A 1931 Time profile captured Nikola Tesla’s late-life claims about wireless power, interplanetary communication, and strange signals he recorded in Colorado Springs.
Nikola Tesla, born in Smiljan in what is now Croatia, spent his career moving between hard engineering and sweeping forecasts. One of the clearest records of his late-life outlook appears in “Tesla at 75,” published by Time on July 20, 1931. In that piece, Tesla described plans for wireless power on a planetary scale, argued that interplanetary communication would transform society, and hinted at a “new source of power” while refusing to spell out how it would work.
Those themes connect to an older episode that Tesla returned to for decades: the periodic disturbances he said he detected during his 1899 work in Colorado Springs, signals he later tied to the idea of communicating with other worlds.
The 1898 “robot” that was really a radio-controlled boat
Tesla’s reputation for being ahead of his time rests partly on demonstrations that were concrete, public, and documented. In 1898, at the Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden, he showed a small craft that responded to wireless commands, a milestone frequently cited as an early practical display of remote control. The basic concept was formalized in his U.S. patent, No. 613,809, dated November 8, 1898.
The original text calls it “a never-before-seen working model of a robot guided entirely by radio waves.” Historically, the device was a boat, not a humanoid machine, but Tesla himself invited the “robot” framing by presenting it as a system that could receive commands at a distance and act on them. In modern terms, it sits closer to remote control and unmanned systems than to robotics in the contemporary sense.
The timeline matters because it places Tesla’s radio-control spectacle years before the Nobel committee honored wireless telegraphy: Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Tesla’s disputes over priority in radio are a separate, sprawling historical fight, but the date comparison in the text is straightforward: 1898 came more than a decade before 1909.
What Tesla told Time about interplanetary energy and alien life
The 1931 Time profile is where Tesla’s late-life worldview is laid out with unusual clarity. It includes his claim that he had already conceived a way to transmit large amounts of energy from one planet to another, regardless of distance, and it links that to the broader project of interplanetary communication.
Tesla offered these and many other remarks in an interview with Time:
“…he already has conceived “a means that will make it possible for man to transmit energy in large amounts, thousands of horsepower, from one planet to another, absolutely regardless of distance.
“I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come someday. and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling, like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind and will form the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.”
The emphasis in those lines is not merely on technology, but on consequences. Tesla presented communication with other worlds as inevitable, and treated the existence of life elsewhere as a near-certainty that would shape human behavior.
Colorado Springs, 1899, and the “counting” signals
In 1899 while working in his Colorado Springs laboratory and using the ‘Teslascope,’ Tesla is believed to have heard a strange rhythmic sound coming from space.
“I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth. Even now, at times, I can vividly recall the incident and see my apparatus as though it were actually before me. My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me.” (Talking With Planets)
“The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances, I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another… I was not merely beholding a vision but had caught sight of a great and profound truth.”
Some of the signals picked up by Tesla confused him, and it is said that at the time, he even believed what he had picked up was coming not from Earth but Mars.
“Others may scoff at this suggestion…of communicating with one of our heavenly neighbors, as Mars…or treat it as a practical joke, but I have been in deep earnest about it ever since I made my first observations in Colorado Springs… At the time, there existed no wireless plant other than mine that could produce a disturbance perceptible in a radius of more than a few miles. Furthermore, the conditions under which I operated were ideal, and I was well trained for the work. The character of the disturbances recorded precluded the possibility of their being of terrestrial origin, and I also eliminated the influence of the sun, moon, and Venus. As I then announced, the signals consisted in a regular repetition of numbers, and subsequent study convinced me that they must have emanated from Mars, the planet having just then been close to the earth.”
Tesla tied this story most directly to “Talking With Planets,” published in Collier’s Weekly on February 9, 1901. His own language is careful in one way and bold in another: careful in listing what he believed he had ruled out, bold in treating number and order as evidence pointing beyond ordinary terrestrial causes.
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to treat the episode as a clean detection of extraterrestrial intelligence. Radio astronomy did not exist as a formal discipline in Tesla’s era, and the first widely credited discovery of radio emissions from beyond Earth is typically linked to Karl Jansky’s 1933 announcement of Milky Way “static”. A NASA-affiliated technical analysis prepared for the Radio JOVE project at Goddard argues that some natural radio sources could, in principle, fit parts of Tesla’s description, but it treats that as a technical possibility rather than a settled historical conclusion.
The text’s own conclusion goes further, stating that the signals were “indeed extraterrestrial” in the sense of being radio waves from distant celestial sources, but not from Martians or other intelligent beings. That distinction aligns with how later writers often reframe Tesla’s claims: keeping the idea of a genuine phenomenon while stripping away the Mars interpretation.
Wireless energy as a political and economic idea
When talking about the future, free and unlimited energy, Tesla was a man that did not see a world controlled by money as we have it today.
To Nikola Tesla, all the world’s a power house. For 40 years he has been reasoning, calculating and arguing that the earth has a definite electrical resonance. All that men need do to have unlimited power at their command, and that power without the necessity of transmission wires, would be to generate electricity in tune with the earth’s. The generators might be at waterfalls, coal mines, anywhere. Only possible drawbacks would be the vast expense of installation and the fact that every power house on earth would be obliged to generate the same kind of current, and anyone could tap the current. There could be no financial control of electricity.
Tesla’s claim here is not just technical. It is also an argument about control: if power could be transmitted and accessed without wires, it would be harder to restrict, meter, or monopolize. Historically, Tesla’s best-documented achievements reshaped electric power through alternating current and induction motors, while his planet-scale wireless power ambitions remained largely unfulfilled and controversial. The Time profile preserved how he framed that ambition at age 75, including the cost and coordination problems he acknowledged.
The “new source of power” Tesla would not fully name
At the age of 75, and during the interview with Time, Tesla explained that he was actively working on various projects, but one, in particular, could change the world as we know it. Tesla was working to create an entirely new source of power, one that no other scientists before him even dreamed of.
“I am working to develop a new source of power. When I say a new source, I mean that I have turned for power to a source which no previous scientist has turned, to the best of my knowledge. The conception, the idea when it first burst upon me was a tremendous shock.”
“It will throw light on many puzzling phenomena of the cosmos and may prove also of great industrial value, particularly in creating a new and virtually unlimited market for steel.”
“I can only say at this time it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source and will be for all practical purposes constant day and night, and at all times of the year. The apparatus for capturing the energy and transforming it will partake both of mechanical and electrical features and will be of ideal simplicity.”
In the 1931 profile, Time presented Tesla as evasive on specifics, promising more detail later while leaving readers with a broad outline and confidence in the scale of the result. That combination, bold forecast plus limited mechanism, sits at the center of the Tesla legend: a man who demonstrably built world-changing systems, and who also made claims that ranged beyond what he could publicly prove.
