Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren bogelbam here late in a business called Visive Technologies
Speaker 1: formerly Texan, completed a tower off of I thirty five
Speaker 1: near Milford, Texas. With its lattice style structural supports and
Speaker 1: bulbous top. It bears a distinct resemblance to Nicola Tesla's
Speaker 1: Warden Cliff Tower, sometimes called the Tesla Tower, which was
Speaker 1: an ill faded power project envisioned by the famous engineer
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century. The tower was meant to
Speaker 1: provide free energy all over the planet using wireless technology,
Speaker 1: but instead wound up scrapped by creditors after Tesla couldn't
Speaker 1: pay the mortgage on the property. Viziv's vision statement, rendered
Speaker 1: in all caps on its website, is to power the
Speaker 1: planet and bring light to the world, indicating that its
Speaker 1: primary goal is indeed power related. They're aiming to offer
Speaker 1: up electricity without traditional infrastructure as part of a partnership
Speaker 1: with Baylor University. If it's anything like Tesla system, it
Speaker 1: could also offer new ways to send signals for radio
Speaker 1: communications and global positioning systems, and it could bring electricity
Speaker 1: to the one point three billion people worldwide who don't
Speaker 1: have it and don't have the infrastructure to get it.
Speaker 1: According to company literature, the endeavor relies heavily on what
Speaker 1: are called Zenic surface waves. These waves, named for Jonathan Zenic,
Speaker 1: a twenty century physicist and electrical engineer, are electromagnetic waves
Speaker 1: that harness Earth's surface. Is a sort of waveguide or
Speaker 1: conduit for electricity and communication signals, so powerful that they
Speaker 1: enveloped the entire planet without the need for wires. Unlike
Speaker 1: so many other types of transmissions, zenic waves don't suffer
Speaker 1: degradation from challenges like solar flares, lightning, or other electromagnetic pulses.
Speaker 1: Sounds like a fairly straightforward corporate experiment so far right.
Speaker 1: Set up power transmitters in one location and then the
Speaker 1: receivers in another, tweak the variables of it, and then
Speaker 1: determine if you can make your theories work in real
Speaker 1: world conditions. The thing is, when it comes to Nicola
Speaker 1: Tesla's legacy, nothing is simple. His legend is fertile ground,
Speaker 1: not only for real modern science, but also for fringe
Speaker 1: theories of all kinds. Down the rabbit hole we go.
Speaker 1: Let's review in Tesla brilliant possibly mentally ill scientist died
Speaker 1: in the hotel he was living in. U S officials
Speaker 1: immediately seized the scientists research, partially in hopes of finding
Speaker 1: plans for a secret death ray particle being weapon, and
Speaker 1: of course, also to prevent access spies from getting their
Speaker 1: hands on any useful scientific revelations. Hundreds of pages of
Speaker 1: those documents were subsequently classified and went missing. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until sixteen that a Freedom of Information Act forced authorities
Speaker 1: to unveil some of those papers. It's possible that Tesla's
Speaker 1: tower had potential applications in some sort of particle ray weapon,
Speaker 1: hence the classified files. Some have even taken to calling
Speaker 1: the device a piece ray, a kind of defense system
Speaker 1: that the war hating test created to prevent countries from
Speaker 1: attacking each other, a powerful, invisible wall of force that
Speaker 1: would keep enemies at bay without resorting to the violence
Speaker 1: of bullets or bombs. Flash forward to modern times. Fringe
Speaker 1: theorists pounced on the fact that two of visive technologies
Speaker 1: top leaders are ex military with histories in ballistic missile defense.
Speaker 1: This at a time when the U S Commander in
Speaker 1: chief is speaking about a space based missile defense system
Speaker 1: and the residents of Milford, Texas reasonably worried about the
Speaker 1: tower's purpose. But there's more. When Tesla died in three
Speaker 1: and U S authorities snapped up his research, they called
Speaker 1: in a well regarded electrical engineer from m I T
Speaker 1: to sift through the papers and note anything useful. That
Speaker 1: engineer was Dr John G. Trump, uncle to President Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: After evaluating Tesla's work, John Trump scoffed at many of
Speaker 1: the genius's ideas as speculative. But why then were these
Speaker 1: documents classified for so long? And is it just a
Speaker 1: coincidence that Visit Tower was constructed after a Trump family
Speaker 1: member was elected to office. Visit Technologies did not respond
Speaker 1: to the request of the How Stuff Works editorial staff
Speaker 1: for comment on this story, but Michael Taylor, vice president
Speaker 1: of Communications at Visive, had indicated previously that the first
Speaker 1: rounds of testing involved low power waves that wouldn't have
Speaker 1: any negative effects on humans or animals, and has said
Speaker 1: that the company only wants to improve the lives of
Speaker 1: people in the community and quote the world around us.
Speaker 1: As of June eighteen, the company had planned to conduct
Speaker 1: tests for perhaps six months to a year and then
Speaker 1: use those results to reevaluate its future plans for further experiments.
Speaker 1: As to what sort of plans those might be, we'll
Speaker 1: just have to wait and see. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart
Speaker 1: Media and how Stuff Works. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other electrifying topics, visit our home planet, how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com