Despite his obscurity, the greatest genius of all time may have been Nikola Tesla. Geniuses like Tesla and Einstein come along only every 50 years or so. An extraterrestrial from Venus, Tesla was a superhuman inventor who had the uncanny ability to visualize the working of machines in his head. Tesla: the prodigal genius, the forgotten genius, the sorcerer, the wizard, the man out of time. His esoteric electric technology, way over your head, is best interpreted by experts in scaler electromagnetics and quantum physics.In his old age, forgotten and penniless, Tesla was murdered by agents of the U.S. government in a seedy Manhattan hotel room, his papers confiscated by the FBI. Tesla's technology continues to be withheld from the public and instead is directed into black projects like the Philadelphia Experiment, subterranean Tesla, coils, and HAARP. Antigravitic UFO's are Tesla technology, as are the quantum-vacuum-zero-point free-energy generators that drive them. Tesla's technology has brought us the Teslar watch and the Tesla Scaler Potentizer. It was Tesla's magnifying transmitter that caused the devastating Tunguska explosion of 1908. A contemporary black-project version installed underground in Ontario accidentally brought about the East Coast, August 2003 blackout.

The above will pass as intelligent Tesla-speak on late-night talk radio, on the internet, and at cocktail parties. And Tesla-speak one must these days if one has any pretensions to electric or physics expertise. The italics above contain some direct quotes, including the first two sentences; other examples are more periphrastic; but all are consistent with the contemporary idiom of Tesla suburban legend.

And all are instances of what Tesla ain't that make me want to scream.

Tesla, the genius

He could visualize machines working in his head! But can't any mechanical thinker? Yet one hears this all the time.

"Tesla, the great mathematical and physical genius, came up with an idea called zero-point energy," quacks Michio Kaku, the string theorist, who has been declared a genius himself.

Is there a Tesla biography with a title that has in it no "genius" or variation thereof? A magazine journalist of the 1940's, John O'Neill, authored a panegyric called Prodigal Genius, which has become institutionalized as the standard. O'Neill's enthusiasm may have been genuine, his biography eloquent and respectably researched, but his spin may have been inspired by promotional newspaper articles from Tesla's heyday.

Far from obscure, Tesla circa 1900 was as famous as Thomas Edison. Tesla was exploited as the poster-boy for an emerging electric power utility industry based upon his AC patents. The press romanced Tesla to the public as a genius in the process of promoting this industry, which would develop into omnipotent monopolies, from Insull to Enron.

Of course, when Tesla deviated with his radical high-frequency inventions, the media tried to render their genius a non-person, permitting him only the exposure of an annual birthday press conference.

One book that provides relief from the ubiquitous genius thesis (although the title does have that ring) is Enigma Fantastique by W. Gordon Allen (Health Research), which parallels Tesla's life with that of Rudolf Steiner. It was Tesla's distinctive education that made him special, says Allen. Jesuit instructors played a part, as did various mystical schools circulating in Eastern Europe when Tesla studied at Graz. These stressed self-discipline of both mind and body and the development of powers of rigorous self- application.

These are the strengths that set Tesla apart. The genius sentimentality is a disfavor to Tesla and is a misrepresentation of human potential generally.

Tesla as victim

The victim cliché dovetails with the genius one, and it feeds on inventors (as it does writers, musicians, and artists). Thus Tesla is commonly reported to have died in poverty – murder is sometimes in the script, by government agents – and the myth has his work stolen and suppressed.

In truth, Tesla died at age 89, evidently of natural causes, and he did not die in poverty, but in his rooms at the New Yorker, a commodious midtown hotel, which is not the Waldorf or the Plaza quite, but a convenient situation for a senior citizen, being a little city unto itself with restaurants, shops, and services, (a nifty habitat, testifies this writer, who stayed at the New Yorker more than once in his college days, 15 years after Tesla's death) and as good a place as any for a venerable inventor to live out his last days.

Tesla's papers and belongings at the hotel indeed were confiscated by the government, not by the FBI but by the Immigration Department's Division of Alien Property. It may be true that much of Tesla's New Yorker notes got disappeared, but it is a distortion to dwell lugubriously on this, for we have so much of Tesla's technology raw – in patents, lectures, articles, his Colorado Springs notes, the material unearthed by Leland Anderson, Gerry Vassilatos and others. By no means has this wealth of material been properly digested.

It is true that Tesla's later work invited suppression, but so much of it did make it into patent, and the Tesla name lived on, underground, floating on the inventor's former (corporately sponsored) fame until resurrected in the 1980's, albeit unofficially.

Given the fate of inventors generally, Tesla fared very well. Compare the innumerable inventors whose work goes unknown, including so many who are in patents, whom you might run across in a subject patent search, find as clever as Tesla, but who will remain forever in obscurity.

folklore

Dammit, Tesla had nothing to do with a fantasy set in the years 1943 - 44 called the Philadelphia Experiment, having died in January of 1943! Believers are encouraged to read the paper in Electric Spacecraft Journal #8 written by a military historian who searched in vain in all the logical records for any corroboration of this incredible event.

Nor does Tesla's particular radio technology have anything particularly to do with HAARP (other than that the project is radio, which Tesla invented), for Tesla's radio is longwave, and HAARP is shortwave, and HAARP supposedly impacts an ionosphere, which Tesla insisted does not exist and would have no effect upon radio if it did. Poor Tesla, who must witness all this rhetoric helplessly from above. He would deeply resent the loose recitation of his name in conjunction with "ionosphere" in fashionable HAARP-talk.

The short-wave complex called HAARP may well be a menace. And Tesla did know the electrics of weather and the potential of electric weather modification. And, knowing this, Tesla, if alive, might encourage you to be suspicious of any and all of the humungous military transmitters, old and new, but particularly the low-frequency (long-wave) installations, such as ELF, Omega, NAA, LORAN, and GWEN, Tesla, I think, might encourage suspicion of rather than just the novel short-wave HAARP (though he might allow that HAARP itself might modulate its high-frequency carrier with low-frequency pulses.)

That the Siberian forest at Tunguska was leveled in 1908 by a 15-kiloton blast from Tesla's magnifying transmitter at the opposite side of the earth is a bizarre rumor that won't die. Some advocates of the story say the incredible destructive pulse originated from Wardencliff, the site of Tesla's famous magnifying transmitter tower, but, thanks to J.P. Morgan's funding cut-off, Tesla was well gone from that site by '08, and the facility had never been completed nor activated.

Blaming Tesla technology for the August 2003 blackout is a story that played on Art Bell one night but never gained traction. The mischief was supposedly done by a black-project giant Tesla coil or magnifying transmitter bunkered underground somewhere in Ontario. However, this theory did not acknowledge or explain the equally mysterious blackouts that occurred around the same time in three large areas of Europe.

Tesla is celebrated for a "death ray" (which he explored but never patented). This sensational idea the Tesla lore promotes beyond so many other of his extraordinary inventions that did get into patent, this because of one cavalier utterance at a birthday press conference that was seized upon by the press. Meanwhile Tesla's documented explorations into electric-ray technology and ray guns remain obscure within the blooming body of Tesla literature.

So much fantasy, folklore, and disinformation swim around Tesla that a writer venturing into these waters has difficulty finding any secure footing. This writer had the good fortune of first encountering Tesla in patents, having stumbled upon a complete set someone had photocopied at the National Archives (prior to these becoming available in book). Surveying the field, even as the literature was developed back then, this writer soon concluded that the patents were the only sound footing in Teslaland. Also, it is a good idea for any writer to ground himself in some hands-on experimenting, but so few Tesla-technology pontificators actually do.

what he really did

Tesla invented the 60-cycle AC power system that runs civilization today, the dynamos, the transformers, the motors, the regulators and arc lamps. This technology established, along with his own wealth and fame, Tesla went on inventing. A turning point was 1891, when Tesla applied for patent 462,418, a Method and Apparatus for Electrical Conversion and Distribution, which was a spark-gap oscillator high-frequency lighting system. This began a stream of inventing that produced the Tesla coil, electrotherapy devices, the magnifying transmitter, radio, and wireless power. Although much of this work got into patent, most never got into manufacture, and some, like radio, did so under another's name, like Marconi's.

Tesla did patent a free-energy receiver (685,957, 1901), but that he pursued this into working prototypes is difficult to support. However, Tesla's nephew wrote an account of a drive through New York in a Pierce Arrow his uncle had converted into a free-energy electric.

UFO's? Antigravity? No patents, a few speculative notes. Some antigravity experimenters employ Tesla-coil high-voltage technology.

Such terms as "energy from the vacuum" and "zero point" are alien to Tesla's vocabulary and would annoy him greatly.

quantum Tesla

A huge volume of verbiage and intellectual energy is expended in a misguided effort to reconcile Tesla's electrics with modern quantum theory, a gigantic waste of time, human energy, and print.

Tesla came in on the ground floor of particle theory with his exploration of x-rays, which he observed were "streams of matter." But he had little respect for the quantum theory that later developed (and he had no good words for Einstein's either). The only mention of "particles" in all of Tesla's patents is in his free-energy receiver, in which he describes cosmic radiation as "particles from space" (a 24-hour free-energy source).

Tesla is on record as declaring "There is no such thing as an electron." Somebody should print this on tee shirts and conduct a campaign to stamp out the fashion that requires such excruciating utterances as this:

A Tesla coil is a quantum action device…Recent experiments in Europe have found that if the phase of a split quantum particle is changed, its conjugate partner instantly knows this phase change has occurred, and this effect is independent of separation of distance between partnered particles. This occurs… for Tesla coil action wherein the phase wave information is nearly instantaneous and 90 degrees to the particle motion which forms the group wave information. (an internet posting by a Jerry Bayles)

Or this from Col. Thomas Bearden:

Tesla waves – which are scaler waves in pure massless charge flux itself – thus can exhibit extraordinary characteristics that ordinary vector waves do not possess. And Tesla waves have extradimensional degrees of freedom in which to move, as compared to vector waves. Indeed, one way to visualize a Tesla scaler wave is to regard it a pure oscillation of time itself.

Bearden continues:

The charge of vacuum spacetime is assumed to be zero, when in fact it is a very high value. Vacuum has no mass, but it has great massless charge and virtual particle charge flux.

What a turn-off this jargon to the innocent who encounters it in a search for some on-the-ground knowledge of Tesla!

Tesla, who was not a physicist but an engineer, took for granted an etheric physics that had served electric science well for at least 150 years. Etheric theory allows for a field permeating all space and matter that is the medium of electric phenomena – charge, potential, polarity, conduction being instances of etheric disequilibrium.

Wireless, for example, is a standing-wave disturbance manifested in "compressions and rarefactions of the ether." To Tesla, wireless is not radiation ("radio"), nor is the phenomena of wireless analogous to that of light rays, as in the Herzian model, which Tesla vehemently rejected.

To Tesla, radiant-particle phenomena and the phenomena of electrics belong in two quite separate theoretical physics camps. Again, Tesla was not a physicist, though he had his physics for sure. Where would Tesla (and his contemporaries like Roetgen) have taken the theoretical physics of particle rays had not others taken it over into nucleonics, nuke bombs, nuke power, zillion-dollar linear accelerators, and plenty of baffling, alienating rhetoric?

Tesla's articles (and his "lost" lecture) on x-ray research were in the same time period as his Tesla-coil patent filings (mid-1890's), but never in these patents or in lectures on Tesla-coil phenomena does Tesla digress into quantum-style explanations, as some fashionable Tesla theorists feel they must do today.

Did Tesla really invent a new kind of "scaler" wave, as Bearden asserts? The etheric view easily allows for the standing wave phenomena (which Bearden is struggling with) as well as the instantaneity troubling Mr. Bayles. To both of these utterances, Tesla (assuming he could understand the vocabulary) would remark "Of course. So what? Why bother?"

The etheric view of electrics is a cosmic macrophysics. The quantum view is an atheistic, materialistic microphysics. Does one really have to get down to some fundamental particle to comprehend electrics, or is particle-quantum physics an erroneous focus, a distraction that takes us nowhere.?

Microphysicists suffer vexation when they intuit a "unified field," but etheric physicists do not flinch. Having dismantled the ether, the quantum guys must laboriously tie it back together with "strings."

The typical quantum graduate comes to Tesla with a big handicap. His challenge is to shed a thick crust of miseducation. If he insists on coming to Tesla as a physicist, he would do well to submerge himself in ether physics. To comprehend Tesla one must dare to cross over into the fringe.

"The Philadelphia Experiment Reconsidered," is a very skeptical inquiry by a military historian, Electric Spacecraft Journal, No. 8, www.electricspacecraft.com

Tesla's "lost" Lecture, before the New York Academy of Sciences, April, 1897, Leland Anderson, ed., 1994. Also Tesla's Teleforce, Anderson 1998, for more on Tesla's particle-ray technology. Both from Twenty First Century Books, www.tfcbooks.com

Articles on Tesla's Pierce Arrow and his New Yorker Hotel days can be found in Extraordinary Technology, Vol. 1, No. 2. www.teslatech.info

Trinkaus' own guess on the '03 blackouts (a hacker hit, possibly a secret-government probe into power-grid vulnerability) is published in The American Free Press of 10/20/03.