Nikola Tesla Lightning. Nikola Tesla - Lord of Lightning. Scientific investigation of amazing facts. Text. Tesla became interested in electricity thanks to the cat

I no longer work for the present, I work for the future...

The great mysteries of our existence have yet to be unraveled, even death may not be the end.

Nikola Tesla

“In the thick of the forests of Croatia, the small village of Smiljany was lost. And although the city of Gospić is only twelve kilometers away, the inhabitants of this village reach the center of the province only by foot mountain paths. A hundred years ago, when Croatia was part of the Habsburg Empire, which seized the lands of the Croats and Slovenes and enslaved the freedom-loving Slavic peoples, Smilians consisted of only a few houses, a school where teaching was conducted not in their native Croatian language, but in German, a church and the Orthodox Church, next to which was a small house of the priest. In this house, which was preserved until 1942, the fourth child was born in the family of the priest Milutin Tesla exactly at midnight from July 9 to 10, 1856, who received the name Nikola.(Fig. 1).

Rice. 1. Nikola Tesla Memorial in Smolyan, Croatia

“Shortly before his death, the great inventor Nikola Tesla declared that, “based on a completely new physical principle,” he was able to “ignite the sky” and “melt an airplane or a car at a distance of 400 km.” In addition, Tesla is credited with the invention of laser weapons (“death rays”) and the “electric gun”, the discovery of a resonant effect capable of causing artificial earthquakes, and even a grandiose explosion in the Siberian taiga, now known as the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.

After the death of the scientist in 1943, his military inventions were forgotten - or rather, they tried to forget about them ... This is the main military secret of the United States. These weapons are more powerful and more destructive than nuclear weapons. It can not only shoot down enemy missiles, but also cause man-made disasters anywhere in the world, completely paralyze radio communications and electronic equipment, and even affect the psyche of people. The use of this secret weapon, disguised as a scientific program, threatens a catastrophe on a planetary scale!(Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Planetary cataclysm

“The nature of these places is majestic and beautiful. On the tops of the mountains, wild rocks are heaped on top of each other. It is difficult to find between them small patches of land suitable for cultivation for sowing. No wonder there is a folk tale in Croatia that God, evenly distributing stones on the ground, flew over it with a large bag. Above Nika, the bag broke through, and the rest of the stones spilled out, forming Velebits.

... Not far behind the mountain range - the coast of the azure Adriatic, or, as it is called here, the Jadran Sea; just a few hours away are the amazingly beautiful Plitvice Lakes, surrounded by mighty oak, beech and maple forests. Fast rivers cascade down from the high mountains into the valley of the Lika plateau in cascades of waterfalls.(Fig. 3).

Rice. 3. Eastern Croatia - the valley of the Lika plateau

Interest in the creative heritage of the mysterious Slavic inventor arose across the ocean in the late 50s of the last century. It was then that a lot of publications appeared, bizarrely linking the Philadelphia experiment, the Tunguska miracle and even the incident in Roswell with the name of Nikola Tesla. Each author, who has explored the dark spots in the biography of an outstanding electrical innovator, has stuck to his own special version. Most often, these were and are mutually exclusive reconstructions of events of the now distant past. Among them there are quite in-depth studies, and superficial assessments, and outright falsifications. It is quite difficult, and sometimes almost impossible, to figure out where the truth is here, and where journalistic conjectures and fantasies are.

True, there is another way, which we will try to go. This is a historical analysis of the scientific essence of many rather unusual actions of Nikola Tesla, which gave rise to a lot of legends and rumors. This is especially true for the history of construction and experimental operation of the cyclopean ethereal electrical resonator, known as the Tesla tower, created for the project "Worldwide Wireless Information and Energy Transmission System" (Fig. 4). Another mystery is connected with the secret life of this brilliant scientist.

The moment one constructs an imaginary device is related to the problem of moving from a crude idea to practice. Therefore, any discovery thus made lacks detail and is usually incomplete. My method is different. I'm in no hurry with empirical verification. When an idea appears, I immediately begin to refine it in my imagination: I change the design, improve and “turn on” the device so that it heals in my head. I don't care if I test my invention in the lab or in my mind. I even have time to notice if something interferes with proper operation. Similarly, I am able to develop an idea to perfection without touching anything with my hands. Only then do I give concrete form to this end product of my brain. All my inventions worked that way. Not a single exception has happened in twenty years. There is hardly a scientific discovery that can be predicted purely mathematically, without visualization. The introduction of unfinished, crude ideas into practice is always a waste of energy and time.

Nikola Tesla

Rice. 4. Page of the magazine "New York American", 1911 (!) Devoted to the most fantastic project of the scientist - "The Worldwide Wireless System for Transmitting Information and Energy"

As an American citizen, he was engaged in closed research for the United States and at the same time offered his secret developments to England, Germany, Russia ... What motivated Tesla? The unscrupulousness of a scientist who does not care where his ideas are realized? Thirst for profit? A mania for destruction?

The colossal amount of original ideas that Tesla generated with inexplicable ease shocked his contemporaries. The scientist’s shocking confession is also known: “I am not the author of these ideas!” Absolutely inexplicable was the source of Tesla's knowledge about unknown, unexplored phenomena. Genius intuition and insight explain absolutely nothing. Where did he get his ideas from? This is the third riddle.

Chapter one
lightning lord

Our world is immersed in a huge ocean of energy, we are flying in endless space at an inconceivable speed. Everything around rotates, moves - everything is energy. We have a huge task ahead of us - to find ways to extract this energy. Then, extracting it from this inexhaustible source, humanity will move forward with gigantic strides.

Nikola Tesla

It's midday, business lunch time, and downtown New York is filled with thousands of white-collar workers rushing for a hearty meal in cafes, bars, and inexpensive fast food restaurants. Along the avenue, clogged with a stream of honking cars, grimacing annoyedly from the bluish clouds of exhaust gases, a tall, thin, black-haired man in a dark-striped expensive three-piece walks with a quick step, almost skipping (Fig. 5).

His fixed gaze of feverishly shining black eyes is directed somewhere far away over a sea of ​​swaying top hats and hats. A thin face with a beautiful black mustache is distinguished by a deep inner spirituality, strikingly different from the stupid "American" smiles of most passers-by. Unexpectedly, the strange thinker stops and, slapping his forehead, makes a beautiful somersault with acceleration, not noticing the astonished looks of those around him.

How many people have called me a dreamer, how our deluded short-sighted world has mocked my ideas.

Time will judge us.

Nikola Tesla

Rice. 5. Magician of electricity

Walk "Doctor Electricity", as the newspapers called Nikola Tesla, ended with the birth of some new idea. If Tesla's somersault had been seen by his neighbors in a luxurious mansion on East Houston Avenue, they would hardly have been surprised at the eccentric behavior of the famous inventor. After all, there were rumors about a strange Slav that he was “a relative of Count Dracula” (where can “educated” Americans distinguish a Serb from a Romanian?), And he himself looks like a vampire, because he avoids sunlight ... And the newspapers wrote that he created terrible “ rays of death "and a weapon that shoots lightning (Fig. 6).

In fact, Tesla, of course, had nothing to do with otherworldly forces, although he was very fond of casting a “mystical” fog in numerous interviews. And although such a disease is still unknown to medicine, he claimed that under the influence of powerful electromagnetic fields, his nerves acquired a special sensitivity to "radiant energy." Bright light caused nervous migraines in the inventor, but he saw perfectly at dusk and even distinguished some “energy contours of objects” in complete darkness.

The eccentric inventor has repeatedly claimed that, being close to electrical discharges, he, like some kind of energy vampire, is fueled by "ethereal electrical substance." In doing so, he used his famous transformers, in which the secondary winding, tuned with a ferrite core, made it possible, by resonating with the primary winding, to obtain an output voltage of several million volts. This led to a powerful corona discharge in the air, and the design itself was called the Tesla Lightning Generator.

Rice. 6. Tesla in the Colorado Springs laboratory /

In 1900, Tesla's colossal project to build a global wireless power transmission station began a few tens of kilometers from New York on Long Island. It must be said that this project of the famous researcher of electricity had a rather vague scientific basis. Tesla himself carefully concealed his formulas and calculations from the general public. With a thoughtful look, he told the shareholders of his enterprise how he would produce a resonant buildup of the "planetary electrical atmosphere." At the same time, he claimed that he would turn the entire Earth into one global resonator circuit, where the air layers would play the role of colossal capacitors.

One way or another, Tesla managed to convince the American millionaires of the reality of his idea, and soon two thousand engineers, technicians and workers began to build the object, which was called the Wardenclyffe (Fig. 7). Construction began in 1901, but was never fully completed due to funding cuts. The amazing structure was dismantled in 1917.

Tesla's global resonator is still associated with many legends and rumors. At one time, Tesla himself warmed them up, claiming that he could transfer huge energy through the ionosphere to any part of the globe. There is even a hypothesis that the mysterious Tunguska miracle of 1908 occurred as a result of experimental sessions of the global resonator. Tesla left the project in 1905, but at the beginning of the First World War he began to conduct some kind of secret experiments on behalf of the US Army. The tower was dismantled in 1917 due to the not entirely clear circumstances of the loss of livestock and a wave of cardiovascular diseases.

Rice. 7. Station of the global electrical resonator "Wordencliff"

After some time, the cyclopean structure of the world's first wireless power transmission system arose on the former wasteland. It looked like a wooden tower structure 57 meters high with a steel shaft 36 meters deep. The wooden frame of the tower with a diameter of more than 20 meters weighed 55 tons. The only metal part of the structure was the spherical dome. At the top of the resonator tower was a 55-ton metal dome with a diameter of 20 meters. Using a 60-meter coil, one of the poles of which was connected to a large copper sphere towering over the laboratory hall, Tesla created electrical potentials that generated lightning discharges tens of meters long. Five years after the start of construction, a trial run of the global resonator took place. Tesla chose a good time for the demonstration, and in the late afternoon, having waited for a powerful thunderstorm front moving from the Atlantic, connected his atmospheric resonator.

The effect was amazing! The next day, the newspapers were full of headlines such as "Dr. Electricity sets the air ocean on fire," "Tesla sets the sky on fire," "Electric fireworks over New York."

It was undoubtedly one of the most grandiose (and dangerous!) experiments in the history of electrical engineering. The copper hemisphere of the dome of the resonator, when the installation was turned on, was covered with a sea of ​​raging lightning tens of meters long, and thunder was heard within a radius of 20 kilometers. From a distance, it seemed that a huge dazzlingly luminous ball was burning around the resonator screen, and in the surrounding courtyards and streets, passers-by with mystical fear looked at sheaves of sparks between their feet and the ground. It is known that, due to a number of physiological reasons, horses are more sensitive to electric shock shocks than humans, so many cargo and passenger carriages rushed about, colliding because of the "carried" horses, receiving continuous painful injections through iron horseshoes. Static electricity in the form of St. Elmo's lights buzzed softly on every metal object in the area.

And a few kilometers from the Wardenclyffe tower, the ultimate goal of experiments on wireless power transmission was demonstrated. In the presence of numerous witnesses, who were the shareholders of Tesla's enterprise, batteries of hundreds of electric light bulbs caught fire, one contact of which was grounded, and the second was connected to a plate of an air-ether resonator, which plays the role of one of the capacitor plates.

Tesla intended to build the second tower of the electric global resonator at the Niagara hydroelectric power station. The fact is that it was this power plant that was the first in the world to be equipped with alternating current generators designed by Tesla, and the inventor received a large stake in the Niagara Electrical Company. Tesla began to ardently convince his sponsors-shareholders of the need for new investments, but the boom in radio communications and the many very unpleasant side effects of operating global etheric resonators led to a "revolt of shareholders." American businessmen gave the inventor a kind of ultimatum: either he completely switches to radio engineering research and builds radio transmission lines, or they begin bankruptcy proceedings for his company. Despite the fact that Tesla built many models of radio transmitters and radio receivers somewhat earlier than Marconi, who only established a transatlantic connection between England and Canada in December 1900, the inventor most decisively rejected the conditions set for him. A scandal erupted, in which, of course, small investors suffered the most, but, one way or another, all Tesla's ambitious projects lost funding. True, there was one strange moment when it seemed that the parties would come to some kind of compromise. This was due to Tesla's statements that he regularly communicates with alien civilizations on the already existing radio equipment of his design ... And in the future he agrees to deal only with interplanetary communication problems! The prospects for communication between the planets of the solar system (Tesla for some reason insistently pointed to Mars) did little to inspire Wall Street businessmen, and after a heated debate, they nevertheless decided to refuse Tesla to finance this line of research.

After the unfortunate fiasco with the global ether resonators, Tesla switched entirely to the study of transformers and inductors. Subsequently, they were called so: transformers and Tesla coils. Their amazing properties and unusual parameters still amaze electrical engineers.

Tesla transformers consist of coils of a special design (Tesla coils) that are not inductively coupled and do not have a common core. Their primary winding was made of several turns of large-section tires. Secondary - high-voltage - contained a large number of turns of a thick insulated cable. For Tesla transformers, the transformation ratio was ten times higher than the ratio of the number of turns of the secondary winding to the number of turns of the primary and was proportional to the quality factor of the secondary circuit.

At the same time, the inventor continues to improve his alternators, releasing them at a joint venture with the well-known industrialist Westinghouse, Westinghouse Electric. Tesla is also continuing its furious ideological war with DC proponents, led by Thomas Edison, and is developing unique radio-controlled vehicle models. He constantly participates in the work of various forums and exhibitions, where his exposition with operating instruments and equipment makes a splash.

But years pass, and the scientist's thoughts more and more often return to his most famous design - the tower of the global ethereal resonator. After lengthy negotiations with the government authorities, Tesla manages to conclude an agreement to lease his former Wardenclyffe test station to the military. What was the scientist going to do with his "shaker of the electric ether"? Alas ... here we have to step on the shaky ground of guesses and assumptions. The fact is that all the documents related to this period of the experimenter's activity are still (!) a state secret of the US government (Fig. 10).

More or less reliably known that in the pre-war years, Tesla began working on secret projects for the US Navy. This included the wireless transmission of energy to defeat the enemy, and the creation of a mysterious "resonant weapon". The only thing that got into print was the information that Tesla created very capacious air capacitors, charging which to a voltage of several tens of thousands of volts, he received powerful decimeter radiation during discharge. At the same time, he varied the breakdown voltage of the spark gap, changing the course of the discharge and, accordingly, the powerful pulsed current of the primary winding, creating microwave radio waves.

Tesla's big mistake, from the point of view of the scientist's ethics, was the spread of unverified rumors that the Tunguska Miracle was not the fall of an asteroid in the form of a colossal block of ice, but "the sporadic release of electrical energy of the ether" as a result of the action of its global resonator. So, in an interview with a number of tabloid publications, Tesla directly stated: “... the idea came to my mind that if I can create a resonant system between the Moon and the Earth, then the transmitter power can be insignificant, and the energy from such a system can be extracted colossal. After calculating how much energy can be extracted, I was surprised. It followed from the calculation that the energy extracted from this system was enough to destroy a large city ... And only later, after reading about unusual phenomena in the newspapers, I realized what a terrible weapon I had created. Of course, I expected that there would be a strong explosion, but it was not even an explosion - it was a disaster.”

Rice. 10. Multi-loop Tesla transformer

The termination of this series of experiments and the dismantling of all equipment, including the tower of the global ethereal resonator, was preceded in 1917 by a series of very strange events. First of all, in the vicinity of Long Island, a mass death of wild and domestic animals began. The locals were very quick to compare the periods of operation of the resonator tower, covered with garlands of static electricity from St. Elmo's fires, with the strange behavior of animals that fell into fatal fits of rabies. Then came the time of the people, and the surrounding hospitals overflowed with cores. Here, having smelled a real sensation, hordes of journalists took up the investigation, while requests were sent to all authorities, and even a Senate temporary commission of inquiry was created. One can imagine what titanic efforts the military department had to make to put out this information fire. Bringing out Tesla with his mysterious experiments, the military did not find anything better than to hastily destroy all traces of research along with the experimental base.

All this greatly quarreled with the inventor government authorities, and for a long time he lived as a hermit on his ranch in Texas. What he was doing during this time, no one knows. However, Tesla's active nature could not do without large-scale projects, and from 1936 to 1942 he took part in the Raduga naval control project. Many researchers of this period of the scientist's life even believe that he was the executive director of the project that ended in the infamous Philadelphia experiment. There is reason to believe that after the experiments with the global resonator, Tesla foresaw the possibility of human casualties and in every possible way delayed the conduct of the decisive experiment, making endless modifications and adjustments of the equipment. However, after his death in the winter of 1943, the factor holding back the military disappeared, and, as we know, in the autumn they began their first experiments.

If you once again take a mental look at the work of the inventor between the two wars, then the “almost official hypothesis” that the US Navy conducted an experiment on the invisibility of a ship for radar takes on a completely new sound. Especially doubtful is the story that on the Eldridge destroyer, with the help of Tesla generators, they created a kind of shielding "electromagnetic bubble" that was capable of scattering the radiation of enemy radars past the ship's hull. Even more questions are raised by the further course of the experiment, when the ship became completely invisible in the optical range. Moreover, it is believed that he suddenly appeared on the roads of Norfolk, hundreds of kilometers away from Philadelphia.

As you know, for the Eldridge crew, the experiment ended tragically. And if we exclude obvious absurdities like “molecular mixing” of the metal of the hull and bodies, then the diagnosis would look like this: the members of the ship’s crew completely lost their orientation in time and space, could not move without leaning on the walls, and their psyche was traumatized by some kind of shock stress, turning into a state of inescapable horror. Subsequently, after a long period of rehabilitation, all members of the team were first decommissioned ashore, and then completely dismissed from the Navy with diagnoses of "psychopathy", "mental imbalance" and even "a tendency to psychopathology".

So the project "Rainbow" seems to have ended ingloriously. However, is it really so inglorious and really ended? One thing is clear: in wartime conditions, the counterintelligence of the Navy not only did everything possible to classify as much as possible what was related to the experiment in one way or another, but also carried out the most extensive disinformation activities that diverted attention. So suddenly, as a result of the “information leak”, a completely meaningless idea arose that in reality the goal was to create magnetic fields of ultra-high intensity based on Tesla’s unique installations for ... levitation of the destroyer and its crew (obviously, separately?) in the Earth’s magnetic field. Say what you like, but countless publications and journalistic speculations, devoid of any sense, constantly suggest a very clever and professional disinformation campaign still being carried out.

Meanwhile, let's return to the last years of Tesla's life (Fig. 12). It is definitely known that he was very interested in the influence of electromagnetic microwave waves on biological systems, especially on cardiac activity and brain function. It is known that shortly before Tesla's death, information was leaked to the New York newspapers that he had invented some mysterious "death rays" that could destroy thousands of aircraft from a distance of hundreds of kilometers.

The International Electrotechnical Commission is happy that the feeling of deep respect and admiration for the works of Nikola Tesla, on the main of which the work of the commission itself largely depends, is marked by the general agreement reached on assigning the name "tesla" to the international unit of magnetic induction ...

The assignment of the name of Nikola Tesla to an important and often used unit in electrical engineering is the greatest expression of the international recognition of Tesla's works, just as in the past this recognition was expressed in relation to such giants of electrical engineering as Ampere, Volt, Faraday, Ohm, Maxwell, Watt, Hertz and more...

IEC Decree of July 27, 1956 on the assignment of the name "tesla" to the unit of magnetic induction

Rice. 12. Monument to Nikola Tesla at the Niagara Hydroelectric Power Plant

Tesla himself did not at all deny the fact of such a monstrous invention and even tried to explain that the basis of his device is a kind of “radio frequency oscillator”, which allows you to broadcast energy in the atmosphere and focus it on various moving targets. Of course, such statements by the inventor were far from accidental and were voiced in the press on the special instructions of the "competent authorities". After all, we must not forget about spy mania and rampant censorship.

It is also known that the inventor, who did not need funds at all (his company was simply overwhelmed with military electrical orders), suddenly began to send proposals to design "super-deadly beam weapons" all over the world. In an interview with amazed journalists, he explained that by selling his invention to everyone, he wants to establish an absolute balance of power between different countries and thus prevent all wars in the world. It is curious that even earlier, in 1937, the inventor negotiated with a representative of the Soviet Union. As a result of these very strange contacts, he allegedly handed over some plans for a vacuum chamber for his "death rays", receiving in exchange some drawings of Novgorod radio physicists. In 1940, in an interview with The New York Times, 84-year-old Nikola Tesla declared his readiness to reveal the secret of "telesila" to the American government. As the scientist said, it is built on a completely new physical principle, which no one dreamed of, different from the principles embodied in his inventions in the field of power transmission over long distances (Fig. 13). According to Tesla, this new type of energy will work through a beam with a diameter of one hundred millionth of a square centimeter and can be generated by special stations that will cost no more than a couple of million dollars and take only a few months to build.

Rice. 13. Maybe it's a new type of energy.

Yes, perhaps the aging inventor really plunged into the world of illusions. However, given that he never threw words to the wind and always implemented the declared projects, it can be assumed that Tesla could adapt the technology of wireless power transmission to the needs of the military.

The fact that the US government attached great importance to Tesla's research is also confirmed by the fact that after his death the most thorough search was carried out at the New Yorker Hotel, where he lived recently. FBI special agents seized all the papers related to the scientific activities of the inventor. A day later, Dr. John Trump, who led the National Defense Committee, made a strange statement that an expert study of Tesla's legacy showed that "these records are speculative and speculative, are purely philosophical in nature and do not imply any principles or methods for their implementation." Most of the diaries and manuscripts of Nikola Tesla disappeared under unclear circumstances. The history of scientific research reliably indicates that as soon as a new weapon or reconnaissance method appears, the corresponding “anti-devices” are immediately developed.

The history of the creation of a radar station (RLS) is no exception here, because a serious study of the problem of "radio invisibility" began in the early 1930s. In this regard, historians of science usually mention the experimental physicists John Hutchinson and Emil Kurtenhauer of the University of Chicago. Their research boiled down to experiments of the same type on the passage of radio waves between the plates of a capacitor through a sprayed air suspension of water droplets, or, more simply, a fog model. For some reason, Tesla was very interested in these unpretentious experiments, and after short negotiations, a kind of creative team was created, and Tesla immediately abruptly changed the experimental direction. Now, the directed (!) effect on the sea fog of super-powerful radiation of various designs of Tesla coils was investigated.

In 1933, on the initiative of Professor Kurtenhauer, the famous Institute for Advanced Studies was established at Princeton University. One of the aims of his work is to organize and employ the many brilliant scientists who fled Nazi Germany. And some newspapers directly wrote that the Princeton Institute was directly created "for a major brain drain from Europe" and even specifically "for Einstein." Indeed, it must be admitted that at that time the rumble of an imminent war was already heard, and many scientists, mostly of Jewish nationality, were secretly transported from Germany through various channels. In any case, the creation of this research center should certainly be considered one of the most profitable investments of the American government in US history. What happened, the meaning of which many of our current politicians cannot understand in any way, is the investment of very large funds in the intellect of the nation ...

Thus, one of the most prominent theorists in the history of mankind, Albert Einstein and his colleague John von Neumann (Fig. 14), got into the “informal creative team” to study the electromagnetic permeability of various media. Unfortunately, we are almost unaware of any of their publications of that period regarding "radio invisibility", but the very fact of their unification in one research topic under the leadership of Tesla speaks volumes. Apparently, it was soon possible to obtain some important results that were extremely interested in the military department. After all, the project was classified (subsequently, the status of secrecy was repeatedly raised!), And he fell under the auspices of the Navy, receiving the code name "Rainbow V". The first reporting demonstrative experiments were planned for the summer of 1940, when a full-scale experiment took place at the Brooklyn Naval Base in the presence of the Princeton group and the highest ranks of the Navy. An unnamed decommissioned Coast Guard ship with no people on board was chosen to carry it out. During the tests, according to some reports, the ship's power system was connected to a coastal power station using long power cables, and according to others, diesel generators of other ships were used.

Rice. 14. John von Neumann (1903–1957), prominent physicist and mathematician, one of the founders of cybernetics

The brilliant scientist was born in the village of Smilyan in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Croatia) in the family of a priest in 1856. The Tesla family had five children.

Nikola graduated from the Higher Real School in the city of Karlovarts in 1873, after which he returned to the family, who at that time lived in the city of Gospic. At that time, cholera was rampant in the city. Here is what Nikola Tesla himself says about this:

“Illness knocked me down. Later, cholera led to dropsy, lung problems, and other illnesses. Nine months in bed, almost without movement, seemed to have exhausted all my vitality, and the doctors abandoned me. It was a harrowing experience, not so much because of the physical suffering, but because of my great desire to live. During one of the attacks, when everyone thought that I was dying, my father quickly entered the room to support me with these words: "You will get better." How now I see his deathly-pale face when he tried to encourage me in a tone that contradicted his assurances. “Maybe,” I replied, “I can get better if you let me study engineering.” “You will enter the best educational institution in Europe,” he answered solemnly, and I knew that he would do it.”

The recovered N. Tesla was soon to be called up for a three-year service in the Austro-Hungarian army. Relatives considered him not healthy enough and hid him in the mountains.

In 1875, Nikola Tesla entered the Higher Technical School in Graz, immediately fascinated by lectures on electrical engineering. In his third year, Tesla became interested in gambling. He gave the money he won to the losing players, which is why he was known as an eccentric. The gambling addiction ended because of a big loss that forced Tesla's mother to borrow money.

After the death of his father, Nikola Tesla could no longer study and went to work.

Until 1882, Tesla worked as an electrical engineer for the government telegraph company in Budapest, which at that time was engaged in laying telephone lines and building a central telephone exchange. In February 1882, Tesla figured out how to use the phenomenon, later called the rotating magnetic field, in an electric motor.

One of the largest works of the company was the construction of a power plant for the railway station in Strasbourg. At the beginning of 1883, the company sent Nicola to Strasbourg to solve a number of working problems that the company had encountered while installing lighting equipment for a new railway station. In his spare time, Tesla worked on the manufacture of a model of an asynchronous electric motor, and in 1883 he demonstrated the operation of the engine at the Strasbourg City Hall. When the work at the railway station was completed, Nikola Tesla never received his fee, offended, he quit.

At this time, the budding scientist seriously thought about moving to Russia, but Charles Bachlor managed to persuade him to emigrate to the United States. In 1884, Tesla went to work in the laboratory of Thomas Edison.

It is worth noting that Edison rather coldly perceived Tesla's new ideas and more and more openly expressed disapproval of the direction of the inventor's personal research. Edison soon promised Tesla $50,000 (then roughly equivalent to $1 million today) if he could constructively improve Edison's DC electric machines. After some time, Tesla proposed 24 options for new projects. However, Edison chose to laugh it off when it came to the reward, citing the fact that "the emigrant does not understand American humor well." Tesla was offended again and quit.

The young scientist, who did not want to become a “goose that lays golden eggs” for large companies, was forced to survive in odd jobs.

He was engaged in digging ditches, "sleeping where he could, and ate what he found." During this period, he befriended a similarly positioned engineer, Brown, who was able to persuade several of his acquaintances to give Tesla a little financial support. In April 1887, the Tesla Arc Light Company, created with this money, began to equip street lighting with new arc lamps. Soon the prospects of the company were proved by large orders from many US cities.

In 1888-1895, Tesla was engaged in research on magnetic fields and high frequencies in his laboratory. These years were the most fruitful: he received many patents. On May 20, 1892, he spoke to an audience that included eminent electrical engineers of the time, and was a great success.

On March 13, 1895, a fire broke out in the laboratory on Fifth Avenue. The building burned to the ground, destroying the latest achievements of the inventor. Tesla restored his discoveries from memory, the Niagara Falls Company allocated money for the project, investing $ 100,000.

In 1899, the "stormy" period begins in the life of Nikola Tesla. The scientist is working on studying the potential of the Earth, including the effect of standing electromagnetic waves caused by lightning discharges in the earth's atmosphere.

Obsessed with the idea of ​​developing wireless current transmission, Nikola Tesla constructed a 47-meter wooden tower with a copper hemisphere on top to conduct his new experiments. At this time, John Morgan, the main sponsor of the scientist's developments, learns that Tesla, instead of practical goals for the development of electric lighting, is busy developing his super-idea. Funding for Tesla's scientific activities is terminated.

After 1900, Tesla received many other patents for inventions in various fields of technology (electric meter, frequency meter, a number of improvements in radio equipment, steam turbines).

Tesla was one of the first to patent a method for reliably obtaining currents that could be used in radio communications.

Researchers have proven that it was in Tesla's developments that the principles of the Internet connection were first voiced.

In one of the scientific journals, Tesla himself talked about experiments with a mechanical oscillator, by tuning it to the resonant frequency of any object, it can be destroyed. In the article, the scientist said that he connected the device to one of the beams of the house, after a while the house began to shake, a small earthquake began. Tesla took a hammer and smashed the invention. Tesla told the arriving firefighters and policemen that it was a natural earthquake, he told his assistants to keep quiet about this incident.

The ideas of the brilliant scientist are widely used to this day: alternating current is the main method of transmitting electricity over long distances, power plants of various types use power generators to generate current, modern trams and trolleybuses use electric motors, radio-controlled robotics has become widespread in all areas - starting from the well-known TV remote to military aircraft equipment.

The scientist died at an advanced age - at the age of 86 in a New York hotel. Before his death, the scientist was ill for a long time, the consequences of the accident, as a result of which he was bedridden with chronic pneumonia, had an effect.

Interesting Facts:

Tesla invented the first miniature radio-controlled ship in 1897. Similar toys appeared in our stores only after 100 years.

Mark Twain, being a friend of Nikola Tesla, called his brilliant friend "Lord of Lightning".

The famous tower, on which Tesla conducted his experiments with lightning peals, extremely frightened the inhabitants of the neighborhood. When turned on, the huge structure sparkled with 40-meter flashes of lightning, and thunder could be heard for 25 kilometers around. The steel horseshoes gave horses strong electric shocks, and blue halos could be seen on the metal. For 40 kilometers from the tower, to the applause of the scientist's associates, 200 light bulbs lit up. Electricity was transmitted to them without wires.

Tesla never slept more than two hours in a row. During his studies, he could not sleep for 48 hours, spending time playing billiards, cards and chess.

There is an opinion that Tesla destroyed all the documents related to his brilliant inventions. But according to the employees of the Serbian Tesla Museum, at least 60,000 scientific documents written by Nikola have come down to us. The legacy of the great inventor has not disappeared - just no one wants to study it.

The proposed network of Tesla towers has been designed to make it possible to exploit the Earth's own conductivity and transfer energy through the earth and ionosphere with very little loss.

While the original Tesla Tower on Long Island weighed 60 tons, the prototype the Plekhanovs are about to build weighs only two tons due to advances in structural materials. The length of their Tesla coil will be about 20 meters.

The team hopes to raise $800,000 through an IndieGoGo crowdsourcing campaign that ended July 25, 2014 to build their prototype. They already successfully raised $40,000 last year for research and design work on the tower's power source. The schedule of the project and its budget are given on the website, the authors undertake to make its results freely available on the Internet as soon as the tower is put into operation.

Books about ingenious inventors and experiments:

Great Russians. Russian scientists and inventors. "Rosmen-press", 2003

Mark Seifer. "Nikola Tesla. Master of the universe." Yauza, Eksmo, 2007

Achkasova I., Levinshtein E., Tatarinova M. "General history of inventions and discoveries." Moscow, 2012

Nikola Tesla - "lord of lightning"

Nikola Tesla - inventor in the field of electrical and radio engineering, engineer, physicist. He is widely known for his contributions to the development of AC devices, polyphase systems and the electric motor, which led to the so-called second stage of the industrial revolution. He is also known as a supporter of the existence of the ether: his numerous experiments and experiments are known, which aimed to show the presence of the ether as a special form of matter that can be used in technology. The unit of measurement of magnetic flux density (magnetic induction) is named after Tesla. Tesla was regarded by contemporary biographers as "the man who invented the 20th century" and the "patron saint" of modern electricity.

Tesla was born and raised in Austria-Hungary, his family lived in the village of Smilyan, 6 km from the town of Gospic, the main town of the historical province of Lika. Father - Milutin Tesla - a priest of the Srem diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, mother - Georgina Mandic, was the daughter of a priest.

Nikola finished the first grade of elementary school in Smilany. In 1862, his father was promoted to the rank, and the Tesla family moved to Gospic, where he completed the remaining three years of elementary school, and then the three-year lower real gymnasium, which he completed in 1870. In the autumn of the same year, Nikola entered the Higher Real School in the city of Karlovac. He lived in the house of his aunt, his father's cousin, Stanka Baranovich.

In July 1873, Tesla received his Abitur. Despite his father's orders, Nikola returned to his family in Gospic, where there was a cholera epidemic, and immediately became infected (although it is not entirely clear whether it was actually cholera). Here is what Tesla himself said about this: “From childhood, the path of a priest was destined for me. This prospect, like a black cloud, hung over me. After receiving my Abitur, I decided to study the spiritual sciences. It was then that a terrible epidemic of cholera broke out, which wiped out a tenth of the population. The illness took a toll on me. Later, cholera led to dropsy, lung problems, and other illnesses. Nine months in bed, almost without movement, seemed to have exhausted all my vitality, and the doctors abandoned me. It was a harrowing experience, not so much because of the physical suffering, but because of my great desire to live. During one of the attacks, when everyone thought that I was dying, my father rushed into the room to support me with these words: "You will get better." How now I see his deathly-pale face when he tried to encourage me in a tone that contradicted his assurances. “Perhaps,” I replied, “I will be able to recover if you let me become an engineer instead of a priest and let me go to study engineering.” “You will enter the best educational institution in Europe,” he replied solemnly, and I knew that he would do it. A heavy weight was lifted from my soul. But the consolation might have come too late if I had not been miraculously cured by an old woman with a bean tea. There was no power of suggestion or mysterious influence in it. The remedy for the disease was in the fullest sense curative, heroic, if not desperate, but it had an effect.

The recovered Nikola entered the Graz Technical College (now the Graz Technical University), where he began to study electrical engineering. Watching the operation of the Gramma machine at lectures on electrical engineering, Tesla came to the idea of ​​the imperfection of DC machines, but Professor Jacob Peshl sharply criticized his ideas, giving a lecture on the impracticability of using alternating current in electric motors before the whole course.

After graduating from college, Tesla got a job as a teacher in a real gymnasium in Gospic - the one in which he studied. Work in Gospic did not suit him. The family had little money, and only thanks to financial assistance from his two uncles, Petar and Pavel Mandic, young Tesla was able to leave for Prague in January 1880, where he entered the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Prague. In order to somehow survive, Tesla also tripled for a part-time job - until 1882 he worked as an electrical engineer in the government telegraph company in Budapest. But work in the telegraph company did not give Tesla the opportunity to realize his plans for the creation of an alternating current electric motor. As soon as the opportunity arose, he got a job at the Edison Continental Company in Paris, but there he was deceived by not paying the promised salary, as a result of which he, insulted, quit.

One of the first biographers of the inventor, Boris Rzhonsnitsky, states: “At that time, Tesla had amazing inventions in his luggage that were important for the development of electrical engineering. He expected to sell them at the place of service, but after cheating with money, he decided to sell them to someone else. His first thought was to go to St. Petersburg, since many important discoveries were made in Russia in those years, and the names of Pavel Yablochkov, Dmitry Lachinov, Vladimir Chikolev and others were well known to electricians of all countries. But at the last moment, one of his friends persuaded Nikola to go to the USA instead of Russia.

Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 and took a job as an engineer repairing electric motors and DC generators. One day, he offered his supervisor a bet: he would be paid $50,000 (at the time, an amount roughly equivalent to $1 million today) if he could constructively improve Edison's DC electric machines. The bet was made, Nicola went to work and soon introduced 24 variations of the Edison machine, a new commutator and regulator that greatly improved performance. Having approved all the improvements, in response to a question about remuneration, Edison refused Tesla, noting that the emigrant still did not understand American humor well.

For several years, the inventor was forced to survive in ancillary work. He was engaged in digging ditches, "sleeping where he could, and eating what he could find." During this period, he befriended a similarly positioned engineer, Brown, who was able to persuade several of his acquaintances to give Tesla a little financial support. In April 1887, the Tesla Arc company, created with this money, began to equip street lighting with new arc lamps. Soon the prospects of the company were proved by large orders from many cities in the United States, and its bank accounts were replenished with the first million.

For the company's office in New York, Tesla rented a house on Fifth Avenue not far from the building occupied by the Edison company. An intense competitive struggle unleashed between the two companies, known in America as the "War of the Currents".

In July 1888, the famous American industrialist George Westinghouse bought more than 40 patents from Tesla, paying an average of $25,000 each. He also invited the inventor to a consultant position in the Pittsburgh factories, where industrial designs of AC machines were developed. The work did not bring satisfaction to the inventor, hindering the emergence of new ideas. Despite Westinghouse's persuasion, Tesla returned to his laboratory in New York a year later.

Tesla spent the following years researching magnetic fields and high frequencies in his laboratory. These years were the most fruitful: he received many patents - their number exceeded one hundred thousand (all kinds of electrical appliances, frequency meters, devices for equipping submarines, various radio equipment, a number of improvements in steam turbines, etc.). He spent all the money he earned on his experiments, which made him famous for centuries. In his speeches, Tesla said that he received the ideas of inventions from the unified information field of the Earth, to which he learned to “connect”.

In the childhood of 1914, Serbia was at the center of the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War. While staying in America, Tesla first thought about creating a superweapon: "I am obliged to make a machine capable of destroying one or more armies in one action."

At the heart of the machine was supposed to be, as the scientist believed, an electric current. Tesla began research on high frequency currents and high voltages. The experiments led to the discovery of a way to clean contaminated surfaces. A similar effect of currents on the skin has shown that in this way it is possible to remove small rashes, cleanse pores and kill microbes. This method is used in modern electrotherapy.

Such a weapon, as is commonly believed, Tesla did not succeed in inventing. However, this is the official version. Many researchers believe that the Tunguska meteorite that fell in Siberia more than a hundred years ago is nothing more than a test of Tesla's new unique weapon. In support of this hypothesis, it is reported that many who have been in the scientist's laboratory saw a map of Siberia on his wall, including the area in which the explosion occurred. In addition, in one of the articles - published a few months before the incident at Tunguska, Tesla himself wrote: "... Even now, my wireless power plants can turn any area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe globe into an area unsuitable for habitation ...".

There is more evidence. So, a few months before the explosion, Tesla publicly announced his intention to light the road to the north pole of the expedition of the famous traveler Robert Peary with electricity. It is noteworthy that on the night of June 30, many observers in Canada and Northern Europe noted clouds of an unusual silvery color in the sky, which seemed to pulsate. This coincides with the accounts of eyewitnesses who previously observed Tesla's experiments in his laboratory. In addition, in those days, in dozens of settlements in Western Europe and Russia, there was an intense glow of the sky, nightly luminous clouds and an unusually colorful twilight. According to spectral observations carried out in Germany and England, the glow was not related to the aurora.

Somewhat later, in 1914, the inventor proposed a project according to which the entire globe, together with the atmosphere, was to become a giant lamp. To do this, you just need to pass a high-frequency current through the upper layers of the atmosphere, and they will begin to glow. But Tesla did not explain how to do this, although he repeatedly claimed that he did not see any difficulties in this.

This was his main invention - "The Worldwide Wireless System for the Transmission of Information and Energy". The transmitting station could send electrical energy to any point on the Earth, taking into account the reflection from the ionosphere - the upper layers of the atmosphere and from the Earth itself. Everyone could use it - ships, planes, factories through a special receiving installation. The same system could, according to the scientist, broadcast accurate time signals, music, drawings, facsimile texts to the whole world.

All these facts undoubtedly strengthen the positions of the supporters of the hypothesis that on June 30, 1908, no meteorite or comet fell in the region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, and the explosion was the result of Tesla's experiments with energy transfer over long distances.

Another mysterious invention of Tesla, about which his followers argued for a long time, is the "Earthquake Machine", which, working on electromagnetic waves, is supposed to be able to cause natural disasters anywhere on the planet. According to legend, it was this machine that caused the earthquake in New York in 1908, which destroyed Nikola's laboratory. Tesla himself destroyed this machine, because he saw the real danger that it poses to humanity.

In general, Tesla did not patent many of his discoveries and did not even leave drawings. Most of his diaries and manuscripts have not survived, and only fragmentary information has survived about many inventions to this day. For example, according to some reports, Tesla invented a super-frequency radio receiver that helps to receive signals from other planets.

He managed to establish a connection with living entities on some distant planet (he himself assumed that it could be Mars, but was not sure about this).

In 1931, Nicola showed the public a mysterious car. The gasoline engine was removed from the luxury limousine and an electric motor was installed. Then Tesla, in front of the public, placed a nondescript box under the hood, from which two rods protruded, and connected it to the engine. Saying: "Now we have energy," Tesla got behind the wheel and drove off. The car was tested for a week. She developed speeds up to 150 km / h and, it seems, did not need recharging at all. Everyone asked Tesla: "Where does the energy come from?". He replied: "From the ether." After a successful test, the car and all its drawings were destroyed - articles appeared in the newspapers of that time, where two versions of this act were put forward: either the scientist went crazy, or he was threatened by large automobile businessmen who understood that the electric car would completely destroy their business.

Tesla also announced to the world that he had invented "death rays" that could destroy any incoming aircraft at a distance of up to 400 kilometers at the touch of a button on the remote control.

He invented a camera that was able to photograph the biofield (aura) of a person.

The death of a scientist is also connected with mysticism. At an advanced age, Tesla was hit by a car, he received a broken rib. The disease caused acute pneumonia, which turned into a chronic form. Tesla was bedridden, and soon died - from heart failure. However, many newspapers of the time wrote that the scientist's death could have been set up by those to whom he crossed the road with his inventions, or by those who could be offended by Tesla's refusal to cooperate.

The body of the scientist was not discovered immediately, only 2 days after his death, a maid looked into the room from which he did not leave. On January 12, the body was cremated, and the urn with the ashes was installed at the Farncliff Cemetery in New York. Later it was moved to the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

The great inventor was also a great mystifier. So, the main source of the most fantastic rumors about himself, exciting the public for almost a century and a half, because on July 10, Tesla turns 160 years old. "Around the World" figured out if it's true that ...

Nikola Tesla, 1890

Tesla's experiments caused the "fall of the Tunguska meteorite"

Not. One of the most popular myths: in 1908, it was not a mysterious object from outer space that exploded over the Siberian taiga, but a bunch of energy sent by Tesla to a distance of thousands of kilometers from his Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island in New York. The inventor actually built the tower for experiments on the transmission of electrical signals over great distances, but these experiments, as you know, were not crowned with success.

Tesla became interested in electricity thanks to the cat

Maybe. In 1939, in a letter to a 12-year-old girl, Paula Fotić, the inventor told a story about how, as a child, he ran his hand along the back of a pet and saw a miracle: sparks sparkled on the cat's fur. The father explained to the boy that this is the same electricity as lightning. According to Nikola Tesla, he was then three years old, but the scientist carried the memory of this case, as well as his interest in electricity, through his whole life. However, 80 years passed from the event to the story about it, and the inventor liked to mythologize his biography.

Thomas Alva Edison

Edison “threw” Tesla for 50 thousand dollars

Maybe. Tesla's friend John O'Neill wrote from his words that the inventor who worked in the firm of Thomas Edison offered to improve the design of generators, and the employer agreed, promising 50 thousand dollars for this. But when Tesla completed the task and demanded payment, Edison just laughed and replied: "You don't understand American humor." After that, the offended engineer quit. The author of Tesla's biography, Yevgeny Matonin, writes that seriously tight-fisted Edison simply could not promise employees such amounts.

Tesla invented the radio transmitter

Yes. Italian Guglielmo Marconi, Russian scientist Alexander Popov and Nikola Tesla independently developed equipment for wireless communication using radio waves. In 1943, six months after Tesla's death, a United States court officially declared him, an American citizen, the first inventor of the radio (whereas in Russia back in 1909, the commission of the Russian Physico-Chemical Society recognized Popov's priority). It was Tesla who invented the mast antenna and a number of other important details that improved the quality of radio communications.

Tesla has created a superweapon "death rays"

Not. In the period between the two world wars in different countries there were rumors about the invention of the rays of death, capable of destroying people and equipment at a distance. Tesla, too, was fascinated by the idea and told reporters and potential sponsors that he knew how to create something similar. “Whether you send troops to attack where these rays operate, whether you send 10 thousand aircraft or a millionth army, the aircraft will be immediately shot down and the army destroyed,” she was quoted in 1934 New York Herald Tribune interview given to scientists on their 78th birthday. At the same time, Tesla believed that weapons of such power would end wars, making them meaningless. There is no information about successful tests of such Tesla's invention.

Tesla doted on pigeons

Yes. Living in New York, the inventor specially bought seeds every day and went to feed the birds. And if for some reason he could not, he hired a messenger for this. The birds flocked to Tesla's whistle and landed on his head and shoulders without fear. Several times the scientist had to move out of hotels, due to the fact that he tried to keep pigeons.

Tesla believed he made contact with the Martians

Yes. “The ability to attract the attention of the Martians was the ultimate goal of [my] principle of the propagation of electric waves,” the famed electrical engineer told reporters in 1896 in a wave of sensation when astronomer Percival Lowell suggested that the channels seen by his colleague on the surface of the Red Planet were man-made structures. Three years later, recording electrical impulses in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, Tesla caught the ordered signals and decided that they could not be anything other than messages from Mars.

Tesla was obsessed with the number three

Yes. “All the repetitive actions that I did had to be divided by three,” the scientist wrote. He counted the number of steps while walking and, wandering around hotels all his life, he always settled in rooms with a number multiple of three. Adherence to repetitive actions and personal signs in combination with phobias are symptoms of neurosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Tesla prepared an experiment on destroyer teleportation

Not. Conspiracy theorists are sure that Tesla's works were useful to the US military in 1943 in the so-called Philadelphia experiment, also known as the Rainbow project. Allegedly, the destroyer Eldridge, which was stationed in the port of Philadelphia, was subjected to electromagnetic effects, due to which the ship disappeared, materialized three hundred kilometers away in Norfolk, Virginia, and immediately returned to its place, with half the crew gone crazy. This legend was launched in 1956 by the mentally ill Carl Allen, who claimed to have observed the experiment from a nearby ship. It is established that the Eldridge did not enter the port of Philadelphia at all in 1943.

Pierce-Arrow is a prestigious car brand in the 1930s and one of the oldest

Tesla has created an electric car with an inexhaustible source of energy

Not. The first electric vehicles appeared in the 19th century, but because of the difficulty of recharging, they were replaced by cars with an internal combustion engine. A story is circulating in the media that Peter Savo, who identified himself as Tesla's nephew, told that his brilliant relative solved this problem. According to Savo, in 1931, his uncle tested with him for eight days an electric car, personally converted from a Pierce-Arrow car, and called the mysterious "ether around us" the source of the car's energy. But not a single expert saw this miracle of technology, and the inventor did not have a nephew named Peter Savo. However, an electric car company is named after Tesla. Tesla Motors- in memory of his merits in the improvement of the electric motor.

Tesla was a vegetarian

Yes. In his youth, the inventor was very fond of steak, but over time he refused meat, but drank a lot of milk. Tesla considered tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and chewing gum unhealthy, but, as O'Neill testified, he enjoyed "drinking whiskey, considering it to be a source of very useful energy and an invaluable means of prolonging life." The scientist even claimed that this drink would allow him to live one hundred and fifty years.

Tesla faked his own death to participate in secret US military developments

Not. Tired and sick, the 86-year-old genius of Serbian origin died on the night of January 7-8, 1943 in his room at the New Yorker Hotel due to coronary artery thrombosis. Tesla was buried in a church in front of two thousand witnesses and buried at Ferncliffe Cemetery near New York. Later, the nephew of the deceased, the Yugoslav politician Sava Kosanovich, ensured that the body was exhumed and cremated. Apparently, with a long-range view: a few years later, in 1957, Tesla's ashes in a golden urn were transferred to the museum of the inventor in Belgrade, where it is still kept today.

Photo: Alamy, SPL / Legion-media (x3), Getty Images, Napoleon Sarony / Library of Congress, iStock (x3), NASA / JPL-Caltech, U.S. Navy

What lies behind the mysterious inventions of Nikola Tesla? How was the great inventor connected with the mystery of the disappearance of the destroyer "Eldridge" during the Philadelphia experiment? What kind of mysterious experiments did the followers of Nikola Tesla perform at the abandoned Montauk Air Force Base? The author considers these and many other exciting questions through the prism of the latest achievements of science and technology. The book is written in the form of a collection of popular essays - investigations into the dark spots of the biography of the outstanding electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla. For the widest range of readers interested in the secrets of military research.

* * *

The following excerpt from the book Nikola Tesla - Lord of Lightning. Scientific investigation of amazing facts (O. O. Feigin, 2010) provided by our book partner - the company LitRes.

Chapter one

lightning lord

Our world is immersed in a huge ocean of energy, we are flying in endless space at an inconceivable speed. Everything around rotates, moves - everything is energy. We have a huge task ahead of us - to find ways to extract this energy. Then, extracting it from this inexhaustible source, humanity will move forward with gigantic strides.

Nikola Tesla

It's midday, business lunch time, and downtown New York is filled with thousands of white-collar workers rushing for a hearty meal in cafes, bars, and inexpensive fast food restaurants. Along the avenue, clogged with a stream of honking cars, grimacing annoyedly from the bluish clouds of exhaust gases, a tall, thin, black-haired man in a dark-striped expensive three-piece walks with a quick step, almost skipping (Fig. 5).

His fixed gaze of feverishly shining black eyes is directed somewhere far away over a sea of ​​swaying top hats and hats. A thin face with a beautiful black mustache is distinguished by a deep inner spirituality, strikingly different from the stupid "American" smiles of most passers-by. Unexpectedly, the strange thinker stops and, slapping his forehead, makes a beautiful somersault with acceleration, not noticing the astonished looks of those around him.

How many people have called me a dreamer, how our deluded short-sighted world has mocked my ideas.

Time will judge us.

Nikola Tesla

Rice. 5. Magician of electricity

Walk "Doctor Electricity", as the newspapers called Nikola Tesla, ended with the birth of some new idea. If Tesla's somersault had been seen by his neighbors in a luxurious mansion on East Houston Avenue, they would hardly have been surprised at the eccentric behavior of the famous inventor. After all, there were rumors about a strange Slav that he was “a relative of Count Dracula” (where can “educated” Americans distinguish a Serb from a Romanian?), And he himself looks like a vampire, because he avoids sunlight ... And the newspapers wrote that he created terrible “ rays of death "and a weapon that shoots lightning (Fig. 6).

In fact, Tesla, of course, had nothing to do with otherworldly forces, although he was very fond of casting a “mystical” fog in numerous interviews. And although such a disease is still unknown to medicine, he claimed that under the influence of powerful electromagnetic fields, his nerves acquired a special sensitivity to "radiant energy." Bright light caused nervous migraines in the inventor, but he saw perfectly at dusk and even distinguished some “energy contours of objects” in complete darkness.

The eccentric inventor has repeatedly claimed that, being close to electrical discharges, he, like some kind of energy vampire, is fueled by "ethereal electrical substance." In doing so, he used his famous transformers, in which the secondary winding, tuned with a ferrite core, made it possible, by resonating with the primary winding, to obtain an output voltage of several million volts. This led to a powerful corona discharge in the air, and the design itself was called the Tesla Lightning Generator.

Rice. 6. Tesla in the Colorado Springs laboratory /

In 1900, Tesla's colossal project to build a global wireless power transmission station began a few tens of kilometers from New York on Long Island. It must be said that this project of the famous researcher of electricity had a rather vague scientific basis. Tesla himself carefully concealed his formulas and calculations from the general public. With a thoughtful look, he told the shareholders of his enterprise how he would produce a resonant buildup of the "planetary electrical atmosphere." At the same time, he claimed that he would turn the entire Earth into one global resonator circuit, where the air layers would play the role of colossal capacitors.

One way or another, Tesla managed to convince the American millionaires of the reality of his idea, and soon two thousand engineers, technicians and workers began to build the object, which was called the Wardenclyffe (Fig. 7). Construction began in 1901, but was never fully completed due to funding cuts. The amazing structure was dismantled in 1917.

Tesla's global resonator is still associated with many legends and rumors. At one time, Tesla himself warmed them up, claiming that he could transfer huge energy through the ionosphere to any part of the globe. There is even a hypothesis that the mysterious Tunguska miracle of 1908 occurred as a result of experimental sessions of the global resonator. Tesla left the project in 1905, but at the beginning of the First World War he began to conduct some kind of secret experiments on behalf of the US Army. The tower was dismantled in 1917 due to the not entirely clear circumstances of the loss of livestock and a wave of cardiovascular diseases.

Rice. 7. Station of the global electrical resonator "Wordencliff"

After some time, the cyclopean structure of the world's first wireless power transmission system arose on the former wasteland. It looked like a wooden tower structure 57 meters high with a steel shaft 36 meters deep. The wooden frame of the tower with a diameter of more than 20 meters weighed 55 tons. The only metal part of the structure was the spherical dome. At the top of the resonator tower was a 55-ton metal dome with a diameter of 20 meters. Using a 60-meter coil, one of the poles of which was connected to a large copper sphere towering over the laboratory hall, Tesla created electrical potentials that generated lightning discharges tens of meters long. Five years after the start of construction, a trial run of the global resonator took place. Tesla chose a good time for the demonstration, and in the late afternoon, having waited for a powerful thunderstorm front moving from the Atlantic, connected his atmospheric resonator.

The effect was amazing! The next day, the newspapers were full of headlines such as "Dr. Electricity sets the air ocean on fire," "Tesla sets the sky on fire," "Electric fireworks over New York."

It was undoubtedly one of the most grandiose (and dangerous!) experiments in the history of electrical engineering. The copper hemisphere of the dome of the resonator, when the installation was turned on, was covered with a sea of ​​raging lightning tens of meters long, and thunder was heard within a radius of 20 kilometers. From a distance, it seemed that a huge dazzlingly luminous ball was burning around the resonator screen, and in the surrounding courtyards and streets, passers-by with mystical fear looked at sheaves of sparks between their feet and the ground. It is known that, due to a number of physiological reasons, horses are more sensitive to electric shock shocks than humans, so many cargo and passenger carriages rushed about, colliding because of the "carried" horses, receiving continuous painful injections through iron horseshoes. Static electricity in the form of St. Elmo's lights buzzed softly on every metal object in the area.

And a few kilometers from the Wardenclyffe tower, the ultimate goal of experiments on wireless power transmission was demonstrated. In the presence of numerous witnesses, who were the shareholders of Tesla's enterprise, batteries of hundreds of electric light bulbs caught fire, one contact of which was grounded, and the second was connected to a plate of an air-ether resonator, which plays the role of one of the capacitor plates.

Tesla intended to build the second tower of the electric global resonator at the Niagara hydroelectric power station. The fact is that it was this power plant that was the first in the world to be equipped with alternating current generators designed by Tesla, and the inventor received a large stake in the Niagara Electrical Company. Tesla began to ardently convince his sponsors-shareholders of the need for new investments, but the boom in radio communications and the many very unpleasant side effects of operating global etheric resonators led to a "revolt of shareholders." American businessmen gave the inventor a kind of ultimatum: either he completely switches to radio engineering research and builds radio transmission lines, or they begin bankruptcy proceedings for his company. Despite the fact that Tesla built many models of radio transmitters and radio receivers somewhat earlier than Marconi, who only established a transatlantic connection between England and Canada in December 1900, the inventor most decisively rejected the conditions set for him. A scandal erupted, in which, of course, small investors suffered the most, but, one way or another, all Tesla's ambitious projects lost funding. True, there was one strange moment when it seemed that the parties would come to some kind of compromise. This was due to Tesla's statements that he regularly communicates with alien civilizations on the already existing radio equipment of his design ... And in the future he agrees to deal only with interplanetary communication problems! The prospects for communication between the planets of the solar system (Tesla for some reason insistently pointed to Mars) did little to inspire Wall Street businessmen, and after a heated debate, they nevertheless decided to refuse Tesla to finance this line of research.

After the unfortunate fiasco with the global ether resonators, Tesla switched entirely to the study of transformers and inductors. Subsequently, they were called so: transformers and Tesla coils. Their amazing properties and unusual parameters still amaze electrical engineers.

Tesla transformers consist of coils of a special design (Tesla coils) that are not inductively coupled and do not have a common core. Their primary winding was made of several turns of large-section tires. Secondary - high-voltage - contained a large number of turns of a thick insulated cable. For Tesla transformers, the transformation ratio was ten times higher than the ratio of the number of turns of the secondary winding to the number of turns of the primary and was proportional to the quality factor of the secondary circuit.

At the same time, the inventor continues to improve his alternators, releasing them at a joint venture with the well-known industrialist Westinghouse, Westinghouse Electric. Tesla is also continuing its furious ideological war with DC proponents, led by Thomas Edison, and is developing unique radio-controlled vehicle models. He constantly participates in the work of various forums and exhibitions, where his exposition with operating instruments and equipment makes a splash.

But years pass, and the scientist's thoughts more and more often return to his most famous design - the tower of the global ethereal resonator. After lengthy negotiations with the government authorities, Tesla manages to conclude an agreement to lease his former Wardenclyffe test station to the military. What was the scientist going to do with his "shaker of the electric ether"? Alas ... here we have to step on the shaky ground of guesses and assumptions. The fact is that all the documents related to this period of the experimenter's activity are still (!) a state secret of the US government (Fig. 10).

More or less reliably known that in the pre-war years, Tesla began working on secret projects for the US Navy. This included the wireless transmission of energy to defeat the enemy, and the creation of a mysterious "resonant weapon". The only thing that got into print was the information that Tesla created very capacious air capacitors, charging which to a voltage of several tens of thousands of volts, he received powerful decimeter radiation during discharge. At the same time, he varied the breakdown voltage of the spark gap, changing the course of the discharge and, accordingly, the powerful pulsed current of the primary winding, creating microwave radio waves.

Tesla's big mistake, from the point of view of the scientist's ethics, was the spread of unverified rumors that the Tunguska Miracle was not the fall of an asteroid in the form of a colossal block of ice, but "the sporadic release of electrical energy of the ether" as a result of the action of its global resonator. So, in an interview with a number of tabloid publications, Tesla directly stated: “... the idea came to my mind that if I can create a resonant system between the Moon and the Earth, then the transmitter power can be insignificant, and the energy from such a system can be extracted colossal. After calculating how much energy can be extracted, I was surprised. It followed from the calculation that the energy extracted from this system was enough to destroy a large city ... And only later, after reading about unusual phenomena in the newspapers, I realized what a terrible weapon I had created. Of course, I expected that there would be a strong explosion, but it was not even an explosion - it was a disaster.”

Rice. 10. Multi-loop Tesla transformer

The termination of this series of experiments and the dismantling of all equipment, including the tower of the global ethereal resonator, was preceded in 1917 by a series of very strange events. First of all, in the vicinity of Long Island, a mass death of wild and domestic animals began. The locals were very quick to compare the periods of operation of the resonator tower, covered with garlands of static electricity from St. Elmo's fires, with the strange behavior of animals that fell into fatal fits of rabies. Then came the time of the people, and the surrounding hospitals overflowed with cores. Here, having smelled a real sensation, hordes of journalists took up the investigation, while requests were sent to all authorities, and even a Senate temporary commission of inquiry was created. One can imagine what titanic efforts the military department had to make to put out this information fire. Bringing out Tesla with his mysterious experiments, the military did not find anything better than to hastily destroy all traces of research along with the experimental base.

All this greatly quarreled with the inventor government authorities, and for a long time he lived as a hermit on his ranch in Texas. What he was doing during this time, no one knows. However, Tesla's active nature could not do without large-scale projects, and from 1936 to 1942 he took part in the Raduga naval control project. Many researchers of this period of the scientist's life even believe that he was the executive director of the project that ended in the infamous Philadelphia experiment. There is reason to believe that after the experiments with the global resonator, Tesla foresaw the possibility of human casualties and in every possible way delayed the conduct of the decisive experiment, making endless modifications and adjustments of the equipment. However, after his death in the winter of 1943, the factor holding back the military disappeared, and, as we know, in the autumn they began their first experiments.

If you once again take a mental look at the work of the inventor between the two wars, then the “almost official hypothesis” that the US Navy conducted an experiment on the invisibility of a ship for radar takes on a completely new sound. Especially doubtful is the story that on the Eldridge destroyer, with the help of Tesla generators, they created a kind of shielding "electromagnetic bubble" that was capable of scattering the radiation of enemy radars past the ship's hull. Even more questions are raised by the further course of the experiment, when the ship became completely invisible in the optical range. Moreover, it is believed that he suddenly appeared on the roads of Norfolk, hundreds of kilometers away from Philadelphia.

As you know, for the Eldridge crew, the experiment ended tragically. And if we exclude obvious absurdities like “molecular mixing” of the metal of the hull and bodies, then the diagnosis would look like this: the members of the ship’s crew completely lost their orientation in time and space, could not move without leaning on the walls, and their psyche was traumatized by some kind of shock stress, turning into a state of inescapable horror. Subsequently, after a long period of rehabilitation, all members of the team were first decommissioned ashore, and then completely dismissed from the Navy with diagnoses of "psychopathy", "mental imbalance" and even "a tendency to psychopathology".

So the project "Rainbow" seems to have ended ingloriously. However, is it really so inglorious and really ended? One thing is clear: in wartime conditions, the counterintelligence of the Navy not only did everything possible to classify as much as possible what was related to the experiment in one way or another, but also carried out the most extensive disinformation activities that diverted attention. So suddenly, as a result of the “information leak”, a completely meaningless idea arose that in reality the goal was to create magnetic fields of ultra-high intensity based on Tesla’s unique installations for ... levitation of the destroyer and its crew (obviously, separately?) in the Earth’s magnetic field. Say what you like, but countless publications and journalistic speculations, devoid of any sense, constantly suggest a very clever and professional disinformation campaign still being carried out.

Meanwhile, let's return to the last years of Tesla's life (Fig. 12). It is definitely known that he was very interested in the influence of electromagnetic microwave waves on biological systems, especially on cardiac activity and brain function. It is known that shortly before Tesla's death, information was leaked to the New York newspapers that he had invented some mysterious "death rays" that could destroy thousands of aircraft from a distance of hundreds of kilometers.

The International Electrotechnical Commission is happy that the feeling of deep respect and admiration for the works of Nikola Tesla, on the main of which the work of the commission itself largely depends, is marked by the general agreement reached on assigning the name "tesla" to the international unit of magnetic induction ...

The assignment of the name of Nikola Tesla to an important and often used unit in electrical engineering is the greatest expression of the international recognition of Tesla's works, just as in the past this recognition was expressed in relation to such giants of electrical engineering as Ampere, Volt, Faraday, Ohm, Maxwell, Watt, Hertz and more...

IEC Decree of July 27, 1956 on the assignment of the name "tesla" to the unit of magnetic induction

Rice. 12. Monument to Nikola Tesla at the Niagara Hydroelectric Power Plant

Tesla himself did not at all deny the fact of such a monstrous invention and even tried to explain that the basis of his device is a kind of “radio frequency oscillator”, which allows you to broadcast energy in the atmosphere and focus it on various moving targets. Of course, such statements by the inventor were far from accidental and were voiced in the press on the special instructions of the "competent authorities". After all, we must not forget about spy mania and rampant censorship.

It is also known that the inventor, who did not need funds at all (his company was simply overwhelmed with military electrical orders), suddenly began to send proposals to design "super-deadly beam weapons" all over the world. In an interview with amazed journalists, he explained that by selling his invention to everyone, he wants to establish an absolute balance of power between different countries and thus prevent all wars in the world. It is curious that even earlier, in 1937, the inventor negotiated with a representative of the Soviet Union. As a result of these very strange contacts, he allegedly handed over some plans for a vacuum chamber for his "death rays", receiving in exchange some drawings of Novgorod radio physicists. In 1940, in an interview with The New York Times, 84-year-old Nikola Tesla declared his readiness to reveal the secret of "telesila" to the American government. As the scientist said, it is built on a completely new physical principle, which no one dreamed of, different from the principles embodied in his inventions in the field of power transmission over long distances (Fig. 13). According to Tesla, this new type of energy will work through a beam with a diameter of one hundred millionth of a square centimeter and can be generated by special stations that will cost no more than a couple of million dollars and take only a few months to build.

Rice. 13. Maybe it's a new type of energy.

Yes, perhaps the aging inventor really plunged into the world of illusions. However, given that he never threw words to the wind and always implemented the declared projects, it can be assumed that Tesla could adapt the technology of wireless power transmission to the needs of the military.

The fact that the US government attached great importance to Tesla's research is also confirmed by the fact that after his death the most thorough search was carried out at the New Yorker Hotel, where he lived recently. FBI special agents seized all the papers related to the scientific activities of the inventor. A day later, Dr. John Trump, who led the National Defense Committee, made a strange statement that an expert study of Tesla's legacy showed that "these records are speculative and speculative, are purely philosophical in nature and do not imply any principles or methods for their implementation." Most of the diaries and manuscripts of Nikola Tesla disappeared under unclear circumstances. The history of scientific research reliably indicates that as soon as a new weapon or reconnaissance method appears, the corresponding “anti-devices” are immediately developed.

The history of the creation of a radar station (RLS) is no exception here, because a serious study of the problem of "radio invisibility" began in the early 1930s. In this regard, historians of science usually mention the experimental physicists John Hutchinson and Emil Kurtenhauer of the University of Chicago. Their research boiled down to experiments of the same type on the passage of radio waves between the plates of a capacitor through a sprayed air suspension of water droplets, or, more simply, a fog model. For some reason, Tesla was very interested in these unpretentious experiments, and after short negotiations, a kind of creative team was created, and Tesla immediately abruptly changed the experimental direction. Now, the directed (!) effect on the sea fog of super-powerful radiation of various designs of Tesla coils was investigated.

In 1933, on the initiative of Professor Kurtenhauer, the famous Institute for Advanced Studies was established at Princeton University. One of the aims of his work is to organize and employ the many brilliant scientists who fled Nazi Germany. And some newspapers directly wrote that the Princeton Institute was directly created "for a major brain drain from Europe" and even specifically "for Einstein." Indeed, it must be admitted that at that time the rumble of an imminent war was already heard, and many scientists, mostly of Jewish nationality, were secretly transported from Germany through various channels. In any case, the creation of this research center should certainly be considered one of the most profitable investments of the American government in US history. What happened, the meaning of which many of our current politicians cannot understand in any way, is the investment of very large funds in the intellect of the nation ...

Thus, one of the most prominent theorists in the history of mankind, Albert Einstein and his colleague John von Neumann (Fig. 14), got into the “informal creative team” to study the electromagnetic permeability of various media. Unfortunately, we are almost unaware of any of their publications of that period regarding "radio invisibility", but the very fact of their unification in one research topic under the leadership of Tesla speaks volumes. Apparently, it was soon possible to obtain some important results that were extremely interested in the military department. After all, the project was classified (subsequently, the status of secrecy was repeatedly raised!), And he fell under the auspices of the Navy, receiving the code name "Rainbow V". The first reporting demonstrative experiments were planned for the summer of 1940, when a full-scale experiment took place at the Brooklyn Naval Base in the presence of the Princeton group and the highest ranks of the Navy. An unnamed decommissioned Coast Guard ship with no people on board was chosen to carry it out. During the tests, according to some reports, the ship's power system was connected to a coastal power station using long power cables, and according to others, diesel generators of other ships were used.

Rice. 14. John von Neumann (1903–1957), prominent physicist and mathematician, one of the founders of cybernetics

Generally speaking, one can try to open the thick veil of secrecy over the Philadelphia experiment in a somewhat unexpected way. To do this, it is necessary to analyze the narrow specialization of the scientists participating in the project. For example, one of the active participants and the leader of the whole direction of degaussization (active demagnetization) was magnetophysicist Brown Townsend. It is known that he specialized in magnetic and vibration mines for a long time. His group was developing methods to protect against magnetic fuses of mines in a steel case by using powerful electromagnets inside it. Degaussization offered to neutralize the ship's magnetic field in such a way that even the most sensitive mine "did not notice" it. Of course, this required careful measurements of the magnetic field of each ship. And although the “magnetic certification” of the hull was carried out once after the vessel was launched, in the “Rainbow” project, Townsend’s specialists carried out their procedures constantly and repeatedly. This could mean only one thing: the destroyer was using some kind of mysterious experimental equipment, causing intense stray currents and magnetizing the hull. Naturally, the strongly magnetized case brought discord in the readings of measuring and navigation instruments, and it had to be demagnetized all the time. After all, there were clearly no magnetic mines in the waters of the Philadelphia docks!

So, by the time the United States entered World War II, Tesla's team had achieved such impressive success that a brand new destroyer Eldridge was allocated for the Rainbow project, and, apparently, not only it ... Records of changes in the metric tonnage of the ship indicate that several tons of secret experimental equipment were mounted on it, which probably included the famous generators and Tesla coils.

However, it was precisely at this stage of the highest rise in experiments that there was talk that the project director (!) was sabotaging the further course of research. Tesla was really categorically against the next stage of experiments with a full crew aboard the destroyer. Now sometimes you can hear that the constant presence near powerful electrical discharges developed Tesla's mystical abilities in its entirety to foresee the future effect of his inventions with a kind of "inner eye". But we know how ridiculous such assumptions are! It is enough to recall the impact of the global ethereal resonator on others to understand how Tesla knew that the mental and physical state of the Eldridge crew would certainly be seriously tested. The only worthy way out of this situation was seen in the retreat to the starting positions and the multiple repetition of experiments with the "biological factor". It is quite possible that in normal times, after long scrupulous coordination and making the necessary changes, all interested parties would have done so. But not in the midst of the most brutal war in the history of mankind!

The leadership of the Naval Administration, which at first considered Tesla's requirements as another quickly passing eccentricity of the "energy vampire", quickly became convinced of the seriousness of the inventor's intentions. A huge scandal erupted, during which Tesla had to listen to chilling accusations of "deliberate sabotage of the most important defense research", punishable with all the strictness of wartime laws ... The scientist was also reminded of all his statements that an alien civilization is in touch with him, and he feels their signals whenever Mars appears in the sky, and his "journeys through the ethereal shell of the Earth", where he communicated with the astral shadows of other beings, and other eccentric actions and statements. Before the inventor loomed the opportunity to be in the chambers of a psychiatric hospital ... We must pay tribute to Tesla's fortitude and courage, who steadfastly listened to everything and, without signing a single order to continue the experiments, went to the hospital with a diagnosis of "nervous fever due to overwork."

Meanwhile, the administration of the Naval Administration managed to agree with the scientific director of the project, John von Neumann, who never really got along with Tesla. Von Neumann was a brilliant scientist, but, as a leader and administrator, he preferred to listen to the opinion of higher authorities, and not to the arguments of his own mind. After he was appointed director of the project, he set to work with great enthusiasm, beginning intensive preparations for a series of decisive experiments.

Nikola Tesla died in January 1943, and nothing could stop research on the "action of factor X on the biological environment." There is a version that shortly before his death, Tesla sent several letters to the highest authorities, where he reasonably argued the need to immediately stop preparations for the final stage of the Philadelphia experiment. It is hard to say whether this is so, because the secret services immediately after the death of the inventor completely confiscated his entire archive, including personal papers and letters.

John von Neumann revised the design of the experiment again and decided that not two, but three very powerful generators would be required. The eminent theorist, of course, himself admitted that the experiment could be deadly for the crew, as Tesla predicted. He decided that the third - additional - generator would overcome possible difficulties. He still had time to make a third generator, but there was no time left to debug synchronization with the other two. The last generator was never started, because the transmission mechanism, as it turned out, did not meet the required parameters. Von Neumann was not satisfied with the preparation of the experiment, but the management was not going to wait any longer.

In the summer of 1943, the first control tests were carried out with the crew on board. The session of the secret electronic equipment lasted a quarter of an hour and immediately revealed problems with the team. At first, without exception, everyone experienced severe dizziness and nausea. Then mental seizures began and several people began to roll around the deck with foam on their lips. After the termination of the experiment, all members of the ship's crew experienced a throbbing headache, severe weakness and periodic vomiting for a very long time. Subsequently, several people had to be written off to the shore, and three were “purely commissioned” due to obvious signs of mental disorders and mental imbalance.

From the results of the "control run" it clearly followed that the equipment needed improvement, but demonstration tests were scheduled for August 12, 1943. The order came from the Chief of Naval Staff, who stated that he only cared about the outcome of the war. In an effort to reduce the danger to the people involved in the experiment, John von Neumann tried to modify the equipment in such a way as to reduce the power of the electromagnetic field and ensure only partial fulfillment of the project's goals (which ordinary performers did not know anything about).

I will not describe once again the terrible consequences of the decisive stage of the Philadelphia experiment, but I will invite you to pay attention to one curious event that occurred a few days after the tragic experience. A splendid black jeep rolled onto the Philadelphia docks pier, escorted by an open dodge full of armed Marines. Three people got out of the jeep: two of average height, one overweight, and the second thin, and the third - some high military rank in a tunic and cap, completely trimmed with gold braid. A thin civilian in a tightly buttoned overcoat and a hat pulled down deeply opened a leather folder and began to show some papers to the satellites, occasionally pointing to the bay and the ship standing at the quay wall. His plump companion took off his hat and exposed his luxurious gray hair to the fresh sea breeze, then asked something, and the trio moved towards the pier. The military man gave some command to the Marines, and they, quickly slipping past the guards at the gangway, ran, maneuvering along the deck lined with some boxes and devices to the stern. There they threw off the camouflage tarpaulin, and the eyes of the newcomers opened up a strange long apparatus, attached to a spinning artillery machine instead of a stern gun. John von Neumann, gesticulating animatedly and often referring to the mysterious device, was telling something to Albert Einstein and the military curator of the project ...