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Query: Tesla and ADA
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Subject: Tesla
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 10:52:41 +0100
From: "Michael Maar" <michael.maar@snafu.de>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
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Hello,
Reading the strange and thrilling book of the "Jane's Defence
Weekly"-Aerospace Consultant Nick Cook, "The Hunt for Zero Point. One Man's
Journey to Discover the Biggest Secret Since the Invention of the Atom Bomb"
(Century, London), I find one passage not without possible connection to
Nabokov. In chapter 25, Cook writes about the Serb engineer Tesla who in
1884 emigrated to America and worked, having left Edison's Company, on the
field of wireless transmission of energy. To quote Cook: "Tesla's wireless
energy transmission system was initially based upon technology for sending
power through the air, but he soon developped a far more efficient
transmission medium: the ground. In a series of experiments in Colorado,
Tesla showed that the earth could be adapted from its customary role as an
energy sinkhole - a place to dump excess electricity - into a powerful
conductor; a giant planet-wide energy transmission system that obviated the
need for wire." And then Cook quotes a strange legend which, if known by
Nabokov, could have been with some influence on "Ada". "One of the wilder
theories that still cling to his memory revolves around a supposed
experiment to beam some kind of message to the Arctic explorer Robert Peary,
who in mid-1908 was making an attempt to reach the North Pole. According to
legend, Tesla, who had built a powerful transmitter at Wardencliff on Long
Island, beamed the 'message' on 30 June and awaited news from Peary. The
explorer saw nothing, but thousands of miles away, in a remote corner of
Siberia, a massive explosion equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT devastated
500,000 acres of land centered on a place called Tunguska. The Tunguska
'incident' is generally ascribed to the impact of a comet or a meteorite,
but the absence of evidence for the impact theory has enabled Tesla
proponents to maintain the line that it was Tesla's 'death ray' that caused
the blast. Certainly, Tesla himself seemed to believe he was resposible, for
immediately afterwards he dismantled the 'weapoon' and reverted to other
pursuits." Could Nabokov have heard of that story? Certainly it would have
supported his thoughts about electricity about which, as about time and
space, he believed Man to know "nothing". And, curious enough, in Antiterra
electricity is prohibited after some unspecified desaster. Could he have
alluded to Tesla?