More than 130 years ago, Nikola Tesla had the idea to control the weather and climate. Time has proven yet another of his crazy ideas to be true.
See also:
CNN: “China to expand weather modification program to cover area larger than India.”
When Nikola Tesla’s career as a scientist and inventor was first exploding, he toured Europe to speak at the request of the Royal Society and the Institution of Electrical Engineers about his discoveries. There, famed scientist Lord Rayleigh told Tesla he has a unique mind, and this motivated Tesla not to revel in the social attention, but to instead focus more deeply on his pursuit of science. While still on this trip, Tesla grabbed a stack of books and went hiking in some mountains, where he witnessed a sudden rainstorm.
“…a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy involved in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of lightning being much like that of a sensitive trigger.”
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Although lighting does not always trigger rainfall, it does happen under specific circumstances. According to ChatGPT-4: “Yes, lightning can sometimes trigger rainfall, but the relationship between the two is complex…”
In this moment hiking alone in the mountains, Tesla first had a question that stuck in his mind for the rest of his life: Why shouldn’t humans be able to affect the weather?
After all, Tesla had witnessed that lighting can sometimes trigger rainfall from dark clouds, and making small electrical sparks was already essential for his experiments. Soon after, it became a specialty of Tesla’s to create massive bolts of artificial lightning:
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A few years later, Tesla’s lab in New York City was burned to the ground, and the cause of the fire has never been fully confirmed. By the end of that decade, Tesla decides to set up a laboratory all the way in Colorado with the notion that he needs more open space to make huge bolts of lightning, which relates to his experiments in the wireless transmission of electrical power.
Three decades pass and Tesla is still talking about the idea of weather control, claiming it will be one of many functions for his “World System” of wireless power transmission. In 1919, he says:
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This century old quote of Tesla’s is particularly interesting, because the government of China has spent billions of dollars in the last decades on an ambitious project which has successfully proven that humans are indeed able to create farmland from desert zones.
“If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man. The consummation depended on our ability to develop electric forces of the order of those in nature.”
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Here are some news stories about weather modification. Each of these stories relates heavily to Tesla’s idea of how weather systems are delicate and can be affected by precise technological application of heat, energy, moisture, etc, to upset the existing balance:
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