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Even as a child, Nikola Tesla was quite inventive and inquisitive. One of his least successful experiments was on human flight. As a young boy, he climbed to the top of a barn on a windy day. Then, holding an umbrella, he breathed rapidly until he felt light-headed and dizzy, and jumped from the roof. He laid on the ground unconscious until his mother picked him up and took him home. Another peculiar invention of his youth was a motor powered by insects. He glued a number of June bugs to a type of windmill so that as the bugs tried to fly away, they would move the windmill. But as clever as this was for a child, it met its end as a young friend developed a sudden taste for June bugs and began to eat them. Watching the boy eat them, and hearing them crunch in his mouth, Tesla vomited and bug power was abandoned. Some of his other experiments during his youth were much more dangerous. Tesla writes that he was almost boiled alive in milk, trapped in a tomb, even cremated.
Tesla had a number of interesting ideas that included the electrocution of people. He suggested that large currents could keep a man warm at the North Pole. He also suggested that electrocution should be used as a stimulant for actors before a performance, and for bored schoolchildren. At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Tesla applied 200,000 volts to his body to demonstrate its safety. Reporters claimed that his clothing and body continued to glow after the power was cut off. Tesla later wrote, "electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs- life force, nerve force. It's a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors."
After X-rays were discovered in 1895 by Roentgen, Tesla did many experiments, apparently unaware of the dangers until the consequences arised. He wrote, "In a severe case, the skin gets deeply colored and blackened in places, and ugly, ill-foreboding blisters form; thick layers come off, exposing the raw flesh...Burning pain, feverishness, and such symptoms are natural accompaniments. One single injury of this kind in the abdominal region of a dear and zealous assistant-the only accident that ever happened to anyone but myself in all my laboratory experience-I had the misfortune to witness."
Around 1898, Tesla became interested in mechanical vibrations and created a number of small pocket oscillators. One of these he fastened to the iron pillar of a building. The oscillator began to resonate with the pillar, causing huge vibrations, on the magnitude of a small earthquake. Tesla had to smash the oscillator to save the building. Tesla began to muse that he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building with one of these small oscillators. He even claimed that he could split the Earth in two with such vibrations- "split it as a boy would split an apple- and forever end the career of man." He explained: "If I stroke the earth at this instant, a wave of contraction goes through it that will come back in one hour and forty-nine minutes in the form of an expansion. As a matter of fact, the earth, like everything else is in a constant state of vibration. It is constantly contracting and expanding. Now, suppose that at the precise moment when it begins to contract, I explode a ton of dynamite. That accelerates the contraction and, in one hour and forty-nine minutes, there comes an equally accelerated wave of expansion. When the wave of expansion ebbs, suppose I explode another ton of dynamite, thus further increasing the wave of contraction. Is there any doubt as to what would happen? There is no doubt in my mind. The earth would be split in two. For the first time in man's history, he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes!" He conferred that it may take months or a year to finally split the earth, but he believed it was certainly possible. Similarly, he suggested that people could communicate using such vibrations through the Earth, like primitive tribes drumming.
"We are but cogwheels in the medium of the universe, and it is an unavoidable consequence of the laws governing that the pioneer who is far in advance of his age is not understood and must suffer pain and disappointment and be content with the higher reward which is accorded to him by posterity." --Nikola Tesla