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Comment by wheelerof4te | Hacker News Reader

There's no doubt that Nikola Tesla possesed some, let's not say a weapon, but knowledge about a very advanced way to cause mass destruction for it's time.

In a way, his mind was that weapon. And it's a good thing, too. Imagine someone else with that kind of knowledge.

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He didn't have more knowledge than we do now, 100 years, trillions of research dollars and millions of engineers later. He had a very amazing and intuitive sense of electricity, mechanics and physics in general, as well as an eidetic memory but it's not like he was conjuring mystical secrets out of the aether, any more than, say, OpenAI is today. And that's about how his inventions were received: with surprise that such things were possible, followed by credulity and wild predictions over where it might go, mostly relayed by people who didn't understand the technology.

Electricity simply doesn't provide a practical mass destructive capacity in the way that, say, the strong nuclear force does. However, from the breakneck rate of electrical technology from the 1890s onwards, you could see why an extrapolation of those capabilities could make it plausible that it could eventually get there.

While it's no doubt true that he didn't have substantially more knowledge than we do now, it's important to consider that some areas he was working in have only recently come to bear similar fruit. Specifically wireless power transmission, for example, was patented by him in 1916 and only in recent years were similar effects actually put into practice on a small scale (functioning in a nearly identical way as described in the patent).

There's been plenty of times in history something has been lost or buried due to the death of the creator or societal / political pressures.

Consider the EV1 and the legal fight against California's Zero Emissions legislation, some 20 years before Tesla Motors would shake things up.

> wireless power transmission, for example, was patented by him in 1916

So what? Perpetual motion machines, and a lot of other junk that never could work, have also been patented both before and since. Not only Einstein but also a lot of idiots have worked in patent offices around the world.

There's lots of doubt on that. I doubt it, for one, and probably lots of other people too. So where do you get this ridiculous “there's no doubt” from?!?

Until there is some proof that Tesla possesed an “advanced way to cause mass destruction” there is nothing but doubt about that.

I think there's a lot of doubt, actually. He was very smart but he was not a magician.

Have you not seen the documentary "Prestige"?!

Which makes me want to share my new favorite conspiracy theory about the movie(you know a story is good when there are wild theories about an event that was entirely imaginary in the first place, that is a sign of first class world building). anyway,

The entire tesla arc never happened, the whole thing was an elaborate con. "but " you exclaim, "we saw the machine, the hats, the trip to america", to which I reply this is a case of second person narrative the only source for this information is the diary(which the movie dutifully animates) and the diary was planted, the diary was the con.

I absolutely love this theory. Now I definitely need to re-watch the movie

In the vein of fan theories about imaginary events, a favourite of mine was that James Bond died in Blofeld's brain drill chair and the second half of Spectre was hallucinations as his brain shut down.

The release of a subsequent film with the same actor sadly disproved it.

I think that was another movie :)

"basically An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a perennial category of fan theory, along with "they were dead/in purgatory/hallucinating in an asylum all along" and "$X is a Time Lord." The latter i've also seen about James Bond.

And of course Nikola Tesla. Which probably makes Edison The Master. There's definitely an AU fan fiction in there somewhere, which in its Golden Age (electropunk?) Lovecraft-noir incorporates "Edison's Conquest of Mars[0]," an influential but otherwise garbage sequel to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Sorry, what was I.. oh yeah. Tunguska. Obviously Tesla accidentally reversed the polarity of the neutron flow.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison%27s_Conquest_of_Mars

And of course Nikola Tesla. Which probably makes Edison The Master.

OK, sure, fine... but then who was The Rani??

You don't have to be a magician to make a doomsday weapon.

In fact, he likely did not make it. He just possesed enough knowledge to imagine such a weapon possible in theory.

There's a reason why I said knowledge about a weapon.

To this day, nothing in Tesla's body of work is relevant to any weapon of mass destruction. There's no evidence whatsoever that he had any specific knowledge [0] about the means to create a weapon of mass destruction. The idea "big weapon make big boom" predates Tesla by numerous centuries. Saying he "just possessed enough knowledge to imagine such a weapon" isn't a falsifiable claim, and could reasonably be claimed about any 19th/20th century inventor.

[0] I would say that the "death ray" doesn't count, because he's not the first to come up with it. The teleforce is not a weapon of mass destruction.

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