Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff. Lauren bogelbam here late in a business called Visive Technologies formerly Texan, completed a tower off of I thirty five near Milford, Texas. With its lattice style structural supports and bulbous top. It bears a distinct resemblance to Nicola Tesla's Warden Cliff Tower, sometimes called the Tesla Tower, which was an ill faded power project envisioned by the famous engineer
in the early twentieth century. The tower was meant to provide free energy all over the planet using wireless technology, but instead wound up scrapped by creditors after Tesla couldn't pay the mortgage on the property. Viziv's vision statement, rendered in all caps on its website, is to power the planet and bring light to the world, indicating that its primary goal is indeed power related. They're aiming to offer up electricity without traditional infrastructure as part of a partnership
with Baylor University. If it's anything like Tesla system, it could also offer new ways to send signals for radio communications and global positioning systems, and it could bring electricity to the one point three billion people worldwide who don't have it and don't have the infrastructure to get it. According to company literature, the endeavor relies heavily on what
are called Zenic surface waves. These waves, named for Jonathan Zenic, a twenty century physicist and electrical engineer, are electromagnetic waves that harness Earth's surface. Is a sort of waveguide or conduit for electricity and communication signals, so powerful that they enveloped the entire planet without the need for wires. Unlike so many other types of transmissions, zenic waves don't suffer degradation from challenges like solar flares, lightning, or other electromagnetic pulses.
Sounds like a fairly straightforward corporate experiment so far right. Set up power transmitters in one location and then the receivers in another, tweak the variables of it, and then determine if you can make your theories work in real world conditions. The thing is, when it comes to Nicola Tesla's legacy, nothing is simple. His legend is fertile ground, not only for real modern science, but also for fringe theories of all kinds. Down the rabbit hole we go.
Let's review in Tesla brilliant possibly mentally ill scientist died in the hotel he was living in. U S officials immediately seized the scientists research, partially in hopes of finding plans for a secret death ray particle being weapon, and of course, also to prevent access spies from getting their hands on any useful scientific revelations. Hundreds of pages of
those documents were subsequently classified and went missing. It wasn't until sixteen that a Freedom of Information Act forced authorities to unveil some of those papers. It's possible that Tesla's tower had potential applications in some sort of particle ray weapon,
hence the classified files. Some have even taken to calling the device a piece ray, a kind of defense system that the war hating test created to prevent countries from attacking each other, a powerful, invisible wall of force that would keep enemies at bay without resorting to the violence of bullets or bombs. Flash forward to modern times. Fringe theorists pounced on the fact that two of visive technologies top leaders are ex military with histories in ballistic missile defense.
This at a time when the U S Commander in chief is speaking about a space based missile defense system and the residents of Milford, Texas reasonably worried about the tower's purpose. But there's more. When Tesla died in three and U S authorities snapped up his research, they called in a well regarded electrical engineer from m I T to sift through the papers and note anything useful. That engineer was Dr John G. Trump, uncle to President Donald Trump.
After evaluating Tesla's work, John Trump scoffed at many of the genius's ideas as speculative. But why then were these documents classified for so long? And is it just a coincidence that Visit Tower was constructed after a Trump family
member was elected to office. Visit Technologies did not respond to the request of the How Stuff Works editorial staff for comment on this story, but Michael Taylor, vice president of Communications at Visive, had indicated previously that the first rounds of testing involved low power waves that wouldn't have any negative effects on humans or animals, and has said that the company only wants to improve the lives of people in the community and quote the world around us.
As of June eighteen, the company had planned to conduct tests for perhaps six months to a year and then use those results to reevaluate its future plans for further experiments. As to what sort of plans those might be, we'll just have to wait and see. Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and how Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other electrifying topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com