Oh shit he opened OP’s mom’s nightstand!
It was halfway shaken to pieces anyway.
Could a really big off-center motor actually cause an earthquake? It’d definitely have to be bigger than the one in the comic but…is it even possible?
There was a device made by Nikola Tesla called an “oscillator” that could allegedly cause small earthquakes. Nobody has ever managed to reproduce the effect, usually blaming some missing magical property of the device that Tesla deliberately withheld from knowledge. I imagine many people have tried to recreate such devices, but driving large amounts of mass to violent movement with tiny inputs when that mass has a lot of energy dissipation and resistance to movement is really not gonna work. A large motor like that with massive out of balance rotation would probably fall apart or pull free of it’s mounts before it could do any damage.
Damn, the two sources of the earthquake claim are print and I would have liked to read them. They don’t include a quote directly mentioning earthquakes in the wiki…[EDIT] I was wrong, I missed a reference. See my reply below
At one point, while experimenting with the oscillator, he alleged it generated a resonance in several buildings, causing complaints to the police.
I believe that. Resonant frequencies have collapsed bridges
he was forced to use a sledgehammer to terminate the experiment, just as the police arrived
Sounds like a real big fish he caught there!
I was a huge Tesla fanboy decades ago. I even built my own Tesla Coil. Still have quite a few books on him and his experiments. The quote you cited is the one always used by people to imply the device has far greater power than it really does - note it says “alleged” - and people trying to reproduce the effect haven’t managed it. Hence the missing magical property.
As far as the bridge collapse goes, there’s only one known reference to a bridge collapse thanks to soldiers crossing it. That collapse was because the soldiers noticed the resonance of the bridge with their pace, thought it was fun, and deliberately acted to increase it, just like you would on a playground chain bridge, thereby causing some of the cables to fail. The bridge would not have failed had they continued to march normally, so the random collapse due to regular marching isn’t really a thing.
I didn’t mean it to dunk on Tesla, that dude rocked! I was just hoping to see the source of the claim. I went back to copy part of the page for this reply and apparently I missed the [4] so my comment was wrong. Here’s the relevant bit from that page which satiated my curiosity:
[…] he revealed that an earthquake which drew police and ambulances to the region of his laboratory
I didn’t think the bridge collapse was random, I was just commenting on the power of resonance. You can also shatter a glass with your voice if you can hold the frequency!
I didn’t take it as a dunk on Tesla at all, you’re fine. I’m not a gatekeepong fanboy. I just find the conspiracy theorists that circle around his work irritating. A lot of people do blindly accept that marching across a bridge will cause a collapse, but the science says it has to be deliberate and accentuated to make it happen.
Tesla was an odd character. Highly likely he was autistic, which created a lot of problems for him getting so easily taken advantage of as he didn’t really get the business side of things and focused on his work. He made a lot of wild claims even though his inventions were amazing enough as they were.
Earthquakes are deceptively powerful, kurzkesagt did a video on tsunamis using nuclear weapons
Interesting thought experiment!
Even a monster motor mounted to bedrock isn’t going to produce the force of tectonic plates. Think of the masses involved.
I kept thinking about this last night and wound up looking it up. Seems like a nuclear bomb could cause one…but only a minor one - smaller than the bomb itself.
Goes to show just how powerful an earthquake is if even our strongest explosives doesn’t come close!
