So glad to hear of your gratitude for and your recognition of his work!
One, that's the whole point: they keep selling us "our power" whereas Tesla's invention demonstrated everyone would be able to tap into it without cost. Just read last Sunday's New York Times editorial about the suppression of solar energy through untenable tax increases. My point is that anything that would break the dependency chain is a threat.
Two, do you realize the whole energy infrastructure has been founded upon greed, control, obfuscation, and lies?
Third, your unstated assumption-- that the government always has our BEST interest in mind-- defies reality so much I can't believe you would assume that never in our entire history has government oppressed its own citizens!
LetThereBeLight!
I hope I don't come across as being offensive.
One: You keep talking about this. What exactly did Tesla demonstrate? Do you have any written proof from a reliable source? I don't mean some guy who wrote a book. A scientific paper he published maybe? An account of a repeatable experiment? I'm genuinely curious.
Two: And by what do you base this assumption?
Three: The government may not always have your best interest in mind but it definitely has its own best interest in mind. If Tesla really came up with these magical inventions, why would they not use it? Let's use the military as an example. Are you aware of the immense amount of fuel a single modern tank consumes? Historically, the tasks of keeping up logistical supply lines in a war were on far larger scales than actual battles. You don't think after more than a hundred years, your military may have caught on not lost things like the Korean/Vietnam wars?
This next point refers to both point two and three of yours. You seem to assume the USA is the only country in the world, please correct me if I'm wrong. Nikola Tesla was not American, and though he did a lot of his work in the US his findings were certainly not restricted to it. There are many countries who have much to gain from this supposedly infinite energy source and "free" transmission technology. Your energy infrastructure may have been "founded on greed and lies", and your government may "not care about you", but there are certainly governments around the world who do. Are you familiar with CERN? The internet and most of our subatomic physical understanding came from them. They use 1.3 terawatt hours of energy annually, you think some of the brightest minds the world has ever known, concentrated in one place, wouldn't employ the technology you describe? Before you bring it in again, they are far out of reach of your government and its power companies.
I used the world "magical" earlier because the three inventions you described violate physical laws. You state laws are meant to be broken, but I'm sorry that's just not true. In science, for a theory to become a Law it takes an absolutely overwhelming amount of evidence that it is true, and absolutely none about the contrary. It's not something you violate just by writing a few sentences about it. You'd better have a very good, undisputable and repeatable experimental demonstration, which you don't seem to have right now. Regarding these inventions of his, here's my input:
1. His electric car. It was, most likely, a hoax. There is no evidence he did it except the account of a certain Peter Savo, supposedly Nikola Tesla's nephew. There isn't even evidence Savo was his nephew. There is no physical evidence that Tesla ever had such a car.
2. This is a new one to me. I couldn't find any information about it; could you point me to a reliable source? Once again, a reliable source isn't some guy's website, it's a published scientific paper, or in this case at the very least a well regarded newspaper of the time. Tesla did have an oscillator which functioned as an AC electrical generator. Theoretically it seems possible that the oscillating piston could drive the tree and the ground underneath it at its natural frequency and cause resonance, eventually culminating in an earthquake. Realistically, the resonance of the piece of ground and everything on it would be totally different and the damping forces present would mean even a much larger oscillator would do nothing. Additionally, as the device was attached to the tree, the only way it could have transmitted mechanical energy into the ground was through the tree. To cause resonance in the ground, the tree would also have to be resonating with the device and would have simply been shaken to pieces.
3. Wireless transmission; this is a common one, and it is actually possible. In fact we are using it today, though in a smaller form, phone chargers and such. This transmission can be achieved in a variety of ways, which can possibly be useful in different situations. I will not elaborate on this for now as it is a well researched topic. The problem is its efficiency. The greatest problem facing power companies during transmission isn't the laying of wires, those are dirt cheap - it is the power loss when transmitting through these wires. This is the reason we use AC instead of DC to transmit high power electricity and how the world got to know Nikola Tesla in the first place. Wireless transmission of electricity has always been highly inefficient compared to wired transmission, especially so over long ranges. Tesla merely proved the concept is possible, not that it was viable. You seem to have the impression that electrical transmission takes up a large part of your energy bill - it doesn't. Wires are a fixed, sunk cost and again, they are relatively dirt cheap. What you pay for are the fuels and go into generating the power and the upkeep costs of any alternative energy source. Switching to wireless transmission would do absolutely nothing to reduce your power bill, rather it would drive it up because power companies have to produce more to get the same bit to you. Superconductors, on the other hand, are very promising. In this field the US actually has contributed a lot, with three superconducting transmission systems in Long Island, Georgia and New York, more than half of all there is in the world.
Nikola Tesla was a great man and in my mind as well, one of the most under-appreciated scientists there ever was. However, you need to be careful not to exaggerate his claims and his achievements. Tesla did a lot of conceptual experiments and demonstrations but in the real world, numbers matter and very often, you find they don't work in your favour. The Tesla turbine is another example of one of his inventions that has extremely high efficiency in his little model, but in large, practical engines it falls apart. Also, as a member of the scientific community, may I ask politely for you to not label us as slaves of the government, yours or others. While some scientists may be greedy, many of us are in this field simply because of our passion. It doesn't pay well at all. I assure you that if something as world-changing as this were to exist practically, it would be known to some member of the scientific community before the general public such as you. The excitement it would cause would be far greater in the scientific community than in the general public. In a hundred years, someone would have assured it'd come into fruition, especially if blueprints were already in place.
