On 6 February 2018, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched its Heavy Falcon rocket from the same Kennedy Space Center launch pad used for the Apollo missions. Atop the Falcon was Musk’s own Tesla electric roadster, piloted by a mannequin named Starman who is seen lifting off to the tune of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” What would Nikola Tesla [1856-1943], the famous inventor, have thought about this?
As a showman who took 250,000 volt shocks to demonstrate the safety of his alternating current [AC] inventions, Tesla would have been thrilled to see the car named after him orbiting in space. Such gestures, Tesla believed, wake people up and help them imagine technology in new ways. He would have wholeheartedly agreed with Musk who admitted that launching the car into space was “kind of silly and fun, but I think that silly and fun things are important.”
While Starman and the Tesla roadster were supposed to be placed on a trajectory which would take them to Mars, a last-minute firing of the rocket was too powerful and sent Starman and his car careening off in the direction of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Tesla would, I think, be equally fascinated by this development since one of his most memorable pronouncements concerned receiving a radio message from Mars in 1899 which researchers now think actually came from Io, one of Jupiter’s moons.
To understand all this, let’s go back to what Tesla was working on circa 1900. After successfully introducing the AC motor in the late 1880s, Tesla began studying electromagnetic waves—what we commonly refer to as radio waves. To generate these waves, he designed a high-voltage, high-frequency transformer now called a Tesla coil. Using this coil as a transmitter, Tesla hoped to send electric currents through the earth’s crust and do away with cables and overhead wires.
In order to test his new system, Tesla built a pilot plant in Colorado Springs during the summer of 1899. Early on, he discovered that his transmitter could set up stationary electrical waves in the earth’s crust and he devised ever-more sensitive receivers to detect these waves. One evening, while he was listening using a telephone receiver, Tesla was amazed to hear a series of regular beeps: first one, then two, and finally three beeps. “My first observations [of these beeps] positively terrified me,” Tesla later recalled, “as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural . . . . I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth.”
Puzzled that the beeps had “such a clear suggestion of number and order,” Tesla at first considered whether they were “electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes.” Rejecting possible solar or terrestrial causes, Tesla was unable to determine the cause of these unusual signals while working in Colorado.
After he returned to New York in January 1900, Tesla continued to puzzle over these unusual observations until “the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I have been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.” Tesla decided that the beeps must indeed be from another planet, and he announced this conclusion in a 1900 Christmas letter to the American Red Cross. As part of a publicity campaign, the Red Cross had asked Tesla to predict what recent scientific discovery would be important for the new twentieth century.
In subsequent interviews about the beeps, Tesla insisted only that the signals were extra-terrestrial in nature, but reporters were quick to assume that the signals must have come from Mars. In studying Mars in the late 1870s, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli had observed a network of long, straight paths or channels that he labeled as “canali” on his maps of the red planet. Many people concluded that Schiaparelli’s canals could not have been caused by natural forces and were an indication of intelligent life on Mars. The idea that Mars was inhabited was advanced further by the astronomer Percival Lowell, who built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona specifically to view the Martian canals. In his 1895 book, Mars, Lowell argued the planet was suffering from severe drought and that the canals were an ingenious response by Martians to direct water from the polar ice caps to central parts of the planet.
Lowell’s ideas about intelligent life on Mars received wide circulation in newspapers and magazines, and Tesla was certainly aware of these ideas. Tesla’s friend and biographer T.C. Martin had speculated in an 1895 article that Tesla’s transmitter might be used to “call up” the Martians and Tesla had elaborated on these possibilities when lecturing in Chicago in May 1899.
Over the years, Tesla scholars and fans have puzzled over what to make of Tesla’s claims to have intercepted a message from Mars. Was this an elaborate publicity stunt or did he actually detect something with his sensitive receiver while in Colorado?
In the 1990s, two researchers, Kenneth L. Corum and James F. Corum undertook an analysis of Tesla’s equipment and concluded it was highly likely that Tesla detected extraterrestrial radio signals. In studying Tesla’s notes from Colorado, the Corums determined that Tesla’s equipment was designed to transmit and receive Very Low Frequency [VLF] signals [8-22 Kilohertz] since waves in that range travel more easily through the earth’s crust. After establishing that his receiver was operating in this range, the Corum brothers investigated what sort of VLF signals might have been coming from space during the summer of 1899. As it turns out, one of Jupiter’s moons, Io, emits a 10 KHz signal as it passes through the torus of electrically charged plasma particles which surrounds the planet. First detected in 1955, radio signals from Io often come as a series of pulses. To test their explanation, the Corums rebuilt Tesla’s receiver, used it during a Jovian radio storm in 1996, and recorded a series of beeps similar to what Tesla reported hearing in 1899.
To explain why Tesla associated these signals with Mars, the Corums used astronomical software to determine where Jupiter and Mars would have been in the night sky over Colorado Springs during the summer of 1899. [The Corums didn’t seem to realize that it was reporters, not Tesla, who linked the beeps with Mars.] With this software, they found that on several nights in July 1899, Jupiter would have emitted a signal for part of the evening but would have stopped just as Mars was setting in the western sky. If Tesla had looked out the doors of his laboratory as he heard the beeps stop, he would have seen Mars disappear behind the mountains just West of Colorado Springs, making it easy for him to connect the red planet with the cessation of the signals. On the basis of their analysis, the Corums concluded that Tesla was observing real phenomena when he heard the beeps in his sensitive receiver.
The research by the Corum brothers is significant because it offers a corrective to how we understand Tesla. Annoyed that he made exaggerated claims for his inventions in the tabloid newspapers, Tesla’s fellow engineers in the early 1900s derided him as a “poet and visionary,” and it’s tempting for us to join these critics and conclude that some portion of Tesla’s work was hocus-pocus. The Corums show that, even though he drew a strange conclusion about the beeps, Tesla was detecting actual radio waves from space. Like other inventors, Tesla struggled to get real forces and real materials to conform to the ideas he had in his head
At the same time, we need to realize that Tesla didn’t hesitate to exploit sensational discoveries in order to generate interest in his inventions and that’s why he eagerly announced this extraterrestrial message in 1900. Much like Musk or Steve Jobs, Tesla understood that introducing a new technology required flair and showmanship to attract both investors for his companies and customers for his products.
To be sure, when Tesla told the world about his extraterrestrial message, he didn’t know anything about radio signals being generated by Io as it swept through the charged particles surrounding Jupiter—all that was discovered a decade after his death. Nevertheless, he would be glad to know that Starman is swinging by Jupiter. Given Tesla’s desire to be a careful investigator of natural phenomena, I think he would want Starman to check out the Corum brothers’ explanation first-hand!
