D.5.Alley Wellcome Collection

Serbian-American physicist engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla is nowadays famous for his piece of work on electricity and energy. He developed the alternate current organisation, making it possible to transmit electricity over vast distances, and worked on wireless communication and energy transfer. He was a vivid, but too very eccentric thinker, claiming to become visions and displaying odd behaviour in public like an obsession with personal hygiene and pigeons. Maybe the more enigmatic parts of his personality make him such an interesting subject for conspiracy theories. Tesla is credited to have worked on unknown energy-sources, acquired the Tunguska explosion with his "death-ray" prototype, and supposedly worked on an earthquake-generator.

In 1896 Tesla was working on oscillations for wireless energy transfer. The idea was to build a steam-powered oscillator, able to create various irresolute frequencies. If the frequency matched the resonance frequency of a receiving device, this device should transform the mechanical oscillations back into an electric current.

In 1897 the device was set up and in 1898 Tesla supposedly managed to oscillate his laboratory at 48 East. Houston St., New York, enough, that alarmed neighbors called the police, fearing an earthquake happening. Tesla afterwards explained the principle to reporter Allan 50. Besnson, who in Feb 1912 published an article about Tesla's resonator in The World Today magazine:

"He put his footling vibrator in his coat-pocket and went out to hunt a half-erected steel building. Down in the Wall Street district, he found one, x stories of steel framework without a brick or a stone laid around it. He clamped the vibrator to one of the beams, and fussed with the adjustment until he got it. Tesla said finally the construction began to creak and weave and the steel-workers came to the footing panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Police was called out. Tesla put the vibrator in his pocket and went abroad. 10 minutes more and he could have laid the building in the street. And, with the same vibrator, he could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the Due east River in less than an hr."

The "convulsion-generator" could too be used for more than peaceful applications. Tesla imagined an array of smaller devices distributed all over the planet to relieve energy from Earth and as well to send free energy from one spot to another. A transmitter, a device consisting of a piston vibrating inside a cylinder, transforms electrical energy into vibrations. Using the rocks in the hush-hush equally sort of conductor, the vibrations are sent to a receiving device and the oscillations transformed back into electricity, to be used locally. However, the "telegeodynamics" organisation past Tesla never managed to get beyond the prototype. In reality, the device was not powerful enough to ship free energy through Earth. Dampening of the oscillations by structures and the underground was far as well stiff.

Another vision by Tesla was more successful. He imagined using the oscillations generated by his device to study Globe. Seismic waves generated by an oscillator and projected into the underground are reflected back to a receiver by faults or unlike layers of rocks. Studying the reflected waves, geologists may be able to X-ray Earth (Tesla likewise made important contributions to modern X-ray engineering). Modern seismologists still apply this principle. Pulses of energy, generated by electromagnetic devices, controlled explosions or mechanical pistons, are sent deep into the secret. Geophones record the reflected signals and geologists employ the nerveless information to generate a model of the geological structures hidden beneath the surface.