Abstract

Colorado Springs, International Tesla Symposium, July 1988 - The man sitting next to me was in tears, shaking with quiet hiccuping sobs as if trying to be unobtrusive. He was rotund and wore thick glasses, but otherwise there was little to distinguish his appearance from that of two hundred other electrical engineers and other Tesla fans in the convention hall, still attentive to the scientist who had addressed them so eloquently and was leaving the podium.

It was not difficult to figure out why the man beside me was moved emotionally. The guest speaker, astrophysicist Adam Trombly, seemed to have choreographed his talk to lead to the moment. First, he warmed up his audience by praising his hero. He reminded them that Nikola Tesla was the turn-of-the-century genius who fathered alternating current technologies, radar, flourescent tubes, and bladeless turbines. Tesla also presented the first viable arguments for robots, rockets, and particle beams. If society had followed upon the inventions Nikola Tesla envisioned at the turn of the century as he rode in a carriage near what is now this hotel, said Trombley, "we wouldn't have a fossil-fuel economy today. And J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller and a number of others wouldn't have amassed extraordinary fortunes on the basis of that fossil fuel economy...