Nikola Tesla’s Failures, Death and Legacy

In 1895 Tesla’s New York lab burned, destroying years’ worth of notes and equipment. Tesla relocated to Colorado Springs for two years, returning to New York in 1900. He secured backing from financier J.P. Morgan and began building a global communications network centered on a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. But funds ran out and Morgan balked at Tesla’s grandiose schemes.

Tesla lived his last decades in a New York hotel, working on new inventions even as his energy and mental health faded. His obsession with the number three and fastidious washing were dismissed as the eccentricities of genius. He spent his final years feeding—and, he claimed, communicating with—the city’s pigeons. Tesla died in his room on January 7, 1943. Later that year the U.S. Supreme Court voided four of Marconi’s key patents, belatedly acknowledging Tesla’s innovations in radio.

What happened to Tesla’s files from there, as well as what exactly was in those files, remains shrouded in mystery—and ripe for conspiracy theories. Three weeks after the Serbian-American inventor’s death, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was tasked with evaluating his papers to determine whether they contained “any ideas of significant value.”

According to the declassified files, Dr. John G. Trump reported that his analysis showed Tesla’s efforts to be “primarily of a speculative, philosophical and promotional character” and said the papers did “not include new sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.” The scientist’s name undoubtedly rings a bell, as John G. Trump was the uncle of the 45th U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. The younger brother of Trump’s father, Fred, he helped design X-ray machines that greatly helped cancer patients and worked on radar research for the Allies during World War II.

At the time, the FBI pointed to Dr. Trump’s report as evidence that Tesla’s vaunted “Death Ray” particle beam weapon didn’t exist, outside of rumors and speculation. But in fact, the U.S. government itself was split in its response to Tesla’s technology. Marc Seifer, author of the biography Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla, says a group of military personnel at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, including Brigadier General L.C. Craigee, had a very different opinion of Tesla’s ideas.

“Craigee was the first person to ever fly a jet plane for the military, so he was like the John Glenn of the day,” Seifer says. “He said, ‘there’s something to this—the particle beam weapon is real.’ So you have two different groups, one group dismissing Tesla’s invention, and another group saying there’s really something to it.”

Then there’s the nagging question of the missing files. When Tesla died, his estate was to go to his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who at the time was the Yugoslav ambassador to the U.S. According to the recently declassified documents, some in the FBI feared Kosanovic was trying to wrest control of Tesla’s technology in order to “make such information available to the enemy,” and even considered arresting him to prevent this.

In 1952, after a U.S. court declared Kosanovic the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate, Tesla’s files and other materials were sent to Belgrade, Serbia, where they now reside in the Nikola Tesla Museum there. But while the FBI originally recorded some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Belgrade, Seifer says. “Maybe they packed the 80 into 60, but there is the possibility that…the government did keep the missing trunks.”

Despite John G. Trump’s dismissive assessment of Tesla’s ideas immediately after his death, the military did try and incorporate particle-beam weaponry in the decades following World War II, Seifer says. Notably, the inspiration of the “Death Ray” fueled Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, in the 1980s. If the government is still using Tesla’s ideas to power its technology, Seifer explains, that could explain why some files related to the inventor still remain classified

Although some of his more sensitive innovations may still be hidden, Tesla’s legacy is alive and well, both in the devices we use every day, and the technologies that will undoubtedly play a role in our future. “Tesla is the inventor of wireless technology. He’s the inventor of the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels,” Seifer says of the inventor’s lasting impact. “So radio guidance systems, encryption, remote control robots—it’s all based on Tesla’s technology.”

Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology. Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox church and his mother managed the family’s farm. In 1863 Tesla’s brother Daniel was killed in a riding accident. The shock of the loss unsettled the 7-year-old Tesla, who reported seeing visions.

In 1870, Tesla moved to Karlovac (Carlstadt) and stayed with his Aunt and Col. “Old War Horse” Brankovic. He attended “Higher Real Gymnasium” where teacher Martin Sekulic taught him math and physics and had a decided influence over him. Tesla graduated Gimnazije Karlovac a year early.

Did you know? During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nikola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.

Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.

Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and was hired as an engineer at Thomas Edison’s Manhattan headquarters. He worked there for a year, impressing Edison with his diligence and ingenuity. At one point Edison told Tesla he would pay $50,000 for an improved design for his DC dynamos. After months of experimentation, Tesla presented a solution and asked for the money. Edison demurred, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.” Tesla quit soon after.

Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse

After an unsuccessful attempt to start his own Tesla Electric Light Company and a stint digging ditches for $2 a day, Tesla found backers to support his research into alternating current. In 1887 and 1888 he was granted more than 30 patents for his inventions and invited to address the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on his work.

His lecture caught the attention of George Westinghouse, the inventor who had launched the first AC power system near Boston and was Edison’s major competitor in the “Battle of the Currents.” Westinghouse hired Tesla, licensed the patents for his AC motor and gave him his own lab. In 1890 Edison arranged for a convicted New York murderer to be put to death in an AC-powered electric chair—a stunt designed to show how dangerous the Westinghouse standard could be.

Buoyed by Westinghouse’s royalties, Tesla struck out on his own again. But Westinghouse was soon forced by his backers to renegotiate their contract, with Tesla relinquishing his royalty rights. In the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil.

He also experimented with X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison Square Garden. Together, Tesla and Westinghouse lit the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and partnered with General Electric to install AC generators at Niagara Falls, creating the first modern power station.

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient shoebox-sized device that is sometimes called the world’s oldest computer for its ability to perform astronomical calculations. Discovered by sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the remains of the mechanism are now preserved in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Only 82 fragments, consisting of about one-third of the original mechanism, survive today, It was built around 2,200 years ago.

The mechanism was capable of performing different calculations, and it could help track the motions of the sun, moon and five of the planets; it could even tell when athletic competitions, such as the Olympics, were set to take place, the researchers wrote. Since the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism, scholars have been trying to understand the device. And although they have made considerable progress, many questions remain unanswered. For example, researchers still aren’t sure who made it. The inscriptions on the mechanism are written in Greek.

The recovered fragments of the mechanism contained writing and inscriptions, and over the past two decades, scientists have been able to read more of these Greek inscriptions using high-tech imaging methods, such as 3D X-ray scanning. This has enabled them to learn more about how the mechanism worked.

CT scans “revealed inscriptions describing the motions of the sun, moon and all five planets known in antiquity and how they were displayed at the front as an ancient Greek cosmos.” The mechanism used “cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy and ancient Greek astronomical theories.”

Between the front and back of the mechanism were a vast array of gears, designed in such a way that all the dials would depict the correct timing of all the cycles. “Suppose a user of the Antikythera Mechanism wants to check eclipse predictions for a particular month some years ahead. The user winds the mechanism forwards to the desired date, as shown on one of its calendars,” Tony Freeth, a researcher with the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, wrote in a paper published in 2014 in the journal “PLOS One.”

Though the ship that held the Antikythera mechanism was discovered more than a century ago, the wreck has not been fully excavated. Its location and depth make it hard to excavate. Despite these difficulties a new program of excavation is being carried out by a team of archaeologists and new artifacts continue to be found, shedding light on what the ship, which likely sank around 65 B.C. was like.

Researchers have noted that many of the artifacts were luxury goods intended for the wealthy. So far, the recent excavations have not uncovered any new remains of the mechanism.

Antikythera Mechanism rewrote the history of science

In 2015, Kyriakos Efstathiou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki said: “All of our research has shown that our ancestors used their deep knowledge of astronomy and technology to construct such mechanisms, and based only on this conclusion, the history of technology should be re-written because it sets its start many centuries back.”

In 2016, yet another astounding discovery was made when an inscription on the device was revealed—something like a label or a user’s manual for the device. It included a discussion of the colors of eclipses, details used at the time in the making of astrological predictions, including the ability to see exact times of eclipses of the moon and the sun, as well as the correct movements of celestial bodies.

Inscribed numbers 76, 19 and 223 show maker “was a Pythagorean”

On one side of the device lies a handle that begins the movement of the whole system. By turning the handle and rotating the gauges in the front and rear of the mechanism, the user could set a date that would reveal the astronomical phenomena that would potentially occur around the Earth. Physicist Yiannis Bitsakis has said that today the NASA website can detail all the eclipses of the past and those that are to occur in the future. However, “what we do with computers today, was done with the Antikythera Mechanism about 2000 years ago,” he said.

Making this incredible machine even more impressive is the fact that the movements of the planets are directly linked to specific observation sites around the known world at the time, suggesting that the creator of the Antikythera Mechanism had provided for the use of the machine in more than one location.

Bones found at the Antikythera Mechanism shipwreck site

Greece’s Ministry of Culture issued a statement in late 2019 informing the public that ”bones were collected, which now need to be analyzed, (as well as) olive kernels, and bronze nails from the ship as well as a bronze ring, whose use remains unknown.”

Among the findings which were discovered were sections of the bodies of ancient amphorae, as well as the bases and the necks from the main bodies of the vases. The types of amphorae are identified as those which were typically used on the island of Kos and in Southern Italy in ancient times.

The Greek Ministry noted ”this scientific mission of October 2019 completed the first five-year research program. Based on the results of the latest research, preparations for the new five-year program, starting in May 2020, will begin immediately with the continuation of excavation research in various areas of the wreck, where there are good indications that impressive new findings will come to light.”

“The mission was concluded with great success despite adverse weather conditions and the limited length of time for the rescue research,” the Ministry added.

A video titled “2017 Return to Antikythera Expedition” looks at the delicate and often hazardous work marine archeologists do in recovering ancient gems from the depth of the seas. That expedition, led by the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, Lund University, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was conducted between September 4th to September 20th of that year, and as per previous trips to the wreck, the team did not leave disappointed.

With excellent weather conditions above them, the divers managed to recover an “orphaned” right arm of a bronze statue, pottery shards, nails, lead sheathing fragments, and an odd metal disc, among other artifacts. Prior to that expedition, the Return to Antikythera project team managed to recover glassware, luxury ceramics, anchors, counterweights, tools, and even an ancient skeleton, which is still undergoing DNA analysis.

References:

***https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/15/antikythera-mechanism-secret/

***https://www.livescience.com/antikythera-mechanism