Tesla's Lost Inventions: Suppressed Technologies That Could Change the World

Transcript

Nicola Tesla is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century in fact he helped shape much of the tech we use to this day unfortunately or fortunately many of his inventions have been lost to history remote control navies cameras that could photograph a person's imagination and of course the death ray Nicola Tesla is famous for his work with electricity but he also worked on Military technology like Alfred Noble he thought the best way to stop Wars was to make them so terrible that no one would want to fight Tesla invented a small boat that could be controlled with radio signals he could start it stop it steer it without anyone actually being on board his idea was that if you could take humans out of the fight battleships would stop being built and that quote the most tremendous artillery afloat will be of no more use than so much scrap iron back in 1898 at Madison Square Garden Tesla showed off this boat to the public the boat was a small on manned vessel that Tesla controlled with a radio transmitter this was way ahead of its time remote control technology was just unheard of back then at the time people were so baffled that some even thought he was using magic or mind control to steal the boat so this invention did technically see the light of day just not on the massive scale he was envisioning call it a death ray or as Tesla would call it a peace Ray according to Tesla prior to his death in 1943 and the Cold War in 194 7 he had been working on a particle beam that could produce enough energy to destroy entire armies no matter how far away they might be I mean there were Limits The Beam wouldn't have been able to bend across the Earth to reach adversaries on the other side of the globe but it did have pretty good range and it was incredibly powerful he pitched the idea to a number of governments including the US government and the Soviet Union can you guess who took him up on his offer the Soviets luckily as far as we know Tesla was never actually able to create the weapon but just to be sure after Tesla's passing the US government went to the hotel where he had been staying and pretty much ransacked the place to their relief they found no proof that the weapon had ever made it past the conceptualization stage or so they say for all we know they've got it stored away somewhere in a secure military facility under locking key just waiting for the perfect moment to unleash all hell on some unlucky enemy only time will tell so Tesla had an interesting philosophy on how World Peace would be achieved basically create something so terrifyingly dangerous that no one would ever want to use it thus scaring world leaders out of engaging in violent conflicts kind of like the death ray another one of these scary ideas was the artificial tital wave a title wave that could be set off at will the idea was that this massive wave could be used as a weapon in Naval Warfare to wipe out enemy ships Tesla believed he could generate this title Wave by using a series of synchronized explosions underwater you thought of a machine that could trigger these explosions remotely creating a wave so powerful it would crash down on enemy fleets causing massive destruction at the time the papers wrote that this artificial tidal wave technology would render navies useless and bring Humanity one step closer to World Peace but the invention never actually came to be at least that we know of in 1901 Tesla began working on a groundbreaking invention that would change the way the world viewed electricity a 185 ft tall mushroom shaped wireless energy tower that could transmit messages and images to ships at Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean and power the entirety of New York City by transmitting millions of volts of electricity through the air using only the Earth to conduct the signals in order to do this he secured a $150,000 Grant from American financer and investment banker JP Morgan who you might have heard of from our Titanic videos for five years Tesla worked tirelessly on his invention but unfortunately his vision never came to fruition because in 1906 Morgan cut his funding likely due to the fact that if Tesla was successful in his Endeavor he would have greatly decreased or even eradicated the profits of Morgan's other energy sector Holdings which is too bad because I personally would really love it if I didn't have to pay an electric bill once a month but C I suppose now eradicating electric bills and improving Atlantic Communications weren't the only things Tesla had hoped to use his wireless energy transmitter for Oh No in fact the entire idea was actually sparked by Nicola Tesla's love of flight and the tower was really just a Prelude to what he had actually hoped to create electric powered Super Sonic airships in 1919 Tesla told reconstruction magazine that he had once planned on devel veling aircrafts that would hover 8 miles above Earth's surface and fly at speeds that would allow Pilots to travel from New York City to London in just 3 hours but of course in order for this to work he would have had to have been successful in creating his wireless transmitter because the aircrafts he dreamed of did not carry fuel of course this never went ahead because the transmitter was never completed but think of how much different life would have been if it worked at the top I discussed Nicola Tesla's idea about building a fleet of remote controlled ships but he didn't want to stop there he imagined a world where almost every vehicle would be remote operated and not just vehicles but just full-on robots too after he' showed off his remote control boat reporter suggested it could be used as a weapon Like a Torpedo carrying Dynamite Tesla reportedly flipped out at this and quickly set the record straight he told the reporter that what he was showing wasn't just a weapon but the first of a new kind of machines robots he called them mechanical men stating quote you do not see there a wireless torpedo you see there the first of a race of robots mechanical men which will do the laborous work of the human race what he wanted was a future where robots would help people by taking over tough and dangerous tasks making life easier and safer for everyone at the same time allowing us to focus on more creative things things that machines would never be able to do unfortunately today pretty much the exact opposite has happened thanks to I but that's a topic for another video Tesla was always thinking about new ways to harness energy one of his big Ideas was the concept of solar and wind energy Tesla believed that the Sun and Earth were huge on Tapped sources of energy that could be used to power everything he imagined creating devices that could capture sunlight and turn it into electricity but Tesla didn't want to stop there he also thought about ways to send this solar power wirelessly so people everywhere could use it without needing to be connected power lines Tesla's ideas about solar power were way ahead of his time today we have solar panels and other technology to capture energy from the Sun but Tesla was dreaming about this over a hundred years ago he referred to solar and wind energy at the time as cosmic energy now solar power has been used on a smaller scale for centuries but it wouldn't be implemented in the types of ways we see it being used today until much later in the 1890s Tesla created created something pretty terrifying an earthquake machine by accident you see in 1893 Tesla patented a machine that generated electricity through Steam Powered oscillation the purpose of the machine was to vibrate fast enough to generate electricity which it did but then it also did something else one day while attempting to tune the machine to his house things got a bit out of hand the ground began to shakee but instead of turning the machine off it's Tesla he decided to turn it up and that's when he heard a loud crack all of a sudden it was as though he had created a full on earthquake in his house heavy machinery notes and books were falling over and flying off of tables and walls Tesla's reaction to take a hammer to the generator and destroy it before it destroyed him if he hadn't who knows what could have happened perhaps the small man-made earthquake would have created a chain reaction that ended in the whole world collapsing and many of us having never been born what kind of world would that be when the police arrived he told his staff to uh stay quiet about the whole thing so it wasn't until many years later when he told the story that this terrible invention was revealed however it did lead to generators so good job Tesla Tesla was even picturing weather control long before it was being whispered about on message boards on the internet over a century later he believed that with the right technology it might be possible to influence and change weather patterns he thought he could use electricity to make it rain or prevent storms using powerful electrical machines to send energy into the atmosphere which could then affect the weather for example if there was a drought his theoretical machines could create rain to help crops grow or there was a dangerous storm machines could calm it down before it caused any serious damage Tesla's weather control idea was based on his understanding of how energy and the atmosphere work together now of course he never built the machine that could actually control the weather but as always his ideas were ahead of his time nowadays scientists are still exploring ways to influence the weather some say they've already succeeded now here's a thought camera in 1933 Nicola Tesla attempted to invent a thought camera he said he was convinced that a definitive image formed in thought must by reflex action produce a corresponding image on the retina which might be read by a suitable apparatus in order to test this Theory Tesla conceptualized a plan which consisted of reflecting an image on an artificial retina taking a photograph and projecting that image onto a screen a process which he theorized would allow people's imagination and thoughts to be read as though they were an open book of course this didn't work because that's not how eyeballs work but it was certainly an interesting thought one that we couldn't see on a screen on the other hand if it had worked which it didn't I mean it never made it out of the conceptualization stage it would have revolutionized light detecting and interrogation methods and then maybe MK Ultra would have never happened W with all that said folks we are going to catch you yes you specifically in the next video cheers friends [Music] [Music] oh