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A Tesla Model 3
131 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M re-revisit the suppressed technologies of Nicola Tesla.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
It's time to talk Tesla. Again. Tesla again. Oh god, no, I thought we agreed there'd be no Musk content. No Musk, no Twitter, no wondering why, if the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is his favourite book, he hasn't realised that he'd be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
00:00:17
Speaker
No, no Nikola Tesla, the original Tesla. Classic Tesla? Pigeon Fancier himself. It's played by David Bowie in the best Christopher Nolan film, The Prestige. And a major-ish character in the TV show, Sanctuary, where he was both a vampire and imbued with power over electricity.
00:00:37
Speaker
Plus, he was in an episode of Doctor Who where, somewhat predictably, he fought off an alien menace. And, somewhat unpredictably, fought him off with Thomas Edison. But otherwise, Testa's not really that big a pop culture character, which is strange given his weird and suppressed technology bonafide days.
00:00:55
Speaker
Daly gets mentioned a lot. I'm fairly sure Gary Busey helps to defeat Hitler in the centre of the earth with Tesla technology. And numerous films and shows rely on Tesla tech to explain why the impossible is merely improbable.
Tesla vs. Musk: Pop Culture and Obscurity
00:01:08
Speaker
But in many respects, Tesla media is over. Like how no one talks about the Philadelphia experiment anymore.
00:01:14
Speaker
And nowadays Elon Musk has probably swamped out search inquiries for Nikola Tesla. Imagine telling Tesla that in the future he'd be more associated with Nazi sympathizers and giant man-childs than fighting Edison over what the best electricity delivery system for North America should be.
00:01:32
Speaker
Eh, poor old Tesla. He accidentally invents the X-ray and might have intercepted a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence, and these days his name is mostly associated with cars with poor quality control that also have a habit of trying to run people over when the driver isn't looking. You know, given Edison's hatred of Tesla, it's tempting to think that Elon Musk is actually carrying out Edison's legacy beyond the grave.
Podcast Begins: Hosts' Updates and Topics
00:01:56
Speaker
Hmm, that's a conspiracy theory worth pursuing.
00:02:00
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dintus.
00:02:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here fit as a fiddle in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison and there fit as some other musical instrument in Zhuhai, China. It's Dr. N. Dinder. I think I'm as fit as a flute. That'll do. It starts with an F. It must be true. It's true. It's true. In fact, it's not just true. It's flown.
00:02:31
Speaker
Don't talk to me about flu. We're both well. We were both under the weather in different ways last week, so this sort of got put off a little bit. I actually have COVID, active COVID cases in my own house, but I'm among the uninfected at the moment, so fingers crossed that stays the same. But while I'm well, we'd better get this episode out.
00:02:54
Speaker
Indeed. So yes, earlier this week I was suffering from a rather extreme bout of insomnia, which meant that our planned re-recording time did not quite work because I'd spent most of the night awake and needed to sleep at the time that Josh and I had arranged to record, which means there has been this kind of
00:03:15
Speaker
period of time where we should have been talking about the death of Henry Kissinger. I'm just now beyond the point of talking about the death of Henry Kissinger.
Hbomberguy and Plagiarism Discussion
00:03:24
Speaker
It's a shame. It is a shame, because it would have been great to kind of got in on the pile-on on the corpse of Henry Kissinger. I mean, we could engage in the pile-on that has now occurred because of H. Bomberguy's video on plagiarism on YouTube.
00:03:43
Speaker
which I must have been very invested by, but I just don't feel it's got enough conspiratorial overhangs into this episode. Although I do recommend, if you've got four hours to spare, take a look at Hbomberguy's video on plagiarism on the internet. And frankly, you all have four hours to spare because you listen to this podcast.
00:04:05
Speaker
You do. Yeah, I admit I've sort of skipped through it. I kind of went from section to section because there was a lot of, okay, you know, I get the point. I understand. I believe you. I get what you're saying. Can we move on to the next bit, please?
00:04:20
Speaker
it's put together the guy I think is if you're familiar with his work the guy can put together an argument he can he can he can narrate in a way that keeps you interested so yeah that video was the straw that broke the camel's back made me go maybe I should give some money to his patreon because he only makes a video every six months but they're always well worth watching and frankly he needs to be paid to continue
00:04:47
Speaker
taking figures down. Last year was Tommy Talarico. This year, James Somerton can't wait to find out who it is next year. Really hoping it's never going to be me. Well, I mean, either of us would, in order to have done something notable enough to be taken down by H-Bomb ago, I mean, that's almost an achievement in itself. I know. I kind of think I'm not important enough.
00:05:12
Speaker
Like, I almost wish I was. But everyone who thinks that they're not going to be taken down by H-bomberguy thinks they're not important enough. But your day, Josh, it could come. Live and hope. And fear. But no, let's not pile on to the usual suspects. Let's not follow the crowd. Let's instead talk about a topic that's several years out of date and not for the first time.
Mystery Text Message Investigation
00:05:40
Speaker
four then. So some people might be quite curious about that weird text message we got with the link. Now, the standard policy of the Podcaster's Guide to the Galaxy is that we do not click links that we do not understand the source of, because that's just good cybersecurity. But I was in a unique position earlier this week. So one of the staff members at Beit Shaddaa, Beijing Normal University at Juhai is leaving campus.
00:06:09
Speaker
And, uniquely, I got access to both a laptop that was going to be thrown out and a 3G modem that was about to expire. So, long-term listeners of the podcast will be aware that occasionally we have connection issues when we're recording in China.
00:06:28
Speaker
which is, in part, due to a reliance on a biocorphable VPN, and also due to the university's bad internet infrastructure, which means that some staff members buy 3G or 4G modems and basically use that as their internet access. So this staff member is leaving campus, but he leaves campus today, but actually by time of recording, I think he's actually now left campus.
00:06:54
Speaker
throwing away his laptop, had a 3G modem, I was in the perfect position to take a computer that was never going to be used again. Actually, it might get recycled, but never going to be used again by anyone who has important information on it, and access to a modem, which I could then click the link on, and I now know what is behind that link. And was it porn? No, it was a text file, not even an RTF, just a standard dot TXTAC,
00:07:24
Speaker
which even though it's a text file, I didn't actually copy the contents of that text file out of the webpage onto a separate document. I instead used my phone and just wrote down what was in the text file instead because I'm still slightly paranoid of any link you might find.
00:07:43
Speaker
And it's a series of numbers. Let me give you those numbers, Josh. It goes 2570, 1325, 753, 221, 44, 27, 1053, 1067, 1209, 1222, 1938, 2004, 2020, and then low Mars Knox.
00:08:12
Speaker
Ah, well, you see, there we go. That's clearly an acronym for Old Mark Socks. So it's about, it's about Old Mark. Old Mark in the socks. That's clearly what we're all about here. And not even Old Mark Socks, Old Mark Socks. Old Mark Socks, because you're familiar, it's your accent. This is the patois that you color your text, you color your speech with.
00:08:39
Speaker
Okay, that's an interesting hypothesis. I mean, I've actually thought of the anagram aspect of Lou Miles Knox. But yeah, so that was the content of the text file that someone has been trying to send us for now over a month by email and then by texting us. We still want to know which one of you sent us that text. And now I am kind of curious what these numbers are meant to mean.
Tesla History and Legacy
00:09:05
Speaker
So it remains a good strength.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing more about Old Mark and his socks. But while we wait for the next installment, we should probably go back to the conspiracy and talk about Tesla again. Again. Yes, this is not just back to the conspiracy. It's back to back to the conspiracy. We weren't calling it back to the conspiracy the last time that we actually did Tesla. So it is still back to the conspiracy, but it's back to back to back to back to back.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yes, play the chime and then it'll all make sense. Will it though? Will it? It'll make more sense. Okay, playing that chime around about now. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy.
00:09:51
Speaker
Right, no, so here's the thing. It's kind of funny, you'll laugh, I'm sure. We thought, well, what can we do? We're due back to the conspiracy episode. What's something we talked about a long, long time ago that we could talk about again today? And we thought, Tesla, we did an episode like eight years ago, August 2015, episode 48, we talked about Tesla. So it's well past time we talked about him. And then while, and so I looked at the notes,
00:10:20
Speaker
for that episode and figured we must have mentioned them a few times. I did a quick search through the other episodes. And now it turns out that when you've been doing a podcast for over nine years, you kind of forget a lot of the episodes that you've done previously. And actually, I don't even remember episodes we did this year.
00:10:38
Speaker
No, that's, yeah, me neither. But it turns out that in September of 2019, episode 234, we actually did what we plan to do now. We looked at Tesla and what we'd set them out on before and anything new that had come up since then. So this is actually, this is actually a, that was before the back to the conspiracy segment was a thing, but it was actually a back to the conspiracy as it turns out. And so now we are indeed back to,
00:11:06
Speaker
back to the conspiracy as we talk about Tesla again again again and for the fact there's actually four years and two months between the first time we talked about it and what appears to be four four years and two months between the second time we talked about it and now so for the numerologically inclined there must be something significant about the fact that every four years and two months we decide to talk about Tesla again does that mean we have to talk about Tesla again in four months and
00:11:35
Speaker
Two years? No, no, two months and four years. No, four years and two months. Yes, no, something sometimes, so that'll be like February, 2028. I don't know. Set your alarm now. It's so old. Like your calendars. Anyway, so in any case, it's been quite a while since we talked about Tesla, so we're probably due a catch up. Tell me about Nikola Tesla, the man, the myth, the mystery.
00:12:03
Speaker
Well, Tesla was born to Serbian parents in what we now call Croatia on the 10th of July 1856, and he moved to New York City. I watched far too much what we do in the shed. I went to a madberry New York City. Yes, it's a poisoned everyone's mind.
00:12:23
Speaker
So he moved to New York in 1884. He died on the 7th of January 1943. And that's basically everything we know about this person called Nikola Tesla. He just existed and did absolutely nothing apart from just one small thing. He had a really, really big feud with Thomas Edison. Really, really big feud with Thomas Edison.
00:12:48
Speaker
He did, they weren't great buddies. Well, I mean, but the thing was, they were originally, or at least, I mean, I don't think anyone was ever a good friend of Thomas Edison, but they started out as compatriots of a kind, and then they stopped being compatriots, and Edison may not have had many friends, but when he had enemies, oh, did he have enemies?
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, so Tesla had been working for Edison starting in 1882, but resigned in 1885. I mean, Edison is the reason why Tesla ends up going to New York from memory. He's going to be enticed to come, come join me, come join me. You have really great job opportunities at the Edison company.
00:13:39
Speaker
And there was basically a dispute over pay for Tesla was brought in to work on this big project that involved reworking Edison's less efficient motors and generators. Now, the way I've heard it,
00:13:56
Speaker
is that Edison said, if you do this job for me, I'll pay you X amount of money, a lot of money, a large amount of money. And then when Tesla did it and said, right, where's that money? Edison was like, I was joking.
00:14:15
Speaker
In Edison's version of events, he'd sort of said, yeah, if you can do that, I'll give you a million billion dollars. And was obviously joking. But poor old Serbian Tesla, whose grasp of the English language wasn't perhaps so keen, misunderstood his jokey remark and thought that Edison was actually going to give him that amount of money. Whereas in Tesla's version of events, Edison said, I will give you this amount of money, and then tried to go back on it afterwards. And whichever way it was,
00:14:42
Speaker
There was a large disagreement. The two had a massive falling out, and Tesla resigned. Yeah, so then he started work on a company involved in the generation of electrical lighting, which when you think about the end of the 19th century, that's mostly arc-like lighting that was being used at the time.
00:15:03
Speaker
But he got pushed out by his business partners, and due to that dispute at work,
AC vs. DC Current War
00:15:12
Speaker
also lost the patents that he had made for lighting and the dynamos being used to generate the electricity for those lights.
00:15:21
Speaker
Yep, so then he started another company who was eventually contracted to Westinghouse, who were rivals to Edison and General Electric. So he worked on developing AC current and an AC motor. And this is where the whole current wars thing came in, whether it should be... DC versus AC. DC versus AC. Which I've not... Any kind of one, except in America, where DC for some reason still seems to be used in some situations.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, so the story we should, in a later, I think we did this in what, this is episode 234 we last talked about, and in episode 236 we had to issue a slight correction because we'd done the old story about how Edison electrocuted elephants. He used to like to electrocute elephants. He loved electrocuting elephants. We should see it allegedly because it's not true.
00:16:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's it's it's it's true and it isn't. So there is a movie called Electricuting an Elephant in which a full sign adult elephant is killed by electrocution. And at the end of that movie, you see the credits that say by Thomas Edison.
00:16:32
Speaker
But that's because it was made by the Edison Film Company, and every movie made by the Edison Film Company is set by Thomas A. Edison in the credits. I'd like to take credit for anything he possibly could. So by kind of sneaking, you're using my tech, using my film equipment, therefore technically it's one of my films, therefore I get my name in the credits.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yes, but no. This movie was actually made 10 years after the whole current war was settled. So there was no propaganda advantage in trying to make AC look dangerous at that point. They'd already made their decisions. And it was a case of the satellite. It's not really a nice story. It was an elephant that had been used
00:17:17
Speaker
as literally a circus elephant, but an elephant that had been used for entertainment. I forget the term they use, but like a difficult elephant. It was one who, strangely enough, didn't take kindly to being poked and prodded and told what to do by people. And so they decided to kill it.
00:17:35
Speaker
Essentially, they fed it poison and then finished it off by
Tesla's Quirks and Misconceptions
00:17:40
Speaker
electrocute an elephant. And because killing a very large animal, like at the time, people didn't really have much else to do. So, hey, those people are going to electrocute an elephant was enough to draw a crowd and they turned it into an event and shot a movie. But it wasn't actually Edison saying
00:17:56
Speaker
kill me an elephant to show how evil AC is. However, although Edison did not order an elephant's death, he did work a fellow, he was supportive of a fellow called Harold Brown, who was a man who he definitely did know did electrocute dogs, dogs plural, with alternating current to prove that AC was harmful. So Edison didn't specifically order the death of an elephant.
00:18:23
Speaker
to show that AC was bad, but if his attitude towards killing animals with AC is what we're led to believe, he probably wouldn't have had a problem with it at the time. Yeah, if you're willing to kill a dog, you're probably also willing to kill an elephant as well. Although, if you're willing to kill elephants, are you willing to kill dogs? I don't think it goes both ways. It's strange, maybe we should experiment, but maybe not. With elephants or dogs?
00:18:53
Speaker
with people. See which they prefer. America's been doing that for a while. It's not working out well. No. Anyway, back to Tesla. So he worked in a bunch of labs, he experimented with electricity and x-rays and radio, and then he started up his own warden cliff tower in 1900. He had a bit of trouble getting funding, but eventually he completed it in 1902. I think the story of Tesla is trouble getting funding. He was a very
00:19:19
Speaker
inspired man, I was about to use the word clever man, but we're going to get on to exactly how clever Tesla actually was. But he was a man with a lot of ideas, but he was also a man who seemed to lack what we would call these days, business mouse, because I'm sure that's how economists and financial managers talk about business acumen, business mouse. And so he seemed to have a lot of trouble getting people to latch on to his ideas.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, now, Wardenclyffe Tower, I think that's that's the image I think most people have when they think of Tesla as the as the sort of the mad scientist. That was we mentioned the prestige at the start. That was that was that wasn't the procedure. He goes and visits Tesla at Wardenclyffe Tower and there's Tesla doing electrical magic.
00:20:10
Speaker
while looking like David Bowie. So everything we know about the guy says he does seem to have been some sort of a genius. And also seems to be, you know, obviously we can't diagnose someone a hundred years into the future, but we're here around today. I'm fairly certain he would be diagnosed with some level of neurodiversity. He supposedly had a photographic memory. He spoke eight languages. Although that's taking what's that unusual for Europe. For someone from Europe, yeah.
00:20:38
Speaker
He had a bunch of personality ticks. He had various phobias and obsessions. He had a bit of a germ phobia. He was afraid of pearls, apparently, in other forms of jewellery. He did not like fat people, apparently.
00:20:57
Speaker
some weird thing of his obsessed with the number three had various other things which again if we saw a person exhibiting them today we would probably call OCD but again can't really diagnose someone a hundred years removed from them and really like pigeons yeah some pigeons yep and also strangely feminist in a way and that he was of the firm opinion that woman should become the dominant set
00:21:24
Speaker
He wasn't right about everything though, and part of this is just because he sort of, some of this is areas where the science got settled sometime after his death, sometimes it isn't, but he believed in sort of the e-theory, theoreic mechanics, he didn't buy subatomic theory, none of this electrons existed. But in part because that fitted in with his electrical theories, because he was of the firm opinion that electricity cannot travel in a vacuum.
00:21:52
Speaker
And thus, if you're going to be remotely transferring electricity from one location to another, there needs to be a medium for the electricity to travel through. So the idea that there's a vacuum means his theory is about
00:22:07
Speaker
about, I keep on saying remote, his theories about transferring electricity over long distances without wires isn't going to work unless there's an etheric mechanism to allow to explain how the electricity translates. So it's not just he didn't believe in subatomic theory, it actually went against his own, and I'm gonna say quasi scientific principles here, as to how we thought electricity worked.
00:22:35
Speaker
He also didn't buy Einstein's theories about relativity or curved space. It's scary because he needed the ether. He was something of a fan of eugenics, which as we've talked about in the past, a lot of people were. Early part of the 20th century, eugenics was kind of in vogue and then those damn Nazis came along and showed everyone, actually, if you really get into eugenics, this is kind of where it leads.
00:23:00
Speaker
So I should point out, there were people in the 1920s who were arguing against you at the time. It took the Nazis of people to go, oh, that's not just hypothetical. People actually might literally round up people and take them into camps to get rid of them from the gene pool. It's not a historical danger. It is something which actually can happen and actually, whoa, actually
Tesla Conspiracies and Suppressed Inventions
00:23:26
Speaker
has.
00:23:26
Speaker
So that's the brief history of Tesla, but this is a conspiracy theory based podcast. So what we're really interested in are the conspiracy theories around him, which are mostly sort of suppressed technology conspiracy theories, which we've talked about plenty in the past as well. There are lots of ideas that Tesla
00:23:48
Speaker
came up with all sorts of technologies that have been suppressed by whichever powers that be you choose to blame and so that's why some of these miraculous things that he came up with are not widely used today or either that or he invented things and people suppressed them or since after his death people found his papers and were able to develop them and work on
00:24:14
Speaker
and get working these magical technologies which they then kept to themselves and suppressed. Yeah, because Tesla was one of those people who would talk about an idea in a very speculative way. So rather than going, I've done some research and here's something which I've developed, Tesla would go, here is a thought I've just had. Imagine if you could create a ray that could kill people at a distance.
00:24:43
Speaker
without then ever doing, in some cases, any work to go, well, I wonder if that idea is actually plausible. He might just toss off two or three ideas and then go back to Wardenclyffe to work on remote energy generation, given I'm going to say remote anywhere. I might as well put it in there. Just lean into it. Yeah.
00:24:59
Speaker
And so the problem with talking about Tesla, and the problem of talking about suppressed inventions in Tesla, is it's hard to distinguish between things that Tesla just tossed off in a conversation, as opposed to serious ideas he was actually investigating.
00:25:22
Speaker
Yep. So supposedly some of these things that he invented that were suppressed include free energy from the vacuum of space, which is similar to the so-called zero point energy, which is another thing that we've discussed probably a long time ago as well. The theory is in quantum physics. Once again, as we said before,
00:25:44
Speaker
Tesla really believed in the ether, so he wasn't believing in the vacuum of space as we understand the vacuum of space to be. He was talking about extracting energy from ether. He talked a lot about the wireless broadcasting of electricity, knowing these days we know all about the near field effect. You can get lots of devices that let you charge your phone just by resting it on a thing, or indeed a few
00:26:08
Speaker
If it doesn't even need to be touching, it could be slightly removed from it. There are things like, I think in some like, I'm sure there's probably a public transport, but all I know it from being used from is rides and amusement parks where you have little cars going along with the track that runs down the middle and that's inductive energy. There's the drawing power from that track without actually touching it.
00:26:30
Speaker
It's the thing that he wanted to be able to do it not over relatively short distances. He wanted to be broadcasting electricity over the sorts of distances for which we still use power lines and cables these days. He talked about transferring energy from, say, America to the UK. That was the kind of distance he was thinking about, for sending energy from one location to another.
00:26:55
Speaker
And as we kind of know from the near field effect, it's quite possible to transfer information wirelessly at short range. But the further the distance you get, the more energy takes to get to the other location and the less energy you actually then receive.
00:27:15
Speaker
And so it seems that the kind of long distance broadcasting of energy that Tesla wanted to do, if it were possible, it would be incredibly inefficient. Yeah, these ideas that he came up with this earthquake machine, some sort of a steam powered oscillator that could cause
00:27:35
Speaker
generate earthquakes. Apparently there was an episode of MythBusters where they had to go at this and said it didn't really seem to be feasible, although then apparently they pointed out at the time that at the time Tesla built this machine that was supposed to cause earthquakes, buildings weren't built earthquake proof.
00:27:53
Speaker
in any way. So the vibrations that produced him, the sorts of buildings that he was demonstrating and probably would have felt a lot bigger than vibrations in a modern building, which is built with that sort of stuff in mind. And also this is around about the time where people were concerned about marching on bridges, because you have, say, an army marching on a bridge in step.
00:28:17
Speaker
you can create a resonance which in some situations will cause the bridge to have a rather catastrophic collapse. So we know that you can create resonances that can cause problem to architectural buildings. So this theory actually isn't kind of out of the ordinary. It was a theory that was going around that if you oscillate a building in just the right way, it will cause catastrophic collapse.
00:28:41
Speaker
The problem was the kind of device he was building once again doesn't seem to have enough power to cause the scale of oscillation that you'd expect. And as you also point out, we kind of build buildings differently now in the same way that we kind of build bridges differently now, because we now know this is a problem that needs to be taken into account by the engineers.
00:29:04
Speaker
Yes, and so then apart from that, we have supposedly invented anti-gravity flying machines, the Harp Array, which we used to talk about a bit, but these days it's kind of shut down, or at least it's no longer used. Good old weather manipulation. Weather manipulation, yep. Supposedly he could enhance brain power with electricity. This is the idea of the Tesla death rays, which I think we might talk a bit more about later.
00:29:30
Speaker
And then there's the prestige with this sort of teleport-y weird cloning machines as well. There's all sorts of stuff. In a sense, what didn't Tesla actually invent in secret? Well, there it lies the question. Because for some people, everything was invented by Tesla. Everything. And it's all been hidden, Josh. It's been invented, and it's been hidden from you.
00:29:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, so how seriously can we take these claims then? Like, is there anything to suggest that he did invent stuff that has been kept from us? Well, I mean, the thing is, Tesla was clever. So we actually look at the history of things that Tesla did, which are attested to by the historical record. We go all the way back to his work with Edison. Edison entreats Tesla to come to New York
00:30:22
Speaker
to help him improve the motors and dynamos being produced by General Electric. And we happen to know that Tesla did improve those designs. And we also happen to know that Edison probably stiffed him for the work that was done. He worked on and helped develop alternating current in the United States.
Tesla's Genuine Contributions and Discoveries
00:30:44
Speaker
He didn't actually invent AC. As people like to point out, there was already AC generation going on in Europe
00:30:51
Speaker
by the time that Tesla went to the United States. But at the same time, he didn't just take an idea from Europe and bring it to America. He also improved upon it in the United States. So even if he didn't invent AC, he certainly improved upon AC and persuaded Americans that AC is the way to go when it comes to power.
00:31:15
Speaker
although for some reason America decides to have a completely different voltage system from the rest of the world and that's just confusing. He did inadvertently create an x-ray image whilst trying to take a photo of Mark Twain and this was technically weeks before the formal discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Rötgen. And some of those things where you go
00:31:40
Speaker
given he wasn't actually trying to create X-rays, it was just an accident. There's a question here as to whether this was clever or actually just very bad photography on the part of Tesla, but nonetheless, did take an X-ray of Mark Twain by accident, and that's quite impressive in its own respect. He helped develop radio control, and there's some questions to whether he was also involved in the development of radio transmission,
00:32:10
Speaker
but that is a very, very messy pace of dispute, very messy. He also may have intercepted
00:32:20
Speaker
an alien or at least anomalous radio signal. Josh, what was happening there? Well, we're not sure. We think he possibly in his work on radio intercepted one of Marconi's first attempts at broadcasting via radio in 1899. But he certainly picked up a signal that he was very much not expecting. Yeah. So he was I mean, when you're when you're first developing radio and there are no radio broadcasts out there,
00:32:50
Speaker
What you tend to hear is the background noise of the universe. Because there's no other channels out there, as you're scanning through the spectrum, anything which doesn't sound like the background noise of the universe is going to be a signal.
00:33:09
Speaker
definitely picked up a signal that was not background noise, but given the time frame and the fact there were other people working on receiving and transmitting, it seems that he probably picked up someone else who was doing experiments at the time, and the most likely candidate is, of course, Marconi. Yeah, and I think this is a thing that happens a lot in the history of science. It's
00:33:33
Speaker
It's quite common for an idea to just, you know, it's being a certain idea is time, and you'll find a whole lot of people independently working on the same thing at once, and they'll always... Calculus with respect to Leibniz and Newton.
00:33:48
Speaker
I mean, as we've talked about before, the Wright Brothers may have been the first people to get powered flight working, but there were a bunch of people around the world who eventually succeeded quite independently. You know, it's not like they took the Wright Brothers designs and just copied them. They were working on it at the same time, but the Wright Brothers cracked it first. So, you know, there are lots of cases.
00:34:08
Speaker
including some of these ones that Tesla was working on, where something was a natural extension of the technology that had come before it. And several people all get the same idea at the same time and all start working on it. And someone's got to be first, but there'll always be other people who can quite
00:34:26
Speaker
could fairly claim to have independently invented it as well. And could have been first if it hadn't been for an experiment failing, not getting equipment at the right time. It's an awful lot of luck involved as to who gets that discovery the first time, which is why the Leibniz-Newton calculus dispute is so fascinating.
00:34:50
Speaker
because it does seem like there may have been a conspiracy by the Royal Society to ensure that two people working at the same time, only one of them was going to cross the finish line first.
00:35:01
Speaker
We've talked about that in the past. We have, yes. This podcast is resolutely anti Edison and also anti Newton. That's why we don't believe in gravity. No, no, it's all the hoax. So yeah, basically Tesla was a clever guy. There's there's no denying the fact that he either
00:35:21
Speaker
if not completely came up with a bunch of clever stuff, very definitely came up with clever new ways of doing existing stuff and refined existing stuff, even when he wasn't meeting things from the whole cloth. And that's why when he would start musing about things openly, people go, well, in the past where he's talked about something, he's shown that he can do it. So now he's talking about these other things,
00:35:48
Speaker
And given he's been so successful in the past, why can't he be successful at these things? So when Edison talks about being able to transfer energy from one continent to another or being able to build a death ray, people are going, but this is the man who improved the AC motor. This is the man who improved on AC generation in America. This is the person who improved on X, Y and Z. I mean,
00:36:15
Speaker
If he can do that, why can't he do these other things as well?
Tesla's Death and Invention Mysteries
00:36:20
Speaker
And so people go, he said these things, and yet we can't see them anywhere. Why are they being kept from us, Josh? Why are they being kept from us? Well, yeah, it's all very interesting because now, as you said at the start, he died in 1943, so World War II was underway.
00:36:40
Speaker
at the time of his death. And after he died, apparently his property was taken by the FBI under the Alien Property Custodian Act, even though Tesla was at that time an American citizen. And somebody who was an American citizen, Josh, who was born overseas, and he just can't trust those American citizens.
00:36:58
Speaker
According to the FBI, they found lots of speculation from him in his papers he left behind about wireless power transmission and so on, but no quote, no new sound workable principles or methods for realising such results.
00:37:16
Speaker
And so supposedly because nothing of note was found in these papers, they were just destroyed. Now, Tesla's estate was supposed to have gone to his nephew, one Sava Kosanovic, who was the Yugoslavian ambassador to the US. So some people in the FBI thought he might not just try to take advantage
00:37:41
Speaker
of his uncle's inventions if he ended up with all the information about them. But maybe he might give them to an enemy, an enemy of the state. Which I think does indicate that when Tesla dies, the authorities are going, Tesla said a lot of what appear to be mad things. But given his track record, some of those mad things might actually be real. And we can't let those mad, bad things get into enemy hands.
00:38:11
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, as people point out, apparently there were 80 trunks worth of Tesla's personal effects were packed up and he died and supposedly only 60 of them got back to Belgrade. So we don't know exactly why there's a discrepancy there. Maybe stuff just got taken out and repackaged more.
00:38:29
Speaker
efficiently maybe stuff just got lost or maybe you know maybe stuff was secretly spirited away. I like to think that actually 20 of those trunks are filled with pigeons and when the FBI sees them the pigeons just lie out. My pigeons is dead Tesla. My pigeons!
00:38:48
Speaker
And as we say, Tesla said a lot of stuff. He liked to muse about various things that he might look into, which wouldn't necessarily meant he knew exactly how to make them. But he had talked about the idea of some sort of a death ray in his later years. Yeah, but it's a common refrain in Tesla studies.
00:39:08
Speaker
is that he talked a lot about death rays and all these he mused a lot about wouldn't it be amazing if you could kill people at a distance with a death ray and when someone talks about death rays a lot and is also someone who's associated with major scientific accomplishments you might go I mean the death ray may not be real but at the same time
00:39:33
Speaker
If it is. If it is. Yeah, the sort of stuff we've seen before with your MK Ultra is when you look into psychic phenomena and stuff. There's always a strain of thought in the military that says, well, this looks like nonsense.
00:39:48
Speaker
But okay, just on the off chance it's real, we wouldn't want our enemies to get the ends on it before we could. And it's the reason why the Americans and the Soviets investigated psychic phenomena in the middle of the last century. It looks like nonsense, but if the other side achieves it, we're going to look really stupid and they're going to know. Yeah.
00:40:08
Speaker
The FBI has apparently released what material it had on Tesla in a couple of tranches in 2016 and 2018, although supposedly there are still some missing Tesla files. Now, there was this expert opinion. A fellow called Mark Cipher, who wrote the biography Wizard, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, according to him,
00:40:30
Speaker
a group of military personnel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, including one Brigadier General L. C. Craigie, had a very different opinion of Tesla's ideas. I assumed that opinion was that they were nonsense. No, they are the ones who really believed it. Yeah, they're the ones who are going, oh no, the FBI underplaying the importance of these documents.
00:40:57
Speaker
And I think this gets into the kind of interesting thing of expertise. So the FBI look at the documents and they go, I mean, it just seems like speculation and nothing has worked out. There might be some ideas here that if someone were to work on them, maybe they would result in effects. But there's nothing here which is actually obviously operationalizable at this particular point in time.
00:41:21
Speaker
And another set of experts look at it and they go, oh, no, no, this is much more important than it appears to be. And of course, both sides of that debate are probably going to have scientific experts who are looking at Tesla's documents. And they're going to have different priorities. And the military, of course, are going to be very interested in anything which is of potential military value.
00:41:47
Speaker
Even if it isn't operationalizable now, maybe with work and effort it might be operationalizable in the future. And the military are relying on a scientist from MIT. And that scientist, Josh,
00:42:03
Speaker
was Donald J. Trump's uncle, John G. Trump. It sure was. Is that significant? Probably not. Probably not, but it's an interesting... I don't think Trump has ever expressed any Tesla-related theories. He's been very keen on releasing the JFK files and things, but he's never said anything about Nikola Tesla.
00:42:28
Speaker
No, no. But you know who did say a lot about Nikola Tesla? Nikola Tesla. He did. He did. So when it comes to the question of how seriously should we take some of these claims he made, when he talks about death rays and talks about these fantastical technologies,
00:42:46
Speaker
Should we take that seriously at all and I mean as we've said He was the sort of person to come up with an idea first and then work on the implementation. He would he would sell an idea and then work on Realizing it rather than come up with a working prototype and then try to sell that just like Elon Musk except that I'm gonna taste it was actually clever and Elon Musk just has ideas and
00:43:11
Speaker
Well, yeah, even then, the impression I get from Musk is more that he, or at least in more recent times, he sort of, he has an idea of what he thinks is a good idea.
Tesla's Legacy and Modern Connections
00:43:22
Speaker
He gets the idea that this would be a good technology, this would be something good to investigate or invest in and then find someone doing that and then buys them. You know, that's that's kind of either electric cars are good or here's this Tesla company making electric cars. I'm going to buy that and call myself the founder and the same with SpaceX and so on. And
00:43:40
Speaker
And yes, then when he's left... Or someone will say on Twitter, you should make a Cybertruck, and he goes, yes, we shall. And then they spend five years trying to build one, and then it turns out to be awful. But so Tesla himself, he patented a lot, because that was the important thing back then. I mean, we talk about how Edison was a notorious patent thief, because having the patent is what got you the money, I guess.
00:44:07
Speaker
And so he patented a lot of things, but that doesn't necessarily mean that in all of those cases he'd actually got them to work. You can get patents for ideas that, as long as you can describe an implementation, doesn't require that the implementation actually is realizable.
00:44:24
Speaker
Yeah. So he was apparently the first to patent the AC motor in the United States, although he didn't actually invent it, but he did refine and come up with new implementations of it. So he wasn't, you know, again, this is not to take away from his achievements. To get this patent, it's not just a matter of saying, hey, here's this thing that someone else has invented it, and I'm filing it in the US. You had to come up with, you had to innovate, you had to come up with improvements on the existing thing.
00:44:58
Speaker
But at the end of the day, when it comes to talk of death rays and earthquake machines and what have you,
00:45:05
Speaker
All that we can really say is, well, yeah, that's an idea that Tesla had. But whether it's an actual thing and certainly whether it's an existing thing that got suppressed, it's really just not borne out. No, no. In fact, even if you think that the military stole the death ray from Tesla, the fact that we haven't seen a death ray in use either indicates that it was just an idea Tesla had and those being able to implement it
00:45:30
Speaker
or it turns out it's very hard to implement it even if the idea was good. I mean, otherwise you'd expect that some of these walls going on around the place
00:45:42
Speaker
There'd be death rays in use by now. You'd think so. So that's basically everything that we've talked about with Tesla in the past. And we like to, when we do this, back to the conspiracy type thing. So what's new, what's developed since we last talked about this. And in terms of Tesla himself, there doesn't really seem to be a lot. The only major development is that when people hear the word Tesla, they probably think about something other than the man these days.
00:46:08
Speaker
Indeed, it probably makes it quite difficult to research Nikola Tesla now, because Google is going to mean, did you mean Tesla motor company?
00:46:17
Speaker
and that Tesla is now more synonymous with the companies owned by Elon Musk that is with the person that Tesla is actually named after. So doing research on Tesla on that line now is going to be a lot more difficult than it was, say, when we did our first and second episodes.
00:46:39
Speaker
Yeah, because of course obviously Musk thinks of himself as a Tesla type character or a Tony Stark. But so yeah, I mean, there haven't been any really new Tesla related conspiracies lately, have there? No, I mean, one thing I discovered when I was living in Romania is that there is there is an interesting conspiracy theory amongst Eastern Europeans and actually some central Europeans as well. Well, they'll Google. I mean, given the
Wardenclyffe Tower Restoration
00:47:09
Speaker
Serbo-Croat thing. It's never entirely clear which country Tesla actually came from. Which actually gives us a bit of wriggle room to go, I mean, maybe he came from our country. So I met Romanians who were just, oh yeah, I mean people claim that Tesla was a Serb. But as we all know, he was probably Romanian. And often that's due to
00:47:31
Speaker
racial stereotypes of people in Eastern Europe and thinking that your neighbors are not as clever as you. So it can't be the case that your neighbors came up with a cleverer person than someone from your culture. So you just put them into your culture instead.
00:47:47
Speaker
So yes, I met Romanian to claim that Tesla was Romanian. I met Hungarian to claim that Tesla was actually Hungarian. There are a number of conspiracy theories that allege that Tesla didn't really come from the country that he claimed to come from, but was a secret Romanian or Hungarian or Moldovan, etc, etc.
00:48:10
Speaker
The only other really recent news is that Whartoncliff burnt down two weeks ago. Yes, there was a devastating, as they call it, fire at the Tesla Science Center. I mean, it's kind of doubly devastating because there's a group that is involved in restoring Whartoncliff and the fire occurred as part of the renovation. So they were renovating Whartoncliff to make it into a kind of a science center.
00:48:40
Speaker
And in the process of renovating Wardenclyffe they've actually destroyed it more so, which means they now need more money to restore it to get back to the point they were at when the fire broke out.
00:48:50
Speaker
Yes, so there is now an Indiegogo campaign raising funds for the restoration. Yeah, I think they wanted about three million US to be able to get it back to where it was before the fire started. And even then they still had money to spend to make it a functional science center.
Conclusion and Future Content
00:49:06
Speaker
There was a kind of a sad aspect to Tesla's legacy in the United States.
00:49:11
Speaker
in that he's this important figure in the history of at least electrical generation in the United States, and yet there's precious little memory of him in contemporary America.
00:49:26
Speaker
So Edison, who died rich, has been able to maintain through his estate an image in the popular consciousness. Well, Tester is basically disappearing from history, even though in some respects he is the more important figure
00:49:43
Speaker
an electrical generation in the United States. And so Wardenclyffe is always in danger of closing down and being demolished, whilst Edison's Mausoleum, which is a museum which is only open a few days a year, continues to just tick along.
00:50:01
Speaker
Bit of a shame, but there you go. So that is Tesla. We've done three times now. Tune in in another four years or two months. Was the third time the charm, Josh? The third time was the third time. That's all I will be drawn on. I don't disagree.
00:50:18
Speaker
We're done with tests of it, we're not done with recording for the week, because while we're both still healthy, we better put out a bonus episode for our beloved patrons. I covered the Baba Vanga stuff and the little filler last week, so we won't talk about that, but we'll talk about some other things. I don't know. We should mention, we should say something about Kissinger. We can't not, but we can talk about what's been going on over the last couple of weeks.
00:50:42
Speaker
which involves Winston Peters stuff here, Musk stuff overseas. An interesting update to our look at Alex Jones and David Ike's websites, which was the last property episode we did, as I recall, and a few other things besides.
00:50:59
Speaker
Indeedy. So, but for now we'll finish off this episode. If you want to hear the bonus one, go to Betrayon, look for the podcast that's going to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. But for now, that's it for the regular episode. For you regular, perfectly nice, but not just that little bit extra people. So I'm just going to say goodbye.
00:51:28
Speaker
La da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da
00:51:57
Speaker
do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.