Wardenclyffe Tower

He frittered it away.

And the whole thing about the tower, and this is where I really have to fault Doctor Who, the Wardenclyffe Project.

The idea was to broadcast electricity to the whole world.

And in so doing, yeah, he has this sort of idea that, oh, you could send music, you could send speeches of great men, etc., etc.

All true in his theory.

But what Doctor Who doesn't point out is that the modern scientific consensus, Wardenclyffe would not have worked otherwise.

People were right to pull their funding.

He massively underestimated how conductive the atmosphere is, and he didn't really understand that you'd lose a lot of power.

After convincing him that the wireless transfer of information would make the expensive underwater cables his company used to send transatlantic messages obsolete, Morgan informed Tesla he was willing to support him with a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar investment on the condition that he would own a fifty-one percent stake of the inventor's patents.

Between 1901 and 1905, with the backing of the biggest financial titan in the world, Nikola Tesla constructed the one hundred and eighty-seven foot high transmission tower at Wardenclyffe laboratory, topped with a sixty-eight foot copper dome, which was the first wireless broadcasting system ever built and was largely powered by a gigantic magnifying transmitter designed to channel large concentrations of electricity to any destination conceivable.

Assured that by setting up receivers attached to the ground, he could pick up the electromagnetic waves emitted by the tower anywhere, Tesla was desperate to overshadow his rival Marconi, who in December 1901 at St. John's in Newfoundland was hailed as the inventor of wireless telegraphy by the world's press after reporting triumphantly that he had successfully received the first transatlantic signal sent by colleagues at Poldhu in Cornwall, England.

With a jaded Tesla making it explicitly clear in newspaper interviews that he believed Marconi had stolen many of his ideas from the 1890s and wishing to keep his benefactor on side, he next announced that he was going to create a world telegraphy system, a cutting-edge communication array similar to the World Wide Web of the 1990s, in which individual receivers would pick up messages and news broadcasted by transmitting facilities.

Tesla pictured several different types of receiver, one that anticipated the fax machine by acting as a printer and publishing daily newspapers, one that was a loudspeaker that could play voice messages, and another that was a handheld contraption attached to a vertical wire on a short pole that could decode radio waves, foreshadowing the modern cell phone.

By the summer of 1902, Tesla had moved permanently to Wardenclyffe laboratory and was focusing exclusively on amping up the power levels.

On the other hand, after setting up a company with Morgan to assist the enterprise, Tesla found it hard to sell shares to the moneyed New York elite, who believed the investment was too risky, an appraisal not shared by Tesla, who sold thirty-three thousand dollars of his personal property and borrowed a further ten thousand dollars to realize his dream.

Faced with an additional thirty thousand dollar bill from Westinghouse for the equipment, a lawsuit from the landlord James Warden, who was taking Tesla to court for not paying property tax, as well as another bill from the phone company who had installed a special line out of the laboratory, Tesla struggled financially.

And then another theory is the Tesla Experiment.

A popular urban legend claims that Nikola Tesla was testing his Death Ray or Wardenclyffe Tower wireless energy transmitter and accidentally sent a massive surge of energy to the Siberian wilderness.

While the timing roughly correlates with Tesla's experiments indeed, there is no evidence his technology was capable of transporting that much energy across the globe.

The logic of Tunguska is a battle between magnitude and evidence.

And then another theory is the Tesla experiment.

A popular urban legend claims that Nikola Tesla was testing his death ray or Wardenclyffe Tower wireless energy transmitter and accidentally sent a massive surge of energy to the Siberian wilderness.

While the timing roughly correlates with Tesla's experiments indeed, there is no evidence his technology was capable of transporting that much energy across the globe.

The logic of Tunguska is a battle between magnitude and evidence.

His unfulfilled visions represent absolutely everything we've talked about today.

Let's start with his grandest dream, Wardenclyffe Tower.

Built between 1901 and 1906 on Long Island, New York.

Tesla managed to secure $150,000 from JP Morgan, which was a staggering fortune back then to build this massive 185-foot mushroom-shaped tower.

The official pitch to Morgan was that it would rival Marconi and provide wireless telegraph communication across the Atlantic.

But Tesla's real secret goal, he wanted to transmit free electricity globally using the Earth itself as a giant conductor.

The theoretical physics behind Wardenclyffe relied on a concept called terrestrial resonance.

Tesla deeply believed that the Earth was a massive electrical conductor.

So you look at the advancement, you know.

Like, if you look at what Tesla was doing at Wardenclyffe, that can now be done with a chip- A single chip can open up wormholes, can produce free energy, uh, at, um, uh, you know, what is called, um, superconductivity at room temperature, and it's only...

It's not even the size of a postage stamp now.

I mean, it's like the size of the head of a pin.

And then another theory is the Tesla experiment.

A popular urban legend claims that Nikola Tesla was testing his death ray or Wardenclyffe Tower wireless energy transmitter and accidentally sent a massive surge of energy to the Siberian wilderness.

While the timing roughly correlates with Tesla's experiments indeed, there is no evidence his technology was capable of transporting that much energy across the globe.

The logic of Tunguska is a battle between magnitude and evidence.

They call it telluric energy, and this is what Nikola Tesla was working on.

This is what Wardenclyffe Tower was ultimately aimed to achieve.

So as I said, the higher up you go, the stronger the energy is.

And people are actually making their own Tesla coils right now.