Steinmetz was a genius & hero. It would have been great if Steinmetz and Tesla collaborated. Carl
www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/machine.htm A MACHINE TO END WAR
by Nikola Tesla
A Famous Inventor, Picturing Life 100 Years from Now, Reveals an
Astounding
Scientific Venture Which He Believes Will Change the Course of History
Liberty, February 1937
by Nikola Tesla
as told to
George Sylvester Viereck
Tesla. "It seems," he says, "that I have always been ahead of my time."
Editor's Note: Nikola Tesla, now in his seventy-eighth year, has been
called the father of radio, television, power transmission, the induction
motor, and the robot, and the discoverer of the cosmic ray. Recently he
has announced a heretofore unknown source of energy present everywhere in
unlimited amounts, and he is now working upon a device which he believes
will make war impracticable.
Tesla and Edison have often been represented as rivals. They were rivals,
to a certain extent, in the battle between the alternating and direct
current in which Tesla championed the former. He won; the great power
plants at Niagara Falls and elsewhere are founded on the Tesla system.
Otherwise the two men were merely opposites. Edison had a genius for
practical inventions immediately applicable. Tesla, whose inventions were
far ahead of the time, aroused antagonisms which delayed the fruition of
his ideas for years.
However, great physicists like Kelvin and Crookes spoke of his inventions
as marvelous. "Tesla," said Professor A. E. Kennelly of Harvard University
when the Edison medal was presented to the inventor, "set wheels going
round all over the world. . . . What he showed was a revelation to science
and art unto ail time."
"Were we," remarks B. A. Behrend, distinguished author and engineer," to
seize and to eliminate the results of Mr. Tesla's work, the wheels of
industry would cease to turn, our electric cars and trains would stop, our
towns would be dark, our mills would be dead and idle."
FORECASTING is perilous. No man can look very far into the future.
Progress and invention evolve in directions other than those anticipated.
Such has been my experience, although I may flatter myself that many of
the developments which I forecast have been verified by events in the
first third of the twentieth century.
It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen
years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the
basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were
applied universally. I announced the cosmic ray and my theory of radio
activity in 1896. One of my most important discoveries—terrestrial
resonance—which is the foundation of wireless power transmission and which
I announced in 1899, is not understood even today. Nearly two years after
I had flashed an electric current around the globe, Edison, Steinmetz,
Marconi, and others declared that it would not be possible to transmit
even signals by wireless across the Atlantic. Having anticipated so many
important developments, it is not without assurance that I attempt to
predict what life is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it
contains certain known factors. We may definitely say that it is a
movement even if we do not fully understand its nature. Movement implies a
body which is being moved and a force which propels it against resistance.
Man, in the large, is a mass urged on by a force. Hence the general laws
governing movement in the realm of mechanics are applicable to humanity.
There are three ways by which the energy which determines human progress
can be increased: First, we may increase the mass. This, in the case of
humanity, would mean the improvement of living conditions, health,
eugenics, etc. Second, we may reduce the frictional forces which impede
progress, such as ignorance, insanity, and religious fanaticism. Third, we
may multiply the energy of the human mass by enchaining the forces of the
universe, like those of the sun, the ocean, the winds and tides.
The first method increases food and well-being. The second tends to bring
peace. The third enhances our ability to work and to achieve. There can be
no progress that is not constantly directed toward increasing well-being,
peace, and achievement. Here the mechanistic conception of life is one
with the teachings of Buddha and the Sermon on the Mount.
While I am not a believer in the orthodox sense, I commend religion,
first, because every individual should have some ideal—religious,
artistic, scientific, or humanitarian—to give significance to his life.
Second, because all the great religions contain wise prescriptions
relating to the conduct of life, which hold good now as they did when they
were promulgated.
There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of
science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is
founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never
came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the
natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our
minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a
response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to
the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we
respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our
reactions, understanding is barn. In the course of ages, mechanisms of
infinite complexity are developed, but what we call "soul " or "spirit,"
is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this
functioning ceases, the "soul" or the "spirit" ceases likewise.
I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in
Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new
psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to
an ethical conception of life. The acceptance by mankind at large of these
tenets will not destroy religious ideals. Today Buddhism and Christianity
are the greatest religions both in number of disciples and in importance.
I believe that the essence of both will he the religion of the human race
in the twenty-first century.
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the
law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less
desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with
the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive
and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of
civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by
sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several
European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize
the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion
among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no
one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.
A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a
person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and
government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will he far more
important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds
office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War. The pollution of our
beaches such as exists today around New York City will seem as unthinkable
to our children and grandchildren as life without plumbing seems to us.
Our water supply will he far more carefully supervised, and only a lunatic
will drink unsterilized water.
MORE people die or grow sick from polluted water than from coffee, tea,
tobacco, and other stimulants. I myself eschew all stimulants. I also
practically abstain from meat. I am convinced that within a century
coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however,
will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life.
The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply
be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients.
Bernarr Macfadden has shown how it is possible to provide palatable food
based upon natural products such as milk, honey, and wheat. I believe that
the food which is served today in his penny restaurants will be the basis
of epicurean meals in the smartest banquet halls of the twenty-first
century.
There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world,
including the teeming millions of China and India, now chronically on the
verge of starvation. The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails,
nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a
process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later
under the stress of war by German chemists.
Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the
scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all
devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization
of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every
household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning
fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be
development along ideal rather than material lines.
Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their
income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will
reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance
than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific
truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the
newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries
and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers
of the twenty-first century will give a mere "stick" in the back pages to
accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the
front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
"It will be possible to destroy anything approaching within 200 miles. My
invention will provide a wall of power," declares Tesla.
PROGRESS along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the
savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an
erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.
Like other inventors, I believed at one time that war could he stopped by
making it more destructive. But I found that I was mistaken. I
underestimated man's combative instinct, which it will take more than a
century to breed out. We cannot abolish war by outlawing it. We cannot end
it by disarming the strong. War can be stopped, not by making the strong
weak but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself.
Hitherto all devices that could be used for defense could also be utilized
to serve for aggression. This nullified the value of the improvement for
purposes of peace. But I was fortunate enough to evolve a new idea and to
perfect means which can be used chiefly for defense. If it is adopted, it
will revolutionize the relations between nations. It will make any
country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes, and other
means for attack. My invention requires a large plant, but once it is
established it will he possible to destroy anything, men or machines,
approaching within a radius of 200 miles. It will, so to speak, provide a
wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective
aggression.
If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be no purpose in
war. My discovery ends the menace of airplanes or submarines, but it
insures the supremacy of the battleship, because battleships may be
provided with some of the required equipment. There might still be war at
sea, but no warship could successfully attack the shore line, as the coast
equipment will be superior to the armament of any battleship.
I want to state explicitly that this invention of mine does not
contemplate the use of any so-called "death rays." Rays are not applicable
because they cannot be produced in requisite quantities and diminish
rapidly in intensity with distance. All the energy of New York City
(approximately two million horsepower) transformed into rays and projected
twenty miles, could not kill a human being, because, according to a well
known law of physics, it would disperse to such an extent as to be
ineffectual.
My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of
microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great
distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any
kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream
thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist. This wonderful feature
will make it possible, among other things, to achieve undreamed-of results
in television, for there will be almost no limit to the intensity of
illumination, the size of the picture, or distance of projection.
I do not say that there may not be several destructive wars before the
world accepts my gift. I may not live to see its acceptance. But I am
convinced that a century from now every nation will render itself immune
from attack by my device or by a device based upon a similar principle.
At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we
have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The
solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the
machine.
Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be
performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the
laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has
been described as a "thinking machine." I anticipated this development.
I actually constructed "robots." Today the robot is an accepted fact, but
the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the twenty-first century
the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient
civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come
to pass in less than a century, treeing mankind to pursue its higher
aspirations.
And unless mankind's attention is too violently diverted by external wars
and internal revolutions, there is no reason why the electric millennium
should not begin in a few decades.