Nikola Tesla's Teleforce & Telegeodynamics Proposals
Tesla Presents series, Part 4
Leland I. Anderson, Editor
viii, 117 pages
ISBN: 0-9636012-8-8
DESCRIPTION:
In this fourth and final installment of the Tesla Presents Series, Nikola Tesla describes his accomplishments in the areas of particle-beam production and geophysical exploration.
In the 1930s the unorthodox inventor Nikola Tesla announced to the world two astonishing new inventions. The first was a particle-beam projector that Tesla intended to be used as an instrument of national defense. He called his system "teleforce." With this machine he declared that a nation could bring wholesale destruction upon invading armies and shoot down fleets of incoming aircraft when they were 200 miles away. While the basic beam weapon concept was first revealed in 1934, on Tesla's 78th birthday, specific details about the actual device have been difficult to obtain.
One year later, during his annual birthday press conference on July 10, 1935, Tesla claimed a method to transmit mechanical energy with minimal loss over any terrestrial distance, allowing for a new means of communication and a technique for the location of subterranean mineral deposits. Tesla's mechanical power transmission system, he dubbed it the "art of telegeodynamics," was based primarily upon his reciprocating engine invention, patented in 1894. While the fundamental operating principles of Tesla's mechanical oscillator are well understood, little has been said about how the machine would have been used for underground prospecting.
In Leland Anderson's newest book Nikola Tesla's Teleforce & Telegeodynamics Proposals these two important papers, hidden for more than 60 years, are presented for the first time. The principles behind teleforce—the particle-beam weapon, and telegeodynamics—the mechanical earth-resonance concept for seismic exploration, are fully addressed. In addition to copies of the original documents, typed on Tesla's official stationery, this work also includes two Reader's Aid sections that guide the reader through the more technical aspects of each paper. The papers are followed by Commentary sections which provide historical background and functional explanations of the two devices. Significant newspaper articles and headline accounts are provided to document the first mention of these proposals. A large Appendix provides a wealth of related material and background information, followed by a Bibliography section and Index.
Note: No further printings of this Limited Edition are planned at this time.
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INTRODUCTION:
This book contains the original texts of two unique proposals that Nikola Tesla offered up during his later years. In both cases, the technologies described trace their roots back to an earlier and tremendously productive decade in Tesla's life beginning in the early 1890s. At the time of the proposals' unveiling, "teleforce," the particle beam concept, and "telegeodynamics," the mechanical earth-resonance concept, received significant press coverage.
The teleforce death-beam weapon was first divulged on Tesla's 78th birthday, July 10, 1934 in the New York Sun. With this machine, he claimed, a nation could deal out wholesale slaughter upon invading armies and shoot down fleets of approaching aircraft 250 miles away. Based on Tesla's own statements it is believed that by 1937 a working model of the device had been constructed.
What appears to have been the inspiration for teleforce was described in a piece which showed up in the July 11, 1934 New York Herald Tribune. Tesla recalled an event that would occasionally take place while experimenting with his single-electrode vacuum tubes in which a minute particle would break off the cathode, pass out of the tube, and physically strike him. "He said he could feel a sharp stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out." In comparing these small fragments with the bits of metal projected by his "electric gun" Tesla said, "The particles in the beam of force . . . will travel much faster than such particles . . . and they will travel in concentrations."
Just one year later, on the occasion of his annual birthday celebration interview by the press on July 10, 1935 in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker, Tesla announced a method of transmitting mechanical energy accurately with minimal loss over any terrestrial distance, including a related new means of communication and a method, he claimed, which would facilitate the unerring location of underground mineral deposits. At that time he recalled the earth-trembling "quake" that brought police and ambulances rushing to the scene of his Houston Street laboratory while an experiment was in progress with one of his mechanical oscillators.
Tesla's mechanical power transmission system, he dubbed it the "art of telegeodynamics," was based upon his Reciprocating Engine invention, U.S. Patent No. 514,169, February 6, 1894. The earthquake story also appeared in John O'Neill's biography of Tesla, Prodigal Genius. The account tells of Tesla causing a minor earth trembler in lower Manhattan, where he had established his laboratory, by clamping a small engine of this type to an I-beam and letting it find its own sympathetic resonance.
In the article "Nikola Tesla, Dreamer" (Allan L. Benson, World Today, Feb. 1912), an artist's illustration appears showing the entire earth cracking in half with the caption, "Tesla claims that in a few weeks he could set the earth's crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of feet and practically destroy civilization. A continuation of this process would, he says, eventually split the earth in two."
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EXCERPT:
The advances described are the result of my research carried on for many years with the chief object of transmitting electrical energy to great distances. The first important practical realization of these efforts was the alternating current power system now in universal use. I then turned my attention to wireless transmission and was fortunate enough to achieve similar success in this fruitful field, my discoveries and inventions being employed throughout the world. In the course of this work, I mastered the technique of high potentials sufficiently for enabling me to construct and operate, in 1899, a wireless transmitter developing up to twenty million volts. Some time before I contemplated the possibility of transmitting such high tension currents over a narrow beam of radiant energy ionizing the air and rendering it, in measure, conductive. After preliminary laboratory experiments, I made tests on a large scale with the transmitter referred to and a beam of ultra-violet rays of great energy in an attempt to conduct the current to the high rarefied strata of the air and thus create an auroral display such as might be utilized for illumination, especially of oceans at night. I found that there was some virtue in the principal but the results did not justify the hope of important practical applications although, some years later, several inventors claimed to have produced a "death ray" in this manner. While the published reports to this effect were entirely unfounded, I believe that with the new transmitter to be built, many wonders will be achieved.
EXCERPT:
REACTIVE FORCES OBTAINABLE BY TESLA'S ISOCHRONOUS OSCILLATORS—These are generated by Tele-Geo-Dynamic transmitters which are reciprocating engines of extreme simplicity adapted to impress isochronous vibrations upon the earth, thereby causing the propagation of corresponding rhythmical disturbances through the same which are, essentially, sound waves like those conveyed through the air and ether. . . . With a machine of this kind it will be practicable, in the differentiation of densities and aggregate states of subterranean strata and tracing their outlines on the earth's surface, to reach a precision approximating that which is secured in the investigation of the internal structure of bodies by penetrative rays. For just as the vacuum tube projects Roentgen shadows on a fluorescent screen, so the transmitter produces on the earth's surface shadows which can be detected by acoustic devices or rendered visible by optical instruments. The receiver can be made so sensitive that prospecting may be accomplished while riding in a car and without limit of distance from the transmitter.
Or by nuclear bombs, do they just mean cosmic impacts giving off radiation?
