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and financiers of his day, including George Westinghouse, J. Pierpont Morgan, A. Stanford White, and John Jacob Astor, only to die destitute and penniless in his room at the New Yorker Hotel. This was the man, however, whose ideas the scientists at ARPA turned to when faced not only with the threat of the first Soviet Sputnik orbiting the earth, but the even worse threat that the EBEs, seeing and hearing the Russian satellite, would be convinced that if colonization of the Earth was their goal, it was the Russians who would help them accomplish it. What was Tesla's idea? Consistently, throughout the 1890s, Tesla wrote and lectured about his theory of the wireless transmission of electrical current. Like Marconi's wireless radio, which revolutionized communication, Tesla's wireless electrical power supply would revolutionize the growth and development of entire cities. Not just as an extrapolation of wireless power but as a theory in its own right, Tesla reported that he had experimented with a beam of electrical energy, directed without wires, that could excite the atoms in a substance to the point where the substance, even though it could resist heat in conventional ovens, would break down. Such a beam weapon, Tesla said, would revolutionize warfare. In theory at least, it was a very similar device, the laser cutting tool, that the Army retrieval team picked out of the scrub at the Roswell crash site. One of the astounding aspects about the life and career of Nikola Tesla isn't just that he theorized about these projects, he actually experimented with them, many times succeeding in very intriguing ways, and then patented the important inventions that derived from his experiments. But his ideas were so radical for the time, so far ahead of anything his contemporaries were thinking, that they were dismissed as either the uncontrolled ravings of a mad scientist or so wildly impractical that they amounted to nothing. Yet, when you review the patents in his name, his descriptions of the systems he designed, and actual results of the public experiments or exhibitions he conducted, you find that even the most lunatic sounding ideas like his turn of the century plans for a vertical takeoff and landing bomber actually looked as though they should work. In some cases, like his atom smasher, they worked better and more efficiently than the modern equivalents of these machines when they first appeared. When | realized that at the turn of the century Tesla had actually demonstrated a model of a remotely piloted boat that could be controlled by radio from a distance and deliver torpedoes right into the heart of an enemy fleet, | was amazed that the navy hadn't jumped on the idea in advance of World War | and even more amazed that we hadn't ordered the design from Tesla in World War II when we knew the Germans were already experimenting with one. Yet today, we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop remotely piloted vehicle similar in concept to the one Tesla had designed almost a hundred years ago at less than a thousandth of today's cost. And in 1915, Tesla had written the U.S. War Department that in addition to his remotely piloted boat, they should urgently consider his remotely piloted "aerial machines devoid of sustaining planes [wings], ailerons, propellers, and other eternal attachments, which will be capable of immense speeds, and are very likely to furnish powerful arguments for peace in the near future. Such a machine, sustained and propelled entirely by reaction [thrust rocket engines], can be controlled either mechanically or by wireless energy [radio controlled]. " Tesla's description of the remote controlled rocket powered guided missile, which was even more advanced than the German V2, is the forerunner of today's modern ICBMs whose targeting information can be relayed to them after they're in flight. As a tactical weapon, Tesla had described, over half a century earlier, the army's remotely piloted TOW antitank missile that destroyed Saddam's armored divisions in the Persian Gulf. Tesla's experiments with particle beam generation and direction were well under way during the 1890s when he was invited to set up an experimental station that would prove that he could transmit electrical power using the earth's atmosphere as the medium instead of a heavy cable. If power could be so directed, Tesla's backers, who included industrialist George Westinghouse and financier J. P,:Morgan, agreed, it would revolutionize the infant electrical power industry and make whoever controlled the source of power rich beyond anyone's imagination. Tesla believed he could control that power and, with about $60,000 from his backers, traveled to Colorado Springs, not coincidentally today's home of the Air Force North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and the United States Army's Space Command, to build and demonstrate his power transmission station. Tesla described his experiments in an article he wrote for the thirtieth anniversary edition of the Electrical World and Engineer in1904. He said, "Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic messages any distances without wires, as | recognized long ago, but also able to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited amounts, to any terrestrial distance and almost without any loss. "In Tesla's vision, electrical transmission stations would circle the planet, storing and relaying power from station to station so as to provide electrical power to the entire planet without the use of above or below the ground power lines, feeder cables, and transmission lines. He also saw that a network of relay stations could receive and retransmit the world's breaking news stories instantly around the globe to pocket receivers, "a cheap and simple device which might be carried in one's pocket, " which would record special messages sent to it. Tesla had described a modern microwave cellular telephone and remote pager system. He also said that with relay stations like this, " the entire Earth will be converted into a huge brain, as it were capable of response in every one of its parts, "in other words, an Internet. During his time, Tesla truly made history by showing that energy could be directed as a beam without wires. 103