New York Summit on Electricity's True Master Theorists, Experimenters and Fantasists Try to Take Tesla Further Pushing the Envelope: On the Edge or Over It? For anyone interested in science and the fantasies it generates in the minds of older men the place to be this weekend was the New Yorker, the hotel owned by the Unification Church at 34th Street and Eight Avenue in Manhattan where the Serbian scientific and inventing genius Nikola Tesla lived out the final years of his life in a 33rd Floor room and study, now adorned with small plaques by the management of the hotel. Joseph Kinney, a New Yorker Hotel manager who built Tesla coils as a teenager in Tennessee and is a church member who has long supported "the cause of Tesla", welcomed a three day Conference on the subject of his hero, whose reputation has been elevated in recent years by enthusiasts who point out that in the field of electricity he contributed more to human welfare that Thomas Edison, since he (Tesla) invented alternating current, which is the only practical way of delivering electrical power over long distances. Crackpates or Geniuses, Explorers All Sponsored by the Tesla Scientific Foundation the convention welcomed all comers, with many of the speakers the original mad scientist type, the kind the Tesla's life and work often inspires, together with some still cogent professors emeritus and home experimenters who hope to take Tesla's ideas further in theory and application. While these latter day Teslas may easily appear to the worldly but uninitiated reader as harmless crackpots we find them lovable in their dedicated sincerity as they live out later life in optimistic exploration of the still veiled corners of the universe, and we remind readers that original thinkers must always strike the established conformist to current ideas as misguided cranks until they are vindicated and win the Nobel, when everybody agrees that their ideas are sound and were always obvious. Certainly Tesla is the patron saint of the maverick genius with his over the top giant apparatus using the entire Earth as one terminal and success at sending electrical energy without wires as far as twenty miles or more, culminating in the huge tower he built on Long Island at Wardenclyffe. With a Saturday award dinner, and Sunday and Monday Conference speakers and table exhibits, this grand celebration of Tesla offered the chance to assess his achievement and see if whether there might be further discoveries and inventions coming from those trying to extend his legacy. After all, as the Tesla Science Foundation which put the three day session, Why Tesla Matters, together to mark the 70th anniversary of his death on Jan 7, 1943, proudly announced in the printed program, their hero's "great achievements are being re-examined by new and old researchers in various fields. The growing list of acknowledgements from major scientific journals and individuals are a testimony to the man who contributed more than any other scientist/inventor to our modern, contemporary scientific and technological world." The perfidious Edison failed to trash Tesler Many are happy at this turnaround for Tesla since they know the story of how the immigrant Serbian was treated badly by the already influential Thomas Edison. The American hero, who had already invented and invested in direct current, a method which has problems in transferring energy over long distances, went to absurd lengths to sabotage Tesla's winning idea of AC, including fatally electrocuting animals in public to suggest that AC was a uncontrollable danger to users. In fact, Edison behaved badly from the start in dealing with Tesla, whom he employed soon after the Serbian's arrival in the States, and offered a bonus of $50,000 to make his own DC electrical generator workable. He then stiffed Tesla when he succeeded in the improvement, laughing off the obligation to pay him by remarking that evidently the new immigrant "didn't understand the American sense of humor". Just how superior a creative thinker and discoverer Tesla was than his subsequently more famous 19th Century rivals such as Edison and Marconi was the ever present theme of the conference, which celebrated his unique gifts over three days. The scientific high point was a series of presentations and practical demos on the final afternoon by lively graybeards expounding his achievements in science, some of whom are still trying to extend the theory and application of his ideas. Action at a distance One of these dedicated amateurs (these researchers and experimenters tend to be retirees or professors emeritus who had once been in related fields) kicked off the afternoon proceedings with a demonstration of action at a distance, which seems to be a favorite preoccupation of latter day scientific explorers following in the footsteps of the Serbian giant. Michael Manning from Philadelphia, where he says he has a forty foot long, 14 foot high ceiling shed he has built as an extension to one of the two houses on his two acre property in the North of the city, showed off a microscope video where a living cell or circular organism of some kind was induced to spin by an electromagnetic field. He was followed by Gary Peterson, whose Internet bookstore, 21st Century Books, includes 216 books for sale on or by Tesla, who had mounted apparatus on tables on stage ("Pull that back leg in!" cried Dr Manning, from the audience, warning that one six foot Tesla coil might topple over) and showed us how a Tesla iron core induction coil in a simple transformer circuit powered by a 12 volt DC battery could transmit enough power across a distance in space of six feet or more to light a bulb attached to a second six foot Tesla coil, if the oscillation of AC current in the first was finely tuned to resonate in the second, Sure enough, the light bulb burned brightly after Mr Peterson had used his hand held oscilloscope to get the tuning right (the ideal frequency was 272.7 cycles per second, it proved)., In fact, it worked powerfully enough that it burned out the first bulb he tried. He also showed that a propeller could be turned through similar wireless transmission, Wardenclyffe Resurrected Gary, who when on stage was engagingly fumbling in style yet got everything to work very well in the end, is the CEO of the Tesla Wardenclyffe Project whose mission is to preserve the Tesla Science Center in Eastern Long Island where a Tesla museum and science center is being established with $1.4 million raised on Indiegogo. The crowd source fund raising was famously kick started by the comic artist Matt Inman of oatmeal.com, whose page on Tesla explaining how Tesla deserved more credit for invention than the "douchebag" Thomas Edison helped spark contributions of over $1 million in just nine days to "Let's Build a Goddam Tesla Museum" last summer. (The page on badassoftheweek.com is pretty good, too). He was given a special Tesla award on Saturday evening, amid a burst of enthusiasm from the Serbian Americans present including Mirna Momcicevic, the pr representative of the Tesla Science Foundation in Philadelphia (Tel 215 410 6914 mirna.momcicevic@hotmail.com www.teslasciencefoundation.org), who praised Inman for his exceptionally "human, natural and down to earth" manner, quite aside from his prodigious fund raising. Unfortunately, it seems that this stimulating demonstration of a basic principle still suffers from too little practical potential, as it always has, according to Dr. Manning, since direct connection with a wire has always been so much more efficient, and the need for wireless transmission of power is rare. In fact, J. P Morgan was an early and enthusiastic financial supporter of Tesla experiments in this line, which eventually grew to gargantuan size, showing that the effect was possible over as long a distance as 22 miles. But the celebrated investor abruptly withdrew his backing once he realized there was no way to meter the power transferred, which was open to all comers in the vicinity to access and use. There followed Goran Marjanovic's discussion of the "Tesla waves machine" along the lines of "the conservation of energy stated by Max Planck in my formulation has been extended... in my energy densities quantification model". Mr Marjanovic is Teknicki Direktor of Softlab doo (mob +381 62.444.177 office +381 11 337 4501 gmarjanovic@beotel.rs and gmarjanovic55@gmail.com Inzenjerski biro Mra www.ibmraz.com ib.mraz@web.de) described on the site in English with some difficulty as "ENGINEERING BUREAU Frost for 30 years successfully engaged in the development and production of electro-medical equipment. All products are developed in collaboration with physicians and scientists. In doing so, special attention is paid to electro-acupuncture, ear acupuncture specifically. Kostruisan every one affordable device that allows acuSan no particular expertise individual application. Accurate diagnosis and possible stimulation of acupuncture points. Very good results were achieved in young children who have not been able to explain what hurts.You can contact us directly by e-mail: ib.mraz @ web.de". The latest product from Marjanovic's studies of Tesla coils is the TeslaGen T-7L Tesla Scalar Wave Generator, a device to improve health by countering "existing harmful electromagnetic radiation in space" with "bio-energy radiation" emanating from this "ambient bio-energy radiator" which according to the EPC/GDV diagnostic method of one Dr. Korotkov, is a system tested over many years of clinical trials, proposed to the Russian health authorities by the Russian Academy of Sciences, and approved for general medical purposes, which gets "really outstanding results" in health status with its "subtle-energy vibrations positive effect on the bio-energy structure." Somewhat more practical in intent was Francis McCabe, who presented his analysis of The Secret Life of Gyroscopes, where he had used Tesla's thinking to find a way, he believed, to multiply not just force but energy using gyroscopic manipulation. Gyroscopes, he had informed us in the notes to his talk, have with the coming of the Space Age grown exponentially in complexity, and he had "devoted a large part of his discretionary-life-time to conceiving, building and experimenting" with unique examples. He expounded his line of thinking on the phenomenon of "precession" and related matters and seemed to believe that he had a line of investigation which might multiply energy, but one expert in the audience remained unconvinced. "He thinks he has multiplied energy, but it is just a change in force." A library of fantasy on tables Outside, the ability of Tesla to stimulate fantasy as well as practical achievement was well represented at a row of tables along the wall amid an environment which not only, in the existence of the conference celebrating the imaginative hero, set free any latent tendency to indulge in way out thinking but also, perhaps, was liberated by the hotel itself, which has been owned by the Unification Church since 1972. Among the tables was a display by Howard Lipman who is writing a series of books of historical fantasy inspired by Tesla under the nom de plume Pan Orpheus, the first of which is now out, Phoebe (The Delphic Oracle) which takes Tesla to Peru among other "what if... contemplations of whether spirits from another realm intervened in the life of Nikola Tesla at a very important moment." Other books on offer included Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy" by Thomas Valone, Ph.D, PE., available for $17 from the catalogue of the www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org. The volume is described as "Presenting the Science of Tesla's Greatest Dream - Read Why the Wireless Transmission of Electrical Power is our Destiny". Dr Valone himself recommends as "exceptional" another book on the list of the Institute (whose role is "Researching Scientific Integrity in Energy, Propulsion & Bioenergetics"): Understanding Tesla Coils and Beyond, Everything You Need To Know, by Mark Bean, $25, which, Valone writes,"is possibly the best comprehensive resource on Tesla coilsever written with easy to understand spark gap and vacumm tube designs, along with the new advancements in solid state coils". Tesla coils are what create the spectacular displays of man-made lightning which fascinate Tesla fans, and Mark Bean will inform readers that the copil is the "grandfather of the modern radio transmitter, and that a Tesla coil resides inside a common household device." Upbeat finale The final presentation was by a deep thinking theorist , Dr. Stoyan Sarg Sargoytchev of Toronto's York University department of computer science and engineering (Tel 416 736 2100 x 70122 Cell 416 728 1761 stoyans@cse.yorku.ca 2039 CSE Bldg, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J IP3) who addressed the topic of Did Nikola Tesla Envision Solutions When he Predicted a Global Energy Crisis and Conflists Leadiing to Wars? by detailing his theoretical analysis which suggested, as he had labeled the back of his calling card, "The global crisis could be solved by a new technological breakthrough that will come through a breakthrough in Physics! /BSM-SG by Stoyan Sarg www.helical-structures.org." Unfortunately by this time the 5pm deadline for vacating the conference hall was approaching so when Dr Sarg could be persuaded to finish reading out his slides word for word there was time only for a wrap up, announced from the stage by the blonde conference director and executive director of the Tesla foundation, Marina Schwabic, with the other three main coordinators of the conference, David Pokrajac, Nikola Loncar, founder and president of the Tesla foundation, Worcester Polytechnic physicist Marko Popovic from Boston, professor of biomechanics and robotics, who was in charge of the stage and ushering the speakers on and off in timely fashion (617 470 8198 mpopovic@wpi.edu Faculty, MIT, WallTrust. A banner was then unfurled on the stage by supporters of the warm friendship between Serbians and Americans which sprang from World War II when US paratroops parachuted into the country to save it from the Nazis, or similar, and over 500 were missing in action but rescued by the Serbs. The meeting then broke up into handfuls of social bonding outside where personable members of the Serbian community exchanged particulars and forged plans to reunite at some later date.