I read an article recently about Tesla claiming he built an earthquake making device? And, he tested it on Manhattan? Is this a true story? - Jinx
It’s true, but a little exaggerated, which is true of many things associated with Tesla. After all, he was the original guy upon which Hollywood based it’s mad scientist of early films. His “earthquake machine” was just a mechanical oscillator. If you hit the right resonnant frequency it would shake the bejeezus out of something. If you’ve ever seen the video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, you know how deadly oscillations can be if the circumstances are just right.
I found this site which has some details about Tesla’s machine:
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/EclipseLab/Tesla/Oscillator.html
Tesla almost certainly claimed to have achieved this, but probably only many years after the purported experiment. By that stage of his life he was making wild, unsubstantable claims to any passing journalist, so the stories have be regarded with a vast pinch of salt on historical grounds alone. Furthermore, there appears to be no independent evidence for this particular claim.
In particular, there are two versions of the story. In his Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (1996; Citadel, 1998, p190-1), Marc Seifer mainly relies on an article called “Tesla at 79 Discovers New Message Wave” from the Brooklyn Eagle in 1935. I haven’t seen this newspaper article, but it obviously derives from Tesla talking to the journalist himself. For whatever reasons, Seifer seems convinced that the incident dates from much earlier: without quite saying why, he dates it to the period 1896-7. So we’re talking about an account in any sort of print perhaps nearly 4 decades after the experiment.
Seifer also recognises the other source for the story: John O’Neill’s biography Prodigal Genius (1944; Spearman, 1968, p159-65). This the canonical version; for instance, Margaret Cheney has several pages in her Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981; Delta, 1998) that do little more than paraphrase the relevant portion of O’Neill’s chapter 10. The problem with O’Neill’s account - which he dates to the 1890s - is that he gives no source for anything. Like with much else, one just has to presume it was stuff told to him by Tesla late in life.
There are minor differences of detail between the two versions - is it the Police or the Fire Department who intervene, for instance - but there’s no reason to suspect that they both don’t derive from the aged Tesla. Crucially, nobody seems to have dug up any contemporary documentation.
With this as the quality of the evidence, I’m really not prepared to give the story much credence at all.
As for the physics, it’s fairly clear that Tesla’s tale was spun out of the idea of resonance, albeit in a fairly folk notion fashion. But the obvious problem with the story as told is energy. Resonance may make one’s exertion of energy particularly effective, but you still can’t use a small electrical oscillator to destroy a skyscraper. To judge by the accounts of what he said, Tesla seems to have sort of realised this and so talks of the oscillator having to run for quite some time. But even if you were to run the machine for hours, days or even weeks, it won’t output enough energy to mimic an earthquake.
I don’t know about Nikola but Tesla rocked the Hard Rock Cafe in NY in 2002 
The 1935 story was actually Tesla talking at a six hour dinner where he revealed all. He also said at that time that the theory of relativity was hogwash and he could prove it. I don’t think he talked specifically to a just one journalist, but I could be wrong. I didn’t go beyond reading various newspaper accounts from that year.