Is it true that Nikolai Tesla was the cause of the explosion at Tunguska in the Soviet Union? Apparently he had developed a death ray that he tried to sell to the US Military but they declined to buy it. From what I have read, the military stole his plans after his death. Anyone have any info on this?
It’s BS. Here is an article about this that is slanted towards the “Yes it’s true” side. Let me explain why it is BS:
The author demonstrates a misunderstanding of what a ‘watt’ is. A watt is how much power it takes to transmit one joule of energy over one second of time. It takes more power to transmit the same amount of energy in less time. It takes 1 million watts to transmit 1 joule in one microsecond. So, if tens of billions of watts are unleashed for a very small amount of time, you have the machine that goes ‘ping’. I.e., it does nothing.
The tunguska event was probably a meteor. It was the equivalent of a large nuclear warhead. In order to transmit that much energy to Siberia, Nikola (not Nikolai) would have had to tax every power generation facility in the US for a fair amount of time and save the energy up somewhere, then deliver it all at once to Siberia.
Hogwash. Tesla did go a little looney in his later years, but the story about the death ray is bogus. It was a meteor.
here’s a site with some good information.
Current thinking is that it was not a meteor but was a comet, hence the lack of fragments os enhanced levels of iridium in the area.
There was a BBC documentary about the Tunguska event a couple of years ago, most of the researchers were American so I would imagine it has been shown on US tv.
They seemed to have determined the angle of trajectory, size of explosion, speed and altitude by using standard research tools such as working models, hyper-ballistic cannon and computor modelling.
Carl Sagan also explored the mystery in one of his episodes of Cosmos. That was back in the (I think) mid-'80s and he agrees with casdave: it was a comet impact. Meteor theories were ruled out because of the lack of meteoritic rock & iron at the impact site, and especially because there was no impact crater. Other silly theories such as a chunk of antimatter or a mini-black hole were also ruled out because there was no residual radiation detected at the impact site.
Let’s not get started on all these crazy theories. Everybody knows it was the crash of a nuclear-powered space-alien flying saucer. End of discussion.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an impact of anything. There’s no evidence of anything colliding with the earth, i.e., a crater.
Whatever it was exploded with nuclear bomb-like force up in the atmosphere, explaining why the trees in the area fell in a circular pattern and, again, no crater.
Oh boy! I love the Tesla story! It’s fiction but it makes for a good read (like the Bob Lazar story)! If I remember it right it goes like this:
Tesla got financing to build a big ass Tesla coil out in New York from J.P. Morgan. He told Morgan it was for gobal communications, but it really was an experiment in providing free electricity. Tesla thought the globe was just full of electricity, and that he could just draw it up out of the ground and direct it wherever he wanted. Well, Morgan found out what Tesla was doing and was going to pull the plug. Tesla knew this a did a test fire of it. He was aiming for the arctic, but because he did not take the curvature of the earth into consideration, he hit Tunguska instead. Cool story, but it didn’t happen that way. Tesla did build a big tower in Shoreham, New York that was supposed to be for international wireless broadcasting. And J.P. Morgan did withdraw funding for it, forcing Tesla to give up on it, but not because Tesla wanted to provide the world with free electricity. A cable special I saw said that Tesla’s testing of the tower and the Tunguska event happened in the same year. But even if it did, I doubt he destroyed a big chunk of Russia with it. After this defeat, Tesla did go a little looney, and on his birthday would entertain reporters with tales of death rays and weather control machines. It’s kinda sad, because these stories (like his involvement in the Philadelphia Experiment), and his own kookery in his later years, muddy the fact that at one time he was a great inventor.
There’s a good hour-long show on the latest theories re: Tunguska on the Discovery Channel. Watch out for it.
Tesla was probably too much of a genius for his ability to handle it and the rest of the world too.
He was the one who suggested high voltage a.c transmission to reduce losses and he was the one who postulated that there was a solar wind that interacted with the earths magnetic field and that it had something to do with the Aurora Borealis.
The latter was poo-poo ed by the then scientific establishment but they did not have the equipment to prove or disprove his theories so you would have to say that they were not good scientists to have such closed minds, they could at least have said that they had doubts but to reject it out of hand…
A moderate-sized comet (its size has been calculated, but I’m not sure of the number) collided with the Earth’s atmosphere. As with all things hitting the atmosphere at interplanetary speeds, it got very hot and very stressed. Ice not being known for its capacity to withstand heat or stress, the comet exploded some time before hitting the ground, sending steam and fragments of ice every which way, as well as producing an impressive shock wave. This shock wave flattened trees in a pretty concentric pattern for many miles and killed a total of 43 reindeer, but fortunately, it was a very isolated area, so there were no human casualties. Meanwhile, the steam mixes with the rest of the atmosphere and raises the humidity slightly, and the fragments of ice, as ice tends to do, all melted or sublimed away, leaving no visible trace of the object itself.
Utter ka-ka. :rolleyes:
Tesla made a major contribution to electrical engineering.
He probably did withhold some inventions (Mr. Edison’s treatment of him might have something to do with that).
But he rejected Einstein’s physics. And , therefore; could not have successfully tapped into the kind of forces (i.e.–nuclear forces) that could have conceaveably (sp?) produced such a blast.
Not so the blast pattern was, in fact, shaped like a butterfly with its wings outspread.
This pattern helped researchers determine the angle of trajectory.
A model was constructed using matchstalks mounted on solid but flexible wire to imitate trees on a base whose topography was the same as the Tunguska region.
An explosive charge was slid down a cable above the model at various speeds and angles and the pattern caused observed.When it got to around 26[sup]o[/sup] IIRC it matched the Tunguska profile in every respect.
This might sound a little bit string and sticky tape science but the effect of trajectory on blast patterns is well understood and the model is a standard method of data collection.
By the way, about this business of Tesla not actually making a death ray… Does this mean that the computer game Command and Conquer: Red Alert isn’t true? 
I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned what is probably the most pop-culturish explanation for this event, from the movie Ghostbusters:
Dr. Ray Stantz: You are a most fortunate individual, Mr. Tully.
Louis Tully: (dazed) Yeah, I know.
Dr. Ray Stantz: You have just been a participant in the biggest inter-dimensional cross-rift since the Tunguska Blast of 1909!
Dr. Egon Spengler: We’d like to get a sample of your brain tissue.
Pete
Long time RGMWer and ardent AOLer