The history of transoceanic VLF wave radio, an inferior science and technology, thus begins with Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi represents a figure critical to comprehending the relationship of the financial world to technology. Marconi was a not a brilliant financier. Marconi was a brilliantly employed tool for the financial power which supported him. Marconi was effectively used against the normal flow of discovery, of technology, of knowledge, ultimately of civilization itself. Anything and cinyone who presumes to force the providential stream pays the heaviest consequence.
Marconi now wished to drive his station building exploitations across the world. The strong lure of fame and fortune had already pulled Guglielmo Marconi into such deep waters that he would later grow to despise his entire achievement. Drawn irresistibly into the world of oaths, promises, contracts, and demands, Marconi found himself no longer in control of “his Radio”. Marconi found himself being pressed by investors and patrons. The romantic dream was long gone. The work, no longer a simple parlor trick, became a burden set on him by powerful and demanding investors. Clamoring for the perfection of his promised “global radio circuit”, Marconi had to deliver his patrons their due. This meant that he had to conceive and develop original inventions; a task which proved beyond the ability of the experimenter-tumed-diplomat.
Ignoring Tesla’s established principles of power transmission, Marconi focussed all of his attentions on establishing world wave communications. Developing the lossy systems which Tesla continually upbraided as “inefficient and excessive”, a determined and well-financed Mcuconi established a world-girdling radio communications “circuit”. Marconi engaged his financial bases to supply him with necessary capital to establish this global VLF system. Firmly establishing his first reliable TransAtlantic service in 1910, Marconi thereafter strove to estabhsh his planned VLF mammoths on every major coastland of the Atlantic. With later help from General Electric, the Morgan based establishment originally designed to break Teslian patents in Polyphase, Marconi formulated a regime of VLF stations. Marconi established these kinds of “directional beam” VLF stations all along the Atlantic coastlands as early as 1917. Both sides of the Atlantic. Soon, he would be directing the same across the Pacific. It was all so very routine now. While his previous spark generated VLF waves demonstrated ability to penetrate the trcms-Atlantic barriers these complex signals, though penetrating, could not support the transmission of vocal signals. Without this new addition, his Radio would be condemned to a telegraphic realm, one which would soon find httle utility in a world where telephony was the established standard. Dr. Fessenden was first to broadcast voice transmissions from Brant Rock in Nova Scotia through aerial high frequency waves on Christmas Eve of 1906. Radiotelephony was the new regime, and Marconi hated the notion. This meant new inventions had to be developed and he, plagued with too numerous concerns already, had no creativity left to spare.
Marconi now required continuous wave generators to supply the adequate carrier signal for radiotelephonic signals, a feat which he himself could only direct and manage. This carrier had to be a smooth and consistent harmonic wave alternation of much higher frequency than ordinary VLF, an impossible d requirement. The only such system of which he had knowledge were the designs which were deployed in 1890 by none other than...Nikola Tesla. This would never do. Marconi would never use Tesla’s patents. The demand was too pressured however. Develop radiotelephony! General Electric engineers designed these generators, copies of the original Tesla patents. Alexanderson alternators were simply “lifted” Tesla designs on a large scale. The frequency was now somewhat higher than before, but infinitely smoother and more consistent; a condition which Marconi somehow continued to believe would produce more penetrating signals. In light of the actual performances of each such system, we realize the unscientific reasoning, an obvious cover for several other issues. Marconi was compelled to implement the engineering staff of General Electric, In addition, he was required to find market areas for the industrial product lines produced by that Morgan-owned company. Here, industry was now making its dictates to the self-styled and undisputed Ruler of Radio! It was for Marconi an intolerable situation, one from which he would seek escapes.
Stirred in the heart of a greater life, there was an intolerance of another kind altogether. In a truly remarkable and revealing photograph, taken at the dedication of Marconi’s New Brunswick Station in New Jersey, a dark faced Nikola Tesla appears. In this reveahng portrait, the very soul of Tesla may be seen burning through magnetic eyes. For Tesla, these previously unseen emotions...anger, aimoyance, grief, hurt, and sadness...tell us a world of tales. In this photograph, there is only one emotion which pierces time and circumstance, penetrating our present world is his determination. Tesla was determined to proliferate a technology of liberations. He had in fact discovered the technology ¦whose power was so new, so astounding, so completely permeated with unexpected potentials, that humanity would be completely transformed by its use. Tesla had long realized that aether technology was the closest access to the fundamental and truly human agency: consciousness, vision, thought, and sensation. To implement these energies would literally be like turning on a magickal lamp on society. Tesla experimented with hosts of applications, each of which resemble nothing like the world has ever seen. These applications were more like the images evoked by science fiction romance novels where flying platforms serenely sail through luminous pastel skies.
Tesla had a conception of worldwide broadcast which greatly outweighed the mere transaction of words and song, news and weather. Tesla had a conception of a Radio World in which small portable receivers would permit the direct reception of pictures and thought. The medium of words was insufficient to truly change humanity. He had long inferred that pictures could be harmlessly beamed directly into the mind, into neurology. These developments were demonstrated and witnessed, but he kept them close and secret. The world was not yet ready for the release of this information. He is seen among those forces vdth which he battled all his life: abstraction without experience, and the bureaucratic prostitution of scientific expertise. Tesla appears remarkably youthful, despite the fact that he was already sixty years of age. Thoroughly disgusted with the unnecessary waste of effort, outraged by the display of bureaucratic control, Tesla objected to Marconi himself as well as his inferior system. Yet, we glimpse a rare moment in history (see figure).
Up through this time, Tesla’s biography became clouded. This was partly
Due to his own growing preference for secrecy and seclusion, so often the victim of hurt and derision. Asked to comment on the new Marconi World System, a vision which he himself had once dreamed to see fulfilled, Tesla made characteristic use of the opportunity. Tesla’s mocking indictment of this wasteful broadcast method told why VLF wave communication was prone to interference and natural restrictions. There was a reason why these stations had to be so expensive and mammoth. Tesla published an analysis of the Marconi System in a later mocking indictment, the wasteful broadcast method of waves being explained. In this splendid thesis, entided “The True Wireless”, we are shown that VLF alternating waves resemble the radiation of radio “heat” rather than the more powerful aetheric radiant modes which he himself discovered and developed. The radiation of radio “heat” could not equal or compete with the emission of powerful “electrical rays”, which he himself first discovered and developed.
Knowing exacdy how to stir Marconi and his financial base direcdy, he addressed the very heart of the growing communications cartel. Mocking its futile waste of funds, and predicting its eventual failure, Tesla was blunt, derisive, and technical. The latter portion of his statement was directed toward the vast supportive staff of engineers on which Marconi now absolutely relied. This technical swipe had its own determined effect. After the event, after the statements, the press interviews, and the publications, many engineers began to demand an elevated pro-Teslian technology. Having secured sufficient technical information in the older Tesla patents to reconstruct some semblance of the otherwise “lost secrets”, there were those who broke all affihations with Marconi and sought employment in more privatized laboratories. The names of De Moura, Hartmann, Gati, McCullough, Hettinger, Ulivi, Turpain, Reno, Moray, Farnsworth, and others who delved into Teslian technology are not widely known.
We are sure Marconi read all of these publications with exceedingly deep anger. Nevertheless, Marconi was conquering nations now. His empire would not be driven down by this wizard! For the establishment of his Radio Empire, Marconi expected the cooperation of many different nations. This necessarily would be an international network. Nothing would stop his procession of conquest. Toward this end, Marconi first sought the capture of European nobility. Politically and bureaucratically equipped to impress his own system on a worldwide basis, he would sell the idea of a worldwide communications “circuit” first to the aristocracy. The establishment of his huge world-communications “circuit” did not suffer by knowing his mother’s family ties in England. Himself a Marchese, this easy access to the major European Houses made his initial foray relatively easy. Perhaps only a Marconi could have suited this role. Stubborn, adamant, glacial in his reserve, the sharp-tongued Marconi managed to insult many a European dignitary with little regard for their dainty feelings. The list included Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. In his business affairs.
He insisted complete autocratic rule. He envisioned the popular democratic future which his system would unfold with himself as its ruler.
His wireless organization incorporated schools and luxurious hotels for operators. Run as a military organization after the Edison model, Marconi had final and ultimate say over every publication and official release. The deliberation of this action sealed the fate of both the academic and commercial radio world for an entire century. Establishing his Radio System as a monopoly, Marconi could effectively control and regulate all world-financial traffic on behalf of any financial base which bid the highest price. Personal communications with European markets would mean total financial dominion across the world for any individual wishing participation in the new Trans World Radio Circuit World Wave Communications had arrived. Financiers had their private radio stock-ticker system now.
By far not the first to conceive, investigate, develop, and proliferate radiosignalling apparatus, it remains that Marconi was the first to commercialize wireless communication systems. In this proliferation of wireless communications, he alone remained the paramount business developer. Marconi had the world, and Tesla had his visions. Wave Radio was the inefficient result of a willful ignorance, one which exalted pride above superior discovery. A tragic personal flaw thus became a social contamination. The result has been a world ignorance of the very deepest kind, one which has kept us fi-om having reached the highest quahty of life potentially available during this century. This declination from the high mark has touched each one of our lives in more ways than we can possibly know. While capital accretes human talent, labor, and effort to itself, producing profit for those who send it through the social seas, technology fares far better. Technology which reaches the deepest heart of Nature accretes to itself far more than mere capital profit.
Tesla Technology had its powerful potentials aimed at the social eradication of low living standards, disease, isolation, and ignorance. In each of these Tesla, an oftentimes victim of deprivations in America, saw the application of his Radiant Energy Technology to each social problem. While not here able to discuss the psychotronic aspects of Teslian Technology, let it suffice that Tesla had found means for broadcasting vital energies. Tesla Radiant Energy transmitters later evidenced enhanced ability to transmit emotions and even thoughts, a phenomena to which he often referred when speaking of the “Increase of Human Energy”.
He had already applied both disease-nullifying and consciousness-elevating broadcasts to himself and his staff These fingering effects worked, some of which having been later redeveloped by individuals such as Dr. Albert Abrams, Dr. Ruth Drown, Dr. Royal Rife, Antoine Priore, and several others. The social repercussions of such broadcast energies would trigger a world revolution. While financiers doubted the reality behind such reports, deeper consideration proved their fear and hatred of such a possibility. Those whose fortunes were gained as a result of the regulated social ignorance would not tolerate such experimentation. A critical vertex in human history had been reached, and financial clout was again redirecting and distorting the natural flow of human development. Critical knowledge, critical technology, and critical consciousness were each covered and forsaken to the extent that we now even doubt the clarified documentation afforded through patents.
World History
