This story was sent to me by a reader of this website, and it really gave me pause. It's one of those things that made me go "hmmm..." and perhaps it will make you entertain the same suspicions as I.

First, some background. Nikola Tesla was in my opinion the greatest physicist and engineer of the 19th and 20th centuries. Some would even argue that he may have been the greatest scientist who ever lived, and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree with them, though I could think of some other contenders. And as many readers of this site are aware, toward the end of the 19th century, Tesla's electromagnetic investigations took him to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he conducted a series of deliberately conceived experiments to test an idea of his: could the normal method of electrical circuitry be inverted, and could the Earth itself be utilized in a system of wireless power transmission?

We know the results of those experiments. Tesla claimed not only success, but his Colorado Springs notebooks leave one with the strong impression that he had investigated a new phenomenon: an electro-acoustical wave, a longitudinal electromagnetic wave... and upon his return to New York, he persuaded finance capitalist JP Morgan to fund a project to build a wireless transmission of power station...

...we know the rest of the story, or, at least, we claim to: JP Morgan, when he found out what Tesla was really up to - the story runs that Morgan thought simply that Tesla was building some sort of "radio" system - he pulled the financial plug on the project... And, so we're also sometimes told, the whole project was impractical and unworkable and no engineer has been able to get it to work since.

Well, now there's this, and notably, it's coming out of Utah (I'll leave all of you to ponder that, and only add only one more clue..."Moray"....OK...well maybe another clue....Farnsworth.... and maybe another....Mormon):

University Uses Tesla Technology to Wirelessly Charge Electric Bus

Now that the basic concept appears to be (finally) practically vindicated, let's return to the wider Tesla part of the story...

You'll recall that I said above that the story is that when Morgan heard that Tesla planned not a fancy radio or communications system, but an actual wireless electrical power, he pulled his financial backing. We're told that Morgan allegedly said "you can't meter it" and hence, saw no profit to be made from it, and hence, left Tesla high and dry in a financial mess from which he never recovered.

But a moment's reflection will reveal this standard "directed narrative" story to be precisely that, a story.... for one thing, Morgan simply wasn't that stupid; he knew he stood to make a pile of money simply on the licensing agreements for the technology. So there had to be some other reason.

That reason I advanced in Babylon's Banksters: Tesla himself eventually revealed that one and the same technology could also be used as a colossally destructive weapon, no reconfiguring of the equipment required. At that juncture, I argued, Morgan pulled the plug, fir it meant a relatively simple technology could proliferate into the "wrong hands," meaning non-elite hands, hands which were already bound to a limited-resource energy system...

...and now the University of Utah (think Pons and Fleischmann here folks), has done it again, and revealed the workability of the system...

....Tesla weapons, anyone?

See you on the flip side.