Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

420 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
grander plan—sending power wirelessly in order that anyone at any place
on the planet could plug into freely-available electricity. Before his financiers
figured out where Tesla's research was leading, it was briefly funded
by men such as Colonel John Jacob Astor as well as Morgan.
The same year that Tesla's generator turned on the power from Niagara
Falls, he suffered a major setback. One night in March of 1895 his laboratory
burned down, with all files and apparatus destroyed. When he
returned from a meeting, he discovered the smoking mess of twisted metal
that had fallen through two floors to the foundations of the building.
Afterward he wandered through the streets in a daze for hours. The loss of
his papers meant that he could not document what he had been working
on. For example, later that year the discovery of X-rays by German physicist
Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was made public. Tesla's papers could
have proven that he had been the first to take pictures by X-ray.
GOD OF LIGHTNING
Next Tesla concentrated on patenting his methods for sending power and
messages wirelessly. In 1889 to 1890, Tesla moved his operations to the
high country of Colorado Springs, Colorado, to test his new ideas and
develop the art of tuned radio frequency. He built a high-voltage laboratory
on a hillside cow pasture. Inside his lab was the world's largest Tesla
coil, and the building was topped by a flagpole-like structure. While
experimenting on a massive scale, toward his new goal of sending electromagnetic
vibrations throughout Earth, he predicted that Tesla coils
could also be pocket-size message receiving devices.
Tesla's God of Lightning experiments in Colorado Springs were truly
dramatic. Thunder reverberated for at least 15 miles when he fired up the
electrical discharges. His massive 52-foot diameter Tesla coils discharged
more than 12 million volts at a burst, and threw electric sparks of more
than a hundred feet in length from the copper ball on top of his pole. The
townspeople sometimes thought his laboratory was on fire. The ground
under their feet was so highly charged that spectators at a distance from
the laboratory would see tiny sparks between their heels and the sandy soil
when they walked, according to biographer Margaret Cheney. Half a mile
away, horses would get a shock from their metal horseshoes and would
bolt in panic.
The inventor did start a fire one day, when his "magnifying transmitter"
experiment accidentally burned out the power plant for the town of Colorado
Springs. The town went dark and the overloaded dynamo was in flames. It
took Tesla's team of technicians a week to repair the town's generator.