Tesla’s universal language machine

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the pioneer of the alternating current system, radio and remote control technology, devoted his life to the development of wireless energy transmission, based on which he put forward his ideas regarding a universal transverbal language of the future. Since these ideas coincide with contemporary propositions of «optical neuro-imaging systems» or nonverbal interface technologies, which pursue a similar dream of direct «brain-to-brain» communication, I intend to look at Tesla’s proposal in some detail.
After successfully establishing his alternating current system at Niagara Falls (1896), Tesla devoted his energy to experiments in high frequency and radio transmission, which culminated in the discovery of the so-called terrestrial «stationary waves» at his experimental station in Colorado Springs (1899), which he claimed were the main carrier waves for his greatest project: the World Wireless System or Universal Central Station built at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, New York. Tesla was convinced that it was possible to economically transmit enormous amounts of electrical energy without wires to any point on the globe for industrial purposes with minimal energy loss. He laboured to complete his system from 1901 to 1903, but was unable to prove his hypothesis, mainly through lack of funds, his own hubris and the relentless wheelwork of history. His wireless revolution never materialised, and the Wardenclyffe station was demolished in 1917 to pay off his debts. A shroud of mystery still envelops his last project, since crucial historical and scientific evaluations of his system have not been carried out, mainly because hardly anyone understands the principles involved and is therefore unable to recreate the same working conditions. Tesla never mathematically formulated the exact principles upon which his system is based and in all probability didn’t commit them to paper for fear of patent infringement or theft. Perhaps the mystery will one day be solved, since the archives related to his wireless experiments, housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, have not yet been released to the public in their entirety.
Tesla planned to encircle the globe with giant wireless transmitters and receivers in synch with each other and with the resonant frequencies of Earth’s electromagnetic matrix, thereby potentially enabling everyone access to an unlimited supply of energy at minimal cost. This might, according to Tesla, bring about the instantaneous electrification of the globe, the unification of all classes of society, or something he called «universal enlightenment» – the main prerequisite for the establishment of universal peaceful relations. In his famous essay ‹The Problem of Increasing Human Energy› (1900) Tesla saw humanity as a mass urged on by the force of artistic and scientific progress, which tends to unite «heterogeneous elements of humanity», while being hindered by frictional forces (starvation, war, ignorance). According to Tesla, human energy would be most increased if decentralised, social-transformative technology for the transmission and procurement of energy is equally provided for all. And if the autonomy and independence of each individual would be guaranteed by free access to clean water, food and cheap, renewable energy. That is, energy obtained without «waste or consumption of any material whatsoever». Only a decentralised world-wide wireless energy distribution system would usher in a colossal revolution of all human relations. In the essay ‹The Transmission of Electrical Energy as a Means of Furthering Peace› (1905) Tesla reflects on the need and possibility of a universal language:
«Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another’s point of view. (…) To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse. (…) Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue.»
It is important to stress the context of Tesla’s teleutopia, which forms a crucial backdrop to his ideas on the future of a trans-verbal language, for he unequivocally conceived them as a neccesary extension of his Universal Wireless System. In his essay ‹Science and Discovery are the Great Forces Which Will Lead to the Consummation of the War› (1914) Tesla writes:
«The human voice and likeness will be flashed around the globe without wire, energy projected through space, the wastes of the ocean will be made safe to navigation, transport facilitated, rain precipitated at will and, perhaps, the inexhaustible store of atomic energy released. Advances of this kind will, in times to come, remove the physical causes of war, the chief of which is the vast extent of this planet. (…) But one accomplishment will still be lacking to make the triumph of the mind of man complete. A way must be found to interpret thought and thereby enable the accurate reduction of all forms of human effort to a common equivalent.»
For Tesla, the last stepping stone to a world of peaceful relations (after the establishment of his wireless system worldwide and «freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations») is an interface for interpreting thought in a trans- or non-verbal manner. He hints of ways to accomplish this in an early lecture entitled ‹On Light and Other High Frequency Phenomena› (1893), which praises the human eye as an «organ of the higher order»:
«Will it ever be within human power to analyse the condition of the retina when disturbed by thought or reflex action, by the help of some optical or other means of such sensitiveness, that a clear idea of its state might be gained at any time? If this were possible, then the problem of reading one’s thoughts with precision, like the characters of an open book, might be much easier to solve than many problems belonging to the domain of positive physical science (…).»
Believing he had solved all the problems of material existence with his wireless system, Tesla visualised interfaces that might be able to record or transmit thought directly, without the need of verbal media. If he ever developed such devices remains doubtful. After believing it possible to transform each individual into a free producer with unlimited access to clean energy «from stores forever inexhaustible» from any point on the globe, or after succeeding in «attaching [our] machinery to the very wheelwork of nature», Tesla dreamed of providing the tools capable of recording our own thoughts and dreams directly onto a material carrier in some sort of a neural-visual language that is hard to fathom even today. This device would, in Tesla’s eyes, probably abolish the need for the film industry, since one person could become his own production house, film director, actor, and stage-set in one. I imagine the birth of professional dreamers, where stories, films or concerts would no longer be written or performed, but dreamt out in live sessions to be transmitted without a material carrier, «brain-to brain» so to speak, or directly recorded on some unknown medium. What the medium for this «message» might be remains a mystery.
In a benevolent world where all of Tesla’s unrealised inventions would have successfully materialised, this might seem awesome. But without the context of Tesla’s teleutopia, this truly gives me the creeps. Transverbal technology implies the use of an optical neural interface, which might, in this day and age of digital exploitation, usher in not the electric socialism of Tesla’s teleutopic paradise of energy independance and mutual understanding, but in all probability the next phase of a potential worldwide conglomerate of neural-fascism, where all thoughts become open to direct manipulation by numerous interested industries: instantly recordable, immediately exploitable and remotely directable.
An appropriate response might not be a technological solution, but a change in the way we perceive and practice speech as such. The Slovene poet Miklavž Komelj reflects on the linguistic utopias of the late nineteenth century, which sought to conceal social antagonisms by trying to unify communication:
«The utopia of one single language in the form of a universal (trans)national language of pure rational communication came into being as a linguistic-communicational utopia of an imperialism without conflict. (…) In opposition to such utopianism, a truly universalist answer to the bankruptcy of the imperialist instrumentalisation of linguistic reality (…) can only lie in the problematisation of fundamental presumptions in the relationship between the subject and speech, which questions the rationalist-progressivist identity, grounded in the understanding of language-as-instrument. New ways of speech have thus come about (…) which don’t seek to construct some new codified language, but rather a new subjectivisation of what it means to speak or read at all. Writings which we are unable to read and which through this establish new coordinates of reading as such.»
Poetry, or the poetic function of speech, is seen as «the universality of irreducibility to each particular identification». I might even go as far as to claim: Every text creates an autonomous zone, which the reader enters, co-creates and develops in the moment of reading. No autonomous zone is fixed. Just as capitalism moves its machinery of exploitation around the world, autonomous zones of opposition shift in the minds of wo/men. They squat abandoned factories, internet domains or mediums of transmission… THE TEXT IS THEREFORE AN INTELLIGENT MACHINE, A FEEDBACK CARRIER FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND INTERACTION; as I write, I program or design the architecture of a shared and common experience DOWNLOADABLE, ENHANCEABLE, DEVELOPABLE BY ALL.