Genius inventor Nikola Tesla is responsible for A/C current, the radio, the remote control, and...the death of thousands? One of his ideas chillingly mirrored the infant Manhattan Project, which he refused to work on for ethical reasons, preferring his own weapon of mass destruction:
“This ‘death-beam,’ Dr. Tesla said, will operate silently but effectively at distances “as far as a telescope could see an object on the ground and as far as the curvature of the earth would permit it.” It will be invisible and will leave no marks behind it beyond its evidence of destruction. An army of 1,000,000 dead, annihilated in an instant, he said, would not reveal even under the most powerful microscope just what catastrophe had caused its destruction. - The New York Times, 11 July 1934
Naturally, this Death Ray would be used to—what else?—“make war impossible.”
Fear will keep the local systems in line, sure, but was it ever built? By the Russians, or maybe Ronald Regan? Could Superman withstand it? In honor of Tesla’s 153rd birthday, listen to Mike Daisey’s tale of Nikola Tesla’s legendary Death Ray. This segment originally aired on Studio 360; visit PBS for more about Tesla’s strange genius.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 01:45pm EDT · amended on Friday July 10, 2009 01:46pm EDT
I could never support the idea that a weapon could inspire peace. Peace is not a reaction to a threat. But even though I don't subscribe to Tesla's view, it doesn't detract at all from the admiration I feel for him as an innovator.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 02:50pm EDT
But *my* invention, the Explodes-The-Brains-Of-Anybody-Who-Disagrees-With-Me Beam, is going to usher in a new age of peace and brotherhood for all mankind. Probably. I think.
Either way, Tesla was one interesting guy.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 03:00pm EDT
Man, I better get to work on my "Anti-Brain-Ray-Cranium-Protector Helmet" right away!
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 03:19pm EDT
Well, nuts. Now we have an arms race on our hands! Heads. Whatever.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 04:43pm EDT
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 05:03pm EDT
So yeah, for my part, I'll wear my tin-foil and not punch anyone.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 05:28pm EDT
Shh! Don't give away my defense secrets!
@6
Yeah, that was pretty much the whole justification for the nuclear arms build up in the cold war. But what was the real result? A few nations armed to the teeth, poised to press the "history eraser button" and rather than "peace through superior firepower" there were armed conflicts throughout the cold war and a heap of death anyhow. Well done, there.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 05:40pm EDT
As to the cold war, yes there was plenty of "limited warfare" and death, but imagine what even a non-nuclear full war between the USA and USSR would have been like. I'd like to think that M.A.D. did it's job of stopping us from actually erasing history thus far. Now to wonder if it will work again with certain other quickly-arming countries in a different geographic locale. Let us hope none of them are trying to maintain their Purity of Essence and get the first hit in.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 06:33pm EDT
I didn't take it as a Utopian solution. I was just throwing in my two cents.
Supposing you are correct and the M.A.D. did what it was supposed to, do you think the existence of Tesla's Death Ray (assuming it worked just as he described) would have had the same effect as nuclear weapons, deterrence-wise? (Not asking to be argumentative. Just curious.)
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 06:44pm EDT
So no, I don't think the Death Ray would have worked very well with MAD, especially since it was also a very limited-range weapon. I mean, we have howitzers that can fire over the horizon now with dead-on accuracy, and the long range of nukes was also part of what made them scary. The Death Ray would most likely have only forced us even quicker away from line-warfare to a more ranged and dispersed model of fighting.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday July 10, 2009 07:00pm EDT
That's pretty much what I was thinking. No fallout=more likely to have been used.
VIEW ALL BY · Saturday July 11, 2009 01:40pm EDT
VIEW ALL BY · Saturday July 11, 2009 02:19pm EDT
What puts Tesla's death ray in a league of its own is that his design actually had competent, even inventive, engineering about it. His idea was to use a gigantic electrostatic generator run by one of his turbines to accelerate tiny particles of mercury until they became a stream of super high-powered bullets of several million volts. Since they were accelerated in a vacuum, Tesla needed a way to spit them out of the accelerator sphere without letting air in. He proposed to do this with a special nozzle which blew high-pressure air around an open tube leading to the evacuated sphere and acted like a constantly renewing plug to preserve the vacuum. What happen to the mercury stream after it left the nozzle and had to travel through the atmosphere was another matter that was never quite figured out.
Incidentally, by "particles" Tesla did not mean protons, neutron and the like, but tiny droplets. Tesla had little truck with atomic theory and for an electrician he had no time for electrons.
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Saturday July 11, 2009 02:52pm EDT
I shudder to think of the catastrophe that would have been Tesla's deathray used for MAD posturing. The important thing about the nuke is that, in wide-scale deployment, it's "almost as dangerous to your enemy as it is to you". Even if one side wiped out the other before retaliation could be launched, nuclear winter still killed everyone else. With the death ray, you don't have that additional level of deterrant, which means somebody could actually win with a hard enough first strike.
VIEW ALL BY · Saturday July 11, 2009 03:49pm EDT
http://robin-d-laws.livejournal.com/356993.html
Tesla's Death Ray would have easily wiped out striking pro-union crowds leaving nothing sympathetic to photograph.
Monday July 13, 2009 12:20pm EDT