photo #3910173

• @publicdomainrev Double-exposure photograph, staged for Century magazine in 1899, showing Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla seated beneath a giant “magnifying transmitter”, arcing 22-foot-long bolts of electricity. Beneath this copy of the photo Tesla inscribed: “To my illustrious friend Sir William Crookes of whom I always think and whose kind letters I never answer!”. ⁠⁠Too busy to return letters, Tesla was hard at work making the medium obsolete. In the Century article “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, the inventor describes how his “mind was dominated by the idea of effecting communication to any distance through the earth or environing medium”. Tesla had hit on the idea of a planetary messaging platform, for both tellurian and extraterrestrial recipients, which would consume decades of his life. Why fuss with laying telegraph cables (or power lines) if the earth itself could deliver electrical signals of varying strengths to a specific addressee?⁠⁠