The Mysterious Black Box
The year was 1931, and TIME Magazine had featured Nikola Tesla on its cover for his 75th birthday. Einstein praised him as “an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents.” Though later that year tesla had announced that he was on verge of discovering an entirely new source of energy, and when the press asked him to describe it, his reply was, “The idea first came upon me as a tremendous shock… I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source.”
The following year, the Pierce Arrow automobile manufacturer and George Westinghouse commissioned Tesla to develop an electric motor to power a car. The motor was a mere 40 inches long and 30 inches across, and produced about 80 horsepower. Under the hood was the engine: a small, 12 volt storage battery and two thick wires that went from the motor to the dashboard.
Tesla connected the wires to a small black box, which he had built the week before with components he bought from a local radio shop. “We now have power,” he said. This mysterious device was used to ruinously test the car for eight days, reaching speeds of 90 mph. He let nobody inspect the box, and cryptically said that it taps into a “mysterious radiation which comes out of aether,” and that the energy is available in “limitless quantities.” The public responded superstitiously with charges of “black magic” and alliances with sinister forces of universe. Affronted, he took his black box back with him to New York City and spoke nothing further of it.
Tesla continued to work diligently, and in 1937, stated to the press that he had completed a “dynamic theory of gravity”, and that he would hope to soon give it to the world. It would never be published. He also criticized Einstein’s theory of relativity, calling it a “magnificent mathematical grab for fascinates, dazzles, and makes people blind to the underlying errors.”
On January 5th, 1943, Tesla placed a small “do not disturb” sign on his door in the New Yorker Hotel. Two days later, the sign remained. The maid entered to find him dead in his bed. He was 86 years old. Despite receiving over 800 patents in his lifetime, and quite literally inventing the twentieth century, he died penniless and alone.
When his cousin, Sava Kosanovic, arrived at his room the next morning, Tesla’s body was already gone as were his effects. Papers and notebooks were missing, including a treasured black book that contained hundreds of pages of technical research notes. Two days later, the U.S. Office of Alien Property seized all of Tesla’s possessions, and his papers were declared top secret by the War Department sue to the nature of the inventions and patents.
Einstein said that, “imagination is more important than knowledge,” because “knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
