Original article (in Croatian) was published on 29/11/2022
A video shared on Facebook falsely claims that Nikola Tesla discovered the secret of free energy, but the big powers have covered up his discovery.
“Here in this video you will see why this is so and who is responsible for the hell on Earth in which we still live today”
This is the description of a Facebook post that has been circulating since September and has been viewed more than 100,000 times on this social network, gathering more than 2,000 likes and the same number of shares.
A video clip in which incorrect claims are made about the scientist Nikola Tesla was published by the profile “Kako Dalje”, and was originally published on the YouTube channel bebamur2.
The aforementioned channel publishes content related to conspiracy theories (aliens, pyramids in Bosnia, anti-vaxxer content), and the mentioned video “Why was Tesla’s discovery banned and who is Einstein really?” was published on it six years ago.
Here we will briefly review the dominant claims from the viral clip.
Transformer and power plant
The video begins with the claim that the beginning of the era of energy without fuel is connected to the year 1903, when Nikola Tesla found a resonant transformer and “got at the output energy that is many times greater than the input”.
“Using a small turbine of the Niagara power plant and a system for transporting energy without a leash, Tesla supplied the entire country with electricity”, states the video featuring Niagara Falls.
Damir Skrjanec, vice-president of the “Society for the Promotion of Science and Critical Thinking – Skeptica”, who previously gave numerous lectures on Nikola Tesla, while commenting on these claims for Faktograf, explained that Tesla’s resonant transformer or Tesla’s coil was developed and patented in 1891, not 1903, as the video claims.
“That innocuous mistake is just the beginning of a series of bad interpretations. The transformer does not give more energy at the output than at the input, this would be contrary to the law of conservation of energy. What is multiplied is the voltage. At the same time, the current flow is the same number of times smaller, so the energy remains the same, if we do not count the losses. After all, that’s why it’s called a transformer – it converts, not produces. The principle of the transformer is known to everyone who has used a mobile phone charger”, says Skrjanec.
The power plant at Niagara Falls
Nikola Tesla competed with Thomas Edison in electrical energy transmission systems.
Tesla’s system used a transformer that could regulate the voltage in different situations, such as transmission over long distances. As part of that competition, Tesla and Edison developed a proposal for a plant at Niagara Falls. Tesla’s solution won, so he and industrialist George Westinghouse created the world’s first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls (BigThink).
It is incorrect to suggest that with a single turbine and wireless transmission, Tesla supplied the entire US with electricity.
“The hydroelectric power plant on Niagara transmitted electricity through a 35-kilometre long transmission line, not wirelessly”, says Skrjanec.
The power plant was put into operation on November 16, 1896, sending electricity to Buffalo, and in the years that followed, thousands of residents and businesses received electricity from it. Electricity then flowed into New York City, electrifying Broadway, street railways and subways, but by no means the entire US (BigThink).
Information previously circulated on the Internet that the 1895 Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant was the first commercial alternating current hydroelectric plant, which is incorrect. Such plants were developed in Europe from 1878 to 1885.
According to Enciklopedija.hr, on May 24, 1892, Tesla held a lecture at the City Hall in Zagreb at the invitation of Mayor Milan Amrus. With that lecture, he encouraged the engineers in Croatia who built and put into operation a hydroelectric power plant for alternating current on the Krka just a few months after the one on Niagara Falls.
Tesla’s technology
The video also claims that Tesla stated that he was getting energy from the ether, after which the journalists spread the news that any amount of energy could be taken from space.
It is claimed that this prompted an emergency meeting of the US government that decided to ban Tesla’s technology, after which his patents began to be withdrawn from libraries, and his name disappeared from the press. The bankers, it is claimed, prevented the development of the perpetuum mobile, and it is stated that the scientists who were involved in the development of “technology without fuel”, including Henri Poincaré, died in strange circumstances.
Ether is a “hypothetical substance with elastic properties without measurable mass that was supposed to fill outer space and with which the propagation of light and other electromagnetic waves was explained in the wave theory because it was considered that waves cannot propagate through a vacuum” (Enciklopedija.hr).
Albert Abraham Michelson, in collaboration with Edvard Williams Morley, performed the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887, which gave a negative result on the existence of ether.
“No decision has been made to ban Tesla’s technology. On the contrary, these inventions were intensively exploited for the next hundred years. Every electric car is proof. Perpetuum mobile was not ‘banned’ by bankers, but by physicists, you should complain to them. Henri Poincaré died of an embolism after the operation, which was a common complication at that time. The ether was removed from physics after experiments proved that it does not exist, and not by some kind of decree”, says Skrjanec.
After the ether was “removed” from physics, according to the authors of the video, a project called the special theory of relativity was created, which mixed the concepts of space and time, which is “incompatible in physics”. The theory of relativity, as claimed, has been ordered.
The theory of relativity
The postulates of the special theory of relativity were presented by Albert Einstein in 1905 and refer to two principles.
The first is that all physical phenomena in inertial systems, with the same initial conditions, take place in the same way, and the second is that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same in all directions and in every part of the observed inertial system, but also in all inertial reference systems. Special relativity is correct when gravitational effects are negligible or very weak, otherwise it must be replaced by the general theory of relativity, which Einstein presented 11 years later (1, 2, 3).
The general theory of relativity is a theory of gravity that describes the geometric curvature of space as a consequence of the presence of bodies of large masses and explains the existence of a general gravitational attractive force between masses as a consequence of the property of inertia. The theory has been confirmed and harmonised with numerous observations in astronomy and astrophysics, particle and nuclear physics in particle accelerators, and in precise satellite and laboratory experiments worldwide.
“In the fierce competition between the nonsensical and the wrong, the idea that the theory of relativity is valid for only one point in space is the absolute winner. In fact, this theory opened a window for us into 90 billion light-years of the universe”, Skrjanec commented briefly at the end.