapor was not available to “carry” high voltage charges throughout the room. No charge carriers could be cited in this instance to explain the stinging nature of the pressure wave. So what was happening here?

The pressure wave was sharp and strong, like a miniature thunderclap. It felt strangely “electrical” when the dynamo voltage was sufficiently high. In fact, it was uncomfortably penetrating when the dynamo voltage was raised beyond certain thresholds. It became clear that these pressure waves might be electrified. Electrified soundwaves. Such a phenomenon would not be unexpected when high voltages were used. Perhaps he was fortunate enough to observe the rare phenomenon for the first time.

He asked questions. How and why did the charge jump out of the line in this strange manner? Here was a phenomenon which was not described in any of the texts with which he was familiar. And he knew every written thing on electricity. Thinking that he was the victim of some subtle, and possibly deadly short circuit, he rigorously examined the circuit design. Though he searched, he could find no electrical leakages. There were simply no paths for any possible corona effects to find their way back into the switching terminal which he held.

Deciding to better insulate the arrangement in order that all possible line leakages could be eradicated, he again attempted the experiment. The knife switch rapidly closed and opened, he again felt the unpleasant shock just as painfully as before. Right through the glass shield! Now he was perplexed. Desiring total distance from the apparatus, he modified the system once more by making it “automatic”.

He could freely walk around the room during the test He could! hold the shield or simply walk without it. A small rotary spark switch was arranged in place of the hand-held knife switch. The rotary switch was arranged to interrupt the dynamo current in slow, successive intervals. The system was actuated, the motor switch cranked it contacts slowly. Snap …snap …snap …each contact produced the very same room-filling irritation.

This time it was most intense. Tesla could not get away from the shocks, regardless of his distance from the apparatus across his considerably large gallery hall. He scarcely could get near enough to deactivate the rotating switch. From what he was able to painfully observe, thin sparks of a bright blue-white color stood straight out of the line with each electrical contact.

The shock effects were felt far beyond the visible spark terminations. This seemed to indicate that their potential was far greater than the voltage applied to the line. A paradox! The dynamo charge was supplied at a tension of fifteen thousand volts, yet the stinging sparks were characteristics of electrostatic discharges exceeding some two hundred fifty thousand volts. Somehow this input current was being transformed into a much higher voltage by an unknown process. No natural explanation could be found. No scientific explanation sufficed. There was simply not enough data on the phenomenon for an answer. And Tesla knew that this was no ordinary phenomenon. Somewhere in the heart of this activity was a deep natural secret. Secrets of this kind always opened humanity into new revolutions.

Tesla considered this strange voltage multiplying effect from several viewpoints. The problem centered around the fact that there was no magnetic induction taking place. Transformers raise or lower voltage when current is changing. Here were impulses. Change was happening during the impulse. But there was no transformer in the circuit. No wires were close enough for magnetic inductions to take place. Without magnetic induction, there could theoretically be -no transformation effect. No conversion from low to high voltage at all. Yet, each switch snap brought both the radiating blue-white sparks and their painful sting.

IMPULSES

Tesla noted that the strange sparks were more like electrostatic discharges. If the sparks had been direct current arcs reaching from the test line, he would surely have been killed with the very first close of the switch. The physical pressure and stinging pain of these sparks across such distances could not be explained. This phenomenon had never been reported by those who should have seen and felt its activities.

Tesla gradually came to the conclusion that the shock effect was something new, something never before observed. He further concluded that the effect was never seen before because no one had ever constructed such a powerful impulse generator. No one had ever reported the phenomenon because no one had ever generated the phenomenon.

Tesla once envisioned a vortex of pure energy while looking into a sunset The result of this great Providential vision was polyphase current. A true revelation. But this, this was an original discovery found through an accident. It was an empirical discovery of enormous significance. Here was a new electrical force, an utterly new species of electrical force which should have been incorporated into the electrical equations of James Clerk Maxwell. Surprisingly, it was not.

Tesla now questioned his own knowledge. He questioned the foundations on which he had placed so much confidence in the last several years. Maxwell was the “rule and measure” by which all of Tesla’s polyphase generators had been constructed. Tesla penetrated the validity of Maxwell’s mathematical method. It was well known that Maxwell had derived his mathematical descriptions of electromagnetic induction from a great collection of available electrical phenomena. Perhaps he had not studied enough of the phenomena while doing so.

Perhaps newer phenomena had not been discovered, and were therefore unavailable to Maxwell for consideration. How was Maxwell justified in stating his equations as “final”? In deriving the laws of electromagnetic induction, Maxwell had imposed his own “selection process” when deciding which electrical effects were the “basic ones”. There were innumerable electrical phenomena which had been observed since the eighteenth century. Maxwell had difficulty selecting what he considered to be “the most fundamental” induction effects from the start.

The selection process was purely arbitrary. After having “decided” which induction effects were “the most fundamental”, Maxwell then reduced these selected cases and described them mathematically. His hope was to simplify matters for engineers who were designing new electrical machines. The results were producing “prejudicial” responses in engineers who could not bear the thought of any variations from the “standard”. Tesla had experienced this kind of thematic propaganda before, when he was a student. The quantitative wave of blindness was catching up with him.

Tesla and others knew very well that there were strange and anomalous forms of electromagnetic induction which were constantly and accidentally being observed. These seemed to vary as the experimental apparatus varied. New electrical force discoveries were a regular feature of every Nature Magazine issue. Adamant in the confidence that all electrical phenomena had been both observed and mathematically described, academicians would be very slow to accept Tesla’s claims.

But this academic sloth is not what bothered Tesla. He had already found adequate compensation for his superior knowledge in the world of industry. Tesla, now in possession of an effect which was not predicted by Maxwell, began to question his own knowledge. Had he become a “mechanist”, the very thing which he reviled when a student? Empirical fact contradicted what that upon he based his whole life’s work. Goethe taught that nature leads humanity.

The choice was clear: accept the empirical evidence and reject the conventional theory. For a time he struggled with a way to “derive” the shock effect phenomenon by mathematically wrestling “validity” from Maxwell’s equations … but could not. A new electrical principle had been revealed. Tesla would take this, as he did the magnetic vortex, and from it weave a new world.

What had historically taken place was indeed unfortunate. Had Maxwell lived after Tesla’s accidental discovery, then the effect might have been included in the laws. Of course, we have to assume that Maxwell would have “chosen” the phenomenon among those which he considered “fundamental”.

There was no other way to see his new discovery now. Empirical fact contradicted theoretical base. Tesla was compelled to follow. The result was an epiphany which changed Tesla’s inventive course. For the remainder of his life he would make scientific assertions which few could believe, and fewer yet would reproduce. There yet exist several reproducible electrical phenomena which cannot be predicted by Maxwell. They continually appear whenever adventuresome experimenters make accidental observations.

FOCUS

High voltage impulse currents produced a hitherto unknown radiant effect. In fact, here was an electrical “broadcast” effect whose implementation in a myriad of bizarre designs would set Tesla apart from all other inventors. This new electrical force effect was a preeminent discovery of great historical significance. Despite his fact, few academicians grasped its significance as such. Focused now on dogmatizing Maxwell’s work, they could not accept Tesla’s excited announcements. Academes argued that Tesla’s effect could not exist. They insisted that Tesla revise his statements.

Tesla’s mysterious effect could not have been predicted by Maxwell because Maxwell did not incorporate it when formulating His equations. How could he have done so, when the phenomenon was just discovered? Tesla now pondered the academic ramifications of this new effect. What then of his own and possibly other electrical phenomena which were not incorporated into Maxwell’s force laws? Would academes now ignore their existence? Would they now even dare to reject the possibility of such phenomena on the basis of an incomplete mathematical description?

Seeing that the effect could grant humanity enormous possibilities when once tamed, Tesla wished to study and implement the radiant electrical action under much safer conditions. The very first step which he took before proceeding with this experimental line was the construction of special grounded copper barriers: shields to block the electrical emanations from reaching him.

They were large, body sized mantles of relatively thick copper. He grounded these to insure his own complete safety. In electrical terms, they formed a “Faraday Cage” around him. This assembly would block out all static discharges from ever reaching Tesla during the tests. Now he could both observe and write what he saw with confidence.

Positioned behind his copper mantle, Tesla initiated the action. ZZZZZZ…the motorized switch whirring, dynamo voltage interrupted several hundred times per second, the shock action was now continuous. He felt a steady rhythm of electrostatic irritations right through the barrier accompanied by a pressure wave which kept expanding. An impossibility. No electrical influence should have passed through the amount of copper which composed the shield. Yet this energetic effect was penetrating, electrically shocking, and pressured. He had no words to describe this aspect of the new phenomenon. The shocks really stung.

Tesla was sure that this new discovery would produce a completely new breed of inventions, once tamed and regulated. Its effects differed completely from those observed in high frequency alternating current. These special radiant sparks were the result of non-reversing impulses. In fact, this effect relied on the non-reversing nature of each applied burst for its appearance. A quick contact charge by a powerful high voltage dynamo was performing a feat of which no alternating generator was capable. Here was a demonstration of “broadcast electricity”.

Most researchers and engineers are fixed in their view of Nikola Tesla and his discoveries. They seem curiously rigidified in the thought that his only realm of experimental developments lay in alternating current electricity. This is an erroneous conception which careful patent study reveals. Few recognize the documented facts that, after his work with alternating currents was completed, Tesla switched over completely to the study of impulse currents. His patents from this period to the end of his career are filled with the terminology equated with electrical impulses alone.

The secret lay principally in the direct current application in a small time interval. Tesla studied this time increment, believing that it might be possible to eliminate the pain field by shortening the length of time during which the switch contact is made. In a daring series of experiments, he developed rapid mechanical rotary switches which handled very high direct voltage potentials. Each contact lasted an average of one ten-thousandth second.

Exposing himself to such impulses of very low power, he discovered to his joy and amazement that the pain field was nearly absent. In its place was a strange pressure effect which could be felt right through the copper barriers. Increasing the power levels of this device produced no pain increase, but did produce an intriguing increased pressure field. The result of simple interrupted high voltage DC, the phenomenon was never before reported except by witnesses of close lightning strokes. This was erroneously attributed however to pressure effects in air.

Not able to properly comprehend their nature at first, Tesla also conservatively approached the pressure phenomenon as due to air pressure. He had first stated that the pressure field effect was due to sharp soundwaves which proceeded outward from the suddenly charged line. In fact, he reported this in a little-known publication where he first announced the discovery. Calling the pressure effects “electrified soundwaves”, he described their penetrating nature in acoustic terms.
Further experimentation however, gradually brought the new awareness that both the observed pressure effect and electrical shock fields were not taking place in air at all. He demonstrated that these actions could take place in oil immersions. Impulse charged lines were placed in mineral oil and carefully watched. Strong pressure projections emerged from sharp wire ends in the oil, as if air were streaming out under high pressure.

Tesla fast believed that this stream was wire-absorbed air driven off by electrical pressure. Continual operation of the phenomenon convinced him that the projected stream was not air at all. Furthermore, he was not at a loss to explain the effect, but was reluctant to mention his own theory of what had been generated by high voltage direct current impulses.

Tesla made electrical measurements of this projective stream. One lead of a galvanometer was connected to a copper plate, the other grounded. When impulses were applied to wire line, the unattached and distant meter registered a continual direct current. Current through space without wires! Now here was something which impulses achieved, never observed with alternating currents of any frequency.

Analysis of this situation proved that electrical energy or electrically productive energies were being projected from the impulse device as rays, not waves. Tesla was amazed to find these rays absolutely longitudinal in their action through space, describing them in a patent as “light-like rays”. These observations conformed with theoretical expectations described in 1854 by Kelvin.

In another article Tesla calls them “dark-rays”, and “rays which are more light-like in character”. The rays neither diminished with the inverse square of the distance nor the inverse of the distance from their source. They seemed to stretch out in a progressive shock-shell to great distances without any apparent loss.

MAGNETIC ARCS

Nikola Tesla now required greater power levels than those provided by his mechanical rotary switch system. He also saw the need for controlling ultra-rapid current interruptions of high repetition (“succession”) rates. No mechanical switch could perform in this manner. He had to envision and devise some new means by which ultra-rapid interruptions could be obtained. In his best and most efficient system, highly charged capacitors were allowed to impulsively discharge across special heavy duty magnetic arcs.

The magnetic arc gap was capable of handling the large currents required by Tesla. In achieving powerful, sudden impulses of one polarity, these were the most durable. Horn shaped electrodes were positioned with a powerful permanent magnetic field. Placed at right angles to the arc itself, the currents which suddenly formed in this magnetic space were accelerated along the horns until they were extinguished. Rapidly extinguished!

Arcs were thus completely extinguished within a specified time increment Tesla configured the circuit parameters so as to prevent capacitor alternations from occurring through the arc space. Each arc discharge represented a pure unidirectional impulse of very great power. No “contaminating current reversals” were possible or permissible.

Reversals.. alternations.. would ruin the “shock broadcast”. The effect was never observed when alternating currents were engaged. High voltage was supplied by a large dynamo. Tesla could speed or slow this dynamo with a hand operated rheostat. Power was applied in parallel across the capacitor. The magnetic arc was linked almost directly to one side of this capacitor, a long and thick copper strap connecting the magnetic arc and the far capacitor plate.

This simple asymmetric positioning of the magnetic arc discharger to one side of the dynamo supply produced pure unidirectional electropositive or electronegative impulses as desired. Tesla designed this very simple and powerfully effective automatic switching system for achieving ultra-rapid impulses of a single polarity. Capacitor values, arc distances, magnetic fields and dynamo voltages were all balanced and adjusted to yield a repetitive train of ultrashort singular impulses without “flyback” effects.

The system is not really well understood by engineers, the exceptional activities of the arc plasma introducing numerous additional features to the overall system. While the effects which Tesla claimed can be reproduced with electron tube impulse circuitry, these produce decidedly inferior effects. The overall power of the basic arc discharge is difficult to equal. Tesla eventually enclosed the magnetic arc, immersing the gap space in mineral oil. This blocked premature arcing, while very greatly increasing the system output.

Most imagine that the Tesla impulse system is merely a “very high frequency alternator”. This is a completely erroneous notion, resulting in effects which can never equal those to which Tesla referred. The magnetic discharge device was a true stroke of genius. It rapidly extinguishes capacitor charge in a single disruptive blast. This rapid current rise and decline formed an impulse of extraordinary power. Tesla called this form of automatic arc switching a “disruptive discharge” circuit, distinguishing it from numerous other kinds of arc discharge systems. It is very simply a means for interrupting a high voltage direct current without allowing any backward current alternations. When these conditions are satisfied, the Tesla Effect is then observed.

The asymmetrical positioning of the capacitor and the magnetic arc determines the polarity of the impulse train. If the magnetic arc device is placed near the positive charging side, then the strap is charged negative and the resultant current discharge is decidedly negative.

Tesla approached the testing of his more powerful systems with certain fear. Each step of the testing process was necessarily a dangerous one. But he discovered that when the discharges exceeded ten thousand per second, the painful shock effect was absent. Nerves of the body were obviously incapable of registering the separate impulses. But this insensitivity could lead to a most seductive death. The deadly aspects of electricity might remain. Tesla was therefore all the more wary of the experiments.

He noticed that, though the pain field was gone, the familiar pressure effect remained. In its place came a defined and penetrating heat. Tesla was well aware that such heat could signal internal electrocution. He had already made a thorough study of these processes, recognizing that such heating precedes the formation of electrical arcs through the body. Nevertheless, he applied power to the dynamo in small but steady intervals.

Each increase brought increase in the internal heating effects. He remained poised at each power level, sensing and scoping his own physiology for danger signs. He continued raising the power level until the magnetic arc reached its full buzzing roar. Tesla found that this heat could be adjusted and, when not extreme, was completely enjoyable. So soothing, relaxing, and comfortable was this manifestation that Tesla daily exposed himself to the energies. An electrical “sauna”.

He later reported these findings in medical journals, freely offering the discovery to the medical world for its therapeutic benefits. Tesla was a notorious user of all such therapies from this time on, often falling into a deep sleep in the warm and penetrating influences. Once, having overindulged the electro-sauna therapy, he fell into a profoundly deep sleep from which he emerged a day later! He reported that this experience was not unpleasant, but realized that proper “electro-dosages” would necessarily have to be determined by medical personnel.

During this time, Tesla found shorter impulse lengths where the heating effect disappeared altogether, rendering the radiance absolutely harmless. These impulse trains were so very high that the deepest nerves of one’s body could not sense the permeating radiant energy field. Now he could pursue his vision of broadcast energy systems without fear of rendering to humanity a technological curse, rather than a true blessing.

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. 51, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 1995)

The Most Notably Forgotten Episode in “Hot” Fusion History

A recent excellent article by Lawrence Forsley recounted each major step in the history of “hot fusion” projects. The account depicts the arduous pursuit of hopeful and brilliant personnel chasing after a prize which never appeared. This chapter in technological history left most scientific researchers with a sense of silent despair. Exploration of this inward sense of loss was an emotional item which few actually and honestly addressed. Yet the projects rolled on.

Hot fusion was THE cold war quest. Besides the space race, FUSION was the socio­scientific dream. The loss of hope… the loss of myth… in this massive social project produced a brooding meditation among engineers who were devoted to its fulfillment. For the better part of twenty years there were billions of dollars spent for fusion research… seemingly in vain.

Each lost social dream becomes social malaise. Wars develop when social myths are deferred. The synthetic manufacture of new and continual myths replaces the hope deferred. Governments and regulators sponsor such alternative myths continually. The gross funding of new fusion projects represents a means for maintaining public morale at a very subliminal level.

The elusive prize was replaced by countless journals, articles, and texts… as if so much paper would fulfill the absence of the Grail. This general sense of misdirection among most physicists was balanced by a furious return to the chalkboards and publishing homes. The dream deferred became mere talk and analysis. Theoreticians, at least, found continual employment.

Shelves of once optimistic theoretical works on fusion were suddenly flooded over with equally optimistic and authoritarian apologetics. These inflated works proclaimed the “way out” through newer magnetic containment systems.

While most project personnel simply dissociated themselves from the race for controlled fusion, others (foolishly) raised their broken swords higher and “challenged nature to achieve where anti others failed. This of course meant that grant monies were to be sought again… despite the generally accepted hopelessness of the quest Fusion researchers were trapped, like some modern Tantalus… in magnetic containment.

MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT

The tragedy of each magnetic containment device lay chiefly in the theoretical promise which always failed. The hope deferred seemed to flood each separate project not long after a particular device was constructed. One usually knew after the very first trial what the end would be… and how soon it would come.

In methodic succession, and after several billion dollars were spent it became apparent that the magnetic containment systems would not succeed at all. Mercurial and elusive, certain designers attempted to “steal the secret” despite the natural odds: to fight with Nature and wrestle from her jealous hands the guarded gold. Not one imagined that perhaps their method was the wrong one… that Nature would not let go of her gold because the suitors were behaving like barbarians.

The need for the gigantic was also a feature of these projects. No units smaller than a gymnasium could meet the theoretical need. Somehow both the theoreticians and project designers believed the delusion that size and symmetry would “make the difference” in magnetic systems. Always the secret hope was held that “this one might do it.” Small laboratory devices produced unstable plasmas because they were small. Larger devices should produce more crushing power… like building an ever larger press to squeeze a lightning bolt.

Many project designers simply failed to promise a fusion achievement altogether from the outset… preferring to maintain the “safe grounds of plasma analysis.” The ancillary projects (instability analysis, arc analysis, plasma contamination, plasma diagnostics) made their appearance… a flood of “studies”… but no reactor. Grant money was poured into “plasma analytic methodologies” and almost dominated the scene where working fusion reactors should have stood.

P. Kapitza studied ball lightning phenomena with a remarkably opened mind when few academicians would not even dare touch the topic at all. S. Ulam also studied reports of the accidental formation of plasmoids among submarine generators and arc switching devices. Others studied the piezoelectric formation of plasmoids in rock fractures. Thorough research on Tesla Technology (and Tesla’s means for generating plasmoids at will) seemed to open doorways toward new possibilities.

M. Theroux developed a special Tesla transformer which actually projected small aerial plasmoids… and could repeat the performance. The Air Force funded a much larger project toward this end (R Golka). Each was looking for the answer in a new realm. And this was the precise answer… to look elsewhere for that which intuition envisions.

Intuition craves confirmation however. Too few of these “new view” researchers were actually familiar with the archives of both natural and laboratory anomalies. No one remembers what has already been achieved in isolated laboratories. Very often a chance occurrence, however subtle, gives the new direction to the world. New hydrogen energy, you will remember, was observed by several qualified persons in diverse places. Had these records been forgotten, perhaps the new revolution might never have been forged.

Were the hot fusionists true and ardent students of the stored periodical treasurehouse they too would not have simply written more surficial papers on their views. They would have known what to do to achieve the prize itself, for the answer was there… in a group of patents some twenty five years old which should have been known by all of them collectively. Perhaps they would have found their way back to the forgotten mines… but then came Tokamak.

When the Tokamak rose in the east, it seemed to offer the brightest new morning of life for fusion research. Many stole away to steal the secret of its fire. But even the Tokamak failed to deliver the immediacy of its promised prize. So deeply resentful were many researchers after the postponement of immediate success that few would even believe that the goal could be reached at all.

It is not unreasonable (given the emotional infrastructure of fusion research) that science had become first melancholy and then sanguine in all its subsequent discussions of controlled nuclear fusion. The topic represents (to the crusaders) a major dragon left undefeated. Most would rather forget the dream and all knowledge of it.

Forgotten knowledge was the main problem. Even before magnetic containment was attempted, there was a simpler answer to the particle containment problem. In his closing paragraphs Dr. Forsley asks that we imagine the truths which were lost through out this period in venture­technology.

An answer had been recorded into the scientific ledgers already which would have spared these valiant workers much time, money, and disappointment. Forgotten knowledge started all the researchers off in the wrong direction from the start.

FORGOTTEN KNOWLEDGE

Unexpected devices of great import emerge from very old patent registers and periodicals. These developments span two hundred years of astounding technological progress, and chronicle our epistemological progress as a civilization. The literary treasure house of this time period contains incredible discoveries which remain yet unrecognized, unevaluated, and forgotten.

Despite this fact, many academicians are overly confident that “old knowledge” has been thoroughly comprehended and admixed into contemporary theory and is, therefore, expendable. This view is inwardly believed to such a degree that old texts are methodically being gathered into “annex” warehouses. These treasures are then permitted to decay and are (gradually) eliminated.

This shockingly repugnant pride is the very opposite of scientific sensibility. This mindset is counter­productive and totally self destructive. Each new unexpected discovery comes as a sharp rebuke to those who remain unenlightened concerning the past. Old texts preserve forgotten thoughts… not disproven thoughts. Researchers have committed their often anomalous and disquieting observations and findings to the journals and texts. It is traditional practice that what cannot be now explained must be treasured, pondered, and comprehended for some future purpose. Discovery and anomaly are rare gifts which must be honored and preserved until understood.

The scientific historian methodically searches out catalogues of forgotten phenomena by thorough examination of old periodicals, texts, and patent files. The retrieval of old and forgotten observations, discoveries, scientific anecdotal records, and rare natural phenomena provide the intellectual dimension desperately needed by modern researchers who work in a vacuum of dogma. It is astounding to find the volumes of rare and anomalous phenomena­lists and laboratory anecdotes made by credible and qualified Victorian researchers throughout older volumes of Nature Magazine and The Electrician (c.1890).

The retrieval of inventions, designs, and other applications reveal repeatable phenomena “in application” which demand re­evaluation of tenaciously held theoretical models. The trained researcher identifies, distinguishes, and secures those particular forgotten discoveries which violate contemporarily held theoretical models. The aim of this research is new knowledge through reevaluation.

Eric Dollard is an electrical engineer who has done remarkably exhaustive historical research and experimental verifications of scientific claims made by Nikola Tesla a century before. It was through Mr. Dollard that we learned about a forgotten chapter in the art of controlled thermonuclear fusion like no other. In fact, those who read this article may be shocked to learn the real truth abouttone specific “hot fusion” project from 1962 until 1967.

The reality of anyone controlling fusion reactions… and reaching self­sustaining reaction stage would sound bizarre to anyone familiar with the historical publications. Of all the venture projects chasing after the hot fusion Grail one group of researchers looked directly into Nature’s brilliant face and saw her sparkling eyes. Mr. Dollard’s research on unusual electron tubes led him into an exhaustive study of several vacuum tube designs patented by the father of electronic television: Dr. Philo T. Farnsworth. There he found the forgotten gem.

PHILO T. FARNSWORTH

Among the incredibly prolific patents of Dr. Farnsworth are two working designs for achieving practical nuclear (“hot”) fusion. Dr. Farnsworth is the original designer of true electronic television. He had to develop the entire system of electronic television with all its parts. Image dissectors, pulse transmitters, synchronizing oscillators, synchronous scanning, image analyzers, receivers, and special cathode ray tubes… Farnsworth conceived, designed, and hand built each of them.

The technological demands of his complete television system required the development of very special electron tubes from start to finish. Each component demanded new tube designs and operational theories. In fact, examination of the Farnsworth patents reveals nothing but novel tube designs without contemporary equal.

Existing multi­element tubes could neither match the stringent power demands or frequency requirements of television. Therefore Farnsworth developed numerous unusual tubes to make his television oscillators, receivers, and transmitters more efficient. No existing technology could match the performance characteristics of his UHF oscillators, electron multipliers, and cold cathode signal amplifier tubes when he patented them.

Farnsworth designed numerous high­power UHF tubes. Notable among these designs were cold cathode devices (some of which employed soft radioactive materials), photomultipliers, multipactors, IR imaging tubes, image storage tubes, and image amplifiers. Each was a marvel of originality and inspiration. But the multipactor was a true wonder.

The multipactor design employs two opposed concave cathodes and a central series of cylindrical anodes. Noise surges generate and sustain powerful tunable oscillations within the multipactor when voltage is simply applied to the cathodes and anode. The multipactor utilizes photomultiplier effects to supply electrons. Multipactor performance borders on the anomalous, approaching “impossible” efficiency coefficients.. His success was followed closely by engineers from every military and industrial group. Full­scale research addressed the multipactor efficiency “problem”. Reports from the time period may be easily secured for study and re­evaluation.

Farnsworth continued to be a prolific designer of very unusual electron tubes before and after World War II. Casual examination of his patents continually proved the genius behind the legend. Dr. Farnsworth explored new alternatives and designed radically new concepts into a series of electron tubes which became as heralded as his development of electronic television. Each development produced in own species of anomalous phenomena These were each utilized and compounded in his successive developments. The patent record tells the story best.

PLASMOIDS AND VIRTUAL ELECTRODES

While testing high power UHF tubes Farnsworth discovered an anomalous self­focussiog space charge phenomenon. These space charge plasmoids glowed all the more brilliant with increasing application of voltage… a control characteristic. He named these point­plasma phenomena “poissors”.

“Poissors are brilliant space­suspended plasmoids of star­like appearance. When Dr. Farnsworth operated his multipactors the poissor phenomena manifested themselves with special brilliance. Electron optical focusing concentrates ions just as mirrors concentrate light. Early Farnsworth multipactors utilized twin opposed concave cold cathodes.

The design feature of concave electrodes was a radical departure in the world of electron tube designs at the time. Most electrodes of the day were simple planar surfaces. The concaves permitted the re­discovery of electron optics… a phenomenon originally witnessed by Sir William Crookes and forgotten. Students are directed to the Crookes tube with its concave cathodes.

Farnsworth multipactors and cold cathode discharge tubes produce optically focused “poissors” and exhibited all the response­control characteristics later sought by plasma physicists in their race toward achieving hot fusion. Control­responsive poissors would shrink in size, increase in ionic density, and produce more brilliant light with increasing voltage application.

Notably discovered in 1936, the poissor phenomenon made a new breed of electron power tubes and plasma devices possible. The existence of these mysterious suspended plasmoids stimulated Farnsworth’s research toward the refined use of electron optics. His refinement and use of the newly manifested phenomena produced remarkable performance efficiencies in UHF and SHF applications. In their unprecedented spherical geometries the Farnsworth tubes proved incredibly efficient and long lasting.

Virtual electrodes could influence electron behavior in power tubes. Ions could be bound in small plasma points (poissors) exhibiting stability in ionic multi­layers and sheaths. Poissors could absorb and store energy: an aspect which deeply impressed Dr. Farnsworth. The time for their retrieval from the archives of the anomalous drew close.

By 1953 he had conceived of a means for using the poissor phenomenon to produce controlled nuclear fusion reactions.. The patent record shows that Farnsworth achieved the goal. Yet, there are far more deeply entwined reasons why few have ever heard of Dr. Farnsworth’s contributions and achievements besides the academic censure of this possibility.

THE “FUSOR”

In 1959 H. S. Geneen (Raytheon) invited Dr. Farnsworth to address the ITT board of directors on controlled nuclear fusion. Against the verbalized misgivings of the AEC this lecture­presentation was given. Shortly thereafter a preliminary test on the Farnsworth “Fusor” was performed in a small ITT basement laboratory. His first design for a hot fusion reactor was realized in 1959. ITT monitored all the research and brought its own supervisors into Farnsworth’s team.

Virtual poissor plasmoids of deuterium would be isolated, shaped, confined, treated, balanced, or moved without magnetic confinement. Farnsworth’s solution to reactant confinement was elegant, simple, inexpensive, and highly efficient. He designed a new and dramatically original tube which he named “The Fusor”. This was the summation of a lifetime’s discoveries and development. I believe it is the most advanced electron power tube ever designed.

The Fusor is a device which produces controllable hot fusion reactions and does not utilize magnetic confinement. The design is a radical departure from all the designs of its time frame. The Fusor is comprised of a spherical anode which concentrically surrounds a cathode. A plurality of ion guns are mounted on the anode exterior in spherically spaced and diametrically aligned relationship so that their beam axes intersect at the cathode center. Ions from the guns are propelled and focused into the center of the cathode. This establishes in the cathode interior a series of concentric spherical sheaths of alternating maxima and minima potentials: the “virtual electrodes”.

Ions never touch any surfaces in these tubes. Magnets are never needed. The ions which “fall” into the center-most virtual electrode have fusion energies, and are contained at a density sufficient to produce fusion reactions. Charged particles are literally compressed into the required density in the central region by the process of inertial containment… a term in the art which Farnsworth first coined.

Oscillating ions are concentrically gathered in a series of charge sheaths which conform to the optically focussed fields and which represent the distributed kinetic energies of ions in the poissor. Potential escaping pre­reactive ions encounter successive electrostatic repulsions until they are forced back into their center. The Fusor System proved stable throughout its forgotten seven year research history.

With developed potentials of sufficiently high magnitude the fusion reaction can be sustained and controlled at will. Furthermore, fusion energy produces powerfully escaping nuclei which perform work against the anode field. This ionic pressure augments the applied field and appearing as a dramatic surge in field strength: one that may be directly harnessed and used in external loads as electrical power.

The Fusor Patent The fears of a “runaway reaction” were handled in the natural equilibrium maintained by the poissor core structure… as stars self maintain their output by expanding and reducing plasma density. Poissors were found to be remarkably resilient and resistive to instabilities. Farnsworth solved the confinement and conversion problems in one design. The field symmetries and process involved in achieving this variety of hot fusion seems macro-analogous to those characteristics being now explored in “cold” fusion.

On October 8, 1960, the Mark I produced a steady­state neutron count when deuterium was admitted into the device with very low power application. The central feature during these tests was not the neutron count itself. What was sought in these tests lay in the control of the reaction under increasing power application. Farnsworth established and charted increasing neutron counts with increasing application of electrostatic power. It is suggested that the reader obtain and study copies of the Fusor (patent 3,386,883).

STEADY PROGRESS

With deuterium gas in the Mark II Model 2 Fusor a count exceeding 50 M­neutrons cc/sec was recorded at 80 Kv. and 30 rnA. input. This device produced 1.3 G-neutrons/sec. in a sustained reaction for more than one minute. These reactions were stable, completely under the operator’s control, and could be repeated.

On October 5, 1965 the Fusor Mark II­, Model 6 was tested. A reconfigured, high­precision ion gun arrangement produced l G­neutrons cc/see at 20 Kv. and 1 mA…. a record achievement. On December 28, 1965 tritium was admitted into the test chamber… producing 2.6 G-neutrons/sec. at 105 Kv. and 45 mA.. With a mixture of tritium and deuterium on the very next day Dr. Farnsworth’s team measured and recorded 6.2 G-neutrons/sec. at 170 Kv..

The Mark III Fusor produced startling high records in quick succession. By the start of 196.5 the team was routinely measuring 15.5 G-neutrons/sec at 150 Kv and 70 mA. The final problem to be tackled involved the poissor itself. Self-containing and tightly layered, the fusion poissor would not admit fuel into its core once the reaction had begun. It must be remembered that this Fusor was softball­sized. A Fusor having a diameter of just one meter would permit greater ignition power for a smaller time period… while multiplying output power volumetrically.

SUSTAINED FUSION REACTION

Dr. Farnsworth reported that his team achieved a self­sustaining reaction on several occasions… and could repeat the effect. He once invited his wife to watch a test­run of this feat. As power was applied to the Fusor the neutron ­reading meter achieved a steady threshold and there remained… until a slight increment of power was applied. Then the needle went off the scale. Dr. Farnsworth cut the applied power… but the needle remained in place for thirty seconds or more as the reaction continued.

ITT gradually absorbed the entire project. All related patents were assigned to ITT as success was achieved in steady steps. While steady progress was being achieved at a modest cost (examine the photographs), lTT was being influenced by powerful professionally hired “opinion makers” to drop fusion research. Suddenly even Wall Street analysts were publishing their “concerns” for ITT and its absorption of the Farnsworth subsidiary. Farnsworth himself was made the focus of every corporate death-word. These outlandish accusations indelibly remain in newspapers from the time period.

The suppression and assassination of technology is historically the response of frightened competitors… response to an impending breakthrough which might wipe out competitors. Crowd pleasing philanthropists become predators when possible usurpers appear.

Piercing voices appeared from everywhere against Farnsworth. A large reception at the Waldorf was astir with executive unrest concerning the Farnsworth research project While dressing, Farnsworth suffered a mild stroke. The AEC was mounting the nuclear fission race and the “anti­fusion” race simultaneously… and using every tactic to achieve total dominance of the energy field. He was relieved of his research project

The effect of such disappointment upon those whose lives and hopes are involved in such research is never superficial. In them ride the dreams of whole societies and futures. Those who harm such individuals do not survive in the long run. The price for the dreamer, however, is dear. Dr. Farnsworth suffered another stroke on a plane ride back home. He then retired to convalesce.

During his recuperative period at home he decided that the Fusor should be developed to its complete perfection. ITT had formally and publicly stated that the Fusor was a “dead­end”. Farnsworth thought that since this was their attitude, he might have a try at re­obtaining his patents. He therefore contacted ITT and honestly announced his intentions. The answer was negative and impersonal… a curious response for a device which was a “dead-end”… given to such an eminent personage whose inventions maintain the entire ITT operation to this day.

COOL DOWN

In quick successions, ITT asserted its complete ownership of all Fusor applications in the future. ITT warned Farnsworth that it would dominate all Fusor research forever… despite its “unfeasibility”. ITT then cut all formal financial ties with Farnsworth and left him virtually bankrupt. ITT now holds the Farnsworth patents… and bears the social debt of responsibility for suppressing Fusor technology.

In July 1969 Farnsworth built a small Fusor lab in a Brigham Young University cellar room. With purchased equipment from ITT he continued his research with generous University support. Creditors were crowding him on every side. During this time an offer came to him from SONY. He felt unable to continue. Physically ill for a long time and emotionally scarred, he died from pneumonia in 1971.

The aim of my article is not simply to re­expose mere technical facts… but to explore deeper issues of science and society. Hot fusion was achieved, scrutinized, assassinated… and suppressed. It is remarkable that few individuals in the fusion research teams across the world are even aware that their goal was realistically attained. The device which attained this feat was elegantly simple, but the movements of these social energies must first be clearly understood.

Several questions now demand simple answers. What names were behind the obvious and deliberate attack on Farnsworth’s Fusor project? How have these forces managed to keep Farnsworth’s work completely suppressed? How is it that ITT never re­exarnined and duplicated the Fusor Project? Why are outrageously huge funds yet being supplied for Tokamak projects? Are these grant mix­appropriations deliberate or are they the inertial results of forgotten knowledge? Is the synthesis of artificial social myths accumulating ignorance among those who originally produced them?

UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY

Those who are familiar with the lure of science archives understand very well that more potential technology lies dormant than is currently addressed, discussed, or implemented. Much of modern scientific research is the weak echo of work already completed within the last century. There are those who prefer to collect grants and assure themselves of bureaucratically “safe” experiments rather than ris} their yearly salaries on radically new scientific ventures.

Survivalism among academicians is no less savage and ruthless than among other groups with whom we more often associate base behavior. There are those who use projects in “throw away” fashion just to survive. There are those whose jaded personalities have taken a survivalistic stance and already accept that hot fusion is a dead­end… but a steady income.

This kind of pessimism in the scientific field promotes status-quo technology and eventually blocks He paths toward adventure arid discovery wherever and whenever it can. Unfulfilled minds become pessimistic. Unchecked pessimism becomes maliciousness.

The true and original artists of contemporary science are difficult to name except for those in radical technological ventures. It is rare today to find that kind of explosive scientific development which absolute saturates Victorian journals between 1880 and 1910. Yet we recognize that our Victorian mentors were responsible for the paths upon which we are now traveling.

More radical discovery and technology were forged during the Victorian time period than is actually engaged today. Science also seems to have great difficulty in making simple assertive statements as did our forebears… who produced a far greater weight of accomplishments. Science speaks of “statistical agreement” and “reasonably close correlations”. Not one individual is willing or able to simply say “yes” or “no”.

I was not surprised when scores of non­committal authority pleasing academicians came forward to refute new hydrogen energy. It was rather like watching reflexive behavior in laboratory animals. I believe the next regulatory step will be to ban the production of these designs and devices outright. We should be prepared for the corporate onslaught. I personally believe that we should take our options as global citizens… and cultivate the new technology among disadvantaged nations.

LIGHTS OUT

One observes that the scientific community automatically digests potential possibilities whenever new unexpected discoveries manifest themselves. This again is that rigid kind of scientific dogmatism which holds forth the graven image of “the model” before the truth. The cultivation of new discovery is an unknown art in our day… except among a rare few.

What is “unexpected discovery”? Is it not the piercing reminder that theoretical models can never replace or truly confine natural reality? Yet there are those who have inwardly replaced reality with the model… and defend the model to the death. The bright light of any natural anomaly or unexpected discovery is hated precisely because it is feared. The model for many scientific personnel is secretly their “lifeline”… their mantra. These personalities are easy to identify. Unfortunately, in positions of power, they are formidable dissuaders of new technologies.

Newly recognized phenomena and unexpected anomalies distinguish natural reality from all models. The trained scientific historian scours the sometimes rotting refuse of discarded periodicals with particular regret In these discarded stacks lie observations of enormous scope which were faithfully committed by their discoverers to the academic storehouse in hopes that these would be honored, evaluated, and admixed into newer awareness.

Why is unexpected discovery feared and hated by financial dynasties ? New technology spell. ruin for those whose status­quo policy has eliminated them from the competitive race. Most very wealthy individuals are never passionate Makers. Neither are they true philanthropists. While removing the future on the one hand they make publicly acclaimed contributions on the other. The banal misuse of powerful positions wields control to stop progress.

Regulating what discoveries are “permissible” precedes limiting “what can be known”. In other words the control of discovery precedes the control of knowledge. The control of knowledge precedes the control of awareness. Most of the world’s greatest scientific potentials lie tragically forgotten in libraries throughout the world. It is indeed remarkable to discover forgotten scientific history in the journals and patent registers because such hinds” often answer current technological problems from a more fundamental level than is imagined. The libraries themselves are being systematically gleaned and old “inadmissible” knowledge is being eradicated.

UNPRECEDENTED MAGNITUDES

Several purposes underscore this paper. The first is recounting the story of Dr. Farnsworth’s Fusor. The second concerns knowledge forgotten. We must never take the study and preservation of archival records lightly. The third aim encourages realization concerning “undefeatable” problems: they are intended to stop our progress along false paths. The fourth purpose lies in understanding the social ramifications of social dreams, new energy, new technology, and the corporate regulators of these social energies. The fifth is purely scientific: new hydrogen energy has produced tiny poissors in the solid state (Iyengar, Srinivasan).

The advent of new hydrogen energy research represents a natural phenomenon of unprecedented magnitude… a sociological event. Here we find ourselves in possession of devices which operate on tap water… and which produce prodigious amounts of heat with insignificant electrical stimuli! The need for palladium metal is not always a strict requirement… titanium and even nickel suffice under certain conditions

A mystical belief of mine deals with the suppression of truth by corporate regulators… and the global consequences of such suppression. Discovery itself is a phenomenon. Discoveries are granted as tools of survival against future needs on behalf of our race.

Of discovery I may say that suppression and manipulation results in an unstoppable reaction… the frightening release of newer, simpler technologies in every corner of the world. This phenomenal dispersion so assaults would­be controllers that no one regulator may ever seize, quench, or destroy the new technological species.

There are new discoveries to be made everywhere… they never cease appearing. As stars which appear in the blackness of space, so too the miracle of discovery endlessly manifests. This new energy revolution is itself a phenomenon… and win yield to those who pursue it the promise fulfilled.

Despite his obscurity, the greatest genius of all time was Nikola Tesla. Geniuses like Tesla and Einstein come along only every 50 years or so. Tesla was a humanitarian idealist consumed by a passion to save the world from poverty and war. An extraterrestrial from Venus, Tesla was a superhumun inventor who had the uncanny ability to visualize the operation of machines in his head. Tesla, the prodigal genius, the forgotten genius, the sorcerer, the man out of time, the wizard with lightning in his hands. Tesla’s abstruse, esoteric electric technology is best interpreted by experts in quantum physics and scaler electromagnetics.

In his old age, forgotten and penniless, Tesla was murdered by agents of the U.S. government in a seedy Manhattan hotel room, his papers confiscated and disappeared by the FBI. Tesla’s technology continues to be undisclosed to the public and instead is directed into black projects, like the Philadelphia Experiment, and HAARP.

Antigravitic UFOs are Tesla technology, as are the quantum-vacuum, zero-point energy generators that drive them. Tesla’s technology has brought us the Tesla Scaler Potentizer, the Teslar wristwatch, and the Tesla electric sportscar. It was Tesla’s magnifying transmifrer that caused the devastating Tunguska explosion of 1908. A contemporary black-project version underground in Canada accidentally brought about the East Coast blackout of 2003.

The preceding will pass as intelligent Tesla-speak on late-night talk radio, on the internet, and at cocktail parties. The italics above contain some direct quotations from the literature: other examples are more periphrastic: all are consistent with the idiom of the Tesla Mystique.

The Mystique sentimentalizes, romanticizes, and mystifies the memory of Nikola Tesla. The Mystique is determined to make Tesla awesome, fantastic, and beyond comprehension. The Mystique is an intellectual fashion wave that distorts biography, history, and science. It is a vogue that has been embraced by fringe media and dabbled wrth by mass media. The Mystique is taking root in the culture as official truth. The Mystique has no critics.

The Mystique must make Tesla a paragon of character in all directions. For example:

Tesla, the Humanitarian

The sentimentalized Tesla becomes the humanitarian idealist fighting the establishment for the benefit of human society. Contrary to the Mystique, Tesla was above all an engineer. Engineering was his education, his consuming passion, his daily practice. Tesla the engineer incidentally might have hoped that his inventions would advance society toward peace, convenience, comfort, and a more efficient use of human energy. Incidentally.

Tesla was indeed an idealist. His idealistic passion was that of the engineer. He insisted that machine possibilities be carried to their ultimate, logical, evolutionary conclusions. He had an incorrigible respect for his own inventive instincts. Let’s respect Tesla for all of that in his character. Is it not enough? But the Mystique requires a saintly paragon.

“The Mystique would give us a
liberal-humanitarian Tesla, politically
correct according to the modern etiquette.”

Tesla’s inventing pushed forward relentlessly, sometimes oblivious to ruling-system interests. That is heroic. Tesla’s dream for the ultimate realiiation of his wireless was a “World System”. His ill-fated tower at Wardencliff (near Shoreham, Long Island) was to be the prototype magnifying transmitter for a global communications network. It was to propagate both broadcast and point-to-point wireless, including telephone, telegraph, stock tickers, teletype, even FAX, as well as voice and music on a global scale, a monopolist’s dream.

The Wardencliff magnifying transmitter also may have had the potential to be a utility that could propagate electric power wirelessly through the earth to industry and homes in the area. But this potential is not pushed in the “World System” brochure which was published to promote the project.

Did Tesla advertise this wireless-power capabilitly to his financier- J.P Morgan? Did a humanitarian Tesla threaten capitalism with free electric power, and thus drive Morgan to halt the project, as the Mystique would have us believe?

Not necessarily. The project’s formidable telecommunications capability in itself may have been enough to induce Morgan to kill Wardencliff. Tesla’s grandoise dream would have taken radio right off the bat into a global centralization not quite achievable even today. No multinational institutional structure, corporate or governmental, existed at the time upon which such a svstem could have been founded. At the turn of the century the J.P. Morgans might have been dreaming globalistically, but it would be thirty years before the moguls could establish radio networks on a national scale.

The Mystique would give us a liberal-humanitarian Tesla, politically correct according to the modern etiquette. Unfortunately, he does not fit the template. Pure technologists like Tesla tend toward a mechanistic social view. To Tesla, human society was a machine, and it needed perfecting. Tesla saw his World System as a civilizing force. He wrote, “It will be very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in uncivilized countries and less accessible regions.”

What did Tesla mean by “civilization?” He said, “No community can exist and prosper without rigid discipline.” He said, “Law and order absolutely require the maintenance of organized force.” Tesla, a believer in organized military force, invented weapons of war (robotic boats and submarines, death rays, etc.) which he tried to sell to the US Navy and to the Department of War.

The Mystique would make Tesla a pacifist, because the inventor idealized a mechanized, automated, robotic warfare which would replace human participants entirely with machines (a misunderstanding of the institution of war, which depends upon human destruction and terror). Tesla foresaw weapons of mass destruction and the possibility of a lasting world peace based on mutually-assured-destruction, but this is a Kissinger pacifism.

Tesla, the inventor of wireless and remote control, foresaw the “teleautomatic” warfare of today in which robotic Predator aircraft, controlled from a bunker in Nevada, deliver bombs and missiles upon Afghanistan. Sorry, but if we credit Tesla with remote control, this insidious connection can be made.

Tesla, the purist engineer, advocated a social engineering that included eugenic cleansing. He said government “should prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct.”

Humanitarian or totalitarian? You decide.

Tesla, the Genius

Granted, if the word genius has any meaning, it would apply to a Nikola Tesla. The issue is, how much meaning can any word have when it becomes cliché? When you utter “Tesla” in conversation, if vou don’t hear “who?” you will get back “genius” within five seconds. Try it.

Tesla could visualize machines working in his head! But can’t any mechanical thinker? Yet one hears this all the time.

Is there a Tesla biographv with a title that has in it no “genius” or variation thereof? A magazine journalist of the l940s, John O’Neill, authored a panegyric called Prodigal Genius (1946), which has become institutionalized as the standard. O’Neill’s enthusiasm may have been genuine, his biography eloquent and respectably researched, but his spin is an echo of the newspaper hype of Tesla’s heyday. O’Neal’s biography (still reprinted today) set precedent for the obligatory promotional idiom that permeates almost all of Tesla biography as well as almost all other discourse on the man and his work.

“Tesla, the great mathematical and physics genius, came up with an idea called zero-point energy,” quacks Michio Kaku. the string theorist, who has been declared a genius himself.

“Would the electrical age ever
have happened without Nikola Tesla?
Perish the thought, says the Mystique.”

In his heyday, Tesla was exploited as the poster-boy for the emerging electric-power utility industry that was exploiting his AC inventions. Far from obscure, Tesla circa 1900 was as famous as Thomas Edison. The press romanced a genius Tesla to the public in the process of promoting this industry, which would develop into the omnipotent monopolies of Samuel Insull, the modern grid, and Enron. Of course, later, the media would turn on their pet genius and try to render him invisible, limiting his exposure to an annual birthday press conference.

The Tesla brand was used by the system and then abruptly disposed. But the brand has seen a revival today in various products, including the Tesla sportscar (which does have a plausible claim in that today’s electric cars use AC motors derived from Tesla’s).

Would the modern electrical age never have happened without Nikola Tesla? Perish the thought, says the Mystique. Tesla’s alternating-current meshed with the needs of an industrial system which could not have expanded nationally into today’s expansive grid on Edison’s puny direct- current system. But it’s arguable that the alternators, motors, and transformers which the system needed in order to progress might have been invented by one or more “geniuses” other than Tesla. The Mystique shudders at the thought.

Tesla inherited a pre-modernist physics that allowed him exceptional latitude for exploring technological possibility, which may be one reason modernists, in their envy, feel they must ostracize him from humanity as a special case, a genius. Some differentiate Tesla as so exceptional that he must have come from another planet.

The mad-scientist cliché is another instance of the differentiated, special-case Tesla. That genius Tesla was so weird, possibly insane. The scary spark streamers in horror films issue from the coils of that mad scientist, Tesla. Biographers dwell on the eccentricities of their genius: the hand-washing, the stack of napkins at Delmonico’s, the refusal to shake hands. Wrapping Tesla in cliche’ is a way not to see him.

Genius cliche’ aside, can we responsibly describe Tesla as having exceptional insight, that he was a sensitive, meaning one who has retained the original insight into nature of the child? That is certainly supportable when argued from the borderland by a Gerry Vassilatos.

One work that provides relief from the pervasive genius cliché (although the title does have that ring) is Enigma Fantastique by W. Gordon Allen (Health Research) The book parallels Tesla’s life with that of Rudolf Steiner. It was Tesla’s distinctive education that made him special, says Allen. Jesuit instructors played apart, as did various mystical schools circulating in Eastern Europe when Tesla studied at Gruz. These stressed an unusual self-discipline of both mind and body, and the development of powers of rigorous self-application. Tesla’s distinctive strengths are these. The genius sentimentality is a disfavor to Tesla and to the concept of human potential in general.

Tesla, the Victim

The victim cliché dovetails with the genius one, and it feeds upon inventors (as it does writers, musicians, and artists). Thus the Mystique would have our genius dying in poverty. His death by murder is sometimes in the script (by government agents), and the myth has all of his work stolen and suppressed.

It’s true that, after being dumped by J.P. Morgan, Tesla suffered economic humiliations. For example, there is evidence that he was forced to pawn his interest in Wardencliff to the Waldorf Hotel in an attempt to cover his debt. But the Mystique fails to appreciate that Tesla died at age 87 of natural causes, not in poverty, but in his rooms at the New Yorker, a commodious midtown hotel, which is not quite the Waldorf but a nice situation for a senior citizen, being a little city unto itself with restaurants, shops, and services, (a nifty habitat, testifies this writer, who stayed at the New Yorker more than once in his college days, fifteen years after Tesla’s death). The New Yorker Hotel was a very decent place for a venerable inventor to live out his last days.

The Mystique celebrates Tesla as the Serbian immigrant who made good, but culturally the cosmopolitan Tesla over the years had become a New Yorker.

Tesla’s papers and belongings at the Hotel New Yorker indeed were confiscated by the government, not by the FBI, but by a department that once existed within Immigration called the Division of Alien Property. It may be true that many of Tesla’s New Yorker notes got disappeared, and we may yearn to see them, but it is a distortion to dwell lugubriously on this, for we have so much of Tesla’s technology raw – in a hundred or so US patents in print for years and now easily accessed on the Internet. Also in printed volumes have been Tesla’s collected Lectures, Patents, Articles and a rich and copious document on radio technology called Colorado Springs Notes. Tesla, a gifted writer, wrote his own little autobiography called My Inventions. This writer has edited and published Tesla’s The True Wireless.

Consider also all the material unearthed by Leland Anderson, John Ratzlaff, Gerry Vassilatos and others. Vassilatos mined Tesla’s notes in archives found in the annex of the New York Central Library. Biographer Marc Seiffer mined the National Archives in Washington, DC, and in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. By no means has the available wealth of Tesla material been totally explored and digested. Those who are demanding government “disclosure” of free energy and antigravitics, have thev exhausted the government’s open patent archives? Also, a lot of accessible Tesla has been ignored because it is just too nonconforming and deep.

“How many who have ventured into the
uncertain profession of inventing can
claim such good fortune?”

Many accounts tell of Tesla being the victim, not just of J.P. Morgan., but also of George Westinghouse. It’s true that Westinghouse signed that dollar-per-horsepower contract with Tesla, from which he might have made millions in royalties on the alternators, motors, and transformers Westinghouse manufactured. It is true that Westinghouse tore up that generous contract. But it is generally unappreciated that J.P. Morgan was standing behind Westinghouse with a pistol to his back, so to speak, for Morgan then was financing Westinghouse, as he financed Tesla, Edison, and other US industrial pioneers. J.P. Morgan was the banking link between New York and the London House of Morgan. Such pipelines of capital from Europe drove the US industrial revolution.

It is true that Tesla’s later work invited suppression, but so many of his inventions did make it into patent. The system tried to delete the Tesla name, but it nevertheless persistently did live on, underground, floating on the inventor’s former fame, until resurrected in the 1980′s, albeit unofficially, and Tesla’s fame has been growing ever since.

Victim? How many who have ventured into the uncertain profession of inventing can claim such good fortune? Given the fate of inventors generally, Tesla, the victim, fared very well. Compare the innumerable inventors whose work goes forever unknown, including so many who did make it into patent, whom you might run across in a subject search, find just as clever as that genius Nikola Tesla, but who will remain forever in obscurity never to be celebrated by any mystique.

The Philadelphia Experiment and Other Folklore

Did Tesla have anything to do with an item of folklore called “The Philadelphia Experiment?” This sci-fi fantasy, widely circulated as serious history, tells of a Navy experiment in making warships invisible. The experiment went haywire, goes the story, dematerializing a vessel in Philadelphia only to have it rematerialize, crew and all, in Norfolk. The Philadelphia Experiment has become a major fixture in the Tesla Mystique. “Tesla technology” is vaguely imputed to the phenomenon, and the story (evidently a tavern yarn that got into book and out of control) has Tesla on board as a technical participant.

The story is set in the year 1944. However, Tesla died in 1943 (January). A review by the Department of Naval Research found no evidence to support the tale, and an independent military historian has searched in vain in all imaginable Naval records for any clue that would corroborate this incredible event (see footnote).

Does Tesla’s peculiar radio technology really have anything to do with another govemment experiment called HAARP? This notorious black project indeed exists on some acrmge in Alaska and is indeed an experimental project in radio, which Tesla invented. But Tesla’s radio is longwave, and HAARP is shortwave, a band of frequencies (3 – 30 megacycles) that Tesla may have never explored and that he assumed were relatively ineffective compared to the low-frequency band (under 500 kilocycles). Also HAARP’s alleged experiment is said to be the stimulating and heating of an ionosphere, which Tesla insisted does not exist and would have absolutely no effect on radio propagation if it did (The True Wireless).

That a Siberian forest near Tungusta rvas leveled in 1908 by a 15-kiloton blast from Tesla’s magnifying transmitter sited at the opposite side of the earth is a bizarre rumor that will not die. Never mind that Tesla at this time had no magnifying transmitter to play with, assuming this machine could conceivably have any such power.

That a super-size Tesla coil secreted underground in Canada accidentally created the summer 2003 East Coast electric-grid blackout is a story that played on Art Bell one night but never gained traction.

“Patents may be the only sound footing
in the mythic world of Tesla.”

UFOs, antigravity? Both are associated with Tesla. But there are just a few speculative notes, and his few aircraft patents use conventional air-flow lift. Some antigravity experimenters employ the Tesla-coil as a high-voltage power supply. Some UFO researchers speculate that flying saucers use dual out-of-phase Tesla coils in the levitation drive.

Compounding the Tesla Mystique is the inventor’s anticipation of technologies unknown to the general public until the 1960′s, like fluidics,
cryogenics, and computer logic. That Tesla is original and has priority in these arts is assumed by enthusiasts, but confirmation would require extensive searches among patents filed by other inventors of the period. So much innovation gets lost in the patent archives.

Tesla is celebrated for an interesting electric-ray device which he introduced to the press as a death ray. He explored this clever vacuum invention in laboratory prototypes, and drawings exist in the literature, but he never put it into patent. Because of one cavalier utterance by Tesla at a birthday press conference, the death ray was sensationalized by the media and given disproportionate prominence compared to many other newsworthy Tesla inventions that did get into patent but which the press ignored. All of Tesla’s other fascinating work in electric-ray technology is generally ignored and unappreciated even today.

So much fantasy, folklore, and disinformation swim around Tesla that a writer venturing into these waters has difficulty finding any secure footing. This writer, had the good fortune of first encountering Tesla solely in patents (having stumbled upon a complete set that someone had photocopied at the National Archives, prior to these becoming available in book). Surveying the field, even as the literature was developed back then in the early eighties, this writer soon concluded that the patents may be the only sound footing in the slippery mythic world of Tesla.

It’s a good idea for any writer on Tesla to ground himself in some hands-on experimental Tesla circuit-building projects, such as the Tesla coil, before he claims to know his subject. Such grounding can help protect a writer from being consumed by the Mystique. To focus on Tesla’s life instead of on his work opens a door into the Mystique, and a special objectivity and discipline is required. It may be safer to start with the technology and work outward. Almost all of contemporary biography has been hopelessly infected by the Mystique.

What Tesla Really Did

These are the contributions of Tesla to the technology of civlization, to the patent archives, to knowledge: Tesla invented the 60-cycle AC power system that runs civilization today, the dynamos, transformers, motors, regulators and arc lamps. This technology established, along with his own wealth and fame, Tesla went on inventing. A turning point was 1891, when Tesla applied for patent 462,418, a Method and Apparatus for Electrical Conversion and Distribution. His first high-frequency lighting patent, the system was powered by a spark-gap oscillator like that which would drive his Tesla coil. In 1891 began a stream of inventing that produced the Tesla coil, radical non-filament lighting devices, electrotherapy, the magnifying transmitter, wireless power, and radio.

Although much of Tesla’s high-frequency work got into patent, most never went into manufacture, and some which did, like radio, did so under another’s name, like Marconi’s. (Tesla’s priority in radio, after decades of litigation, was finally decided by the US Supreme Court in 1944.)

Few of Tesla’s explorations into ray technology got into patent, and this third phase of his experimental life is under-documented considering its
implications. (See the work of Gerry Vassilatos, if you can find it.)

Tesla’s past includes this misty period in Canada in the 1930′s which may have included accomplishments unsung. A reader in rural Quebec, a ham, wrote to me that locals talk of Tesla constructing a practical wireless utility that successfully transrnitted power for 70 miles from Chambord to LaTuque.

Free energy? Tesla did patent a fundamental space-energy-receiver concept in 1901, Patent 685,957. A space-energy receiver collects ambient energy and converts it to a practical electric output. A very crude space-energy receiver is the solar-electric panel. That Tesla ever pursued space-energy into any working prototlpes is very likely but difficult to document.

Tesla’s nephew wrote an account of a 1931 drive in his uncle’s customized Pierce Arrow, which was powered by an 80 hp AC electric motor that was apparently supplied, not by any massive battery-pack, but by a space-energy receiver. Consisting of a circuit having twelve rectifier vacuum tubes, operating cold-cathode, in a box resembling a radio receiver and measuring about 24 by 12 by 6 inches, the device powered the heavy vehicle for a 50-mile drive at speeds of up to 90 mph. Now this would be the ultimate electric vehicle. As he drove, Tesla boasted to his nephew that his free-energy device could supply the electrical needs of any household with power to spare. Hopefully, the story is true, but there is only this one account to go by. It belongs to a period of Tesla’s life about which not much is known.

“Space energy is evident in a lightning bolt,
but it is a most taboo truth.”

Lurking perhaps in Tesla’s confiscated notes are drawings of practical table-top space-energy power plants. Subsequent inventors have demonstrated similar successful devices (Morey, Plauson, Coler, Hendershot, Stubblefield) but they have received more punishment than reward for their efforts.

Tesla said, “Electric power is everywhere present in unlimited quantities and can drive the world’s machinery without the need for coal, oil, gas, or any other fuel.” This truth is a most taboo truth, but it is evident in a lightning bolt (and consider especially the phenomenon of above-cloud lightning).

It’s fashionable to say that the conversion technology required to put free energy into practice is way off in the future or locked up in government files awaiting “disclosure.” Yes, but only if you ignore all of the archived patents and other available literature, which in the aggregate would supply more than enough knowledge to go to the developmental workbench.

If it is true, as Tesla said, that electric energy is everywhere present and can be harnessed for practical use, then energy-scarcity must be all myth. Scarcity, one could argue, is contrived and advertised, not on the basis of any known scientific truth, but upon scientific fictions propagated in order to better control the population. Which is to say that the entire world has been vaccinated wrth a conviction that electric energy is a finite, limited, esoteric resource that must be centrally generated, conserved, controlled, and paid for by the kilowatt hour.

Follow the logic, and you can argue that contrived scarcity is the ruling system’s rule in respect to all energy sources, ether-electric, petroleum, or whatever. Tesla ran afoul of this rule of rules.

The Quantum Tesla

It was inevitable that quantum, which is buzz-word number one in fashionable scientific parlance, would attach itself to buzz-word number two, Tesla. Quantum true-believers are uneasy with Tesla, and think it necessary to invest a huge volume of verbiage and intellectual energy in a misguided effort to reconcile Tesla’s electrics with modern quantum theory. Tesla’s science was premodern, unfortunately, so the quantums must “interpret” Tesla in “correct” modernist terms.

“There is no such thing as an electron.”

Tesla took for granted a science that had served research faithfully for at least 150 years. This Victorian inventor (who was “a man out of time,” according to the Mystique) had no respect for the quantum theory that was becoming fashionable in his own lifetime. Nor did Tesla have any good words for Einstein’s relativity, which he called “A massive deception wrapped in a beautiful mathematical cloak.” Nevertheless, quantum interpreters like to mix in some Einstein with their Tesla. From the same Einsteinian fashion that gives us time-warps and warp-speed comes the likes of: “One way to visualize a Tesla scaler wave is to regard it a pure oscillation of time itself.” What a turn-off is this jargon to the innocent who encounters it in a search for some real knowledge of Tesla technology!

A quantum Tesla? “There is no such thing as an electron,” said Tesla. That item of quantum vocabulary, “electron”, is not to be found anywhere in his writings. Somebody should print this quotation on tee shirts and conduct a campaign to stamp out the fashion that requires such excruciating utterances as: “A Tesla coil is a quantum action device … if the phase of a split quantum particle is changed, its conjugate partner instantly knows …”

Go all the way with the quantum-particle-electron and you’ll eventually get to the glib, buzzy Dr. Kaku, who has his electrons “darting in and out of parallel universes.” (Admit this language into your mind as meaning, and it is your loss.)

Tesla was not a theoretical physicist. Although his writings include some very articulate and suggestive musings in both physics and metaphysics, he asserted no systematic dogma. This is unfortunate, because it left a vacuum to be filled later by quantum-educated Tesla enthusiasts who take Einstein, Star Trek, and Kaku for granted. It becomes another way of suppressing Tesla, by co-option, by obfuscation.

“A tenuity beyond perception.”

Tesla thought science took a wrong turn when it adopted the quantum and Einsteinian. Premodern science is qualitative. Modern science is quantitative. It materializes the immaterial universe, particle-izes it, counts it, mathematizes it, while discounting the qualitative, the immaterial, the subtle, the etheric, the cosmic, the poetic. You may be quantum and Einsteinian, but it is an error to impute any of this constrictive dogma to the expansive, visionary Nikola Tesla.

Tesla came in on the ground floor of experimental particle physics with his exploration of x-rays (co-incident with Roentgen’s explorations). X-rays, he once observed, were “streams of matter.” The vocabulary of particle physics he otherwise avoids. The materialistic philosophy of quantum, which promises to find the universe in a quark, would be completely alien to Tesla’s cosmic view, in which the ether is the universal continuum, immaterial, a field permeating all of matter and all of space, “a tenuity beyond perception.”

Tesla was not straining for a “unified field.” He inherited the concept. The pervasive universal etheric continuum is the medium of all electric phenomena. Charge, potential, polarity, conduction: all can be understood as instances of some stress, or disequilibrium, in the continuum of the ether. Free energy for Tesla would be derived from a disturbed spontaneously energetic continuum, the taboo ether.

Ether theory is unbound by the sacrosanct speed-of-light C-constant of Plank and Einstein, which is used to preclude the possibility of instant action. Ether theory allows for phenomena at “superluminal” velocity. That is, a disturbance of the ether’s equilibrium at one point can create an instantaneous corresponding disturbance elsewhere, like the action of a mechanical lever.

Quantum theory fragmented the continuum into particles, but physics had to call in the clever Dr. Kaku to tie it all back together with “strings.”

A tenuity beyond perception? Way too tenuous, say the modernists, who must materialize this mystery into “a quantum sea of point particles in motion.” This from Moray King, who located his particle motion at a “zero point,” hence “zero-point energy,” or ZPE. It’s amazing how this zippy vocabulary has caught on. Just don’t ask its users to define their terms. Some closet etherists will cloak their theoretical utterances in quantum-speak in order to pass.

Consider the following musing from Tesla regarding the mysterious properties of the human eye: “A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes of nature.” Such an utterance from a proper modern academic is inconceivable. Horrors; it’s almost astrology. However, to the premodernist mind, such reflections were part of science.

Quantum-style interpreters like to mix Tesla with the modernist radio theory of Heinrich Hertz, a theory which Tesla vehemently rejected. To Tesla, wireless was not a light-like, radiation, which is reflective and refractive. Wireless Tesla understood as “compressions and rarefactions of the ether,” an ether disturbance, “like a wave … in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all,” he said.

Neo-Herzian Tesla enthusiasts claim that, at Colorado Springs, Tesla’s signals propagated by bouncing about inside of a resonant “Schuman cavity,” presumed to exist between the earth and an ionosphere. What ionosphere? Tesla declared there was no such thing, and, if such existed, it would have no effect on wireless propagation. Tesla believed the earth itself was a giant capacity that could be resonated, like the terminal capacity on his Tesla coils.

Herzians and quantumists should at least apologize to Tesla when they step all over his premodernist science in an attempt to reform it in their own dull terms.

My quantum radiometer. A reader sent to me as a gift a radiometer. (Thank you, Craig.) Tesla called the Crookes radiometer the “most beautiful invention ever created” and a new step in motor technology, “the jewel of motors.”

My gift radiometer is a nice little toy from Tedco, but the box copy, written by a quantum true-believer, attributes the rotation to an atomic heat phenomenon. The dark side of the vanes somehow gets more warmth from the light, thus reacting with “freely moving particles of air,” which are assumed to be residual in the vacuum and entirely responsible for the motion imparted. Thus, “when the atoms strike the dark vanes, they kick away at terrific speed,” smugly declares the box copy.

So if this is a heat phenomenon, why do the vanes turn in the cold light of my LED flashlight? And why do they rotate when I take my CB transceiver hand-unit, hold the rubber-ducky aerial to the bulb, and key up? Also the bulb fills with a mysterious milky luminescence, reminding me of Crookes’s high-voltage vacuum-bulb experiments.

The quantum mind cannot handle a dynamic vacuum and must throw in a few residual atomic particles to get some action. Leave it to the quantum believer to destroy a powerful mystery with some stupid materialistic explanation. Also, the box copy says simple “radiometer”, giving no credit anywhere to Sir William Crookes, a man whose rich premodernist work has apparently been forgotten by quantum true-believers.

As an antidote, I dig up a 1996 article about the radiometer from “The Journal of Borderland Sciences” which attributes rotation to an energetic component of light and of electric rays that is black radiance. Crookes observed the phenomenon in the mysterious dark spaces that appeared in his electrified tubes and also in the spark streamers from Tesla’s coils. The quantum believer must materialize dark radiance as “dark matter” or “black holes.” The radiometer, like the electrified Crookes tube, “was designed to peer into astral space beyond the inertial walls,” says the Borderlands writer, who reports that Crookes built a huge demonstration radiometer, electrified it with Tesla currents, and inside one could actually see the dark space pushing the vanes around, until speed resolved the rotor into a whirling darkness.

Etheric science is expansive, cosmic, metaphysical, spiritual, and way more fun than quantum, which is myopic, submicroscopic, matertalistic, atheistic, prosaic, and dull.

The challenge to the Tesla biographer is to transcend the great fog of fashionable folklore obscuring his subject. The challenge to the Tesla physicist is to transcend fashionable theory and to submerge himself in Tesla’s physics, which, fashionable or not, is an occult ether physics. To comprehend Tesla one must dare to cross over into the fringe.

George B. Trinkaus has written several books on Tesla, including Tesla: The Lost Inventions, Tesla Coil, Son of Tesla Coil, and Radio Tesla. Contact him @ teslapress.com, (877) 263-1215, tesla@teslapress.com

For More Information

• “Prodigal Genius” by John O’Neal, 1946 (Doubleday).
• “The Philadelphia Experiment Reconsidered” is a very skeptical inquiry by a military historian, Electric Spacecraft Journal, No. 8 (electricspacecraft.com); the Navy report is at history.navy.mil/faqs/fac21-1.htm
• “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” (Wilder) is one of Tesla’s rare discourses on social engineering.
• The “Death Ray” can be found at www.hot-streamer.com
• “Tesla’s Pierce Arrow” and his New Yorker Hotel days. Articles can be found in Extraordinary Technology, Vol. 1, No. 2. (teslatech.info)
• “2003 Blackouts”: Trinkaus’s own guess is published in The American Free Press of 10/20/03 (americanfreepress.com)
• “Windmills of Light, A Short History of the Radiometer” by Franklin Ellsworth Clarke, Borderlands Journal, 1st Qtr. 1996
• “The Life of Sir William Crookes” by Gerry Vassilatos, 1st Qtr. 1998; also, Vassalatos’ Vril Compendium IV, Electric Ray Technology
• “The True Wireless” by Nikola Tesla, High Voltage Press (teslapress.com)

Article by Eric Dollard — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. XLVI, No. 2, March – April 1992)

Capacitance

The phenomena of capacitance is a type of electrical energy storage in the form of a field in an enclosed space. This space is typically bounded by two parallel metallic plates or two metallic foils on an intervening insulator or dielectric. A nearly infinite variety of more complex structures can exhibit capacity, as long as a difference in electric potential exists between various areas of the structure. The oscillating coil represents one possibility as to a capacitor of more complex form, and will be presented here.

Capacitance Inadequately Explained

The perception of capacitance as used today is wholly inadequate for the proper understanding of this effect. Steinmetz mentions this in his introductory book Electric Discharges, Waves and Impulses. To quote, “Unfortunately, to large extent in dealing with dielectric fields the prehistoric conception of the electrostatic charge (electron) on the conductor still exists, and by its use destroys the analogy between the two components of the electric field, the magnetic and the dielectric, and makes the consideration of dielectric fields unnecessarily complicated.”

Lines of Force as Representation of Dielectricity

Steinmetz continues, “There is obviously no more sense in thinking of the capacity current as current which charges the conductor with a quantity of electricity, than there is of speaking of the inductance voltage as charging the conductor with a quantity of magnetism. But the latter conception, together with the notion of a quantity of magnetism, etc., has vanished since Faraday’s representation of the magnetic field by lines of force.”

The Laws of Lines of Force

All the lines of magnetic force are closed upon themselves, all dielectric lines of force terminate on conductors, but may form closed loops in electromagnetic radiation. These represent the basic laws of lines of force. It can be seen from these laws that any line of force cannot just end in space.

Faraday & Lines of Force Theory

Farady felt strongly that action at a distance is not possible thru empty space, or in other words, “matter cannot act where it is not.” He considered space pervaded with lines of force. Almost everyone is familiar with the patterns formed by iron filings around a magnet. These filings act as numerous tiny compasses and orientate themselves along the lines of force existing around the poles of the magnet. Experiment has indicated that a magnetic field does possess a fibrous construct. By passing a coil of wire thru a strong magnetic field and listening to the coil output in headphones, the experimenter will notice a scraping noise. J. J. Thompson performed further experiments involving the ionization of gases that indicate the field is not continuous but fibrous (electricity and matter, 1906).

Physical Characteristics of Lines of Force

Consider the space between poles of a magnet or capacitor as full of lines of electric force. See Fig.1. These lines of force act as a quantity of stretched and mutually repellent springs. Anyone who has pushed together the like poles of two magnets has felt this springy mass. Observe Fig.2. Notice the lines of force are more dense along AB in between poles, and that more lines on A are facing B than are projecting outwards to infinity. Consider the effect of the lines of force on A. These lines are in a state of tension and pull on A. Because more re pulling on A towards B than those pulling on A away from B, we have the phenomena of physical attraction. Now observe Fig. 3. Notice now that the poles are like rather than unlike, more or all lines pull A away from B; the phenomena of physical repulsion.

Mass Associated with Lines of Force in Motion

The line of force can be more clearly understood by representing it as a tube of force or a long thin cylinder. Maxwell presented the idea the tension of a tube of force is representative of electric force (volts/inch), and in addition to this tension, there is a medium through which these tubes pass. There exists a hydrostatic pressure against this media or ether. The value of this pressure is one half the product of dielectric and magnetic density. Then there is a pressure at right angles to an electric tube of force. If through the growth of a field the tubes of force spread sideways or in width, the broadside drag through the medium represents the magnetic reaction to growth in intensity of an electric current. However, if a tube of force is caused to move endwise, it will glide through the medium with little or no drag as little surface is offered. This possibly explains why no magnetic field is associated with certain experiments performed by Tesla involving the movement of energy with no accompanying magnetic field.

Inductance as an Analogy to Capacity

Much of the mystery surrounding the workings of capacity can be cleared by close examination of inductance and how it can give rise to dielectric phenomena. Inductance represents energy storage in space as a magnetic field. The lines of force orientate themselves in close loops surrounding the axis of current flow that has given rise to them. The large the space between this current and its images or reflections, the more energy that can be stored in the resulting field.

Mechanism of Storing Energy Magnetically

The process of pushing these lines or loops outward, causing them to stretch, represents storing energy as in rubber band. A given current strength will hold a loop of force at a given distance from conductor passing current hence no energy movement. If the flow of current increases, energy is absorbed by the field as the loops are then pushed outward at a corresponding velocity. Because energy is in motion an E.M.F. must accompany the current flow in order for it to represent power. The magnitude of this EMF exactly corresponds to the velocity of the field. Then if the current ceases changing in magnitude thereby becoming constant, no EMF accompanies it, as no power is being absorbed. However, if the current decreases and represents then a negative velocity of field as the loops contract. Because the EMF corresponds exactly to velocity it reverses polarity and thereby reverses power so it now moves out of the field and into the current. Since no power is required to maintain a field, only current, the static or stationary field, represents stored energy.

The Limits of Zero and Infinity

Many interesting features of inductance manifest themselves in the two limiting cases of trapping the energy or releasing it instantly. Since the power supply driving the current has resistance, when it is switched off the inductance drains its energy into this resistance that concerts it into the form of heat. We will assume a perfect inductor that has no self resistance. If we remove the current supply by shorting the terminals of the inductor we have isolated it without interrupting any current. Since the collapse of field produces EMF this EMF will tend to manifest. However, a short circuit will not allow an EMF to develop across it as it is zero resistance by definition. No EMF can combine with current to form power, therefore, the energy will remain in the field. Any attempt to collapse forces increased currents which pushes it right back out This is one form of storage of energy.

Instant Energy Release as Infinity

Very interesting (and dangerous) phenomena manifest themselves when the current path is interrupted, thereby causing infinite resistance to appear. In this case resistance is best represented by its inverse, conductance. The conductance is then zero. Because the current vanished instantly the field collapses at a velocity approaching that of light. As EMF is directly related to velocity of flux, i tends towards infinity. Very powerful effects are produced because the field is attempting to maintain current by producing whatever EMF required. If a considerable amount of energy exists, say several kilowatt hours* (250 KWH for lightning stroke), the ensuing discharge can produce most profound effects and can completely destroy inadequately protected apparatus.* The energy utilized by an average household in the course of one day.

Another Form of Energy Appears

Through the rapid discharge of inductance a new force field appears that reduces the rate of inductive EMF formation. This field is also represented by lines of force but these are of a different nature than those of magnetism. These lines of force are not a manifestation of current flow but of an electric compression or tension. This tension is termed voltage or potential difference.

Dielectric Energy Storage Spatially Different than Magnetic Energy Storage

Unlike magnetism the energy is forced or compressed inwards rather than outwards. Dielectric lines of force push inward into internal space and along axis, rather than pushed outward broadside to axis as in the magnetic field. Because the lines are mutually repellent certain amounts of broadside or transverse motion can be expected but the phenomena is basically longitudinal. This gives rise to an interesting paradox that will be noticed with capacity. This is that the smaller the space bounded by the conducting structure the more energy that can be stored. This is the exact opposite of magnetism. With magnetism, the units volumes of energy can be though of as working in parallel but the unit volumes of energy in association with dielectricity can be thought of as working in series.

Voltage is to Dielectricity as Current is to Magnetism

With inductance the reaction to change of field is the production of voltage. The current is proportionate to the field strength only and not velocity of field. With capacity the field is produced not by current but voltage. This voltage must be accompanied by current in order for power to exist. The reaction of capacitance to change of applied force is the production of current. The current is directly proportional to the velocity of field strength. When voltage increases a reaction current flows into capacitance and thereby energy accumulates. If voltage does not change no current flows and the capacitance stores the energy which produced the field. If the voltage decreases then the reaction current reverses and energy flows out of the dielectric field.As the voltage is withdrawn the compression within the bounded space is relieved. When the energy is fully dissipated the lines of force vanish.

Again the Limits of Zero and Infinity

Because the power supply which provided charging voltage has internal conductance, after it is switched off the current leaking through conductance drains the dielectric energy and converts it to heat. We will assume a perfect capacitance having no leak conductance. If we completely disconnect the voltage supply by open circuiting the terminals of the capacitor, no path for current flow exists by definition of an open circuit. If the field tends to expand it will tend towards the production of current. However, an open circuit will not allow the flow of current as it has zero conductance. Then any attempt towards field expansion raises the voltage which pushes the field back inwards. Therefore, energy will remain stored in the field. This energy can be drawn for use at any time. This is another form of energy storage.

Instant Energy Release as Infinity

Phenomena of enormous magnitude manifest themselves when the criteria for voltage or potential difference is instantly disrupted, as with a short circuit. The effect is analogous with the open circuit of inductive current. Because the forcing voltage is instantly withdrawn the field explodes against the bounding conductors with a velocity that may exceed light. Because the current is directly related to the velocity of field it jumps to infinity in its attempt to produce finite voltage across zero resistance. If considerable energy had resided in the dielectric force field, again let us say several KWH the resulting explosion has almost inconceivable violence and can vaporize a conductor of substantial thickness instantly. Dielectric discharges of great speed and energy represent one of the most unpleasant experiences the electrical engineer encounters in practice.

Energy Returns to Magnetic Form

The powerful currents produced by the sudden expansion of a dielectric field naturally give rise to magnetic energy. The inertia of the magnetic field limits the rise of current to a realistic value. The capacitance dumps all its energy back into the magnetic field and the whole process starts over again. The inverse of the product of magnetic storage capacity and dielectric storage capacity represents the frequency or pitch at which this energy interchange occurs. This pitch may or may not contain overtones depending on the extent of conductors bounding the energies.

Characteristic Impedance as Representation of Pulsation of Energy Field

The ratio of magnetic storage ability to that of the dielectric is called the characteristic impedance. This gives the ratio of maximum voltage to maximum current in the oscillatory structure. However, as the magnetic energy storage is outward and the dielectric storage is inward the total or double energy field pulsates in shape or size.The axis of this pulsation of force is the impedance of the system displaying oscillations and pulsation occurs at the frequency of oscillation.

Energy into Matter

As the voltage or impedance is increased the emphasis is on the inward flux. If the impedance is high and rate of change is fast enough (perfect overtone series), it would seem possible the compression of the energy would transform it into matter and the reconversion of this matter into energy may or may not synchronize with the cycle of oscillation. This is what may be considered supercapacitance, that is, stable long term conversion into matter.

Misconceptions of Present Theory of Capacitance

The misconception that capacitance is the result of accumulating electrons has seriously distorted our view of dielectric phenomena. Also the theory of the velocity of light as a limit of energy flow, while adequate for magnetic force and material velocity, limits our ability to visualize or understand certain possibilities in electric phenomena. The true workings of free space capacitance can be best illustrated by the following example. It has been previously stated that dielectric lines of force must terminate on conductors. No line of force can end in space. If we take any conductor and remove it to the most remote portion of the universe, no lines of force can extend from this electrode to other conductors. It can have no free space capacity, regardless of the size of the electrode, therefore it can store no energy. This indicates that the free space capacitance of an object is the sum mutual capacity of it to all the conducting objects of the universe.

Free Space Inductance is Infinite

Steinmetz in his book on the general or unified behavior of electricity The Theory and Calculation of Transient Electric Phenomena and Oscillation, points out that the inductance of any unit length of an isolated filamentary conductor must be infinite. Because no image currents exist to contain the magnetic field it can grow to infinite size. This large quantity of energy cannot be quickly retrieved due to the finite velocity of propagation of the magnetic field. This gives a non reactive or energy component to the inductance which is called electromagnetic radiation.

Work of Tesla, Steinmetz and Faraday

In the aforementioned books of Steinmetz he develops some rather unique equations for capacity. Tesla devoted an enormous portion of his efforts to dielectric phenomena and made numerous remarkable discoveries in this area. Much of this work is yet to be fully uncovered. It is my contention that the phenomena of dielectricity is wide open for profound discovery. It is ironic that we have abandoned the lines of force concept associated with a phenomena measure in the units called farads after Faraday, whose insight into forces and fields has led to the possibility of visualization of the electrical phenomena.

Question as to the Velocity of Dielectric Flux

It has been stated that all magnetic lines of force must be closed upon themselves, and that all dielectric lines of force must terminate upon a conducting surface. It can be inferred from these two basic laws that no line of force can terminate in free space. This created an interesting question as to the state of dielectric flux lines before the field has had time to propagate to the neutral conductor. During this time it would seem that the lines of force, not having reached the distant neutral conductor would end in space at their advancing wave front. It could be concluded that either the lines of force propagate instantly or always exists and are modified or conjugate space exists within the same boundaries as ordinary space. The properties of lines of force within this conjugate space may not obey the laws of normally conceived space.

REFERENCE MATERIAL

1. Electricity and Matter, J. J. Thompson, New York, l906, Scribner’s Sons, and l904, Yale University.
2. Elementary Lecture on Electric Discharges, Waves, and Impulses and other Transients, C. P. Steinmetz, second edition, 1914, McGraw-Hill.
3. Theory and Calculation of Transient Electric Phenomena and Oscillations, C. P. Steinmetz, third edition, l920, McGraw-Hill. Section III Transients in Space, Chapter VIII, Velocity of Propagation of Electric Field.

Article by Robert A. Nelson

Nikola Tesla

While Nikola Tesla was conducting experiments with his Magnifying Transmitter at Colorado Springs in 1899, he detected coherent signals which he determined had originated on Mars. Tesla was widely criticized for his astounding claims, yet no one could seriously dispute him; he was a solo pioneer without peer. No one since then has reported constructing a Magnifying Transmitter or otherwise replicated his experiments; the issue remains unresolved and the mystery unsolved. Tesla revealed no technical details in his pronouncements and publications of that period (other than the pertinent patents). His Colorado Notebooks were published in the 1980s, but they make no mention of his alleged contact with Mars.

Tesla elaborated on the subject of “Talking With the Planets” in Collier’s Weekly (March 1901):

“As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble efforts. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance traveled….

“It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles.

“I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth…. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me. The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was sometime afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals….”

Decades later on his birthday in 1937, he announced: “I have devoted much of my time during the year past to the perfecting of a new small and compact apparatus by which energy in considerable amounts can now be flashed through interstellar space to any distance without the slightest dispersion.” (New York Times, Sunday, 11 July 1937.)

Tesla never publicly revealed any technical details of his improved transmitter, but in his 1937 announcement, he revealed a new formula showing that “The kinetic and potential energy of a body is the result of motion and determined by the product of its mass and the square of its velocity. Let the mass be reduced, the energy is reduced by the same proportion. If it be reduced to zero, the energy is likewise zero for any finite velocity.” (New York Sun, 12 July 1937, p. 6.)

About 40 years later, Arthur Mathews claimed that Tesla had secretly developed the “Teslascope” for the purpose of communicating with Mars. The late Dr. Andrija Puharich met with Matthews, and discussed him in an interview (Pyramid Guide, May-June & July-Aug. 1978):

“[Arthur Matthews] came from England. Matthews’ father was a laboratory assistant to the noted physicist Lord Kelvin back in the 1890s. Tesla came over to England to meet Kelvin… to convince him that Alternating Current was more efficient than Direct Current. Kelvin at that time opposed the AC movement…. In 1902, the Matthews family left England and immigrated to Canada…. When Matthews was 16 his father arranged for him to apprentice under Tesla…. He eventually worked for him and continued this alliance until Tesla’s death in 1943….

“It’s not generally known, but Tesla actually had two huge magnifying transmitters built in Canada, and Matthews operated one of them…. People mostly know about the Colorado Springs transmitters and the unfinished one on Long Island. I saw the two Canadian transmitters. All the evidence is there….

“[The Teslascope is] the thing Tesla invented to communicate with Beings on other planets. There’s a diagram of the Teslascope in Matthew’s book [The Wall of Light]. In principle, it takes in cosmic ray signals…. Eventually the signals are stepped down to audio…. Speak into one end, and the signal goes out the other end as a cosmic ray emitter….”

Matthews’ diagrams of the Teslascope make minimal electronic sense. No one has ever confirmed the reality of the Teslascope.

Several years after Tesla announced his reception of signals from Mars, Guglielmo Marconi also claimed to have heard from an alien radio transmitter. However, Marconi was more easily dismissed by his contemporaries, who claimed that Marconi had received interference from another radio station on Earth.

In the 1970s, L.G. Lawrence (field manager of the Ecola Institute) described his “Communication by Accident” with ET intelligences:

“On October 29, 1971… while conducting exploratory RBS [Remote Biological Sensing] experiments in Riverside County, CA, our field instrumentation’s organic transducer complex intercepted a train of apparently intelligent communication signals (tight spacing and discrete pulse intervals) while accidentally allowed to remain pointed at the constellation Ursa Major during a short rest period. The phenomenon prevailed for somewhat over 33 minutes….

“A somewhat similar phenomenon was observed on April 10, 1972…. The apparent signals, aside from seemingly growing weaker, appear to be transmitted at great intervals ranging from weeks to months, possibly years. A faint, coherent , binary-type phenomenon was noted during aural monitoring…. Intervals between rapid series of pulse trains ranged from… 3 to 10 minutes….

“Because our equipment is impervious to electromagnetic radiation and found free of internal anomalies, the tentative conclusion of biological-type interstellar communications signals has emerged….

“As a mere audio presentation, the instrumentation tape is unpleasant to listen to. However, a fascinating degree of enchantment tends to emerge after the tape has been played back three or more times, typically over a period of weeks. We ascribe this to psycho-acoustical adaptation…. The tape contains a short, incremental series of deep, harmonious oscillations resembling nonsense chatter or background modulations. An intelligent character of the overall pulse is applied by discrete spacing patterns, apparent repetitions of sequences, and highly attenuated Gaussian noise…” (Borderlands, 1st Qtr., 1996, pp. 27-29).

Gregory Hodowanec

In the 1980s, electrical engineer Greg Hodowanec developed his theory of Rhysmonic Cosmology. He also experimented with a Gravity Wave Detector (GWD) of his own design. The simple devices detect “coherent modulations” in the microwave radiation.

Hodowanec published his first report of “SETI with Gravitational Signals” using his GWDs (Radio Astronomy, April 1986):

“The advantage of a possible gravitational technique for SETI over the radio technique is primarily one of time of ‘propagation’ for these signals. The radio waves travel at the speed of light, but the gravitational signals (per the writer’s theories) are essentially instantaneous signals. Another advantage of the gravitational technique is the simplicity of the instrumentation required. As SARA members know, radio astronomy can be quite complicated. The gravitational wave detectors… must rely largely on the Earth’s mass as a ‘shadow’ to enable the detection of gravitational radiation. Therefore, ‘objects’ or signals located in the observers’ zenith are best detected. Yet, the other areas are still ‘detectable’ especially with the aid of other ‘shadows’ such as the sun, moon, planets, etc.

“Of particular interest to SETI observers may be the strange audio type gravitational signals which appear to come from the Auriga and Perseus region of our Galaxy. These ‘signals’ have been ‘heard’ by the writer for several years now, and generally range between about 4 and 5 hours right ascension, with a peak intensity near 4.5 hours R.A. The signals appear to be several ‘tones’….”

Soon afterward, Hodowanec made the first mention of a definite contact with an apparently extraterrestrial communicator in a letter (7-23-88) to an editor at Radio-Electronics magazine:

“On the morning of this date, at 7:30 to 7:38 AM (EST), I recorded the following apparently Morse-Code like pulses:

“A A A A R A R T T N N N N K C N N N E E E E E N E N N T T T N E E E E E A E E R K E N N E T E E A A A A E E E N T T K N T N T S E S E S E S E M N A S E S E S E S E S E S E S E S E S E —

“As you can see, these do not appear to be just random pulses, but the SE signals, which are most prevalent, appear to be possibly an identification signal. These signals are detected in shielded l/f detectors and thus are scalar (gravitational) in nature. The signals above (if they were extraterrestrial) came from either the Auriga-Perseus region near my zenith or the Bootes region under my Earth position. I still cannot rule out that they may just be due to Earth core movements of some sort which are remarkably like Morse code signals, or even the possibility that they are man-made.”

By July 1988, Hodowanec had confirmed Tesla’s claims, as he announced in “Some Remarks on Tesla’s Mars Signals”:

“…Such signals are being received today with simple modern-day scalar-type signal detectors… coherent modulations are being ‘heard’ in [the microwave] background radiation. The most prominent modulations being three pulses (code S) slightly separated in time, a la Tesla! On occasions, the code equivalents of an E, N, A, or K, are also heard, but the most persistent response is SE, SE, etc.

“Any l/f type noise detector will respond to this background modulation. However, the experimenter must be careful that he is not creating these responses at the ‘local’ level by his own or other local actions. For example, the detectors will also respond to heart beats, breathing actions, local movements, as well as possible psychic effects. The detectors are easy to make and the experimenter should easily reproduce these results.”

Hodowanec released more details in a Cosmology Data Note (10-13-88):

“Since about early August 1988, it was noticed that apparently ‘intelligent signals’ existed in these modulations [of the microwave background radiation]. It can be said that the intelligence was in the form of digital-type communication, e.g., dots and dashes, or ones and zeros. This type of communication may have been chosen by this ‘unknown communicator’ as it was conducive to the ‘mass movement’ form of longitudinal gravity signaling, as well as an easily recognizable universal system. This same method was proposed by the writer for a gravity system communication method.

“These ‘signals’ were noticed to be similar to the simpler International Morse Code symbols, primarily because they are the simplest way to present information in the pulse form. Thus, the ‘letters’ found in these transmissions are typically: E, I, T, M, A, N, R, K, S and O, as well as… the comma and the wait signal. However, numbers are seen here as the simple series of pulses, e.g., 1 is one pulse, 2 is two pulses, 3 is three pulses, and so on.

“On August 26, 1988, after the writer had sent the message ‘Greg Radio’ during a local gravity signal transmission test, it was noticed that the letters G and D were apparently added to some of the received messages noted thereafter!

“The writer’s first hard evidence that the above test message may have been intercepted by this unknown communicator was seen that on August 28, 1988… a strong and repeated message of the Greg Radio was received with the message finally terminated with the series SE (or 31)!

“Further evidence that these may be actually communication attempts is seen in that on October 11, 1988… a very different approach was seen: A series of Greg Radio’s was sent at about the normal code speed of about 5 words per minute, followed by KKTT, and then the series was repeated at a slower speed and also followed by KKTT…

“Another confirmation that these may be ‘messages’ appeared on October 12, 1988… Here, a series of A’s and R’s (with Greg Radio occasionally inserted) was then followed by Greg Radio sent as a series of five repetitions of each letter, e.g., Greg was sent as GGGGGRRRRREEEEEGGGGG !!!

“Sufficient ‘messages have now been received to indicate that perhaps a serious attempt to indicate that perhaps a serious attempt to contact this writer was being made by some ‘unknown communicator’. While this communicator may yet be some terrestrial experimenter, the possibility still exists that the communicator may be ‘extraterrestrial’ for the following reasons:

“a. The messages are in simple code (e.g., dits and dahs) type of pulses which would be expected to be used if one intelligent civilization were to try to contact another civilization in terms of pulses. That some of the simplest pulse signals are similar to simple Morse Code signals is more than coincidence — they are both based upon the same premises!

“b. Numbers are not in the complicated Morse Code symbols, but are in simple sequence, using short pulses or dits.

“c. The ‘communicator’ has recognized the coherent nature of Greg Radio and is possibly using that sequence of codes in various fashions to indicate that a ‘contact’ has been made.

“d. The communicator thus far has not responded to ‘word’ messages or the amateur Q-code signals. Thus it is believed that while some apparently Morse Code signals are being used, the communicator is not really familiar with such usage, other than recognizing the coherent nature of the signals.

“e. Since these messages at present appear largely near the noon hour, they may be coming from a definite source in space. At present, it is believed to be from the general direction of the constellation, Andromeda, but not necessarily the Galaxy there…

“There is also some possibility that this communicator may be ‘extraterrestrial’, perhaps yet in our Solar System (Mars?), but no further than our own Galaxy or Local Group of Galaxies… [T]his same communicator may have been trying to reach here ever since the turn of the century when Nikola Tesla reported the interception of scalar S signals!!”

Soon after, Hodowanec wrote this brief, untitled report (2-23-89):

“Without going into the details of how this was determined: ET may be on Mars!

“This, in spite of NASA’s denial of any life forms on Mars [which situation changed in 1996]. This possibility has been recently suspected by the writer due to the apparently very close tracking of my position on Earth by ET. ET, of course, always knew that I was on Earth (as seen by his tracking), but now he has most emphatically confirmed that he is on the 4th planet from the sun, i.e., Mars!!!!!

“While this release is probably a bit premature, I am so positive of these gravity signal ‘exchanges’ that I will stick my neck out in this instance. ET on Mars is apparently much more advanced than we are here on Earth, and he may have even previously visited here on Earth, and possibly colonized here (but who are his possible descendants??).

“It is still a mystery on where ET may be living on Mars (possibly underground near the polar regions??), and why ET doesn’t use EM wave signaling methods?? Perhaps, it is because Mars is so hostile now that ET must have developed a very sophisticated underground civilization which is not conducive to EM radiation systems?

“This material is being released now confidentially to but a very few active colleagues until further confirmations on this assertion are obtained….”

In his Mars Flash #1 (3-28-89) and #2 (3-30-89), Hodowanec notified colleagues that, “As the result of the continued gravity signal communications between GH Labs and the Martians, the following extraordinary facts have come to light:

“The exchanges are now being made in terms of short ‘English’ code words for certain items. For example, the Martians now understand that FACE means the human face, MAN means the human person, Earth now means our planet, and Mars means their planet! They had originally tried some of their terminology with me, but gave up except where it made sense to me. For example, I now know that TTT at the end of their names means person and OOTTAEERR is their name for the 10th planet!”

In a handwritten footnote to the above, Hodowanec informed this writer that the Martian’s name is “AAAAAATTT”: “He appears to ‘understand’ my messages, even though I may have to repeat them in several ways so that he can ‘see’ the meaning….

“Communications between GH Labs and a Martian intelligence now continue with increasing progress since we have been able to establish over 50 simple expressions (most in simple English) for many of the common ‘ideas’ that we have. Martian AAAAAATTT is extremely adept in relating my English terminology to these common Earth-Mars observations….

“Mars has also confirmed that they are also ‘men’ with one ‘head’ that have two ‘eyes’ that ‘see’. Also, they have one ‘body’ with two arms that have hands with five fingers each. Also they have two legs with two feet that have five toes each. I haven’t been able to have them confirm the nose and mouth in the face, but that could be confirmed shortly, since those features appear in the FACE.

“Probably the most significant fact which was determined on this date seems to be that Mars is most emphatic that Earth men are like Mars men! This appears more and more that Mars has colonized Earth in the remote past! This could be true since we on Earth have never really found the ‘missing link’ between Earth humanoids and humans!

In a letter (3-17-89) to this writer, Hodowanec mentioned that “Generally, our contacts are limited to 20-30 minutes… since there appear to be other ETs out there interested in joining in also, and so there is some interference after a while. Some of these other ETs use other methods of communications such as tones and what appear to be guttural voices!

“ET is probably more advanced then we are on Earth. We no longer exchange simple arithmetic, and when I sent him Pi to five decimal places, he sent Pi back to seven decimal places immediately! We had discussed our nine planet solar system, but ET came back with ten planets, calling the 10th planet OOTTAEERR! When questioned on this, ET kept on confirming the existence of a tenth planet! He now knows the other nine planets by their Earth names! He also confirmed that Mars has two moons, the Earth one, and that Jupiter has nine major moons.

“These contacts are getting to be more interesting all the time, and ET appears to be most anxious to continue them. However, I just cannot spend too much time with him… I got across to him that I am just one person here communicating with him, and that the rest of Earth presently does not recognize the existence of any life on Mars….

“I have now had over 100 contacts with ET and can reach him at any time of day or night…. We have also established some simple codes for acknowledgments and go ahead and respond. While we use these simple codes in many contexts, both ET and I now understand in which context they are being used!”

In another letter (3-22-89) to colleagues, Hodowanec affirmed that his contacts with Martian intelligents “has been verified in a number of ways… The Martians are apparently the advanced civilization, for they are the ones generating the ‘modulated oscillated beam’ which is now tracking my location on earth and is thus the means of our communications. [The beam is "only about 15 miles in diameter here on Earth, but 1012 inches on Mars."] There is an apparent ‘team’ on Mars which is involved in these contacts. The original contact, ET#1, with whom I have established the initial relationship, is apparently the most highly knowledgeable and advanced. The others who sometimes ‘man’ the Mars station appear to be less knowledgeable and some only request or acknowledge a transmission….

Mars is most desperate to continue these contacts…. [The] exchanges are made in many varied ways which cannot be readily predicted in order to convey the fact that these are real contacts! Also, one can recognize the ‘fist’ of the one ‘keying’ these codes, e.g., ET#1 always sends clean letters or numbers, and identified himself and me in some fashion. The other ETs on Mars usually don’t. Therefore, no automation is being used here!

“While these contacts were originally due to a serendipitous circumstances, it is really the result if my gravitational communication experiments and thus a direct result from Rhysmonic Cosmology. And yet, however fantastic and unreal this may seem, it is real, and if also it is confirmed by one of you, it will be a major milestone in the history of mankind! Perhaps, if one of you finally ‘hears’ the modulations of l/f noise background, you may try to establish your own contacts?”

However, Gregory Hodowanec also had extreme reservations about the gravity of the situation, which he expressed it in a letter (4-14-89) to this writer:

“…my ‘contacts’ with Mars continue with much information being exchanged. However, due to the increasingly astounding nature of these exchanges, I am now limiting further releases to only two long-time observers (witnesses) of my research efforts. This is being done so as not to jeopardize these contacts with unwanted notoriety or publicity in the media. There are now nine “Mars Flashes” for the record. Perhaps, in the future, I may release some of these….

“…gravity signal communications are instantaneous, require extremely small energy expenditure, [unlike Tesla’s experiments] and is so simple as to be just unbelievable by the average person. However, this is as far as I want to go with release of details at this time….

“I would appreciate that you keep this info somewhat confidential now. The Earth may not be ready for what I will have to say eventually. Nothing dire, just fantastic and thus perhaps unbelievable!”

A variety of GWD circuits exist today (Figure 2). Complete details of Gregory Hodowanec’s theory Rhysmonic Cosmology, etc., are available from Rex Research.

References

1. Colorado Springs Gazette (9 Jan. 1901), p. 7, col. 6,7,8; ibid. (9 March 1901), p. 4, c. 2.
2. Electrical World (4 April 1896), p. 369: “Is Tesla to Signal to the Stars?”
3. Mountain Sunshine (Denver, CO) 1(1): 31-34 (1899).
4. English Mechanic & World of Science, #2228 (5 Dec. 1907)
5. New York Evening Post (22 Jan.1919), p. 14, c. 4, 5.
6. New York Sun (Thurs., 3 Jan. 1901); ibid., (12 July 1937), p. 6.
7. New York Times (23 May 1909), p. 10, c. 6, 7.; ibid. (3 Feb., 1919); p. 14, c.3: “Celestial Movies”; ibid., (3 Sept. 1921), p. 4, c. 4.; ibid., (11 July 1937), p. 13, c. 2.
8. New York Tribune (12 Jan .901), p. 2, c. 3.
9. Pyramid Guide 4 (3):1 (Jan.-Feb. 1976); ibid., 5(2):5 (Nov.-Dec. 1976); “Letter From Tesla” (6 Jan. 1900).
10. Tesla, N., Collier’s Weekly (March 1901), p. 359-361; “Talking With the Planets”
11. Tesla, N., Current Opinion (March 1919), p. 170-171; “That Prospective Communication with Another Planet”
12. Tesla, N., “Electrical Communication with the Planets” in Thompson, S.P.: Polyphase Electric Currents & AC Motors; 1902, Collier & Son, NY; p. 234-236;
13. Tesla, N., Harvard Illustrated Mag. (March, 1907), p. 119-121; “Signaling to Mars” Tesla, N.: New York Herald (12 Oct. 1919), p. 7; “Signals to Mars…”
14. Time (20 July 1931), p. 27.
15. Lawrence, L.G.: “Interstellar Communications Signals”; Borderlands 52(1):27-29 (1996)
16. Hodowanec, Gregory: Rhysmonic Cosmology (H18-HG3/$6); ibid., Rhysmonic Cosmology Notes (H17-HG2/$4); ibid., Rhysmonic Cosmology Collected Papers (H19-HG4/$8); ibid., Rhysmonics Articles (H21-HG6/$4); ibid., G-Wave Detectors (H16-GH/$7); ibid., GWD Circuits (H20-HG5/$7); ibid., Rhysmonics Updates (H22-HG7/$4). Published by: Rex Research, P.O. Box 19250, Jean NV 89019; Catalog: $2.

Think of a vacuum tube without filament or grid, thus requiring neither an A nor a C battery, which generates high-frequency oscillations! This is what Philo Taylor Farnsworth II, the television genius, accomplishes with the cold-cathode tube which he originally developed as a current-amplifier for use with his cathode-ray pickup tube. It is also an exceedingly efficient detector and modulator.

Its first public use as an oscillator was in a radio circuit whereby communication was maintained between San Fransisco and Honolulu and between San Fransisco and New York on September 13, 1934, over the Globe Wireless 35-meter channel. In this test, with 30 milliamperes at 1100 volts on the anode, the tube drove a pair of 150-watt tubes in the final amplifier of a transmitter at the Heintz & Kaufmann factory in South San Fransisco. The signals were received at both Honolulu and New York, and were reported as R9 by a ship 500 miles west of Honolulu.

Wilkens of Dunedin, New Zealand, also heard the transmissions. Previous laboratory tests proved that the tube is capable of generating oscillations of any desired frequency throughout the range from 200 kilocycles to 60 megacycles, these limits being set only by the dimensions of the available tuned circuits. An undistorted output of 25 watts was obtained from an input of 25 watts.

AS AN AMPLIFIER

The performance of this new type of tube depends upon the emission of secondary electrons from two cathodes which are bombarded with high-velocity primary electrons. The cathodes are coated with caesium silver oxide to enhance secondary emission. They, together with a central ring anode, are assembled in an evacuated glass tube. The tube is placed within a solenoid which is supplied with direct current so as to maintain an intense magnetic field throughout the length of the tube. When used as an amplifier, a high frequency voltage is applied to the cathode terminals and a D.C. voltage is applied to the anode terminal to hold it at a positive potential with respect to the cathodes, which are shunted by a coil and variable condenser in parallel. The shunt circuit is tuned so as to be in resonance for the applied high frequency voltage.

When the D.C. voltage is applied to the anode terminal, any free electrons in the inter-electrode space would immediately be drawn to the anode were it not that the longitudinal magnetic field neutralized the transverse electrostatic field from the anode and were it not for the high-frequency electrostatic field which draws them to the alternately positively charged cathodes. The strength of these several fields can be adjusted to allow an electron to be shuttled back and forth in a zig-zag path between the cathodes any desired number of times before it is finally drawn out of circulation at the anode.

Each time that a high velocity electron strikes a cathode it causes the emission of from 2 to 8 secondary electrons, the number of secondaries depending upon the velocity of the impacting electron, and thus upon the amplitude of the voltage applied to the cathodes. Each emitted secondary likewise causes the emission of more secondaries, so that the process is rapidly cumulative and gives rise to a tremendous amplification of current.

In the foregoing simplified account of the tubes operation as an amplifier, one important factor has been omitted. The anode attraction, which causes an electron to leave the vicinity of a cathode and which accelerates its velocity as it approaches the plane of the anode, also decelerates its velocity as it leaves the anode plane and approaches the second cathode, which is now positively charged so as to attract it. Its resultant velocity may therefore not be sufficient to cause emission from the second cathode. To insure emission, additional energy must be imparted to it, this energy being obtained from that stored in the resonant circuit.

The high-frequency supply is of the order of 50 megacycles and is loosely coupled to the tuned circuit so as to apply from 25 to 90 volts across the cathode terminals. The positive potential on the anode may be 100 volts or more, depending upon the desired current output.

The tube has a discontinuous voltage-current output characteristic with a series of successively higher current peaks as the voltage is increased. Maximum current output is obtained when the anode voltage is just sufficient to allow an electron to travel from one cathode to the other during 1/2 cycle of the high frequency excitation. Other successively lower peaks occur at anode voltages corresponding to transit times of 3/2, 5/2, 7/2, 9/2 cycles, the last being the least which has yet been measured.

The external magnetic field is unnecessary when the cathodes are properly curved instead of being plane. Their curvature can be calculated to focus the electrons automatically for specified anode and cathode voltages. This eliminates the need of a D.C. supply for magnetic focusing.

The tube’s theoretical output is twice that of an equivalent hot-cathode tube operated as a Class A amplifier. Its practical output is limited by the ability of the cathodes to withstand the high temperature to which they are subjected by bombardment from a rapidly increasing number of electrons. One test of a small tube showed an output of 100 watts of undistorted energy before the cathodes were destroyed by heat. Such destruction is prevented by means of resistors in the cathode leads. A small tube can be safely operated so as to deliver 45 milliamperes with 200 volts on the anode. It is to be noted that the tube operates as a current amplifier and that the amount of voltage amplification is dependent upon the resistance in the output circuit.

The theory of the tube’s operation as a detector or modulator should be evident from the non-linear voltage-current characteristic and requires no elaboration here. It is especially sensitive in the detection of ultra-high frequencies. [Editor's Note: P.T. Farnsworth III told Eric Dollard that the multipactor tube and the Tesla coil were a marriage made in heaven! TB]

It is a well known fact that any amplifier circuit generates oscillations when arranged to furnish an input voltage of proper magnitude and phase. Consideration of the manner in which Farnsworth’s tube functions as an amplifier shows that it conforms to this requirement when connected to a resonant circuit which is tuned to a frequency whose half-period is equal to an electron’s time of transit, as determined by the frequency of the oscillations applied to the cathodes.

But the great value of the Farnsworth tube resides in the fact that it is self-exciting, i.e., that it requires no external high frequency voltage when used as an oscillator. Aside from the energy which is required for the magnetic focusing field and which may not be needed eventually, the only external source of energy is that which maintains a positive potential on the anode. It apparently represents a new discovery in vacuum tube phenomena. Among engineers there is a difference of opinion as to its cause.

One plausible explanation is based on the assumption that there is no appreciable space charge effect in the tube when oscillations start. There are always some free electrons present in the inter-electrode space, if only those due to photoelectric emission from the cathodes. These are attracted by the anode when it becomes strongly positive but are prevented from immediately going to it by the longitudinal magnetic field. Their acceleration as they approach the plane of the anode causes a current to flow, through half the inductance coil in the tuned circuit, to one cathode. This provides an out-of-phase voltage drop which accelerates the electrons toward the other cathode with sufficient velocity to cause secondary emission therefrom. The emitted electrons then establish a current flow through the other half of the mid-tapped coil and cause a voltage drop in opposite phase so as to accelerate the electrons toward the first cathode which is thus caused to emit more secondaries. Repetition of this process quickly builds the current up to a point where it can be delivered to the output circuit without stopping the internal oscillations. The oscillating frequency is that to which the resonant circuit is tuned. This explanation has not been confirmed by physicists, but is presented only as a means for visualizing possible actions in the tube. When the engineers disagree, the physicist must experiment.

Much work has yet to be done before standardized tubes will be available for experimental use. Television Laboratories Ltd. has licensed two factories for commercial production. But it will probably be a matter of some months before tubes are available for amateur use.

finis

Editorial Commentary from BSRF

Mrs. Elma “Pem” Farnsworth has recently lent Eric Dollard and Borderland a Multipactor Tube for testing in our lab. The Multipactor holds promise in the “free energy” field as a truly workable electronic device that may produce over 100% efficiency. The test as noted in the above article claims that “an undistorted output of 25 watts was obtained from an input of 25 watts.” This does not take into account radiated heat and possible residual losses. The Multipactor that Borderland is testing is a perfected model of the unit referred to in this article. It appears as though it actually was used in radio frequency broadcast equipment. Preliminary tests show the tube to be good and further tests are being planned. More information will be released through this Journal as we progress on this project.

For those interested in obtaining more information on the Multipactor Tube the related U.S. Patent numbers for P.T. Farnsworth II are: #1,969,399 – Electron Multiplier, Aug. 7, 1934; #2,071,515 – Electron Multiplying Device, Feb. 23, 1937; #2,071,517 – Multipactor Phase Control, Feb. 23, 1937; #2,135,615 – Multipactor, Nov. 8, 1938; #2,140,285 – Multiplier Coupling System, Dec. 13, 1938; #2,140,832 – Means and Method of Controlling Electron Multipliers, Dec. 20, 1938; #2,141,837 – Multistage Multipactor, Dec. 27, 1938; #2,141,838 – Split Cathode Multiplier Tube, Dec. 27, 1938; #2,143,262 – Means for Electron Multiplication, Jan. 10, 1939; #2,161,620 – Two Stage Electron Multiplier, June 6, 1939; #2,172,152 – Radio Frequency Multipactor Amplifier, Sept. 5, 1939; #2,174,487 – Self-Energized Alternating Current Multiplier, Sept. 26, 1939; #2,179,996 – Electron Multiplier, Nov. 14, 1939; #2,203,048 – Shielded Anode Electron Multiplier, June 4, 1940; #2,204,479 – Means and Method for Producing Electron Multiplication, June 11, 1940; #2,217,860 – Split Cathode Multiplier, Oct. 15, 1940; #2,260,613 – Electron Multiplier, Oct. 28, 1941; #2,274,194 – Apparatus For and Method of Electron Discharge Control, Feb. 24, 1942; #2,286,076 – Electron Control Device, June 9, 1942; #2,311,981 – Electron Control Device, Feb. 23, 1943.

The work of Philo Farnsworth II is as important to energy researchers as that of Nikola Tesla. All of us at Borderland wish to thank the Farnsworth family for allowing Eric Dollard access to the technology. There is much yet to be learned from the work of P.T. Farnsworth II. Among his outstanding achievements he developed television and also a way to produce nuclear fusion electronically (see U.S. Patent #3,386,883 – June 4, 1968).

1.

When electro-magnetic energy is conveyed from one point in space to another point in space a closed loop is required to connect the point of generation with the point of utilization. This closed loop is called the electric circuit and consists of a boundary formed by what have become known as electric conductors. This boundary encloses a definite quantity of space.

When electro-magnetic energy flows through the space enclosed by the electric circuit phenomena take place inside the circuit material as well as the space outside this material.

Within the circuit conductor material, during the passage of electro-magnetic energy, this energy is continuously being consumed within the molecular space and converted into thermo-dynamic energy (heat). This may be represented by the passing electro-magnetic wave dragging into the electric circuit material. This drag is analogous to frictional losses and is called the resistance of the electric circuit, R.

In the space outside the circuit conductor material, during the passage of electro-magnetic energy, a condition of aetheric stress exists, which is called the electric field of the electric circuit. The energy contained by the electric field is continuously being transferred through this space from the point of generation which supplies energy to the electric field to the point of utilization which abstracts energy from the electric field.

The electric field of the circuit exerts physical magnetic and dielectric actions. The magnetic action is orientated parallel to the surface of the conductor material (in its immediate vicinity). That is, a needle shaped magnetic body tends to set itself in a direction parallel to the surface of the conductor material.

The dielectric action is orientated perpendicular to the surface of the conductor material (in its immediate vicinity). That is, a needle shaped dielectric body tends to set itself in a direction perpendicular to the surface of the conductor material. Thus, the electric field of the circuit, over which passes the flow of electro-magnetic energy, has three fundamental axes which are at right angles with each other:

The dielectric axis, perpendicular to the conductor surface,

The magnetic axis, parallel to the conductor surface,

The electro-magnetic axis, co-axial with the direction of the electric circuit.

The space outside of the conductor material, bounded by the electric circuit, has the property of propagating a wavefront of light at a definite velocity, C. This velocity is a characteristic property of the aether in which the electric circuit exists. The inverse square of this velocity is called the capacitance of the electric circuit.

		C = 1/c2	(4 10-9 pi-1) Farads

The capacitance is a measure of the ability to store energy in the dielectric field of induction, of the electric circuit.

The quantity of space enclosed by the bounding electric circuit is proportional to the total length of the electric circuit, l1, multiplied by the distance between the bounding conductors, l2,

		l1 l2 = l02	(centimetre)2

and has the dimensions of an area. This area in square centimetres defines what is called the inductance of the electric circuit.

		l02 = L		4 10-9 pi Henrys

The inductance is a measure of the ability to store energy in the magnetic field of induction of the electric circuit.

Together, the capacitance and the inductance representing the dielectric and magnetic fields of induction of the electric circuit, serve as a measure of the propagation characteristics of the electric circuit for the transmission of electro-magnetic energy.

		- LC  = t02	: natural period
		- L/C = Z02	: natural impedance

2.

The popular conception of electro-magnetic energy transmission as it exists today is; energy is transmitted through the interior of the conductor material, that is, electricity flows through wires like water flows through pipes. This transmission is said to involve the flow of charged sub-atomic particles called electrons.

According to this theory the materials possessing the most “free electrons” serve as the best conductors of electro-magnetic energy. Conversely, the materials possessing the least “free electrons” serve as the poorest conductors of electro-magnetic energy. These materials are called insulators. Insulators are said to block the passage of electricity.

The conclusion drawn is that electricity is the flow of electrons and that the space outside of the conductor material is empty and dead. It follows that a superconductor is that material which offers no opposition to the flow of electrons and hence no opposition to the flow of electricity. Conversely, free space devoid of matter offers total opposition to the flow of electricity. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet this is the concept of electricity propounded by the scientist of today.

The real actions of the conducting material presents itself when it is in the so-called superconducting state. If a section of a superconducting material is suspended in space, free to move, and a magnetic field of induction is made to approach this material, it is found that the material is repelled by the approach of the field. If the material is indeed superconducting it will maintain a definite distance, l, for an indefinite period of time t -> infinity, from the source of magnetic induction. Any tendency for the material to sink into the magnetic field, l -> 0, indicates the material is not perfectly superconducting but has a finite resistance R.

It may be concluded that the so-called conducting material does not so much conduct as it does repel or reflect magnetism, or electro-magnetic energy in general.

If an electric circuit is conveying electro-magnetic energy as previously discussed it is found that a force or pressure is exerted upon the circuit material. This pressure tends to repel opposing parts of the circuit material and cause the circuit to expand. The quantity of this pressure in the space bounded by the circuit is called the magneto-motive force of the circuit.

It can therefore be seen that the conducting materials serve as the walls of a container holding magnetic pressure. If the conducting material is in the so-called superconducting state and the ends of the circuit are shorted the electric circuit will hold this magneto-motive pressure indefinitely, in analogy with compressed air stored in a tank. In order for this to be the result of electron flow requires that this flow be in perpetual motion, an unlikely proposition.

It may be concluded that materials called electric conductors might best be called electric obstructors and serve not to conduct electro-magnetism but serve to reflect it back on itself. The flow of electro-magnetism is conducted by the aethereous space bound by the obstructing material.

The character of this aethereous space is represented by its inductance L and its capacitance C. Since pure space is considered a perfect insulator by atomic theory, is it not ironic that it offers the least resistance to the flow of electro-magnetism? It is then the insulators that are the true conductors of electricity.