Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah by Nigel Cawthorne Page B

Society asked him what the greatest achievement of the next hundred years would be. In his answer, he said: ‘Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…’
    In interviews, Tesla maintained only that the signals were of an extraterrestrial origin, but journalists quickly concluded they were from Mars. Thanks to Percival Lowell, everyone thought that Mars was inhabited. In his book Mars (1895), Lowell concluded that there had been a drought on Mars and the Martians had built canals to carry water from the polar ice caps.
    Biographer Marc Seifer concluded that Tesla had picked up signals from the tests Marconi was doing with the British and French fleets. But, at that time, the transmitters Marconi was using would not have had the power to transmit a signal half way round the world. Moreover, Marconi was using the high frequencies needed to carry radio waves through the air, while Tesla’s equipment was tuned to the very low frequencies that he believed were transmitted better through the Earth’s crust.
    Another theory was advanced by Kenneth and James Corum who pointed out that Io, a moon of Jupiter, emits a signal in the 10 kHz range used by Tesla. In 1996, they built a Tesla receiver and recorded a series of bleeps like those Tesla described in 1899. Studying astronomical charts they also discovered that both Jupiter and Mars would have been in the night sky over Colorado in the summer of 1899. What’s more, on several nights in July, the signal from Io would have broken off just as Mars was setting. If Tesla had walked out of his lab when the beeping stopped, he would have seen Mars disappearing over the horizon.
    The press began to speculate how Tesla would reply to the Martians, while others dismissed Tesla as a man who would do anything to attract self-publicity.
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    Wonderful White Lightning
    Tesla continued experimenting with his magnifying transmitter, boosting the voltage until it produced streams of artificial lightning 16 ft (5 m) long which set fire to the building more than once. Tesla was continually finding himself close to danger.
    For handling the heavy currents, I had a special switch. It was hard to pull, and I had a spring arranged so that I could just touch the handle and it would snap in. I sent one of my assistants down town and was experimenting alone. I threw up the switch and went behind the coil to examine something. While I was there the switch snapped in, when suddenly the whole room was filled with streamers, and I had no way of getting out. I tried to break through the window but in vain as I had no tools, and there was nothing else to do than to throw myself on my stomach and pass under. The primary carried 500,000 volts, and I had to crawl through the narrow place … with the streamers going. The nitrous acid was so strong I could hardly breathe. These streamers rapidly oxidize nitrogen because of their enormous surface, which makes up for what they lack in intensity. When I came to the narrow space they closed on my back. I got away and barely managed to open the switch when the building began to burn. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and succeeded in smothering the fire.
    Frightening though this experience was, Tesla was thrilled. ‘I have had wonderful experiences here,’ he wrote, ‘among other things, I tamed a wild cat and am nothing but a mass of bleeding scratches. But in the scratches, there lies a mind.’
    Although the famous pictures of Tesla show him surrounded by lightning, they were not discharged during the normal running of the machine. They would have been a waste of energy. When the magnifying transmitter was run at night, a blue beam would be seen rising straight up over the station into the night sky, caused by a corona of fine streamers surrounding the mast and sphere.
    â€˜At night,’ Tesla said, ‘this antenna, when I turned on to the full current, was