Nikola Tesla was a brilliant but eccentric genius, he made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power. He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology.
Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.
#1.Peace Beam or The Death Ray
Nikola Tesla had invented the “Peace Beam” – as he called it, a Death Ray that could have stopped the traditional way of participating in wars. As he meant it to be built, the Peace Beam would have prevented people going into wars instead of machines so no civilians would have been wounded. Using a vacuum chamber open at one end, a turbine to direct air flow for maintaining the vacuum and direct the flow of particles, it was an invention that hardly took little attention by JP Morgan and Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, but even the Soviet related “Amtrog Trading Company” was interested in it and once tested – it was never built.
#2. Tesla’s Oscillator The Earthquake Machine
There’s this interesting story about Tesla creating an Earthquake Machine, which was actually never meant to cause actual earthquakes but to replace some of the massive, unwieldy engines, only by using a small amount of pressured air. He worked on the development of this Oscillator, which is a small machine that could be used to replace the steam – driven engines in everything from mills to trains. His idea was to turn motion into power while being a lot smaller and space saving power source. He actually created several different Oscillators, but at the same time, Steam Turbines also came into the industry and made his Oscillators redundant, which was probably for the best. He claimed that his machine would be capable of leveling the Empire State Building with five pounds of air pressure and ten minutes.
#3. Tesla’s Thought Photography Machine
Nikola Tesla has once discussed in a “Kansas City Journal-Post” article about his idea of making a machine that will put on screen whatever a person thought. The idea was, by using current technology, the picture produced in a person mind which must have had created a corresponding image in the retina of his eyes, to somehow display it on a screen. But even though he had this idea for decades, he never actually worked enough to make it a reality.
#4. Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower
Tesla had this brilliant idea, which could have become a reality in such a short period of time if it weren’t a market crash that actually stopped the project financing. Anyway, he has (almost) built a Tower, topped by a large conductive dome and anchored with a 300 feet, beneath the ground, iron foundation, which was supposed to transmit, wirelessly, not just electricity, but also information over the planet Earth. There was also this guy, Guglielmo Marconi, who stole some of Tesla’s “tricks” and only after a few months Tesla started building the “Wardenclyffe Tower”, was the first to transmit a wireless telegraph signal across the Atlantic. Tesla knew that his invention was way on a higher scale than Marconi’s, and he kept at it, trusting the idea: to “send” electricity into the air and then move it with the natural currents of the earth. When it became official, to stop with the building of the tower, he stated: “Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer’s keen searching sense.”