Recap

The Life of Tesla

Mark DeMucha discussed the life and work of the brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla. DeMucha is conducting a grassroots campaign to gather funding for a proposed feature film, The Tesla Conspiracy, in which a graduate student recreates Tesla's experiments. Through the film he hopes to bring greater awareness to Tesla's ideas and how there has been an effort to suppress his free energy concepts in order to preserve the fossil fuel status quo.

DeMucha shared details that he gleaned from his research about Tesla:

The early death of his brother pushed him in a neurotic direction, and he exhibited obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Tesla originally admired Edison but then was stiffed by him in a financial agreement.

Mark Twain was in Tesla's inner circle and Tesla credits reading Twain's books as helping him recover from cholera.

Tesla received a number of his ideas in telepathic flashes.

DeMucha listed alternating current, the induction motor and the Tesla coil as being among his most prominent inventions, but Tesla also developed the ability to harness microwaves, created both neon and fluorescent lights and was the first person to ever take an X-ray photo.

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Tesla's Death Beam

One of Nikola Tesla's long-standing goals was to create a technological method for ending warfare. In 1934, he unveiled his "death beam," which was trumpeted on the front page of the NY Times as an invention that could "send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles..." Tesla explained that the death beam would make war unfeasible as each nation could have their own "invisible Chinese wall." Read more at pbs.org.

Illustration by Paul Frank from Science and Invention, 1922, depicting Tesla's concept of war as a "mere contest" between machines.