Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Radio remote control

In 1898, Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled boat, which he hoped to sell as a guided torpedo to navies around the world.[134]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

In 1898, Tesla demonstrated a boat that used a coherer-based radio control—which he dubbed "telautomaton"—to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden.[135] Tesla tried to sell his idea to the US military as a type of radio-controlled torpedo, but they showed little interest.[136] Remote radio control remained a novelty until World War I and afterward, when a number of countries used it in military programs.[137]

Tesla took the opportunity to further demonstrate "Teleautomatics" in an address to a meeting of the Commercial Club in Chicago, while he was travelling to Colorado Springs, on 13 May 1899.

By the mid-1890s, Tesla was working on the idea that he might be able to conduct electricity long distance through the Earth or the atmosphere, and began working on experiments to test this idea including setting up a large resonance transformer magnifying transmitter in his East Houston Street lab.[143][144][145] Seeming to borrow from a common idea at the time that the Earth's atmosphere was conductive,[146][147] he proposed a system composed of balloons suspending, transmitting, and receiving, electrodes in the air above 30,000 feet (9,100 m) in altitude, where he thought the lower pressure would allow him to send high voltages (millions of volts) long distances.

In the August 1917 edition of the magazine Electrical Experimenter, Tesla postulated that electricity could be used to locate submarines via using the reflection of an "electric ray" of "tremendous frequency," with the signal being viewed on a fluorescent screen (a system that has been noted to have a superficial resemblance to modern radar).[195]

Tesla was incorrect in his assumption that high-frequency radio waves would penetrate water.[196] Émile Girardeau, who helped develop France's first radar system in the 1930s, noted in 1953 that Tesla's general speculation that a very strong high-frequency signal would be needed was correct. Girardeau said, "(Tesla) was prophesying or dreaming, since he had at his disposal no means of carrying them out, but one must add that if he was dreaming, at least he was dreaming correctly".[197]

In 1928, Tesla received patent, U.S. Patent 1,655,114, for a biplane design capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), which "gradually tilted through manipulation of the elevator devices" in flight until it was flying like a conventional plane.[198] This impractical design was something Tesla thought would sell for less than $1,000.[199][200]

At the 1932 party, Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays.[217] In 1933, at age 77, Tesla told reporters at the event that, after 35 years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was "violently opposed" to Einsteinian physics and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years. He also told reporters he was working on a way to transmit individualized private radio wavelengths, working on breakthroughs in metallurgy, and developing a way to photograph the retina to record thought.[218]

At the 1934 occasion, Tesla told reporters he had designed a superweapon he claimed would end all war.[219][220] He called it "teleforce", but was usually referred to as his death ray.[221] In 1940, the New York Times gave a range for the ray of 250 miles (400 km), with an expected development cost of US$2 million (equivalent to $41.78 million in 2022).[222] Tesla described it as a defensive weapon that would be put up along the border of a country and be used against attacking ground-based infantry or aircraft.

Tesla never revealed detailed plans of how the weapon worked during his lifetime but, in 1984, they surfaced at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade.[223] The treatise, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, described an open-ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allows particles to exit, a method of charging slugs of tungsten or mercury to millions of volts, and directing them in streams (through electrostatic repulsion).[217][224] Tesla tried to attract interest of the US War Department,[225] United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in the device.[226]