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Snippets from The Energy Show: Part II

Posted by DCA Theater on May 18, 2009 in Other, The Energy Show

Snippets from The Energy Show (Friday, June 5 in the Claudia Cassidy Theater—Click here for reservations) submitted by H. Peter Steeves

Nikola Tesla in a multiple-exposure photo in 1899, as a Tesla coil discharged millions of volts.

Nikola Tesla was convinced that AC electricity was the path of the future. Thomas Edison had put all of his money into DC research. History would prove Tesla correct, but would, as well, all but forget him. After only a few years together as a precarious team, Tesla quit working for Edison, and Edison began spreading rumors that Tesla was insane, that his theories on electricity were dangerous, and that he was never to be trusted. The feud was public and malicious, and since Edison had millions of dollars backing him, it was his voice that the people heard.

Tesla began experimenting with what would later be called X-rays. He invented the radio before Marconi. He began building massive coils that generated electrical discharges like artificial lightning. These so-called Tesla coils frightened the public, with spidery arms of purple lightning reaching out with the promise of energy as well as the threat of electrocution He dreamt of finding a way to power the world without wires, to deliver electricity through the Earth, through the air itself.

In New York City, and around the world, Tesla was still asked to give lectures on his work from time to time, but he insisted that he be allowed to put on a show instead: to demonstrate his inventions, complete with music and fanfare and all of the trappings of showmanship. The audience members, expecting a dry lecture on the nature of energy, would often find themselves in the middle of a production number, soon to discover that bolts of lightning would be produced before them on stage as well.

Tesla invented radio controlled boats, robots, the spark plug, new fluorescent lights, and countless other devices; and in 1899, he moved off to the seclusion of the Rocky Mountains. There, in the high altitudes of Colorado, he lived alone and began building secret devices capable of generating millions of volts of electricity and massive lightning bolts more than 100 feet long. His mental illness kept him from being able to touch other human beings, but he claimed that in the mountains he was listening to radio transmissions from space—the precise mathematical clicking of alien messages his only company. Tesla’s reputation as a mad scientist grew.