Earthquake Machine
Nikola Tesla established a laboratory at 46 E Houston Street in New York. There, at one point while experimenting with mechanical oscillators, he allegedly generated a resonance of several buildings causing complaints to the police. As the speed grew it is said that the machine oscillated at the resonance frequency of his own building and, belatedly realizing the danger, he was forced to use a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment, just as the police arrived. The Mythbusters television program made a small machine based on the same principle, but driven by electricity rather than steam, to test the claimed earthquake effect; it produced vibrations in a large structure that could be felt hundreds of feet away, but no significant shaking, and they judged the effect to be a busted myth.
Read more about this topic: Mechanical Resonance
Famous quotes containing the words earthquake and/or machine:
“Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915)