Nikola Tesla

Tesla first realized the massive potential of resonant waves in 1898 when he performed a simple experiment with an electromechanical oscillator the size of an alarm clock. He attached the device to an iron pillar that ran down through the center of his lab into the foundation of his building. His plan was to let it simply tap away until he could produce a significant vibration in the pillar. However, Tesla was unaware that the vibrations from the oscillator were being conducted through the iron pillar down into the substructure of the city. Just as earthquakes are normally the strongest at a short distance from their epicenter, nearby buildings shook and windows shattered while Tesla's lab remained unaffected. Without rapid police intervention, Tesla may have let the oscillator run all night as buildings crumbled around him.

In a later experiment using the same principle, Tesla clamped an oscillator to one of the exposed ground floor beams of a half built ten-story steel building. As Tesla told reporters later that day:"In a few minutes, I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally, the structure began to creak and weave, and the steel workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Rumors spread that the building was about to fall, and the police reserves were called out. Before anything serious happened, I took off the vibrator, put it in my pocket, and went away. But if I had kept on ten minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And, with the same vibrator, I could drop the Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour."

"The principle cannot fail," Tesla would say. He understood that a steady frequency of tiny waves would eventually create enormous ripples if they were timed just right. What Tesla demonstrated was a principle of resonance known as entrainment - the ability of a frequency to cause a less powerful frequency to fall into rhythm simply by placing the two frequency emitters in close proximity. In other words, if you take an electrical oscillator with a power rating of 10 watts that is oscillating at a frequency of 1000 cycles per second (cps), and place it next to an oscillator with a power rating of 1000 watts vibrating at a frequency of 5000 cps, eventually the slower oscillator will be entrained to vibrate at 5000 cps because of the more powerful electromagnetic field created by the 1000 watt oscillator.