Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
♪♪
Captions paid for by discovery communications
prince: We're looking for the missing pieces.
It's got to be here.
- We hit something. - What is that?
- Oh, wow. - Dude, we got something.
Murphy: Nikola Tesla was... And a lot of people
will tell you this...
The greatest inventor in American history.
A.c. Power, electric motors, fluorescent lights,
x-rays, wireless energy...
Tesla paved the way for all of these technologies.
Prince: Tesla was taking several of his inventions
and putting them together to become this superweapon.
He called it the death ray.
Narrator: Now a military investigator...
Murphy: But we're gonna have to go around
some of these obstacles.
Narrator: A historian...
Prince: Holy [bleep]
Narrator: And an engineer of Tesla technology...
We're gonna build Tesla's death ray.
Narrator: Unlock the mysteries
behind what could be
the greatest cover-up of the 20th century.
We need to go deeper.
You're telling me that Hitler actually ordered
the assassination of Tesla?
Yes.
If something fails, there's going to be an explosion.
Murphy: Tesla moved from lab to lab.
He left a paper trail all over the world...
- How can we get in there? - Trunks of information.
Have these documents ever been published?
No.
Murphy: Did Tesla invent the world's first
weapon of mass destruction...
3, 2, 1...
and was he murdered for it?
♪♪
Narrator: January 8, 1943.
As world war ii rages in Europe,
america's most prolific inventor is found dead
in a New York City hotel room,
his safe empty, its contents stolen.
Many of the journals and documents
stolen the night of his death are never found.
Rumors swirl that Nikola Tesla was working on secret,
black projects... Weapons of unspeakable power.
For decades, the rumors are dismissed,
until September 2016.
The FBI releases hundreds of pages
of classified documents on the inventor.
The question is... why was the FBI even interested in Tesla?
He wasn't a bank robber, he wasn't a spy.
So, why did the FBI have hundreds
and hundreds of documents on an inventor?
♪♪
When you ask people about Tesla, they think it's a car.
But the truth is, Tesla is really an American hero.
Tesla was actually the most important inventor
in the modern world.
He gave us the lights, he gave us the motors.
Tesla is the man responsible for bringing america
out of the dark ages.
I've been studying Tesla since I was a kid.
As much as I know,
there's still this shroud of mystery around him.
Tesla kept his notes in shorthand or in code
to protect them if they fell in the wrong hands.
He was very secretive about what he was doing.
There are mysteries about Tesla we're still uncovering,
even to this day.
If you talk to any of my childhood friends,
they'll all tell you the same thing...
That I was the guy who wanted to join the military.
I was a green beret, I served in Iraq,
and then I went over to special forces.
These days, I'm a military analyst.
I investigate top-secret government programs.
My combat experience bleeds over into my experience
as an investigator.
When you've been shot at,
your brain calibrates fear in a different way.
I probably dive into situations more readily
than most investigators would.
Recently, I've been going over newly declassified FBI documents
that could rewrite American history.
So, this FBI document here says that when Tesla died,
that his safe was broken into...
Was forced open by parties unknown.
Could any of the documents that were stolen from the safe
be related to the death ray?
Koscho: It's a hell of a weapon.
I think everybody would want it.
I mean, everybody wanted to get their hands on these documents.
Everybody wanted to have this device.
Tesla theorized, this weapon of his
could take out military aircraft 250 miles away.
He thought that this could be a device
capable of delivering 1.5 gigawatts of power
to a target.
It really was absurd at the time,
and frankly, it still is absurd now.
That means we're taking a bolt of lightning,
pointing it at something, and blowing it up.
Murphy: Maybe he finished the death ray,
maybe he finished the design for it,
maybe he'd never had a feasible plan to begin with.
But these documents prove
that Tesla was working on the death ray,
and they show that the events surrounding his death
are highly suspicious.
If Tesla's weapon was real,
then we could have found a possible motive
for the murder of an American hero.
Aron, as an engineer,
do you think there's enough technology
and there's enough information out there
for you to assemble Tesla's death ray?
Yes, I think it's possible
to build something like what he was after,
but, you know, there's a lot of data missing.
I've spent my whole life
obsessed with Tesla's inventions.
Building Tesla's tech is really the only way
to understand the man's genius.
One of the coolest things about this death ray, to me,
is that it was not just a weapon.
Tesla theorized that a system like the death ray could be key
to unlocking large-scale wireless power distribution.
It's really the holy grail.
Tesla saw the future.
I mean, we're building technology now
that this man conceived of over 100 years ago.
On another page of these declassified FBI documents,
what they say is that persons sympathetic to Russia
were making an effort to secure models
or designs of possible military value.
And when they say "military value,"
they have to be talking about the death ray, correct?
Yes, I think that it's clear
that the weapon is their primary concern.
Tesla was aware of that,
and maybe that's why he was so elusive about this machine.
Toward the end of his life,
Tesla filed a patent for this machine.
It's an incomplete drawing. It's mostly theory,
and that's all we have to go on right now.
As you see it, the death ray is actually feasible.
Can it be built?
I think, Cameron, you and I can go search
and try to dig up additional information.
Hopefully, we'll find something new
that will give Aron what he needs to finish this.
Narrator: Jack and Cameron travel across the country
to meet a key source of information about Tesla...
His grandnephew.
Murphy: Tell me what i'm walking into here.
Who is this guy... Terbo... really?
He is Tesla's last remaining blood relative,
and the last person
that is known to have met Tesla in person.
This is a big deal.
He's considered the subject-matter expert.
1856... Nikola Tesla is born at home
during a lightning storm.
No ordinary child,
he'd sometimes sit still for hours,
memorizing entire books and inventing
and testing machines in his mind.
At 28, Tesla comes to america
and reveals his signature invention...
Alternating-current electricity,
more powerful and efficient than Thomas Edison's designs.
Drawn by his genius, Tesla is the toast of high society.
The most powerful men in New York City...
Like j.P. Morgan... Line up to fund his work.
But the inventor is uncomfortable in the spotlight.
He retreats to his lab,
where strange vibrations in the area
lead neighbors to believe
he's building an earthquake machine.
The rumors about Tesla's activities in his lab
persist to this day.
And now only one person alive
can claim to have known the inventor.
♪♪
Ah, welcome.
Mr. Terbo, how do you do, sir?
I'm Cameron prince. Hopefully, you remember me.
Oh, yes. Come right in.
I'm Jack. Nice to meet you.
Yes, very good.
Murphy: I'm looking for any new information about Tesla
or his death ray...
A starting point that we can sink our teeth into
and really kick off this investigation.
Prince: First of all, I think, just tell us who Tesla was.
Murphy: As a person... His personality.
When I met Tesla, I was only about 9 years old.
It was really a very important invitation
to go to his lab.
Tesla had many brilliant ideas,
but he did not have an organized system of filing.
When I visited him, that's one thing I noticed.
And I believe that he was worried
about people trying to take his research.
So, Tesla worked on the basis of hiding things.
The so-called death ray...
We've reviewed some declassified FBI documents,
and it seems that there were a number of different players
who were interested in his inventions,
particularly the U.S. government,
the Soviet union.
His idea of inventing
something catastrophic like a death ray...
If you want to prove that,
then I think you really have to go
to wardenclyffe.
Narrator: Wardenclyffe...
Tesla's most ambitious and mysterious laboratory.
With funding from the deep pockets
of financial giant j.P. Morgan,
Tesla designs a lab with a power plant
and massive transmission tower on long island, New York.
Increasingly secretive,
Tesla refuses to allow anyone access to the lab,
including his beneficiary, j.P. Morgan.
Rumors grow that Nikola Tesla is a mad scientist,
using wardenclyffe as a secret testing ground
for dangerous technology like the death ray.
He even hires armed guards for the property.
Under mounting pressure, j.P. Morgan pulls his funding.
Tesla loses everything he built.
Mystery still surrounds the lab at wardenclyffe.
What was Tesla building there?
Terbo: Tesla had a bad habit
of raising money to do something,
and doing what he thought was most interesting to do.
And that was his problem... Wardenclyffe.
He generated the kind of power that he thought he needed,
and if he could focus significant amounts of energy,
he could direct it to a warplane
and shoot it down.
Tesla's tower was demolished.
What's there for us to look at?
You know the tower that he had at wardenclyffe
was an expensive element of the laboratory,
but it was not operational.
But what is under the ground might be of interest.
All these auxiliary tunnels
that have not been evaluated completely
as it should be.
There are so many rumors about what Tesla was hiding
in those tunnels in wardenclyffe.
When you talk about having 10,000 or 20,000 pieces of paper
that are missing,
I don't think you could really deal with Tesla without digging.
If Mr. Terbo is right,
and Tesla did dig tunnels at wardenclyffe,
then we have to find out what's buried there.
♪♪
Murphy: Tesla moved from lab to lab.
He left a paper trail all over the world...
Prince: How can we get in there?
Trunks of information.
Wow. Tesla's own hand.
Have these documents ever been published?
No.
If we're gonna build Tesla's death ray,
there's a reason nobody's done this before.
It's dangerous.
It wasn't called a death ray for no reason.
That scares the [bleep] out of me.
All right, everyone clear.
We're good.
Aw, dude, what the [bleep]?
Wow.
Oh, we blew this the [bleep] up.
Murphy: Wardenclyffe was the site of Tesla's old lab.
Prince: There are rumors of tunnels at wardenclyffe.
Murphy: We need to go deeper.
We're looking for the missing pieces.
If we have any hope of cracking the mystery of the death ray,
it's got to be here.
Joe, we hit something. What is that?
Oh, wow. Dude, we got something.
Do you think Tesla finished the death ray?
That makes the death ray real.
Koscho: Five...
He's like the ghost that we just can't pin down.
Four... Look at that.
Three... two...
My mind's blown... One.
This is it, man.
Narrator: Jack and Cameron
are en route to Tesla's mysterious,
abandoned laboratory on long island, New York.
Meanwhile, Aron gathers his team in Texas
to start construction
on Tesla's long-rumored superweapon.
If they can demonstrate the death ray was real,
they'll prove there was a motive to murder Nikola Tesla.
Koscho: All right, y'all, let's do this thing.
[ Tool whirring ]
We're gonna build Tesla's death ray.
Hmm.right.
[Bleep] Yeah.
It's a big device that stores a ton of energy
and shoots it in a beam, out toward a target,
and destroys the target.
Hmm.
So, Tesla patented this idea.
It's a rough idea, right? I think this is something
that he was trying to get down on paper
so that he had credit
for being the crazy guy that came up with the death ray.
I think this is enough
where we can put something together,
kind of make it work.
So, that's the patent sheet. Shouldn't there be more with it?
There's, like, usually drawings and specifications
and more stuff so you can actually prove our claim.
And there usually would be, yep.
And, like, maybe they didn't put it in there specifically
so they didn't have someone re-create it...
Yeah. Unless they could.
Oh, that's an interesting thought.
Narrator: The incomplete plans
call for two components... A power source
and the tower to shoot out the electricity.
All right, now, our design...
I want to use a device that Tesla himself invented.
I want to use a Tesla coil.
Narrator: The Tesla coil is the first system
to wirelessly transmit energy.
Electricity travels inside the device,
along the two giant coils, increasing the voltage output
until, like lightning, it breaks out,
looking for the shortest path to earth.
All right, so, eventually, I want to build something
that's probably 20, 25 feet tall.
But we can't afford to go there yet,
because if it doesn't work, then we're wasting our time.
Building something like this, that's that big,
you know, that's a lot of work.
So we need something, you know, 8 feet tall, maybe.
I want to put together a prototype...
Like, something really basic...
Throw some capacitors together, get one of the Tesla coils out,
and just see if this idea can even work.
I'm confident something's going to happen.
I'm just not sure what that is.
And we're gonna build this, so do we need to get,
like, a permit from homeland security or...
[ Laughs ]
They don't regulate death rays.
Oh, good. [ Chuckles ]
♪♪
Prince: Dude, I am so stoked right now.
I came here once before
'cause they had a guard shack,
and I was able to get in by jumping the fence.
[ Chuckles ]
I wasn't able to really look around,
because I was worried about going to jail, you know.
Murphy: William terbo is
Tesla's last remaining, living relative.
He told us to go to wardenclyffe,
the site of Tesla's laboratory.
He believes there could be clues there that help us
with our investigation into the death ray
and figure out whether or not Tesla was murdered.
Prince: We're walking on holy ground.
Tower stood 187 feet tall in the air.
This tower was designed to send electricity
to the other side of the globe.
He was gonna transmit pictures, text, voice, data...
All that from right here... And most importantly, power.
Narrator: With this tower, Tesla planned
to transmit free energy across the globe,
but the project loses funding in 1905.
The tower is dismantled,
and the property goes into foreclosure.
For decades, rumors of a network of tunnels
hiding Tesla's missing papers persist,
but the full site has never been mapped.
No one knows if the tunnels still exist,
or if they were destroyed along with the rest of the tower.
Prince: We need to figure out
what Tesla was building this tower for.
Was it radio, was it wireless power transmission,
or was it a prototype for the death ray?
Well, this tower and the building
were designed by Stanford white,
who was a friend of Tesla's.
He has a relative that lives here still.
If anyone knows about wardenclyffe, it's him.
Murphy: While you're talking to him,
I'm gonna go talk to some of the locals
and see what kind of insider knowledge they might have.
Narrator: Increasingly paranoid,
Tesla trusts few people with information about his lab,
but he confides in famed architect Stanford white.
White builds wardenclyffe using Tesla's own detailed plans,
becoming the only man who understands the lab's secrets.
Today, his great-grandson is one of the only living connections
to white and Tesla's unusual friendship.
♪♪
So, we know that your great-grandfather,
Mr. Stanford white,
was the architect of wardenclyffe.
Mm-hmm.
He oversaw the construction of the whole project,
including the tower.
They were close personal friends,
and Stanford used to invite Tesla
to come out here and stay on the property.
And the story goes that my great-grandmother
would find Tesla wandering in the gardens
and ask him what he was doing at 3:00 in the morning,
and he said, "I don't sleep."
I can't tell you much about how they collaborated,
but I do have something that you might be interested in.
So, here we have
some of the drawings from wardenclyffe and...
Oh, man, look at this.
So, this is something, you know.
Prince: These are some of the original plans for wardenclyffe.
Seeing what Tesla had in mind for the construction of the lab
could reveal whether this was a power station
or a proving ground
for a weapon of mass destruction.
Ah, look at that.
Copper grounds within lateral tunnels.
These tunnels are odd-looking to me.
Do you have any idea what they might have been used for?
I don't know what the purpose
of a circular tunnel like that would be.
And of course, the possibility exists
that we just aren't smart enough.
We don't know what was in Tesla's head,
and we'll never know.
And unless one of us can channel Tesla,
we'll never find out.
We certainly want to look for these cavities,
and are there other tunnels that kind of come up.
More power to you.
This is why it's so hard to get into Tesla's head.
We know he wanted to transmit electricity wirelessly,
but that's only half the story.
He had other intentions for this lab,
and I want to find out what they were.
If I find something, I'll let you know.
Thanks so much. Thank you again, sir.
You're welcome.
Narrator: Locals give Jack a lead
on a former resident who has explored the property.
Oh, hi, John.
I'm an investigator doing some research on wardenclyffe,
and I was wondering if I could ask you
a couple questions about the property.
One of the main things I'm interested in
is if you had heard anything about tunnels
underneath wardenclyffe.
Murphy: Underground structures would have provided
the perfect place for Tesla to keep his work under wraps.
Tesla might have been burying research.
We have to find these things.
Pritchard: Athena, Athena, come here.
Narrator: Back in Texas, Aron and his team
begin construction on the death ray.
They need to find a way to store a massive amount of energy
until they're ready to release it.
Pritchard: A capacitor is
a device that stores electrical energy,
but all of the energy is discharged in a split second.
It's just like a slingshot.
So, you're pulling it back, you're pulling it back,
you're pulling it back, you're pulling it back.
Finally, we're ready to fire, we let go.
These are actually military capacitors.
When I first bought these,
I got a phone call nearly immediately.
"Hey, what are you gonna do with those?
Are they gonna leave the country?"
We're only going to charge this up
to maybe 10,000 joules of so of total energy.
You know, I remember looking at a defibrillator one time...
The shock paddles.
It only takes 300 joules
to either stop or restart your heart.
We're looking at 48,000 joules' worth.
I don't want to stop my heart.
This would blow your heart out of your chest.
When one of these really large capacitors fails,
it can explode.
But the real danger is
that we don't just have one capacitor.
We have many capacitors, and when one fails,
all of the other ones discharge into the bad one.
So it's really easy to just blow it up.
Go ahead and get the power supply ready
after you get this all hooked up,
and let's get ready for a test.
- Hook it up, all right. - Cool.
Narrator: The team believes there are
two components to the death ray...
The weapon and the power source.
Aron's first step is to see
if they can create the power Tesla imagined.
If this test works, the banks of capacitors
will discharge their energy into this target.
Pritchard: I'll give you a countdown, all right?
I'll tell you when I'm ready.
Okay. Stand by.
Charging.
All right, everyone clear.
We're good.
Now.
Three... two... one... go.
[ Small explosion ]
What the [bleep] was that?
Ah, dude, what the [bleep]?
Wow.
Narrator: Using a crude patent filed for this device,
Aron and his team are attempting to build
a small version of Nikola Tesla's death ray.
They hope that proving this weapon is real
might unlock the secrets of wireless energy
and provide a motive for Tesla's death.
I'll tell you when I'm ready.
- Okay. - Stand by.
Charging.
Narrator: Their first step is
testing a bank of large capacitors,
devices capable of storing the massive amounts of energy
Tesla theorizes this weapon will use.
Now.
Three... two... one... go.
[ Small explosion ]
What the [bleep] was that?
What was that?!
- That was a flash. - Holy [bleep], Aron!
Aw, dude, what the [bleep]?
- Wow. - Whoa.
Oh, yeah, this blew up.
We happened to get the capacitor
that was maybe damaged before we ever had it,
or it was just defective.
When a capacitor fails, it tends to just explode,
instead of destroying our target.
It's cooked from the inside.
It's [bleep] Charcoal.Yeah.
When we charged this to a high-enough voltage,
that voltage broke down this insulator
and caused a huge arc to form inside of it...
Just blew it up.
We just had so much energy here,
if something doesn't work, this happens.
[Bleep] Blows up.
Okay, well, it is what it is.
We're gonna have to rebuild.
Let's do it again.
♪♪
Find it? Yep.
Great.
Narrator: Aron's team swaps out the damaged capacitor
and prepares to retest.
If the test works, the energy will discharge
from the capacitors and hit this target.
Koscho: Tesla was a brilliant inventor,
but some of these ideas are really far-fetched.
There's always a fine line
between genius and mad scientist.
I've been dreaming about building a death ray
since I was a teenager, you know,
and I don't even know if it's possible.
Three...
Two...
One.
[ Larger explosion ]
Damn.
[ Chuckles ]
All right.
That worked.
Success.
Koscho: The energy from the capacitors
discharged into our target the way we had planned.
Now we got to figure out if it's even possible
to send that much energy through a Tesla coil.
I mean, that's a hell of an explosion by itself.
♪♪
Prince: We've got some documents here
that we were able to obtain.
Narrator: The blueprints for Tesla's lab at wardenclyffe
suggest there might still be tunnels underground.
So, this is the tower structure as it stood originally.
And then, down below,
these are what appear to be radial tunnels.
We brought in the ground-testing team
to search the property from top to bottom.
I'm gonna go ahead and stretch this tape measure out,
if you just want to hang on to this.
Okay.
The way this will work...
We'll use two different types of testing...
Seismic refraction and electrical resistivity.
We're throwing the kitchen sink at this [bleep].
We want to know what's happening down there.
Lindes: What we'd like to try to do is
get on 15-foot spacing with these geophones
so that we can try to get to a depth
of somewhere around 120 to 130 feet.
Murphy: Seismic refraction works
by slamming a sledgehammer onto a metal plate
that sends an energy pulse down into the ground.
The energy pulses travel at different speeds,
depending on the type of material
that they're passing through.
And the geophones we've spread out
are what receives those messages,
so we're looking for anything that could indicate a tunnel.
Hit it!
[ Clank ]
All right, so, what do we got, here?
Mcmillen: You can see, it comes down.
There's a little bit of dip there.
Yeah.
So, based on what you're seeing here,
would you say there is a tunnel there?
There could well possibly be.
We need to collect a little bit more data.
Lindes: The first test showed that there is
something suspicious underground,
at the south end of the tower base,
but another test will show if it's a tunnel.
So, we're gonna grab those cables.
We're gonna pull them down from the control boxes up there,
hook them up to each one of these electrodes,
and then we'll start the program and try to collect some data.
Murphy: Resistivity tomography
works by injecting electrical current
into two electrodes in the ground at a time.
They measure how easily that current is flowing
through whatever lies below.
Prince: A combination of these two tests
will give us the location of the tunnels,
if they exist.
♪♪
So, what you see here in the data
is this anomaly right here.
It's indicative of something that has maybe an open cavity
or a water-filled chamber.Wow.
And it's pretty big, too. It is.
We do have another anomaly right around here.
You found two of them? Yeah.
So, what that could be representing
is something like an open space,
consistent with a tunnel.
Narrator: The team finds two anomalies
that could be underground tunnels.
One is on the wardenclyffe property,
where digging is restricted.
The other is just over the property line.
If you turn around,
that's the firehouse right over there,
leading off the wardenclyffe property.
Murphy: There were neighbors who speculated
that there were tunnels that ran off into that direction.
There's tunnels here, underground, somewhere.
Finding them could help us understand
what was going on here.
We might find clues that unlock the mystery of the death ray
and shed some light on Tesla's death.
♪♪
Narrator: Jack and Cameron are investigating
Tesla's abandoned lab at wardenclyffe.
This is where Tesla looked to send
wireless energy across the world
and may have invented his fabled death ray.
[ Knock on door ]
All the clues are pointing towards the firehouse,
which used to be part of Tesla's old property.
So, what that could be representing is
something like an open space, consistent with a tunnel.
That's the firehouse right over there,
leading off the wardenclyffe property.
Come on in, guys. What can I do for you?
We've been doing this investigation
over at wardenclyffe,
and one of the tunnels that they discovered...
Or what appears to be a tunnel...
Actually runs beyond present-day wardenclyffe,
into what we think is probably the fire department's property.
Wardenclyffe was a much larger property 100 years ago,
when Tesla was conducting his experiments.
Yeah, I think maybe 20 acres.
I can only give limited information,
'cause I only know limited information.
This is the maintenance shop.
This was built in the early '90s,
maybe '90 or '91.
And talking to one of the senior men
who was involved in the construction,
while they were doing the floor, they did find something.
There's a depression in the ground.
We've filled it a couple times, but it continues to sink.
So, we've been working with some guys over here,
and they've got some equipment that lets them look underground.
I know this may be a strange request,
but would it be possible for them to come look here?
Well...
I think that's okay.
Murphy: After speaking with the fire chief,
we've learned that there is a sinkhole or depression
in the parking lot, that they have to keep refilling.
We might have narrowed in on the entrance
to one of Tesla's underground tunnels.
Pavement and ground doesn't just crush for no reason,
and you can sort of see those trends
in this asphalt here.
This crack right here, along the roadway,
and all the way down towards here...
I can even see where they've patched it over there.
Right, yeah, and that could be
what the fire department was talking about
when they said they'd made multiple repairs.
Murphy: Since we're in a more contained area
and it's concrete, we have to use
something called ground-penetrating radar.
In 1917, Tesla outlined a plan to use radio waves
as a method of detecting physical objects.
Today, we call it radar.
Narrator: Tesla sees this technology
as a way to detect approaching ships in battle.
Though he is rarely credited,
his ideas are the foundation of modern-day radar, like gpr.
People say that Tesla was hiding things in these tunnels.
We're getting closer to finding the truth
about the death ray, using Tesla's technology.
But you can see how I keep coming across these areas
right through here and here, at those levels.
You can see sort of a trend where you see
a little bit of sinking or settling in the subsurface,
whereas the rest of the screen across,
there's not that uniformity to it.
And how deep are we?
That's somewhere right around six feet.
Murphy: A consistent settling trend indicates
that there's a cavity right beneath our feet.
That's right in line with the tower.
Yep.
And it's also right in line with this new building,
where he talked about that they ran into something.
At 90 degrees.
Lindes: This is really leading towards
one of your best chances of trying to find something.
So we're right over it? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'd call it in this area.
This is the place we should start.
Narrator: In Texas, Aron and his team
are attempting to build a smaller prototype
of Tesla's death ray.
Koscho: In the case of our death ray,
the parts we need
are a big capacitor bank and a Tesla coil.
Those two components working together
are going to be able to deliver a lot of energy to a target.
Three... two... one.
[ Explosion ]
Our capacitor bank test...
[ Laughter ]
it actually worked.
Okay.
So, there she is.
Narrator: The team is able to create and discharge
the energy Tesla imagined.
Now they're moving to the next phase.
If we can do this on a small scale,
then I'm gonna have the confidence
to move forward and say, "all right,
maybe the bigger scale... Maybe this can work."
Let's get it set up.
Let's run it through a quick test,
make sure this is good
before we hook it up to the capacitors.
- Okay. - Yeah.
A Tesla coil is composed of three main parts.
You have the primary.
That's the big square box at the bottom.
In the middle, you have the secondary.
That's the round tube.
The voltage is amplified going up that tube.
And then at the top is that big metal doughnut
that sits on top of the secondary.
That's where all of the energy builds up.
That energy breaks out of that toroid
like a big lightning bolt.
♪♪
Yeah, that looks good.
It's perfect. All right.
♪♪
Narrator: A functioning Tesla coil will shoot arcs of energy
that resemble tiny lighting bolts.
Koscho: All right. We're ready.
Narrator: If the coil is functional,
the team will connect it to the capacitors
and attempt to pass a much larger voltage of energy
through the coil...
We're ready to go.
Effectively weaponizing the lightning bolt.
Koscho: We're gonna start off at a low power here.
♪♪
- Yeah, dude. - [Bleep] Yeah.
- Yeah! - Whoo!
[ Applause ]
You know, we know the Tesla coil works now.
We know how the capacitor works.
The problem is, we're about to do something here
that people don't really normally do.
And, uh, I don't know.
You know, don't really know where this is gonna go.
So, we've tested the capacitors.
We've tested the Tesla coil.
If we can take the energy
that's stored in our capacitor bank...
The one we've charged to 20,000 volts...
If we can discharge that in a beam from the Tesla coil,
we've proven that we can take enough energy
and put it in an electrical beam
and point it at something.
The, uh, controller and e-stop
is ready to go for you, Aron.
Okay.
♪♪
This is dangerous.
We have a lot of power here right now.
This might be too much power for this system.
We've got good distance between us,
but if something fails, there's going to be an explosion.
We've got to keep in mind there's a risk of fire.
There's a risk of things flying.
All right.
Narrator: If this test works, the energy from the capacitor bank
will travel through the Tesla coil
and release a bolt of lightning that strikes the target.
- Ready? - Ready.
Koscho: Okay. Kevin, charge it.
Pritchard: Charging.
Three... two... one.
[ Explosion ]
- Oh. - Oh, wow.
[Bleep] Was that?
Murphy: Tesla was involved in many different innovations.
One of them was the transmission of wireless energy.
Prince: He's like, "you know, marconi's got the radio,
but I'm gonna eclipse him.
I'm going to transmit power, voices, video.
We'll be able to send a page of written text wirelessly."
Everybody thought that was just crazy.
You know, today that's old-school.
Koscho: One of the things
we may learn from this death ray is
that Tesla's wireless power-transmission ideas
weren't all that crazy.
Large-scale wireless power distribution is the holy grail
since Tesla theorized it, over 100 years ago.
Rural areas, communities normally hit by storms...
These areas could receive power with no infrastructure.
It's almost like Wi-Fi but for power.
And having that possible outcome,
even if it's a small percentage chance...
I think that's worth chasing.
Koscho: All right.Charging.
Let's test this thing.
Narrator: Aron and his team
are attempting to build Tesla's death ray.
Now the team is ready to test the flow of energy
between the power source and the weaponized Tesla coil.
Koscho: Three... Two... One.
[ Explosion ]
- Oh. - Wow.
What the [bleep] was that?
That thing's done. [ Sighs ]
We had too much voltage too fast.
Our capacitor bank... It actually held up.
We didn't blow up any more capacitors.
That was great.
The Tesla coil did what it was supposed to.
The thing is, is getting that energy from that capacitor bank
through that Tesla coil
didn't go quite the way we had planned.
I don't know what went wrong.
We might very well have bitten off
a bit more than we can chew here.
So, let's sit down, let's look at it,
let's figure out how to improve it,
and let's move on.
♪♪
Murphy: We've been granted exclusive access
by the local fire department to let us dig,
so we've brought on a team of professionals
to help with the excavation.
How are you? Thanks for coming out.
I'm Jack.Sal.
Good morning. Good to see you.
Nice to meet you. Thanks.
What are you guys looking for, exactly?
Are you familiar with this property across the street?
No.
All right, this is wardenclyffe.
This is Tesla's last remaining laboratory
that's still standing. Now, we know
that Tesla dug tunnels for a grounding system.
There's some sort of complex... Something underneath the soil...
That leads from where the tower stood,
all the way back here. So, if you find the tunnels,
are you going inside the tunnels?
We hope so. We'd like to.
I know the backhoe isn't exactly a precision instrument,
but we want to go as slowly as we can
to take the soil away
without disturbing anything that might be underneath.
Okay.
Yeah, this is a historic dig.
For years, people have wanted to do what we're doing today.
This is the first time it's ever actually happened.
Yeah. let's dig a hole.
Once I get on that, if I have to,
I'll put a piece under it.
♪♪
Murphy: Excavating is the only way
to know what's under wardenclyffe,
but it's a really risky operation.
We're on a sinkhole.
The ground is Sandy and soft, prone to cave-ins.
Watch your back.
Prince: We've got to find out what's buried here
if we have any hope of cracking the mystery of the death ray.
♪♪
We got the right tool for this job.
Yeah, yeah.
Murphy: Our survey of the area
told us that there's something six feet down.
It's like ocean sand you find at the beach.
Yep.
So, if our calculations are right,
we should hit something around five feet deep.
Now we need to go deeper.
Yeah, we're gonna have to go deeper.
I'm not seeing anything yet.
You want to dig some more?
Yeah. All right.
One foot at a time. All right.
♪♪
Yeah, you see how loose this sand is
as we're getting deeper?
♪♪
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Stop.
What do you got?
There's something hard there.Yeah.
What's that? What's that?
What is that? Dude, we got something.
Let's get that out of the way.
♪♪
Koscho: We really could use some more data,
because it's not an easy thing to build a death ray.
Pike's peak?
Yeah, that's Colorado Springs.
Tesla went there in 1899
and built an experimental station.
"Wizard of electricity had instruments which could kill."
"Kill 30,000 people"?"In an instant."
So, we got to go there, get boots on the ground,
actually walk the terrain.
Oh, we blew this the [bleep] up.
It's never been done before.
Trial and error. Yeah.
This picture here depicts his laboratory.
Do you think he conceived of the death ray
here in Colorado Springs? Yes.
So, uh, let's find Tesla's lab, man.
Man: And that' our camera.Wow.
Oh. Oh.
Murphy: Oh, we hit something.
Koscho: We've done everything we can.
Let's hope this [bleep] works.