What's Up with the New 'Tesla Tower'?

A company has built a tower in Texas that resembles Nikola Tesla's famed Wardenclyffe Tower. Learn what we know (and don't know) about it so far in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff.
Lauren bogelbam here late in a business called Visive Technologies
formerly Texan, completed a tower off of I thirty five
near Milford, Texas. With its lattice style structural supports and
bulbous top. It bears a distinct resemblance to Nicola Tesla's

(00:23):
Warden Cliff Tower, sometimes called the Tesla Tower, which was
an ill faded power project envisioned by the famous engineer
in the early twentieth century. The tower was meant to
provide free energy all over the planet using wireless technology,
but instead wound up scrapped by creditors after Tesla couldn't
pay the mortgage on the property. Viziv's vision statement, rendered

(00:44):
in all caps on its website, is to power the
planet and bring light to the world, indicating that its
primary goal is indeed power related. They're aiming to offer
up electricity without traditional infrastructure as part of a partnership
with Baylor University. If it's anything like Tesla system, it
could also offer new ways to send signals for radio
communications and global positioning systems, and it could bring electricity

(01:08):
to the one point three billion people worldwide who don't
have it and don't have the infrastructure to get it.
According to company literature, the endeavor relies heavily on what
are called Zenic surface waves. These waves, named for Jonathan Zenic,
a twenty century physicist and electrical engineer, are electromagnetic waves
that harness Earth's surface. Is a sort of waveguide or

(01:28):
conduit for electricity and communication signals, so powerful that they
enveloped the entire planet without the need for wires. Unlike
so many other types of transmissions, zenic waves don't suffer
degradation from challenges like solar flares, lightning, or other electromagnetic pulses.
Sounds like a fairly straightforward corporate experiment so far right.

(01:50):
Set up power transmitters in one location and then the
receivers in another, tweak the variables of it, and then
determine if you can make your theories work in real
world conditions. The thing is, when it comes to Nicola
Tesla's legacy, nothing is simple. His legend is fertile ground,
not only for real modern science, but also for fringe
theories of all kinds. Down the rabbit hole we go.

(02:13):
Let's review in Tesla brilliant possibly mentally ill scientist died
in the hotel he was living in. U S officials
immediately seized the scientists research, partially in hopes of finding
plans for a secret death ray particle being weapon, and
of course, also to prevent access spies from getting their
hands on any useful scientific revelations. Hundreds of pages of

(02:36):
those documents were subsequently classified and went missing. It wasn't
until sixteen that a Freedom of Information Act forced authorities
to unveil some of those papers. It's possible that Tesla's
tower had potential applications in some sort of particle ray weapon,
hence the classified files. Some have even taken to calling
the device a piece ray, a kind of defense system

(02:58):
that the war hating test created to prevent countries from
attacking each other, a powerful, invisible wall of force that
would keep enemies at bay without resorting to the violence
of bullets or bombs. Flash forward to modern times. Fringe
theorists pounced on the fact that two of visive technologies
top leaders are ex military with histories in ballistic missile defense.

(03:21):
This at a time when the U S Commander in
chief is speaking about a space based missile defense system
and the residents of Milford, Texas reasonably worried about the
tower's purpose. But there's more. When Tesla died in three
and U S authorities snapped up his research, they called
in a well regarded electrical engineer from m I T
to sift through the papers and note anything useful. That

(03:43):
engineer was Dr John G. Trump, uncle to President Donald Trump.
After evaluating Tesla's work, John Trump scoffed at many of
the genius's ideas as speculative. But why then were these
documents classified for so long? And is it just a
coincidence that Visit Tower was constructed after a Trump family
member was elected to office. Visit Technologies did not respond

(04:06):
to the request of the How Stuff Works editorial staff
for comment on this story, but Michael Taylor, vice president
of Communications at Visive, had indicated previously that the first
rounds of testing involved low power waves that wouldn't have
any negative effects on humans or animals, and has said
that the company only wants to improve the lives of
people in the community and quote the world around us.

(04:28):
As of June eighteen, the company had planned to conduct
tests for perhaps six months to a year and then
use those results to reevaluate its future plans for further experiments.
As to what sort of plans those might be, we'll
just have to wait and see. Today's episode was written
by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart

(04:51):
Media and how Stuff Works. For more on this and
lots of other electrifying topics, visit our home planet, how
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