Nikola Tesla revealed that an earthquake that drew police and ambulances to the region of his laboratory at 48 E. Houston St., New York, in 1898 was the result of a small machine he was experimenting with at the time that “could put you in your jacket pocket”
Nikola Tesla is famous today for his work in the field of electricity and energy. He developed the alternating current system, which makes it possible to transmit electricity over great distances, and also worked on wireless communications and energy transmission. He was a brilliant thinker, but also very eccentric.
Perhaps the more enigmatic parts of his personality are what make him such an interesting subject for conspiracies. Tesla is said to have worked on unknown energy sources, contacted by UFOs, caused the Tunguska explosion by a death ray, and even worked on an earthquake generator.
In 1896, Tesla was working on vibrations that could be used for energy transfer. The idea was to create a steam-powered oscillator, which can create different frequencies. If the frequency matches the resonant frequency, a receiving device should convert the mechanical vibrations back into electrical current.
It was a quiet day in 1898 when residents of several blocks of buildings in the busy Chinese and Italian neighborhoods of Manhattan began to experience an earthquake that soon began to shake all the buildings and shatter glass, sending people running in fear through the streets of New York. York.
The police had to arrive quickly to assess the situation. After verifying that the earthquake was confined to that small part of the city and having suspects as to who might have caused it, the police sent two of their officers to 46 East Houston Street.
Just before entering the building, they noticed that the tremor had stopped, and as they entered the door of a laboratory, they were received by a tall, thin man with a mustache, elegantly dressed and armed with a hammer. The man calmly told them:
“Gentlemen,” he said announced“I’m sorry. You’re just a little too late to witness my experiment. I felt it necessary to stop it suddenly and unexpectedly in an unusual way. But if you come over tonight, I’ll hook up another oscillator platform for all of you to stand on. I am sure you will find it a very interesting and enjoyable experience. Now you must leave as I have many things to do. Good day.”
The cause of that incident had been a small electromechanical oscillator (Earthquake Machine) that Tesla was experimenting with that day for his research into mechanical resonance. After placing it on a pillar of his laboratory, the vibrations caused by the instrument began to spread through the building’s subsurface to neighboring buildings, causing chaos among the neighbors.
Tesla was so absorbed and fascinated that he only decided to end the experiment when he noticed that his entire laboratory was shaking violently.
He would tell another of his experiments to a journalist a few years later. This time Tesla decided to experiment outside his laboratory and after finding a building under construction in the Wall Street district that was still a metal skeleton, he placed the oscillator on one of the beams and activated it.
Within a few minutes, the entire ten-story structure of the building began to shake, frightening the workers and causing the police to appear again. Before anyone realized what was happening, Tesla deactivated the device, put it in his pocket and continued on his way.
In the same interview, the inventor said he could take down the Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour, and even claimed that with a suitable machine and dynamite he could split the Earth in half.
“I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could tune it to the vibrations of the building. I made it notch after notch. There was a strange cracking sound. I asked my assistants where the noise was coming from. They didn’t know. I turned the machine up a few notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the shaking of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher.
“Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I took a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been around our ears in a few minutes. Outside on the street it was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants not to say anything. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That’s all they ever knew about it.”
A clever reporter asked Nikola Tesla at that moment what he would need to destroy the Empire State Building with his earthquake machine, and the doctor replied:
“Vibration will do everything. It would only be necessary to increase the machine’s vibrations to match the natural vibrations of the building, and the building would collapse. That is why soldiers break step when crossing a bridge.”
Tesla later explained this principle to reporter Allan L. Besnson, who published in February 1912 article about Tesla’s resonator in The World Today magazine:
“He put his little vibrator in his jacket pocket and went hunting for a half-built steel building. Down in the Wall Street area he found a ten-story steel framework with no brick or stone laid around it. He clamped the vibrator to one of the bars and fiddled with the adjustment until he got it.
Tesla said the structure eventually began to crack and weave and the steelworkers rushed to the ground in panic, believing an earthquake had occurred. The police were called. Tesla put the vibrator in his pocket and left. Another ten minutes and he could have put the building on the street. And with the same vibrator, he could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in less than an hour.”
On the occasion of his annual birthday interview by the press on July 10, 1935, Tesla, in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker, announced a method of transmitting mechanical energy accurately with minimal loss over any earthly distance, including a related new means of transferring mechanical energy transmit accurately with minimal loss over any terrestrial distance. communication and a method, he claimed, that would facilitate the flawless location of underground mineral deposits.
At the time, he recalled the earthquake that brought police and ambulances to the site of his laboratory on Houston Street while an experiment was underway with one of his mechanical oscillators.
