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Sept. 10, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
45:43
Edition 662 - Artemis, Mars And Tesla
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, here I am sitting in London hoping that everything is okay with you.
We've had changeable weather in London.
It has been raining a lot.
Huge comparison to just a few short weeks ago when we were worried about temperatures of the high 30s and low 40s Celsius and London was baking.
Things are very different now as we enter the autumn, as inevitably they must.
But what changing times in which we live.
Thank you very much if you've sent me an email recently.
If you'd like to do that, you can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the email link and you can send me a message from there.
Three guests on this edition of The Unexplained.
They're all from my TV show.
Number one, Dr. David Whitehouse, former BBC Space and Science editor and prolific author on space and science matters.
We're going to get an update on Artemis, NASA's moon mission, and why the launch of the test mission has been postponed.
It's looking like the launch will be sometime in October at the moment as I record these words.
So an update from David.
Simon Morden is guest number two.
We'll talk about Mars.
His new book, The Red Planet, is just out.
So we'll discuss that with him.
And then we're going to talk about the life and times of Nikola Tesla.
I know that you absolutely love stories of Nikola Tesla and how innovative, inventive, and completely different this man was.
So we're going to do that.
We're going to talk about two books that Mark J. Cipher has written, both under the title Wizard.
One was about his life and times, and the latest one is about the wizard at war.
What happened to him, what he did during wartime.
It's a fascinating story, as anything about Nikola Tesla is and would be.
Like I say, thank you for your emails.
Keep them coming.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show when you get in touch.
Let's start now.
Guest number one, Dr. David Whitehouse.
We're talking about Artemis.
A lot of people that I know, and including people in this building, are very disappointed at the setbacks with Artemis.
And I had to remind them, and I wonder what your take on this would be, that this is space.
Some of this science is inexact.
If you want to do it, it's going to cost a lot of money, and you have to be 100% sure it's going to work.
That's right.
This is a test flight.
It's a shakedown mission to make sure that the space launch system and the Orion capsule it's going to send around the moon and the European-made service module are going to work.
In the vast scheme of things, considering that the next flight, Artemis II, is going to be in two years' time and that we'll have people on board, to get it right for people to be on board, a month or two's delay at this stage when you're not sure about what's, you know, whether to launch it, is neither here nor there.
And as you said, this is a difficult thing, though it has to be said that they will be kicking themselves with this latest problem yesterday, because this was a fuel filling problem and a seal in the liquid hydrogen pipe that didn't sit properly.
And they tried to reseat it by adjusting the pressure.
But it wouldn't work.
And you don't want liquid hydrogen leaking because it's obviously very explosive.
That's the reason why it's rocket fuel.
And yes, they've done this.
They've done similar procedures on 135 shuttle launches because it's the same technology.
So they've got to roll it back.
They've got to test it.
They've got to refurbish the supply lines and the seals.
They'll be kicking themselves that it was this particular problem that stopped them this time.
And am I right in saying that this technology is derived from the space shuttle?
Oh, yes.
I mean, the whole space launch system, apart from the Orion capsule at the top, is shuttle-derived technology.
You have the main core, which is basically stretched space shuttle external tanks.
You have four nozzles, four rocket motors at the base of the main core, each one of which has previously flown in space on a space shuttle.
They've been refurbished.
And the outlying solid-fueled boosters, which provide most of the thrust for the first two minutes of the flight, they are stretched versions of the SRBs which took the space shuttle in the initial stages of its flight.
So it was mandated by Congress that space shuttle technology be extended and adapted to build this system, even though some years ago Obama wanted to cancel the whole thing completely.
And we have to remind people, don't we, rather like the people I spoke to today who said, oh, what a letdown.
We were looking forward to it this weekend and all the rest of it.
We have to remind people that this science is inexact and there is, and it's factored in, a certain amount of risk involved in this.
And there is always an identifiable and verifiable percentage that this may not work.
Well, yes.
I mean, space, particularly when there are people involved, involves the liberation of a vast amount of energy in a very short amount of time.
And if something goes wrong, then it's conceivable the crew may not survive and escape with their lives.
That has happened on one launch, Challenger, many years ago.
Nobody wants a repeat of that.
But the thing is that I think, as you and I have said before, the media are disappointed with this launch.
They'll be disappointed with any setback, any postponement.
But the crew that actually have to get on top of this thing in two years' time, not only do they know the score, how dangerous it really is, and it's not routine, not only do they, professional astronauts, know what they're doing, they're actually quite glad that this thing is going through a learning curve because their lives are on the line.
Better that it happens now than it happens, you know, as you say, in the future when we're putting people up there.
And it is amazing technology.
They're saying now that they're going to do this in, what, five weeks from now or thereabouts, middle of October.
Is that looking likely?
Well, that should look likely because they had a problem a week ago with the temperatures of the engines.
And Since these engines at one side have super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and on the other side have an explosion when these are brought together at over a thousand degrees, the thermal gradient is enormous.
And they had problems with the temperature at the start of the process.
So they haven't got to the bottom of that.
The refilling problem they had yesterday seems relatively straightforward.
They have to replace a bit of pipe.
But this is going to take several weeks to actually get the thing back into the hangar, into the vertical assembly building, check it all out, bring it out again, go through the process, and hope nothing else occurs.
Well, I have to say that the new head of NASA is a real cool dude, and he made a statement.
I don't know whether you heard him speak, but it was remarkably calm and remarkably measured, and just a real example of how you explain these things.
Well, he sat, he was part of a space shuttle mission that was scrubbed four times before it was launched.
So he knows all about waiting for the right moment.
Okay, we'll look out for that, but it is nonetheless exciting because it's what's going to take people, men and women, back to the moon after all of these years.
And we remember it the first time round.
And there is nothing like that excitement.
And even though people are blasé about stuff, when we actually set foot on the moon again and we're sending back presumably better quality pictures than ever from the surface, it is going to be exciting.
Very exciting.
The James Webb telescope has been delivering, I mean, it's a gift that keeps on giving, isn't it?
Captured an image that was released this week of an exoplanet, this one a gas giant.
This is an incredibly long way away, and everybody got very excited about this.
I'm not sure whether we have the picture, but talk to me about that, would you, David?
Now, this, every astronomer I know looked at this picture and gasped.
This is an astounding picture.
It's a star that's 385 light years away.
It's a fairly young star, but it has in orbit around it a fairly young planet, a gas giant planet, much larger than Jupiter.
And James Webb has been able to blot out the image of the star and just show the image of the planet.
And it could do this because this planet is orbiting quite a distance from the star.
It's two and a half times the distance Pluto is from our Sun, from its parent star.
So it's quite separated and it's relatively bright as gas giants go because it's very large.
But the fact is you can see this thing so clearly.
And one of the things that James Webb, when it was first thought about, nobody really thought about looking at planets orbiting nearby stars.
They'd hardly been discovered then.
But this is going to be one of the mainstays of James Webb science, not only looking for an image of these planets, and we know from other observations with ground-based telescopes of 20 other planets we've seen images of that James Webb is going to focus in and produce much better images.
But I think you mentioned a few weeks ago that on one of the planets, exoplanets that James Webb looked at, he was able to look in its spectrum and detect carbon dioxide, which is astounding that this resolution of the image and the spectral ability to look at elements and work out the environment of the atmosphere of these planets is a revolution in understanding planets around other stars and perhaps looking for the conditions that might be conducive to life.
And this mission, we have to remind people again, has only just started.
Oh, I mean, I know astronomers who are involved who, because they have a specific area of interest, galaxies, stars, et cetera, every single morning they log on to what are called preprint sites to see what the other astronomers are doing with James Webb.
And every morning, and these are available to the public, you see something brand new come down the line.
And every time your jaw drops and you think this telescope has only just started giving, it's just, it's hard to describe how revolutionary the James Webb is.
It's just remarkable.
And we're seeing a lot, I mean, obviously we are.
We're seeing a long way and we're seeing clearly, will the James Webb Telescope be able to go deeper, to go further?
I think with experience, we're going to get fantastic spectra of atmospheres of nearby stars and look for evidence of chemical disequilibrium, of a planet that's out of equilibrium in the sense that the Earth is out of equilibrium.
If it wasn't for life, the Earth wouldn't have nearly so much oxygen in the atmosphere because oxygen is very reactive and it very quickly disappears in the form of rocks and it's only life that keeps it replenished.
So if you found another exoplanet with a lot of oxygen there or with what's known as the photosynthesis edge, that would be absolutely tremendous.
That would spark a lot of debate about what we were actually seeing.
But you saw a few weeks ago the James Webb deep field, this jewel box of galaxies, which it sent back.
Now, when Hubble tried that, it had to have over a week, I think it was 10 days of continuous observation.
James Webb did it with 12 and a half hours.
So you can imagine if it does it for longer than that, just how deep and how far away the object is going to see.
It's already got, it's already got a list of objects which have broken records of the most distant galaxy and the most distant star.
And that's going to change all the time.
And another reason, one of many at the moment, to be getting really excited about space research, which we both are.
Very quickly.
It's just tremendous.
It is.
Very quickly.
The papers for a couple of months now, really, weeks and weeks and weeks, have been talking up the possibility of a massive solar flare possibly heading this way.
Forbes.com reported this week, large sunspot on the surface of the sun has been disconcertingly quiet this week, leading some astronomers to worry that a big flare may be building.
Daily Mirror said two days ago, sunspot blasting magnetic radiation could See a solar flare develop and make its way towards Earth.
Number one, are they right about this this time?
Number two, is it going to be an issue?
Well, we do not know what the sun could throw at us.
I mean, we can look back in history.
In Victorian times, there were enormous flares on the sun which deluged the earth with particles.
And if that happened these days, that could cause us a problem, and we have to build in resilience for that.
But we don't know if the sun could throw even more at us than that.
Recently, there had been a resurgence of sunspots.
There are lots of sunspots.
There are four groups of sunspots on the disk as we speak.
And they haven't produced, I mean, they're the regions from which flares, this eruption, this explosion of particles which are going into space are produced.
And they haven't produced very much.
But what is happening as we speak is that a few days ago, there was a hole in the corona, a coronal hole, which allowed the solar wind, which is the stream of particles which comes from the sun, to accelerate and to come and strike the Earth.
And if you go to a website like UKAuroraWatch or spaceweather.com, there is a red alert for aurora at reasonably high latitudes, Scotland or there above, and possibly even lower.
I know that in the last night, many states in the United States were able to see Aurora for the first time in many years.
So that's northern lights.
Northern lights, yes.
So it's worth going, if it's clear where you are, and you're at a latitude of 50 degrees or so north or south, it's worth going out if it's clear and getting your eyes adapted and just looking north to see if you're lucky and you can see rare northern lights at your latitude.
And these are particles from the sun smashing, colliding with the upper atmosphere and causing the upper atmosphere to glow.
And they can be greens and reds.
And there is no light in the sky as magical or as movingly mysterious as the northern or southern lights.
David, wonderful to see.
I've always wanted to see the Aurora Borealis, never have, but to think that more people may get a chance to see something like that.
It's very exciting.
David, thank you very much indeed.
Dr. David Whitehouse, former BBC Space and Science editor, all-round good guy and author of fine books, including the latest one, The Alien Perspective.
Dr. David Whitehouse with an update on art in this.
Now let's hear from Simon Morden, who's researched intensively and almost written a biography of Mars, The Red Planet, which we will be visiting at some point.
Maybe not as soon as Mr. Musk and others told us we would be, but we will be going there.
This is Simon Morden talking about his research for the book The Red Planet.
A man who's written a brand new book about Mars, which I spent part of yesterday reading, and was effectively...
Simon Morden, author of Mars, The Red Planet, is online to us now.
Simon, thank you very much for waiting while we were talking about the shroud that you're in.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
Good evening to everyone.
Now, Mars, obviously, is a hugely interesting subject at the moment because we're exploring it intensively.
And eventually, although the dates for that exploration seem to change all the time, I think some optimists, including, I think, Elon Musk, were suggesting 2024, 2025.
But we're going to go there one day, even if I think the astronomer Royal, didn't he suggest this last week that robots could do all of this just as well.
But, you know, human beings are going there eventually.
So Mars is the focus of a lot of attention right now.
And you decided to write what I think is a pretty definitive story of Mars.
You know, like I said, if a planet can have a biography, you've written the biography.
Thank you very much.
The book came around by more or less accident.
I had a brief period in academia back in the 1990s.
I did a PhD and I did some work on meteorites back then.
I've spent the last 10 years or so writing fiction, science fiction, and I've written books set on Mars itself.
And I was contacted by an ex-editor who was now working for the publisher of The Red Planet.
And he'd been in an editorial meeting and they'd asked him, oh, there's a lot happening on Mars at the moment.
Do we know anyone who can write a natural history of it?
And he said, give me a minute.
And he just phoned me up and said, do you want to write a book about Mars?
And I said, you know what?
I would actually pay you.
Now, isn't that interesting?
I didn't know any of that in the publicity material with the book.
That's not included.
That's fascinating because reading it, it reads like a screenplay.
Yeah, writing a factual book, and all of this was done in lockdown.
So this is my lockdown book, which I'm immensely proud of.
Writing a factual book is a very different set of propositions to writing something which is fiction.
But the whole idea is to convey ideas and emotions, even, to the reader simply through the medium of words.
And I think I might have succeeded, which is lovely.
But yeah, I think you're a very modest man and you have.
I'm going to do a little bit of quoting from the book, if you don't mind.
You say, quotes, the history of Mars is drawn not just on its surface, but also down into its broken bedrock and up into its frigid air.
Most of all, it stretches back into deep time.
The history of Mars is simultaneously obvious and hidden.
Now, that is something, I guess, that's always been apparent, but only if you think about it.
And I never have, and most people haven't, and you did.
Yeah, sure.
We've only had a clear idea of what Mars looks like since The late 1970s, when the Mariner probes went past, giving us the first reasonable definition of the planet's surface.
And even then, when the first Mariner probe went by, there was a dust storm on Mars that managed to cover the entire planet.
So when the first pictures were sent back, all they could see was the two poles, pale spaces top north and south, and none of the surface at all.
And the whole thing was a catastrophe to start off with.
But the dust storm slowly abated and they were able to get some decent pictures of the surface.
So everything we know really about Mars has been in the last 50 years or so.
And we've thrown a lot of stuff at it.
Some of it has missed and some of it has crashed catastrophically on the planet's surface.
And yeah, it's very much a focus of our endeavours at the moment.
It's very technical to get there.
It's right at the limits of what we can do.
I think, you know, we're not going to put foot on Mars until probably the 2040s, possibly the 2050s.
Right, so how did we get to the situation where the optimists, including Mr. Musk, were suggesting maybe 2025?
Yeah, you have to think about it this way, is that Mars is at best nearly 60 million kilometers away.
It will take nine months to get there using our current technology.
The longest space trip we've managed so far is Earth to the moon, and that takes three to four days.
We've made progress, obviously.
We've had a continuous presence in space on the International Space Station for years now.
And we've had astronauts who've been up there for over a year.
And that's great.
But that's a whole different ballgame from taking something the size of the International Space Station and launching it at Mars.
That's going to take an awful lot of fuel.
It's going to take even more fuel to get them back again.
So we're talking an engineering problem here, which is far in excess of anything that anyone has ever launched before.
I think 2025 wasn't just optimistic, arguably foolhardy.
And a number of people did say that, but I was among the many who wanted to believe that it was going to happen.
But like you say, 2040, 2040s is more realistic.
You ask a big question in the book, and you say, do we treat our exploration of Mars as an academic exercise?
A worthwhile but ultimately esoteric study of a neighboring planet that has both marked differences from and odd similarities to our own?
Is it something we need to do in order to know our home better?
Are we intending to use Mars as a first step, a proving ground on our way to moving our nascent spacefaring civilization out of the fragile basket that currently holds all of our eggs?
Or is it simply a place to exploit, a land grab for pristine real estate?
Which of those things do you think it is?
I don't know.
And I know that there is a lot of discussion now about what we do with Mars.
And I think it's important to have that discussion before we get there rather than have it presented to us as a fait accompli.
Personally, I would like to see it treated as we treat Antarctica.
The Antarctic Treaty has been in force for decades and it's worked well.
We treat Antarctica as a place for science.
Yeah, and it's protected.
You're not allowed to go there and drill for oil.
You're not allowed to go there and dig up the minerals.
You're not allowed to go there and build cities and towns.
It's there for a purely scientific purpose.
My biggest concern is, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this in a minute, is that if there is actually life on Mars, us going there may well destroy it.
Or change it.
Or change it.
And we have a terrible reputation throughout our own history of going to pristine places and ruining things.
But there's no way around that, though, is there?
We either want to explore it, we either want to know more about it, and it could deliver all kinds of knowledge to us, or we don't do it for fear of ruining it.
One thing I do want to ask you, and our time is very limited, and of course I will plug the book at the end of this.
You would have seen this week about the latest news on the Moxie experiments, where they're actually generating oxygen on Mars.
This is something that a lot of the media missed this week, and I think is massively exciting, because unless I'm wrong, if they scale that up, if they learn how to do that, then doesn't that mean that we can make, I mean, I'm not talking 2040, I'm probably talking 30, 40, but we could one day, if we wanted to, and it was deemed that that was something we should be doing, we could make this place another Earth, couldn't we?
There are a lot of steps between what Moxie has done, and it's a genuine triumph here by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere of Mars and stripping out the carbon and making pure oxygen.
There are two things that are really difficult to transport properly.
The first is water.
And obviously, we have to have water in order to grow plants and drink.
Mars has water in abundance, and that's a real bonus for anyone who wants to go there.
The second is: do we take our own atmosphere?
We have to take a breathable atmosphere.
Oxygen is obviously the most important component of that.
Can we make oxygen out of it, out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere?
And we can, which is all good news.
The problem we have is that at the point where you can say, well, can we terraform Mars to make it more Earth-like?
There isn't enough of those materials to make a significant difference.
If we wanted to do something like that, and I don't think that's necessarily the greatest idea in the world, if we wanted to do something like that, we'd have to find a way of creating those things that aren't there or taking them there.
And that sounds to be an enormous great task.
Simon, listen, thank you very much, Indeed.
I know this has been a short conversation.
Good of you to do it.
The book is called Mars, the Red Planet.
I deliberately haven't gone into all of the labyrinthine detail of the formation of Mars and that deep history because it's well worth reading.
It reads like a movie screenplay, and I think it must have taken you an awful lot of work.
Thank you very much, Simon.
You're very welcome.
Simon Morden talking about Mars.
Now a topic that I know is perennially of interest to people who listen to The Unexplained and to me too, and I'm doing it.
Wizard.
The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla was the first book on this subject that Mark J. Cipher wrote.
He's written another one about The Wizard at War.
Always a fascinating topic.
This is Mark J. Cipher.
I've always thought of Nikola Tesla as a kind of Emmett Brown character, but to the nth degree, you know, the guy from Back to the Future, prayed by Christopher Lloyd.
The ultimate scientist, a man whose mind could create just about anything, who thought out of the box in a way that nobody, and he started his life in the 1800s and his life ended in 1943, nobody was thinking like this man.
And I've always been fascinated by how those thought processes came about.
I mean, there he is on the screen, very dapper-looking man.
He was found dead in a hotel that he was living in and running up a lot of debt in in 1943.
And thereby hangs another tale.
Because he did so much invention and so much work, the details of a lot of it seem to have been disappeared.
Some of that material in that hotel room, in a safe, and maybe something else in another storage place in that hotel.
Disappeared for a very long period.
Let's get on.
Mark Cipher, writer, university lecturer, also a handwriting expert.
He's been featured in the Washington Post, The Scientific American, The Publishers Weekly, the Rhode Island Monthly, Investors Daily, MIT's Technology Review, The New York Times.
But more importantly, for the purposes of this conversation, he is a Nikola Tesla completist.
He is the ultimate authority on Nikola Tesla.
And he's online to us now.
Mark, thank you very much for waiting.
Good of you to come on the show.
Thanks for having me.
Why the fascination?
Well, this is a real crazy question because I've just undone the question because I'm fascinated by him.
But why the fascination for you with Nikola Tesla?
I think part of it is because his life story gets more and more interesting the more you study it.
You're first attracted to the fact that he worked for Tom Edison and the famous War of the Currents, AC versus DC.
DC, you could only send energy or electricity about a mile, power dropping off over distance.
AC, you could send it hundreds of miles, but Tom Edison was stuck in DC and he thought that was the way to go.
Whoever won the Battle of the Currents would set up all the factories along Niagara Falls.
That was the thought.
They didn't realize that if Tesla won, you wouldn't have to put the factories along Niagara Falls.
You could put them anywhere within hundreds of miles of the falls.
So that story alone was really fascinating.
And then when Tesla is battling against Marconi, funded by J.P. Morgan in the field of wireless, he's trying to get cell phone technology at the turn of the century.
That's an amazing story, too.
But his life continues to get fascinating.
So you're first attracted to those two big giant stories, which are great stories in and of themselves.
They're movies in and of themselves.
But then moving on to how he interacts in World War I and how he interacts in World War II, that's really the focus of my new book, Tesla Wizard at War.
So that really is my fascination is that I keep learning more and more things about him, even his series on gravity and its link to the God particle.
You just keep going with the guy.
He's just that amazing.
But this guy was so, and we've talked about him on this show before, but he was so ahead of his time.
He was so inspired.
We know that sometimes in this world, and I've seen this, that sometimes if you can do things that other people can't do, and if you're a little bit ahead of them, your path is difficult.
You know, even if you are the greatest diplomat in the world, and I suspect he probably wasn't, it's difficult for you to win out against everybody else.
Was that his problem?
Is that why we don't have great statues to him and cities built in his honor and all sorts of things now?
Yes, but I also think it comes all the way down to his relationship to J.P. Morgan.
He had a huge wireless enterprise that he was building out on Long Island, which was he had invested Morgan's money, $150,000 and $50,000 of his own money.
That's in 1901.
That's still a lot of money today.
So that's $15,000, $20 million, maybe even more.
And he's trying to complete this tower.
He built it larger than he had contracted with Morgan.
Morgan got angry with him.
So once that happened and he failed at Wardenclyffe, he kind of disappears from the history books.
That was a big part.
Had he succeeded at Wardenclyffe, and I believe he would have, if Morgan had not blocked other investors, then he would be well known.
You know, I'm thinking about Steve Jobs.
And If you look at Steve Jobs' life, he was kicked out of Apple in the 1980s.
So it was just almost a fluke that he got back in and now has the reputation that he has.
But he could have been another Tesla in the sense that had he not been taken back into the company, he would have disappeared from the history books along the lines of a Tesla.
But this Wardenclyffe Enterprise was so far ahead of its time, it would have brought us essentially world telegraphy, a kind of international, easily accessible communication that we only came to have, you know, a lot later.
I think it was...
Was this 1904?
Yeah, he started in 1901.
And really, it was not just telegraphy.
That's all Marconi could do, was dots and dashes, Morse code.
Tesla had the basis of cell phone technology.
And fax technology, which we were all using faxes in the 80s.
He was developing that then.
Yes, he had a fax.
He didn't invent a fax.
There was another guy's name was Gray had a fax in 1893, which he showed at the Chicago World's Fair.
But he's telling Morgan that he could create an unlimited number of wireless channels.
And I went into that to see if he really could do that.
And he really is the inventor of the ability that every single person on the planet has their own cell phone.
What he basically did was he multiplied frequencies.
Marconi didn't even know what frequency he was using.
And again, all he could do was send dots and dashes.
So he came up with the idea of what we would call today a multiplex.
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
And if you think, I mean, that is like almost a century ahead of its time.
And it makes you wonder, doesn't it?
You must have wondered when you've thought about this man who's taken up a lot of your time in researching, you know, how his mind worked, quite literally.
He was absolutely brilliant.
I mean, he studied like crazy.
He also had eidetic imagery.
He could envision these machines in his mind and run them in his mind and see where it went wrong.
But he also was a mathematical genius.
If you look at the calculations in his notebooks, your head spins.
I don't understand them.
I mean, they're unbelievable calculations.
He really was a mathematical genius as well.
Was he an early-day Emmett Brown?
Was he like that guy from Back to the Future?
Was he a mad professor?
For sure.
He definitely was.
Christopher Lloyd had it right down, and whoever plays Tesla in the movies should have a touch of that Christopher Lloyd in it because, yes, that was exactly him.
There is so much to talk about, Mark, and so little time to do it, unfortunately.
There are so many things that this man created, invented, and the excitement that he generated.
I mean, I can see it in your face talking about him.
But you have a quote from a man called, I don't know who he is, but Hugo Gernsack, who went to visit his laboratory and wrote, there is no doubt about it.
Your heart beats faster when you're about to meet a famous electrical scientist, one of the foremost in the world.
It didn't beat a second faster when I met similar men, but not to any such extent as when I entered the room where the master electrical wizard lives.
He who has produced electrical discharges resembling lightning bolts, the largest electrical discharges ever attempted by man.
And so it continues.
I mean, there was a mis in his day, there was a mystique around this man.
Yes, and that was Hugo Gernsback.
Hugo Gernsback was the father of science fiction.
All those far-out pictures of Tesla's tower after they're completed were in Gernsback's book, you know, journal, Electrical Experimenter.
And he worked with Frank R. Paul, who was the, you know, did all the illustrations.
If you just Google Gernsback or Amazing Stories, you'll see all of those.
So Gernsback's fascination with this would have been, here is a man who is making all that stuff I've been writing about come true.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a lovely bit of description, and it's all in the book, as we say.
I mean, Tesla invented so many things.
There was the 1931 PS Arrow transmission of power by wireless.
Now, they're talking about that today, but this is 2022.
The idea that you might be able to transmit power wirelessly, an astonishing thing.
And Mark, my producer, reminded me of something that I think is very relevant to us here in London.
Let me tell you, they, I think about 20 years ago, built a bridge over the River Thames, a walking bridge.
And they had to close it pretty rapidly because of the way that people were walking over it created a standing wave.
And this bridge began to sway with its own sort of kinetic motion.
And they had to rectify that.
They hadn't realized that when you put lots of people walking across this thing, it would create a standing wave.
Tesla created something that utilized, I think, the power of the standing wave with enormous power, we're told.
Yeah, he created an actual earthquake in downtown New York.
He put an oscillator on the main beam where his laboratory was.
And once that main beam started to resonate or vibrate, then other beams in the area began to vibrate in synchrony with it.
When soldiers are told to march across the bridge, they break rank.
They're not supposed to stay marching across because they could create this huge wave, which could actually take down the bridge.
So Tesla had a little oscillator the size of a palm you'd fit in your palm that he could take down any building.
It would take a little while, but it was exactly that principle.
So what happened to all of this research and all of this work?
I know that he died, sadly, in a state of penury, I understand, in a hotel that he was living in.
And it was only discovered after he died that he owed $2,000 in back fees for the use of that hotel room.
You know, there were said to be many patents there for things.
But how come stuff like the transmission system for power and the device that uses the standing wave to demolish things, which is an enormous force if you could harness it, how come all of this stuff disappeared or got disappeared?
Well, I actually think a lot of it is being used right now.
Wi-Fi, wireless communication, cell phone Technology, all of that is Tesla.
Tesla's also the inventor of the Osprey helicopter airplane.
He called it the flipper plane, where it takes off like a helicopter, rotates into the airplane position.
The oscillator that you're talking about is Tesla coil, it's inside so many of our machines, our wireless machines, and all of that stuff.
So a lot of his inventions really are here.
The real issue is why didn't he cash in on all of these things?
And that was the real problem.
He got separated.
Part of it, he was so far ahead of his time.
By the time radio came in, his patents had lapsed.
So he wasn't able to get the money when radio came in.
But with, for example, the standing wave effect, how come nobody has harnessed that in weaponry that we know about?
Well, it goes all the way back to the Bible.
In Jericho, you send the horn at the wall and it'll fall down.
It takes too long.
You're much better off with a rifle or a cannon or something like that.
But Tesla had a particle beam weapon, which my book really gets into, which is a big question of whether that would have worked.
That's a lot more powerful a use of weaponry if you wanted to take down an airplane.
Now, he first, this particle beam weapon, I think he first came up with this in 1931, was it?
It was a long time before the Second World War.
Am I right about that?
Actually, he first announces it in 1915.
He's got this huge tower out on Long Island.
They're about to take it down for salvage, the world of Astoria, because he owed them $20,000.
And so he's appealing to President Wilson, President of the United States.
This tower can be used to take out incoming planes or incoming ships.
So he announces his particle beam weapon or death ray in 1915.
But then again, as you mentioned, in the 1930s, he resurrects all that and actually sells the details to the Russians for $25,000.
And this is where we come into the World War I, World War II period, and Tesla, because according to your book, he didn't only sell it to the Russians.
No, he didn't.
One of the things I learned, which I didn't know until I got into writing the book, was he was closely associated with General Andrew McNaughton.
McNaughton was the head of secret weapons development for the Canadian government, which was essentially for the British Empire, very close associate with Winston Churchill.
And he was third in line to be head of Allied forces behind Mountbatten and Eisenhower.
Eisenhower was the head of Allied forces, but if Eisenhower or Mountbatten were not going to be, then it would have been McNaughton.
That's the guy we're talking about.
And he's negotiating with Tesla.
And Tesla's pleading with him to alert the British government that if the Germans invade, you need my death ray.
You set up these towers.
I will protect you with these towers from an invasion from Germany.
And the thought was, certainly in his mind, but the thought was that this would be a way to resist Adolf Hitler's developing nuclear weapon.
Yeah, particularly in the United States as well.
We uncovered a letter from Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, which is the height of the World War, two weeks before Roosevelt asked to see Tesla, two weeks before that, his scientists come in, including Van Eva Bush, and they say, we think the Germans are ahead of us.
And if the Nazis get the atom bomb before we do, we're toast.
That's the end of the game.
Maybe we should look into the particle beam weapon as a way to protect us in case they fly in this bomb.
That's a way to shoot it down.
That's why President Roosevelt really wanted to contact Tesla.
And that's why Churchill probably was interested too, through McNorton.
McNorton has many letters.
But it all came late to the party.
He was there, as you say, 1915, an awful lot, you know, an awful lot time before that.
1943, he dies, and there is a pretty rapid race to be able to get to the contents of a safe in that hotel in which he resided, and also another storage area that might have had a prototype of the particle beam weapon.
Unfortunately, we've only got a couple of minutes to do this, which is a shame.
But, you know, what happens?
He dies, and they raid his place of abode.
Yeah, there were really two factions which I uncover in Wizard at War.
One faction dismissed Tesla, said he was a bit of a nut.
He was smart in the old days, but later when he got old, forget it.
And then another group headed by Brigadier General L. C. Craigie, who was the first man to fly a jet plane, said, no, we got to hold on to these papers.
So there was actually a battle between one group said, nah, forget it.
There's nothing to them.
Another group said, you've got to be kidding.
This guy was a genius.
We got to keep these patents and we got to study these.
And as I mentioned, one of these patents evolved into the Osprey helicopter airplane, which is a $70 million plane.
And his particle beam weapon evolved into the railgun, which the U.S. Navy uses.
It's one of the most important of their new weapons, but it took 50 years to develop it.
I mean, you needed a genius like Tesla to guide you along to have it come out at a faster rate.
But unfortunately, he was so old by that time that that's part of the reason why it wasn't developed in a more rapid fashion.
Sadly, there's only about half a minute to answer this question, and that ain't fair.
But then's the brakes, as they say.
Do you think, and this isn't something I think that you get to grips with in the book, but do you think that some of the stuff that today we deem as UFOs, like the tic-tacs that made all the news a couple of years ago, might actually have been technology derived by Nikola Tesla, used by somebody, but not everybody is aware of it?
It's a great question.
I think that the whole concept might be the reverse, that a UFO crashed and we reverse engineered and used that technology.
I think there's a lot to that.
The guy you had before about Mars, I talk about that, that there was a strong belief in life on Mars at the turn of the century.
But I think underneath it all, Tesla was a strong believer in the plurality of worlds.
The universe is so vast, there has to be intelligent life elsewhere.
And he was constantly trying to communicate.
Mark J. Cipher, more fascinating revelations about Nikola Tesla.
Before that, Simon Morden about Mars.
And before that, Dr. David Whitehouse on the Artemis mission.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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