by Erik Davis
Of all the Prometheans who laid the wiring for this electric New Jerusalem, none dreamed harder than Nikola Tesla, who never met a natural force he didn’t want to harness for humanity. An ethnic Serbian born in Croatia, Tesla came to America as a penniless young man, with dreams of wooing the great Thomas Edison with his impressive designs. When Tesla died in 1943, he had more than seven hundred patents under his belt and could lay claim to having invented or discovered the induction motor, the polyphase alternating current (AC) system, the Tesla coil transformer, fluorescent lights, and the principle of the rotating magnetic field. He dabbled with X-rays and wireless communication before, respectively, Röntgen and Marconi. He tamed Niagara Falls to illuminate a city, and his AC induction generators and electrical motors continue to generate light and power across the globe. Even as modern civilization levitates above the belching turbines of the industrial age into the virtual empyrean, it continues to owe much of its lifeblood to Tesla.
Tesla was also the ultimate visionary crank, and to this day, both the man and his notions radiate a powerfully uncanny and mercurial aura. Tesla’s habits were severely odd, his speculations both wild and prophetic, and his most spectacular (and unproved) claims vaulted over the primitive science fiction of his day. Tesla was no Spiritualist—his belief that human beings were meat machines pretty much staved off any lapses into occult theorizing. On the other hand, the inventor was not above chatting with the Theosophical cover boy Swami Vivekananda when the guru hobnobbed his way through Western cities in the 1890s; subsequently Tesla began to occasionally slip Vedic notions about prana and akasha into his writings on the “luminiferous ether.”
But the reason that Tesla cuts such an enigmatic figure is that he seemed to possess an intuitive, visceral, almost supernatural knowledge of the electromagnetic mysteries, and investigators are still picking up the strings he left dangling. According to Tesla’s own memoirs, his inventions sometimes popped into his head fully formed, as if he had simply downloaded the prototypes from the astral plane. The notion of a motor capable of generating alternating current—perhaps his most important invention—came to the young engineering student one day when he was strolling with a friend in a park in Budapest. Moved by the stunning sunset, Tesla recited a verse from, of all things, Goethe’s Faust; in a moment “the idea came like a flash of lightning.”33
Years later, Tesla’s alternating current system was sold to the American tycoon George Westinghouse. This pitched the young inventor into a fierce public battle with Thomas Edison, who wanted his own direct current system to power the land. The “War of the Currents” unveiled the dark side of the electromagnetic imaginary, injecting morbid spectacle into late-nineteenth-century electrical culture. The two warring camps publicly electrocuted animals using their rival’s systems—grotesque performances that inevitably gave rise to the first electrocution of a condemned prisoner. Edison arranged to use Tesla’s system to execute one William Kemmler, but Edison’s engineers botched the job and Kemmler had to be zapped twice. This gory sacrifice on the altar of electric utopia was widely reported by the popular press; Scientific American had already praised the method of dispatch, arguing that such “death by lightning” would “imbue the uneducated masses with a deeper terror.”34
For his own public performances, Tesla preferred spectacles with a more crowd-pleasing if Faustian bent. Partly to prove the safety of his system, which eventually won the field, Tesla would saturate himself with electricity, passing hundreds of thousands of volts through his glowing body. In the words of the Electrician: “Who could … remain unimpressed in the face of the weird waving of glowing tubes in the suitably darkened room, and the mysterious voice issuing from the midst of an electrostatic field?”35 The machine that generated some of Tesla’s spectacular onstage fireworks was the famous induction coil that still bears his name. Small Tesla coils are widely used in electronic gear, but their larger kin are most famous for helping generate the tremendous artificial lightning storms that dance about Doctor Frankenstein’s laboratory in James Whale’s classic film version of the tale.
Like many of Tesla’s inventions, the Tesla coil exploits the principle of resonance, which has become such a common trope in contemporary thought as to warrant a brief description here. Not so much a law of nature as a deep habit, resonance pops up across the board, emerging in electrical systems, steam engines, and molecular dynamics, as well as Tuvan overtone chanting and the tuning of radio and TV sets. Everything vibrates, and when the oscillating vibrations of different systems coincide, or resonate, large quantities of energy can be exchanged from one system to the other. That’s why powerful singers can shatter wineglasses; by energetically belting out a tone that matches the resonant frequency of the container, they are able to amplify the vibrations until the vessel explodes.
During the summers of 1899 and 1900, when he built a lab in Colorado Springs, Tesla performed experiments that pushed his own resonant intuitions into heights worthy of the great and terrible Oz. In a remarkable symbolic act, Tesla became the first Promethean to actually generate lightning, producing flashes over a hundred feet long. Investigating the natural lightning storms endemic to the region, Tesla also made the astonishing discovery that the planet itself generated stationary waves. As he put it, “The earth was … literally alive with electrical vibrations.”36 With these planetary waves in mind, Tesla conjured his most enigmatic notion: that the earth itself could be used as a resonant conductor, a kind of vibrating tuning fork that could broadcast power freely across the globe. After performing one experiment in Colorado, Tesla claimed that he had sent electrical energy back and forth across the entire planet without losing any energy along the way. Inspired by the natural laws he claimed to have discovered, Tesla imagined a wireless power network that could produce an earthly paradise. Broadcast power would transform ice caps into arable land, clean up cities, and abolish war, poverty, and hunger. Though some free energy freaks are still convinced that Tesla discovered some still-untapped electromagnetic phenomenon, most scientists today put this particular dream of his into the crank box.
Tesla electrified techno-utopianism, but he also tapped into the dark side of the force. Beneath his arcadian visions lies a violent world of electrocution, death rays, autonomous weapons, and wireless mind control. In the 1890s, popular periodicals reported that Tesla had secretly invented electromagnetically guided torpedoes—rumors that proved to be true. As he grew older and more destitute, the inventor became increasingly obsessed with wireless mayhem on a mass scale. Tesla painted scenarios of horrifying “death rays” and robot warriors that would supplant human soldiers—smart mobile weapons similar to those now making their way through the ranks of the U.S. military machine. But Tesla’s most apocalyptic claim was his assertion that by keying into the resonant frequency of the earth, he could split the planet like an “apple”—a fit image of knowledge gone awry.
Even during his mind-blowing Colorado experiments, Tesla was savvy enough about human nature to recognize that a global fountain of power alone would not ensure utopia. So Tesla coupled his plans for broadcast power with the wireless delivery of information—what we now call radio. As he wrote in the Electrical Experimenter:
The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun’s energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land.37
Though Tesla ended up never building his great wireless transmitter, his vision of a global high-voltage Emerald City still glitters over the technological horizon. Like many techno-utopians today, Tesla held the curious belief that technical solutions to the problem of global communication would magically dissolve the social, psycholog
ical, and political antagonisms that beset humankind. When Tesla wrote that “Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment,”38 he was not just calling for the global imposition of modern cultural values about reason and progress. He was also suggesting that this “universal enlightenment” could be incarnated in the all-pervading waves of the wireless, just as today’s Internet boosters believe that the decentralized structure of the Net or social media will itself instill the information age with a democratic and participatory politics.
The similarity between these two technical dreams should not be surprising. For just as online enthusiasts project their utopias into the unformed “space” of cyberspace, so did Tesla and other radio-heads project their hopes into the wide-open spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum. Though Maxwell had predicted the existence of radio waves in the 1860s, it took later technologists like Tesla and Marconi to prove that the invisible waves could be used as a medium of communication. Once tapped by technology, radio reproduced the now familiar pattern of intense technical development and the usual fatuous prophecies about world peace, democratic communication, and cultural transformation. Radio also attracted legions of hackers—hobbyists, teenage and otherwise, who endowed their home-brewed crystal sets with an undeniable charge of wonder, invention, and anarchic play. Weenies across the globe chatted up a storm while making important discoveries about the spectrum, especially on the shortwave side of things.
By the 1920s, however, federal and commercial interests began stringing regulatory barbed wire across the once many-to-many spectrum, professionalizing and segmenting a free-range medium into the commercial broadcast market we know today. But even as the airwaves began filling up with baseball play-by-plays and ads for laundry soap, radio freaks still heard some strange and otherworldly sounds in their crude headphones—cosmic echoes of the spooks that once haunted the old magnetic ethereum. Thomas Watson got an early taste of such unearthly transmissions late at night in Bell’s lab, when he would listen to the snaps, bird chirps, and ghostly grinding noises that hopped along the telephone circuit. “My theory at this time was that the currents causing these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter explanation but I never detected any regularity in them that might indicate they were intelligent signals.”39 Though the noises he heard may well have had terrestrial origins, Watson made the mind-blowing discovery that electromagnetic waves enabled human ears to directly perceive emanations from the cosmos. And like countless others after him, Watson could hardly suppress the intuition that such whispers from space might hold meanings both mystic and informational.
Watson was not the only electrofreak to believe that he was picking up signals from other planets. During the eventful Colorado summer of 1899, Tesla also picked up transmissions on his 200-foot radio tower, strangely rhythmic tones that led him to tentatively conclude that he was “the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.” Though astronomers would later tune in to such stellar pulses on a regular basis, Tesla’s public announcement of this first hidey-ho from Venus or Mars (the most likely choices) was met with derision. But Tesla held firm. “Man is not the only being in the Infinite gifted with mind.”40 Never one to turn down the opportunity for feverish ponderings, Tesla even speculated that aliens might already move among us—invisibly.
For decades after Tesla received his transmissions, many wireless operators picked up powerful, persistent, and seemingly unexplainable signals, some of which were reported to be Pynchonesque repetitions of the letter V in Morse code. Marconi himself claimed to have received such signals on the low end of the longwave spectrum, and in 1921 flatly declared that he believed they originated from other civilizations in space. On August 24, 1924, when Mars passed unusually close to the earth, an official call was put out for civilian and military transmitters to voluntarily shut down in order to leave the airwaves open for the Martians; radio hackers were treated to a symphony of freak signals. Scientists today would describe the bulk of these sounds as sferics—a wide range of amazing radio noises stirred up by the millions of lightning bolts that crackle through the atmosphere every day. Skeptics would chalk up the rest to the human imagination and its boundless ability to project meaningful patterns into the random static of the universe. But this argument, however true in its own terms, distorts the larger technocultural loop: new technologies of perception and communication open up new spaces, and these spaces are always mapped, on one level or another, through the imagination.
For millennia, the hardwired side of human perception has been limited to the peculiar sensory apparatus constructed by our DNA, an apparatus that partly determines the apparent nature of “the world.” In this sense, dogs and bees and jellyfish—with their own unique ratios of frequencies, sense, and perception—live in a different world than we do. New technologies of perception thus unfold a new world, or at least new dimensions of universal nature. When ocular instruments extended human sight toward Galileo’s moons or Hooke’s microscopic cells, these tools created new regions of causal explanation and knowledge. But they also evoked a sense of wonder and mystery, forcing us to reconfigure the limits of ourselves and to shape the human meaning, if any, of the new cosmological spaces we found ourselves reflected in.
In the book Towards a Cosmic Music, the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen describes the human body as an incredibly complicated vibrating instrument of perception. The composer, who traveled the spaceways between electronic music and mysticism, argued that the “esoteric” is simply that which cannot yet be explained by science. “Every genuine composition makes conscious something of this esoteric realm. This process is endless, and there will be more and more esotericism as knowledge and science become increasingly capable of revealing human beings as perceivers.”41 And transmitters as well. Spiritual or not, we are beings of vibrating sensation, floating in an infinite sea of pulsing waves that roll and resonate between the synapse and the farthest star.
III
The Gnostic Infonaut
In 1945, near the village of Nag Hammadi, an Egyptian peasant with the heavyweight name of Muhammad Ali stumbled across an old jar. Standing with his fellows beside the crumbled talus of the Jabal al-Tarif, Ali hesitated a moment before opening the container, knowing that such an ancient vessel might well contain a nefarious jinn. But Ali was not really a superstitious man, or at least not a squeamish one (a month later, he would hack his father’s murderer to bits). And so he smashed open the jar, wherein he discovered a number of leather-bound scriptures written in Coptic, a form of Hellenized Egyptian prevalent during the late Roman Empire. The texts were not scrolls but codices, ancestors of the bound book, and they contained the largest cache of original Gnostic writings ever discovered.
Ali could not read Coptic, and after wrapping the volumes up in his cloak, he deposited the booty with his mother. Apparently more interested in their value as fuel than as data, she tossed some of the documents on the fire. When the police came to question Ali about the blood feud his family was embroiled in, he hid some of the books with a local priest. Others were sold to neighbors for peanuts, and eventually Bahij Ali, the one-eyed outlaw of al-Qasr, got his hands on most of the texts, which he promptly palmed off to a number of antiquities dealers in Cairo. A portion of one codex was smuggled out of the country and eventually purchased by Carl Jung.
Everyone who knows something of Gnosticism knows this tale, told and retold until it seems a narrative worthy of Indiana Jones. And no wonder. The discovery of ancient things, of tombs and mummies and musty scrolls, is about as close as moderns usually get to the ancient sense of revelation. Impoverished peasants are transformed into so many Aladdins; archaeologists and bespectacled Near Eastern scholars become the hierophants of secrets from a mysterious past. In the popular mind, the simple fact of the discovery is often more exotic than its purported contents; the collective imagination rushes into the
gap between the first tentative newspaper reports and the careful pronouncements made by scholars years later. It’s as if the serendipitous delivery of ancient data threatens to change everything, to reveal that our history, our faiths, and even ourselves are not what we were taught to believe. Such popular desires cropped up around the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered two years after the Nag Hammadi texts by shepherd boys in the Qumran caves above Palestine’s great saline lake. When a ferocious scholarly war over information control kept the translations of the texts out of the public eye, popular rumors claimed that an academic cabal was suppressing secrets that could knock the cornerstone out of the vast edifice of historical Christianity. But while the Qumran materials did prove that Jesus was hardly the only messianic Jewish radical in town, the Church easily withstood the eventual publication of the scrolls, proving once again that the shifting veils that cloak secrets are often far more fascinating than the naked truths themselves.
Many such veils cloak Gnosticism, a mystical mode of Christianity that arose in late antiquity, held a rather sour view of material life, and embraced the direct individual experience of gnosis—a mystical influx of self-knowledge with strong Platonic overtones. Unfortunately, even this relatively basic definition of Gnosticism would be meat for the hawks of Near Eastern academe, since the origins, rituals, philosophy, and influence of the Gnostics are notoriously difficult to reconstruct. This ambiguity, combined with the bad press piled on by a Roman Church desperate to maintain ideological control, has made Gnosticism a kind of Silly Putty religious stance, capable of representing any number of different philosophies and practices. Before 1945, almost everything known about early Gnostic thought came through the writings of its orthodox enemies, who were not exactly inclined to cut the “heretics” much slack. But Ali’s jar contained something different. Unlike nearly all the texts from the ancient world that we can read today, the Nag Hammadi codices weren’t copies of copies of copies, endlessly xeroxed by erring scribes and meddling redactors over the centuries. Though the texts themselves may have been compiled and buried by orthodox Pachomian monks, the Gnostic signals themselves come to us unsullied, straight from the ancient horse’s mouth.
