Nikola Tesla's Earthquake Machine

A few years ago, a friend mentioned that he had noticed a peculiar pattern of the earthquake frequency in Southern California. In all recent instances except the 1993 Northridge blockbuster, the space shuttle had been aloft at the time. (Conspiracy researcher and radio show host Dave "I Read It In A Book So It Must Be True" Emory has commented on this as well.) Even though it was meant as a joke, there are obvious implications for anyone who could control this final frontier of the natural world. Perhaps this has already been accomplished. In the last years of the 19th century, technological alchemist Nikola Tesla may have harnessed this principle to similar effect.

Tesla has been called everything from a genius to a quack. The fact remains that the alternating current electrical system now used worldwide was his conception, and among other inventions he perfected a remote controlled boat in 1897&emdash;only a few years after the discovery of radio waves. This device was publicly demonstrated at Madison Square Garden the next year to capacity crowds.

In 1896, Tesla had been in the United States for 11 years after emigrating from his native Croatia. After a disastrous fire in his former laboratory, he moved to more amenable quarters at 46 Houston St. in Manhattan. For the past few years, he had pondered the sigificance of waves and resonance, thinking that along with the AC system, there were other untapped sources of power waiting to be exploited. The oscillators he designed and built were originally designed to provide a stable source for the frequencies of alternating current&emdash;accurate enough to "set your watch by."

He constructed a simple device consisting of a piston suspended in a cylinder, which bypassed the necessity of a camshaft driven by a rotating power source, such as a gasoline or steam engine. In this way, he hoped to overcome loss of power through friction produced by the old system. This small device also enabled Tesla to try out his experiments in resonance. Every substance has a resonant frequency which is demonstrated by the principle of sympathetic vibration&endash;the most obvious example is the wine glass shattered by an opera singer (or a tape recording for you couch potatoes.) If this frequency is matched and amplified, any material may be literally shaken to pieces.

A vibrating assembly with an adjustable frequency was finally perfected, and by 1897, Tesla was causing trouble with it in and near the neighborhood around his loft laboratory. Reporter A.L. Besnson wrote about this device in late 1911 or early 1912 for the Hearst tabloid The World Today. After fastening the resonator ("no larger than an alarm clock") to a steel bar (or "link") two feet long and two inches thick:

He set the vibrator in "tune" with the link. For a long time nothing happened-&endash;vibrations of machine and link did not seem to coincide, but at last they did and the great steel began to tremble, increased its trembling until it dialated and contracted like a beating heart&endash;and finally broke. Sledge hammers could not have done it; crowbars could not have done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed a baby, did it. Tesla was pleased.

But not pleased enough it seems:

He put his little vibrator in his coat-pocket and went out to hunt a half-erected steel building. Down in the Wall Street district, he found one&endash;ten stories of steel framework without a brick or a stone laid around it. He clamped the vibrator to one of the beams, and fussed with the adjustment until he got it.

Tesla said finally the structure began to creak and weave and the steel-workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Police were called out. Tesla put the vibrator in his pocket and went away. Ten minutes more and he could have laid the building in the street. And, with the same vibrator he c