Nikola Tesla's earthquake machine, vibration, natural frequencies and building demolition

While doing research on various building demolitions, I came across this. I did a search but not much came up other than how to build one.

Excerpt from the New York World

Telegram, July 11, 1935 -

Nikola Tesla revealed that an earthquake which drew police and ambulances to the region of his laboratory at 48 E. Houston St., New York, in 1898, was the result of a little machine he was experimenting with at the time which "you could put in your overcoat pocket."

The bewildered newspapermen pounced upon this as at least one thing they could understand and "the father of modern electricity" told what had happened as follows:

"I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound.

"I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. "Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium.

"The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That's all they ever knew about it."

Some shrewd reporter asked Dr. Tesla at this point what he would need to destroy the Empire State Building and the doctor replied: "Vibration will do anything. It would only be necessary to step up the vibrations of the machine to fit the natural vibration of the building and the building would come crashing down. That's why soldiers break step crossing a bridge."

www.mindcontrolforums.com...

A pocket sized machine that brings buildings down. Especially steel framed ones. With a wierd crackling sound. Note that many eyewitnnesses reported a strange crackling sound before each building fell.

He put his little vibrator in his coat-pocket and went out to hunt a half-erected steel building. Down in the Wall Street district, he found one&endash;ten stories of steel framework without a brick or a stone laid around it. He clamped the vibrator to one of the beams, and fussed with the adjustment until he got it.

Tesla said finally the structure began to creak and weave and the steel-workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Police were called out. Tesla put the vibrator in his pocket and went away. Ten minutes more and he could have laid the building in the street. And, with the same vibrator he could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in less than an hour.

www.excludedmiddle.com...

Mythbusters got close to replicating this machine. Although they couldn't get it to produce an earthquake (which was the myth they were busting), they were able to oscilate a bridge.

The other day I was flipping through the channels (hate to admit it), but came across mention of my man, Nikola Tesla. Of course, I was intrigued. It was on Discovery Channel's program, "Mythbusters". In this episode they set out to build and test Tesla's patented and legendary "earthquake machine", which weighed only six pounds. Tesla claimed he built one and attached it to a steel beam in his large building. He then tuned the machine, searching for a frequency of oscillation that would resonate with the steel structure. After a while he found the right frequency and the entire building started to quake violently. He had to take a hammer to the machine to get it to stop. Residents of the building evacuated and the police and fire department reported to the scene. The hosts of the show, who set out each week to, more or less, scientifically disprove common "myths" and legends, didn't follow the patent exactly and made two machines that didn't work. Then another guy built it and they finally had something that was producing results. A six pound, hand-held machine that was causing a massive steel beam to oscillate violently. They found a large steel bridge to test it on (I'm not sure which bridge it was, but it was massive). After tuning the machine extensively, they finally found a frequency that resonated with the structure and everything on the bridge was vibrating. A six pound machine was producing a rythmic vibration over a hundred feet from its location. They said it felt like a semi-truck was going by...constantly. Nevertheless, they "disproved the myth", because it didn't exactly cause an earthquake. Maybe not, but something else could.

tribes.tribe.net...

What are your thoughts?








[edit on 4/24/2008 by Griff]

Nikola Tesla was a man centuries ahead of his time.

I need more time to read and digest before I respond further.

Starred and Flagged!

Hi Griff..

Yes I have a question...

Does the following quote you posted violate this websites Terms of Service?

He put his little vibrator in his coat-pocket and went out to hunt a half-erected steel building.

JK....

I did look up the mythbusters show. It is legit.

Where are you going with this? Are you attempting to find another reason why the towers collapsed?

Originally posted by CaptainObvious
Where are you going with this? Are you attempting to find another reason why the towers collapsed?

I'm just thinking out loud with all of you. I really don't know if it could work, but imagine a 6-pound device being able to fell a building. And would this device be found, noticed and identified by the workers in the rubble of two-110 story buildings?

reply to post by Griff



It is very interesting. I didn't see the mythbusters episode, but I would like to see what noise this would create.

Good stuff none the less.
Snip



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[edit on 24/4/2008 by Sauron]

If they used a device like a tesla resonator to bring down the towers the building and surrounding ground would most likely be vibrating constantly rather than short percussive durations. As the building starts to resonate it would be affecting surrounding air pressures thus creating its own sound, a bit like a massive tuning fork. I would expect the volume would become overwhelming as these huge steel columns vibrate themselves and everything inside the building, and the vibration would be like a constant unnatural earthquake growing in intensity over a noticeable duration and would vibrate anything coupled to it.




I do believe it is totally possible to drop a building through resonation but it would look and sound very different to what we are seeing in the above video, and we would probably be left with huge slabs of concrete and sections of the building remaining, it wouldnt result in so much complete destruction and so much fine powdering of materials.

Note the explosive percussive nature of the sounds in the video above, much more like bombs than resonators.



[edit on 24-4-2008 by Insolubrious]

One thing about the myth buster episode. They were trying to cause an earthquake, not fell a structure. They also did the experiment in San Fran. Where as Tesla did his in NYC. Different underlying strata, I would assume, would make a difference.

reply to post by Insolubrious


I can agree. I just wanted to see what other people thought about this.


[edit on 4/24/2008 by Griff]

reply to post by Griff


I've mentioned Tesla's pocket "quake" machine in a few posts and thought of opening a thread on it, so glad to see you got farther than I did with it.

There's no question Tesla's ideas on frequency and harmonics can produce destructive results--it's a fascinating area of science that leads in several directions, one being scalar weapons and HAARP arrays. Focused energy at a distance. Also to his little quake gadget at the other end of the spectrum.

Tom Beardon is the best-known proponent about all this; he believes the Soviets had scalar arrays operational in the 70s and the US caught up more recently--and he also claims there are rogue non-state actors with them, FWIW. But the little that is known about the subject and his claims for a remarkable black arsenal of "Tesla tech" gives one pause; some of it is really out there.

One claim though was quite compelling: IIRC the Soviets were working on a Tesla idea for a resonant tube as a weapon (the story goes that Stalin had Soviet scientists go back through scientific literature into the late 19th C to see if there was anything they could develop to leapfrog the US, and they came upon Telsa and experimented extensively with his ideas and patents). The idea was to induce a resonant frequency in a large metal tube that would act like a harmonic cannon. They raised the frequency in steps until they reached a certain level of hz that began to make the field people violently ill. They abandoned experiments in that range because they realized that the focused resonance could actually kill people. A few more steps and you're in literal tin-foil hat territory, with those claims of the gov't bombarding people with "mind-control beams."

You could see a scenario of literally vibrating the towers to pieces, in tandem with thermite and shaped charges. It could explain a lot: the pulverized concrete, the neatly sectioned core columns broken at the welds, the infamous seismic readings...but like insolubrious points out, it wouldn't be a version of the pocket quake machine but probably a scalar weapon, and here you're in an area as speculative as 4g mini-nukes unfortunately.

[edit on 24-4-2008 by gottago]

I'm familiar with everyone not believing in resonant energy on this board.

Have the times changed? =) I could say I have my own nice resononant energy generator involving 2 magnets, a Switch (to snap the magnets back closer together), and 6 Tesla Turbines 3 to the pi of the magnets.

Tesla was a great man too bad the government didn't listen to him when he told the engineers of the Philidelphia Experiment that they need to zero-poin equipment.

Noobs. =)

I saw that Mythbusters episode

they were not trying to cause an earthquake.

they were seeing if the small oscillating device
could be matched to the resonant frequency of the large object
(a bridge) , and to see if the matching frequency would cause
the bridge to start to oscillate as well.

the theory claims that the oscillating frequency will double in intensity
exponentially with virtually infinite power .

its the same way that a singer breaks glass with their voice.

and , yes, the bridge did begin to vibrate and get increasingly
stronger untill they decided "that was enough" before it got out of control.

the only thing missing from the show was that they never did say
how they came up with the resonant freqency of the bridge in the first
place.

but for the twin towers?
I have to vote "NO"

this resonant wave function will not instantly pulverize,
it will slowly increase in vibration until it vibrates itself apart.

Originally posted by gottago
I've mentioned Tesla's pocket "quake" machine in a few posts and thought of opening a thread on it, so glad to see you got farther than I did with it.

Actually, you probably know more about it than I do at this point. I just happened on it while searching about directed energy.

It's amazing what energy can do to mass. Especially when you consider that all mass is just energy anyway. E=mc^2 and all.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. Yes, even you CO with your thinly veiled jokes.

Originally posted by Maya432
but for the twin towers?
I have to vote "NO"

this resonant wave function will not instantly pulverize,
it will slowly increase in vibration until it vibrates itself apart.

One thing I've learned over the years. Never say "never". Maybe they've come up with something that resonates strong enough and short enough time that could do it.

you got a point there
its possible

Originally posted by Maya432
I saw that Mythbusters episode

they were not trying to cause an earthquake.

they were seeing if the small oscillating device
could be matched to the resonant frequency of the large object
(a bridge) , and to see if the matching frequency would cause
the bridge to start to oscillate as well.

If this is true, why do they call the myth "busted"?

After an hour of testing, though, they weren't able to get anything stronger than the vibrations they initially felt. No earthquake.

busted

kwc.org...


Edit: BTW, I'm not knocking what you are saying. It is a real question.

[edit on 4/24/2008 by Griff]

I found this:

Nikola Tesla's Earthquake Machine
Dale Pond & Walter Baumgartner
175 pages, 38 mechanical drawings, illustrated.
345-NTEM ... $16.95

www.tfcbooks.com...

Anyone want to start building?

reply to post by Griff


You should go through Beardon's website; there's quite a lot of provocative material there, much of it pure speculation but not all. It's about the worst-organized site I've ever seen, a bit like an old curiosity shop of alternative science but some fascinating stuff in there, especially his view of Maxwell's original EM equations.

Here's a link to his weapons section, much of it regarding Tesla's scalar weaponry.

Thanks Gottago, I'll take a look see.

Look what I found in the mean-time though.

FIRE INDUCED VIBRATION MONITORING FOR BUILDING COLLAPSE. FINAL REPORT

www.fire.nist.gov...

I haven't read it but just skimmed through so far. Looks like we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.

[edit on 4/24/2008 by Griff]

I think Tesla's work has been highly underestimated as far as the general public goes.

Good thread. Amazing to know that so long ago he was advanced beyond what we currently admit to knowing.

What ever he did bringing down the lightning in Colorado and zapping all the power was pretty impressive for that matter.

Not to throw my own thread off topic but I found something of interest from NIST.

Fire-induced core column shortening detected. Due to heating from fires following the aircraft impacts and subsequent buckling, there was a shortening of core columns seen in both towers on floors at or near the fire-affected impact sites. Shortening of the core columns caused the floor system to pull the perimeter columns inward—the observed inward bowing that was seen minutes prior to the collapse of each tower. Significant thermal sagging of the floor system exacerbated the inward pull on the perimeter columns in WTC 2. Vertical loads carried by shortened columns were redistributed to perimeter columns, putting additional strain on their load-bearing capabilities.

www.nist.gov...

Are they saying that the heat from the fires shortened the core columns? Or are they saying that the core columns buckled, causing them to shorten?

If they are saying the columns shrank, then I'd have to call them imbociles. Steel (and everything else except for some things as in ice crystals) expands due to heat not contracts.

If they are saying the columns buckled from the heat, then they are admitting that the core failed first.

Which is it?

I thought their explaination was that the trusses pulled the outer columns inward. Not the core collapsed and pulled them inward?

[edit on 4/24/2008 by Griff]