Nikola Tesla died before he finished a mysterious, earth-shattering invention,
Mystery still surrounds what this invention was, decades after his death people still speculate about his inventions.
In 1901, Tesla secured $150,000 from financier J.P. Morgan to build a 185-foot-tall, mushroom-shaped tower on the north shore of Long Island capable of transmitting messages, telephony and images to ships at sea and across the Atlantic Ocean by using the Earth to conduct signals. As work began on the structure, called Wardenclyffe Tower, Tesla wanted to adapt it to allow for wireless power delivery, believing from his experiments on radio and microwaves that he could light up New York City by transmitting millions of volts of electricity through the air. Morgan, however, refused to give Tesla any additional funding for his grandiose scheme. (Some speculate that Morgan cut off funds once he realized that Tesla’s plan would have crippled his other energy-sector holdings.) Tesla abandoned the project in 1906 before it could ever become operational, and Wardenclyffe Tower was dismantled in 1917.
Electric-Powered Supersonic Airship
From the time Tesla was a boy, he had been fascinated with the idea of flight. Combining his knowledge of electrical and mechanical engineering, he began to think more about aviation after the failure of Wardenclyffe. In an article in the July 1919 issue of Reconstruction magazine, Tesla discussed his work on developing a supersonic aircraft that would travel eight miles above the surface of the Earth and generate speeds allowing passengers to travel between New York City and London in three hours.
Tesla’s concept called for the aircraft to be powered by electricity transmitted wirelessly from power plants on the ground, eliminating the need for aircrafts to carry fuel. “The power supply is virtually unlimited, as any number of power plants can be operated together, supplying energy to airships just as trains running on tracks are now supplied with electrical energy through rails or wires,” Tesla said in the article.
Tesla’s creative mind continued to spark new visions even late in his life. On his 78th birthday, he told The New York Times that he had come up with this most important invention, one that would “cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks.” The invention? A military weapon that would accelerate mercury particles at 48 times the speed of sound inside a vacuum chamber and shoot a high-velocity beam “through the free air, of such tremendous energy that [it] will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles.” Although the press dubbed it a “death beam,” Tesla believed it a “peace beam” that would foil attacks by airplanes and invading armies and save lives by acting “like an invisible Chinese wall, only a million times more impenetrable.” Tesla offered his particle-beam weapon to numerous governments, including the United States, but the only country to show interest was the Soviet Union, which conducted a partial test in 1939.