Introduction

During the period of radio's most rapid growth (1915-1940), Tesla watched quietly from the sidelines, for by this time he had fallen out of favor with the media, or rather with the establishment that controls it. Still, some of his comments have made it into the published record. In 1927 he said that broadcasting "is now carried out with unfit apparatus and on a commercially defective plan." Of radio technology generally Tesla said in 1932 that "the transmitting and receiving apparatus is ill-conceived and not well adapted for selection. The transmitter generates several systems of waves, all of which, except one, are useless. As a consequence only an infinitesimal amount of energy reaches the receiver, and dependence is placed on extreme amplification."

"Radio experimenters of this age," Tesla said of the hams of 1934, "are following ancient theories." By this he meant backward theories. Tesla's favorite backward theorist was Heinrich Hertz, who saw the phenomenon of radio as some kind of straight-line radiation akin to light. Tesla said Hertz' theory, which is still in vogue today, was "one of the most remarkable and inexplicable aberrations of the scientific mind which has ever been