Here is another article on Tesla:
10 Uncomfortable Truths About Nikola Tesla - Listverse
Absurd Tesla Claims
"Thanks to the Tesla revival, every absurd claim he made to newspapers back in the day is now being repeated as fact. The truth is that Tesla made many claims so far out of left field that they would destroy a scientist’s credibility even today, often with no evidence or results to back them up. But if Tesla was crazy, he was crazy like a fox. Oftentimes, his claims were reported shortly before the historical experiments of other scientists.
For example, when Marconi was gearing up for some important radio signal tests, Tesla told the media that he had already received radio transmissions that he believed were
from Mars. With
his technology, he claimed, we would soon be able to communicate with other planets almost instantaneously. Other projects he claimed to be working on included a torpedo that could be recalled even after being fired and a powerful death ray.
As bizarre as these claims sounded, they gave the impression that Tesla was light-years ahead of everyone else. But if the general public was impressed, the scientific community was decidedly not, regarding Tesla as being mostly full of hot air. While this is an overreaction—Tesla certainly did contribute to our body of scientific knowledge—the plausibility of many of Tesla’s inventions is greatly exaggerated."
The Wardenclyffe Tower fiasco
"Tesla’s most ambitious project—and his biggest failure—was Wardenclyffe Tower. He envisioned a gigantic tower that could transmit incredibly powerful amounts of electricity and wireless communication all around the globe. He asked for $1 million to fund the project, which is close to $30 million in today’s money. However, the
only major backer he secured was J.P. Morgan, who offered him $150,000 dollars, or about $4 million now. Morgan also wanted a stake in Tesla’s patents, which indicates that he might not have had much faith in his investment.
Once Tesla had his funding, he went straight to work. He purchased plots of land and hired laborers to build his tower, which consisted of 16 steel supports that went hundreds of feet into the Earth. He intended to use the Earth itself as a conductor and believed that the supports from his tower would “grip the Earth” and “make it quiver” even at those relatively shallow depths.
While many people think the structure failed because Tesla didn’t receive the proper funding, he apparently completed the plans outlined in his patent and produced a transmitter. The problem was that it didn’t work. Tesla was desperate to fix it and begged Morgan for more money, but Morgan refused, disappointed in the initial results.
Modern-day experts who have studied the Wardenclyffe Tower have come away with
more questions than answers. They couldn’t figure out how Tesla’s device was supposed to accomplish its intended purposes, and the same patent that proposed the plan to use the Earth as a conductor contained another plan to shoot the energy into the Earth’s ionosphere. They aren’t sure which method he intended to use or even which one he actually tested. It’s likely that no money in the world would have resulted in the finished product when its designer didn’t even have a clear vision of his immense project. "
