The Robot Boat of Nikola Tesla

Today cruise missiles, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), remote-control tracked vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have revolutionized the defense industry. These robotic warriors are in daily use in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. Today’s military gurus predict that within a generation weaponized robots will largely replace live pilots, sailors and soldiers sent into harms' way on the battlefields of tomorrow. Few of the play station generation that will control these vehicles from afar know the name of the man who in responsible for giving birth to the automated warrior, Nikola Tesla. Tesla, a Serbian-born American immigrant who basically is responsible for AC power and many of the first breakthroughs in radio, radar and energy fields, invented and tested the first unmanned guided weapons more than a hundred years ago. .

In 1898, six years before the Wright brothers flew, Tesla designed and built a pair of radio controlled boats. He applied for and was granted patent number 613,809 "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles" by the US Patent Office for these boats. The craft were constructed of iron, powered by a electric battery of his own design, and equipped with a radio-mechanical receiver that accepted commands from a wireless transmitter. The boats were equipped with a large whip antenna, a modular space that could carry a charge, diving rudders, a prop and electric running lights that could all be remotely controlled. Tesla demonstrated the vessels to a shocked crowd in an indoor pool at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The crowd was amazed how Tesla, always a showman, maneuvered his six-foot-long boat in patterns through the water, and then stopped and started the craft. He even had the forethought to equip his boats with a crude logic gate which prevented them from being taken over by another transmitter other than his own. The craft alarmed those in the crowd who saw it and who claimed it to be everything from magic and telepathy to being piloted by a trained monkey hidden inside.

Tesla, who referred to the craft as telautomatons envisioned a small group of trained operators could remotely control the craft, which would be armed with warheads and attack naval ships in swarms of hundreds. This did not come to pass, however, as the military establishment could not appreciate the potential of Tesla’s weapon for anti-ship uses or of the broader idea of remote control vehicles. He offered the weapon to the United States navy and later to Great Britain without success. World War I brought about a brief interest in the designs and Tesla’s close friend, the writer Mark Twain, even offered to be an agent for the weapon in Europe. The German Kriegsmarine operated FL-Boote (ferngelenkte Sprengboote) which were small radio-controlled motor boats filled with explosives to attack Allied ships in the last months of World War II. The grasp of the time was shorter than the reach and the concept remained forgotten until after World War II. Today the vision has been adopted and the weapons are real.

Just as Tesla had foreseen:

“Telautomats will be ultimately produced, capable of acting as if possessed of their own intelligence, and their advent will create a revolution”. -Tesla, Nicola, in his book My Inventions, published in 1921

Sources and further reading

The Problem of Increasing Human Energy – Tesla, N published in Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900

Patent number 613,809 "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles” Tesla, N 1899

The Tesla Society of New York

Tesla's boat

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Teslas Diagram

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