Skeptoid ® Says . . .
An early and infamous demonstration of this Zetetic Astronomy model was something called the Bedford Level Experiment of 1870. In this experiment, members of Parallax’s Universal Zetetic Society bet £500 that a straight, 6-mile stretch of the Old Bedford River could be proven flat by surveyors with angle-measuring surveying instruments called theodolites. It was a great media circus with newspapers involved, and the various trials and retrials were debated, fell into disarray, and eventually ended in lawsuits.
For the next twenty-five years, the flat-Earth belief was led by Charles and Marjory Johnson, who lived in a remote desert homestead in California and called themselves the Covenant People’s Church. They formed the International Flat Earth Research Society of America and took over where Shenton left off, publishing their periodical, Flat Earth News. The Johnsons pushed their fire-and-brimstone version of biblical literalism about as far as possible, but peppered it with broad-spectrum conspiracy-mongering. The Johnsons fervently promoted any and every crank theory of the universe, crank theory of physics, whatever, that came along—anything that would support their view that believed science is a deceit.
This was the Apollo era of the Moon landings, and the Johnsons spent a lot time disputing the validity of the Moon landings. The couple devoted much of their newsletter space to charging author Arthur C. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick, who cowrote the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, with faking the Moon landing, as had Shenton before his death. The Johnson’s house burned down in 1995, leaving them destitute, and the publications ceased.
With the onset of the twenty-first century and the rise of the Internet, flat-Earth believers have had ample venues for propagating their beliefs. The biblical literalism angle has largely dwindled away, replaced by alternative science claims, conspiratorial distrust of authority, and ignorance-based ridicule of sciences such as global warming and quantum physics, which are all claimed to be part of the master plan to hide the greatest truth of a flat Earth.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
There was a sharp spike in interest in this conspiracy theory in 2016 when a rapper named B.o.B, who had been promoting the idea, was corrected over Twitter by famous astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. It actually escalated into a rap battle, with Tyson assisted by his musically inclined nephew. The whole phenomenon has take on a life of its own, spreading to NBA athletes and various other celebrities, all embracing the promise of forbidden knowledge and the exposure of the corrupt elite.
The Explanation
Although the Earth’s spherical shape is a self-evident fact supported by so much blatantly obvious proof that it should be unnecessary to even discuss, it can still be an interesting intellectual exercise to find these proofs. Perhaps the best is the existence of time zones, and how we can pick up the telephone in the daytime and talk to someone in another country where it is dark. If the Earth were flat and the sun merely circled above it such that the region below it were most brightly lit, there can be no spot on that flat plane from where the sun would not be visible. That’s not an illuminati lie, it’s geometry.
With telescopes we can watch planets such as Jupiter and Saturn and see their cloud features rotate out of view and back in. We can watch the phases of the Moon change as its spherical surface rotates in and out of the sunlight, and we can even see the curved edge of the Earth’s shadow darken part of the Moon during a lunar eclipse. And if we look at the stars at night and compare their positions simultaneously from different places around the world, there is no possible model to explain what we see except that of the observation being made from points on the surface of a sphere with a radius of 3,957 miles.
Although many obvious facts don’t seem to be worth explaining, it’s always interesting to learn how we know what we know.
Nikola Tesla
* * *
Date: 1856–1943
Location: United States
The Conspirators: World governments wishing to repress their citizens’ access to technology
The Victims: Consumers worldwide who are robbed of advanced technologies
* * *
The Theory
If everything the Internet said about Nikola Tesla were true, we would all have flying cars and holodecks and transporters. This engineer has had his name co-opted by conspiracy theorists more than any other person. No matter what magical technology you wish were real, you can find someone who believes Tesla invented it. The form this usually takes is a vague claim that Tesla invented limitless electricity, free to everyone, forever. But since it would be impossible to meter and sell, nobody would invest in it; indeed, say the conspiracy theorists, his invention was actually suppressed by profit-driven utilities and regulators.
While limitless energy is the main invention that conspiracy theorists mention, his other inventions are treated the same way. They say his inventions were seized by the government and Tesla himself was written out of the history books. The claim that Tesla created fantastic inventions that are suppressed by governments to protect their profits remains a staple of Internet conspiracy culture.
The Truth
Nikola Tesla was a top-notch electrical engineer, but almost all of the fanciful inventions attributed to him by conspiracy theorists are fictional.
The Backstory
Nikola Tesla was almost thirty before he was finally able to immigrate to the United States from what is now Croatia. He’d been stuck in frustrating work as a telephone engineer in a remote European country with few resources or opportunities, while electrical technology was exploding elsewhere in the world.
Once Tesla arrived in the United States, he took a job in the laboratory of the great American inventor Thomas Edison, whom Tesla found to be gruff, unethical, and stingy. A contract dispute was the final straw that prompted him to head out on his own, but he had other (and better) reasons. He knew that Edison would have owned anything Tesla developed while in his employ, and Tesla had several good ideas that he wanted to keep for himself. So, on his own, Tesla filed a number of patents for an AC induction motor and for the distribution of alternating current via an electric grid. The acquisition of these patents by Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company made Tesla’s fortune and fame, and provided him with the resources he needed to do further research.
Tesla gained notoriety with photos of himself fearlessly sitting beside a giant Tesla coil, a high-voltage device popular today for its ability to throw off lightning bolts from a doughnut-shaped coil at the top. And, from his now-famous labs in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and New York State, Tesla plunged headlong into his more fanciful, theoretical work. He was obsessed with the idea of wireless power transmission. He did experiments with X-rays and radio, winning patents still in use today, but not really excelling in the business side of things. His next great investor, the industrialist J.P. Morgan, stopped financing Tesla when Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi beat Tesla in successfully transmitting radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean.
Tesla sunk what funds he had left into building his great tower at Wardenclyffe in New York, with which he hoped to wirelessly transmit power around the world, and into his experiments in Colorado transmitting electricity through the ground. Some reports claim that he had success with this, but the losses were enormous, costing far more electrical power than could be successfully received.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
Tesla’s landmark Wardenclyffe Tower was built in Shoreham, New York, in 1901. Originally conceived as a radio transmission tower in which he could transmit radio signals and even facsimile images to Europe, his plans soon expanded, and he imagined wirelessly transmitting electrical power all over the world. It never worked, and with our improved knowledge of physics today, we now know that it never could have worked. Investors pulled their funds, and the tower was demolished by the creditors in 1917.
Eventually Tesla ran out of money. His experiments came to an end and he moved into a New York hotel to live out the r
est of his life as a recluse with odd habits, a deteriorating personality, and monomaniacal personal hygiene.
However, when he died, the United States was in the midst of World War II. Hoping to find some kind of weapon or useful invention, the government took advantage of Tesla’s status as an immigrant and an obscure “alien property” act to seize all of his possessions. It took only three days to analyze what was there before issuing the following report:
[Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.
Sadly, after such a magnificent and promising career, Tesla’s final gift to the world consisted of nothing more than useless, rambling notes.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
Nikola Tesla did invent one useful technology—and only one, so far as researchers have turned up—that was not also being simultaneously developed by his contemporaries. It was radio control. At the 1898 Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden in New York, Tesla amazed a crowd by wirelessly controlling a 4-foot-long model boat around a pool of water, and even flashing its lights. Nobody present had ever seen anything like it.
The Explanation
No other name in history has been caked with as much false pseudoscience and false history as Nikola Tesla. It’s true that he was a brilliant engineer, and he was certainly ahead of most of his colleagues in the field. Yet virtually every invention attributed to him was really just something that he was the first to patent in the United States.
Tesla is best known for the development of AC (alternating current), and his war with Edison who favored DC (direct current). Tesla’s AC system is the one used worldwide today for transmitting power. However, experimental AC grids were already being tested in Europe when Tesla was still a young telephone engineer in Croatia. Tesla was simply the lucky first one to get the patents filed in the United States.
Tesla is also known as the inventor of the electric induction motor, a big improvement over the DC motors already in existence. Again, he was not the first: Galileo Ferraris had a prototype working two years before Tesla did. But again, Tesla was the first one to the United States patent office.
A clever showman, Tesla was keenly aware of his almost-magical reputation and knew to exploit it. The famous photographs of him sitting in his Colorado Springs laboratory surrounded by lightning bolts from his Tesla coil were double exposures made for publicity purposes. It would have been deadly to actually sit there.
Tesla’s famous tower at Wardenclyffe, which he was never able to complete, is often characterized as a way to provide free electricity to everyone in the world by transmitting it through the air. However, even if it had worked, there would have been nothing free about it. The electricity would still have had to be generated somewhere, at the usual cost; Tesla’s idea was only about transmitting it. Today we have a much better understanding of the ionosphere, and we now know that his Wardenclyffe Tower technology would not have worked. This is why there have been no serious attempts to replicate it.
In addition, many of his experiments with wireless power transmission were based on bad information. Tesla hoped that electromagnetic waves could be persuaded to work in a manner that we know today they don’t. He hoped there would be no losses sending electricity through the Earth, losses that we know today are huge. In short, for much of his later work, he was simply wrong, dependent on crackpot mathematical ideas that were, even in his day, rejected by most mainstream mathematicians and physicists.
Tesla is also known for the creation of a powerful death ray. However, no corroborating information ever surfaced, either in his notes or from any of his lab assistants. This death ray was something he often spoke of, but only during the final years of his life, when he was destitute and consumed by his descent into obsessive compulsive disorder in a New York hotel.
However, Tesla does not deserve to be maligned in any way. He was massively productive and innovative, and spent his entire working career at the very forefront of his field. In order to patent working devices, he had to tweak or improve existing technologies to make his patent applications valid. Every textbook on electromagnetic theory rightly confers upon Tesla the enormous credit he deserves (contrary to the claims of conspiracy theorists who claim he has been “written out of history”). He was no slouch. He just didn’t have the mystical, godlike powers that so many people attribute to him, and nothing he ever worked on remains a mystery to science today. Tesla was perhaps ten years ahead of his time . . . seventy-five years ago.
Free Energy
* * *
Date: Ever since the industrial age
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: Governments, energy companies, regulators
The Victims: Consumers worldwide
* * *
The Theory
If you are an authoritarian government, one easy way to control a population is to make them dependent upon a base necessity, like electricity. If people were able to generate their own electricity for free, and no longer had to buy it to heat their homes, drive their cars, get their news, or do almost anything else, they would no longer be dependent upon the establishment and would thus be more difficult to control.
Given this certainty, it is no surprise that a very vocal community of conspiracy theorists believes that this is exactly what has happened with electrical power generation and transmission. Many theorists believe that electricity can easily be generated for free, but that governments and industry suppress that knowledge for fear of losing their control over the population.
The Truth
Free energy machines do not and cannot exist, as the laws of physics make them impossible. Specifically, the laws of thermodynamics state that when energy is drawn from a system, the system is left with less energy. You can’t drink water from a glass and have the glass still remain full.
The Backstory
Free energy is a compelling proposition. We all wish we could power our homes and cars with free, limitless electricity. The culture of crankery has responded, with centuries of proposals for free energy. Today these proposals often take the form of theoretical high-tech concepts, but for most of history, the idea of free energy has been based on mechanical perpetual motion machines.
The quest for perpetual motion has been around as long as humans have been using machines to do work. The first known concepts were called overbalanced wheels intended to spin forever all by themselves, and these were imagined in many different designs. One had spokes filled with mercury, curved in such a way that the mercury flowed outward as each spoke moved over the top of the wheel to provide more leverage on the downstroke. The mercury flowed back inward as the spoke moved under the bottom of the wheel to provide less leverage on the upstroke. Others used hinged levers to move weights in the same way. The idea was that if a wheel could be made to turn all by itself, it could be connected to a machine to do work, or to a generator to produce free electricity. No design has ever worked, but that’s never stopped amateur engineers from trying.
Today the most common free energy device is a magnetic motor, with some arrangement of permanent magnets intended to keep a rotor always spinning, a ball always moving around some track, or some other mechanical action. No magnetic motor has ever been able to maintain its movement.
The term perpetual motion has gone somewhat out of favor for describing free energy machines, as it seems to suggest old-fashioned contraptions and clunky spoked wheels, rather than the finely machined devices that believers design today. These believers often cite complex mathematical concepts, or terminology from quantum physics, that they think might make their particular machine the first one to actually work. So the term generally used today is an over-unity device, suggesting that more energy comes out than goes in. This is exactly what perpetual motion m
eans, but the new term sounds a bit more sciencey and promising to some in their quest to create a device to produce free energy.
Terminology has, in fact, played a significant role in the modern perpetual motion community. Because many of those who tinker with this stuff are nonscientific amateurs, some can be easily tempted by words that sound like support for their concept. One great example is the term zero-point energy, which suggests an untapped energy source sitting out there in space, just waiting for someone to come along and build the right kind of device to suck that power out and put it to work. The phrase “zero-point energy” can often be found in descriptions of today’s free energy concepts.
One company in recent memory that gained a surprising amount of traction with a blatant claim of free energy production was called Steorn, formed in 2000 as a web design company. In 2006 they announced they were developing a “microgenerator.” They named their device the Orbo but would say very little about how it worked, other than to say it produced free, clean, and constant energy. They asserted that it had been validated by eight independent scientists, but (unsurprisingly) would not name them or present them to the media for interviews.
Conspiracies Declassified Page 14
