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Alternate History Buffs and conspiracy
mavens are often drawn to the work and ideas of
Nikola Tesla. I had only a hazy idea of Tesla’s
accomplishments until I found a copy of Margaret
Cheney’s biography of him in my local used book
store (Tesla: Man Out of Time, published in 1981 in
hardcover, released in 1993 in a paperback version
and re-released in 2001). Tesla did his most
productive work before 1900, but continued regaling
the press with intimations of incredible inventions
right into the late 1930s. He died in January of
1943, a frail old man of 87 whose inventions had
truly changed the world, but without the recognition
or the wealth that his contributions would seem to
merit.
Tesla battled with Thomas Edison over the best
method of electrifying the world, finally emerging
victorious as his Alternating Current (AC) won out
over Direct Current (DC). Tesla’s patents were sold
to Westinghouse and his induction motor devices for
generating power were on display at the 1893
Columbia Exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair,
where Tesla himself demonstrated some of his devices
to the delight of onlookers. He later worked with
Westinghouse to harness the power of Niagara Falls.
His role in the development of our modern system of
delivering electricity is fairly well acknowledged,
but his fertile imagination and prodigious intellect
produced many other inventions and only after his
death did a court declare that Tesla was also the
inventor of radio, the original "wireless"
technology. He had battled that one out with
Marconi, another inventor who was commercially much
more successful but whose work merely built on what
Tesla had already discovered.
I could not help but notice that Tesla’s life
coincided with the life of Edgar Cayce (who died in
1945) whose life readings revealed much about the
technology of Atlantis. According to Cayce, the
power generator for Atlantis was a huge crystal that
provided the power for vehicles that went over land,
through the air, and under the ocean. This was
certainly a wireless technology. Tesla thought one
of his power towers could provide the power for
vehicles and machines at a remote distance. Could
Tesla, with his extreme sensitivity, have been
getting messages across time from Atlantis, or could
he have been a reincarnated Atleantean engineer? Or,
as a writer named Arthur Mathews alleged, could he
have been from the planet Venus? (Check out a film
called The Man Who Fell to Earth starring David
Bowie as a man who descends to earth to give
humanity new technology.)
Tesla had shown some psychic ability, seeing the
death of his mother in his mind before it happened.
He had extremely acute hearing and great sensitivity
to nature, detecting the resonance of the earth. He
felt both the earth and the upper atmosphere could
be conductors of power. He would have found
ridiculous the notion that his ideas came from
Atlantis and never was attracted to occult ideas. On
the contrary, he worked at finding mechanical
explanations for everything, even his own
clairvoyance. Although he had the ability to “see”
pictures in vivid detail, he maintained that these
were always manifestations of things the viewer had
actually seen somewhere. He would have rejected the
idea that they came from the spirit world or from a
memory of a previous lifetime. That has not stopped
others from speculating about his extraordinary
powers. It is possible, of course, that the only
explanation needed is that Nikola Tesla was simply a
whole lot smarter than most people. |
