Two weeks later, July 30, 1903 the patent for the simplest form of the vacuum tube was filed under a newly founded corporation called ‘Cooperative Research’,. In their original timeline, this would be filed a year later, and likely as important to Nikola Tesla, was filed and owned by the Marconi radio company, one of his mortal enemies, who had stolen radio from him. Here, he stole vacuum tubes back.
Vacuum tubes, of course, were crucial for the development of radio. Cooperative Research continued to patent and release advancements in vacuum tubes, over the decades. And other technology.
1903 to 1937 was only 34 years, but it was 34 years that invented vacuum tubes, usable radio, televisions, crystal oscillators, talking motion pictures, and more.
Just to demonstrate the scope of technological advances, the time travelers had left 1937 shortly after the first lab test of a working jet engine, and arrived in 1903 shortly before the first powered flight would take place. Although Cooperative Research’s interests were not in powered flight and they did not do anything there.
What they were interested in electronics.
Cooperative Research spent 20 years staying ahead of normal development, which they did fairly successfully, an incredibly elusive company that managed to patent things that everyone else was working on but hadn’t gotten to yet.
This is essentially the only evidence we have that the older Nikola Tesla also made it back. There are no credible reports of him ever being sighted, but it seems wildly implausible that our two co-founders, who had no scientific education, could have spaced the advancements so well, always staying a step ahead of current research, much less rebuilt time travel to work in a much more controllable manner in 1908. He must have made it, and continued to work with the co-founders.
Although this does raise some interesting questions because the older Nikola Tesla would have been been 86 by 1908, and in other timelines, he died at 86. Either he basically finished right under the line, or he lived longer, and there’s evidence that he continue to develop things until around 1920. It is often claimed he died from complications from getting hit by a car in 1937, and never seeing a doctor about it, so perhaps this confirms that theory, and that in our timeline the medical attention he apparently was willing to receive did allow a longer life.
That was the elusive tech side of their organization, the secretive part that no one understood was linked to them. Those labs operated out of Portland, or at least had a mailing address there. No one has ever located any actual lab site until the relocation to Los Angeles in 1908.
This lab also sold approximately eight tons of pure aluminum in 1903, and then never sold any again. The process to cheaply produce aluminum via electrolysis had been developed a decade earlier, and it wasn’t that odd that a lab would spring up to do that. However, as advances in electrolysis meant the real price of aluminum would drop by almost 60% by 1937, it seems obvious that this aluminum had been purchased in the 1937 and brought back in time to fund things. Specifically, to property purchases in San Francisco.