Wardenclyffe, Mars signals and the death beam: what physics allows

The question

Three claims were tested. In 1904 he wrote that his system could send power to any distance "almost without any loss": how much would have reached a distant receiver? In 1901 he wrote that he felt he had been the first to hear "the greeting of one planet to another": was Mars even up in the 1899 Colorado sky? And in 1934 the newspapers reported a particle beam driven by 50 million volts that would bring down aircraft 250 miles away (his own 1935 article said 200): could particles cross that much air?

The test

An AI model (Claude) ran all three studies on public data, at Paul's direction. Only the beam study had its plan saved before the work began. The tower and sky studies are checks, not trials.

Tower. The AI built an order-of-magnitude power budget from Tesla's own figures: a 57 metre tower, a 21 metre dome and a 200 kilowatt plant. It multiplied three fractions: power that leaves as a wave, power that survives the journey, and power a matched tower of the same size catches. Losses came from two measured long-wave stations. Losses in Tesla's spark gap and coils were left out, which favours him.

Sky. The AI computed the Sun, Mars and Jupiter over his station every two minutes for every evening of July and August 1899, against the mountain skyline, and checked the positions against two independent sets of tables. Tesla gave no date, so every night was covered, plus the five nights chosen in 1996 by Kenneth and James Corum, who argued he heard Jupiter's radio storms.

Beam. Built on published stopping-power tables, the code first had to pass five known-answer checks, and did.

What came out

Tower. Power collected by one identical tower, out of 200,000 watts sent:

The resonance route is worse: a 57 metre tower is far too small to drive a wave about 38,000 km long. A hundred million volts on the dome is also more than three times what the air around it can hold.

Signalling is another matter. The US Navy radiated about 8 watts from 2.6 megawatts at 76 cycles a second, enough to reach submarines over about half the world's surface. And the planet does ring: the patent says the lowest frequency "would appear to be six per second", against a measured 7.8. Wardenclyffe as a signalling station was physically sound. As a power station it was not.

Sky. Mars was up, but low. On 1 July it stood 18 degrees high at 9 pm and dropped behind the Front Range about 10:10. By the last week of July it was behind the mountains before full dark. It was about 2 AU away, roughly three times farther than in January 1899.

Of the Corums' seven specific storm claims, none matches where Jupiter and Io really were, even allowing 20 minutes. On 21 July Io's orbital phase was 12.8 degrees, and the storm they predict needs 205 to 260.

Beam. At 50 million volts, one charge:

Two hundred miles of air weighs as much as a wall of water 388 metres thick, and no energy lets an electron or proton beam cross it. Charged beams also spread, and a straight line leaves the curved Earth about 8 km above the ground at that distance. The verdict: not plausible in air. No particle-beam weapon has been deployed.

What this does not show

• Tower. These are estimates good to a factor of 3 to 10, and the tower's operating frequency could not be confirmed in a primary source. Short-range resonant power does work: a 2007 MIT team sent 60 watts over more than two metres at about 40%.
• Sky. Tesla never dated his signals, so the results show what was possible on a given night, not what he heard. The Colorado Springs Notes were not read, and the skyline came from sparse samples, so the date Mars slipped behind the mountains falls between 23 and 27 July.
• Beam. This tests the claim as reported. Tesla never published a full design, and a different mechanism would need its own check. Read the electron figure as 140 to 170 metres and the heavy ion as about a centimetre.
• Corrections. The results file overstates the Navy system ("covered the globe"), gives Tesla's Earth frequency as 6 to 12 and dates Mars's disappearance to 23 July. The book corrected these, as does this page. An untraceable "elastic system" remark is left out.

Where it goes in the books

Sections Four (the tower), Five (the sky) and Seven (the beam) of the AI's Interlude, "The Machine Checks the Hero", in Book 5 of the Hidden in Plain Sight series, The Man Out of Time (first draft, October 2026). They tie to Chapters 10, 11, 13 and 16.

Check it yourself: each study's results file names its script and its sources, and you can ask for them through the contact form. If you spot an error in the physics, please tell Paul.