Warren Ellis takes a break from scripting his new comic to rant about the alternate history posisbilities of Nicola Tesla.
You know Tesla patented something very like a solar panel in 1901? Do you even care?
I do, because it's going to make my spaceships fly. Tesla's solar panels, Tesla's wireless broadcast power, and the Biefeld-Brown Effect, an electrogravitational phenomenon that causes powered flight. (Tesla himself had also dicked around with electromagnetic field lift, to no great consequence. But if he'd gotten proper funding for broadcast power, things could have been different. He may have been a figure of greater stature in his later years, making Townsend Brown consider contact him. A success in broadcast power would make Tesla a more vital figure in his later years, to be certain.)
(I mean, can you imagine this? America, between the wars, was not the US of today. It did not recognise itself as a "superpower". That's one of the things that prevented a quick save of the Great Depression; America did not attempt to shape the international economic environment solely through its own actions, acting as the hegemony. It had retreated to its old policy of isolationism, as handed down by George Washington in his Farewell Address: "avoid entangling alliances". But imagine an America between the wars whose streets were lit, from coast to coast, by wirelessly broadcast power, and revolutionary ways of generating electricity. Imagine something as mad as signalling a way out of the Depression as sending men into space to photograph the world.)
