What’s all this about Tesla?

While it is important to note that while these timelines are not branches of each other, it is an interesting fact that the story of Tesla’s development of time travel and what happened after that happened almost identically in each timeline, with one extremely small variation in each that caused major differences

In all timelines, Tesla first came up with the practical functioning of manipulating temporal flux all the way back in 1903, but was completely unaware of what he had managed to create for decades, believing it merely to be a form of wireless power transmission.

Around 1934, he started to have suspicions that it wasn’t, reconsidering some of his previous ideas. The notes we have start when he moved into the New Yorker Hotel, and make reference to some prior, now lost, notes where he talked about his new uncertainty about the workability of that wireless power transmission scheme.

But he didn’t hit upon the idea that he had been manipulating something to do with time until March 1935. And he started to write about the idea of controllable time travel in January 1936.

Tesla never told anyone about this. It’s not clear why, at the time he was making grand claims about death rays and mind reading, and time travel would have fit right in. But as far as anyone can tell, not a single word.

He continued to develop these ideas, even managed to test them in secret, until October 1937, when he got hit by a car.

At which point the timelines start becoming rather different, starting with commonwealth history

In Legacy and InterAct things are mostly the same for some more time. In those, Tesla had not met Flynn, so just continued to be injured and work on plans. His notes are nearly identical between both timelines, and his injuries appeared to have stopped his practical experimentation entirely. And the people who have reviewed his notes seemed to think that his heart really was not in the time travel research anymore, that he’d realized that nothing would ever come of it, and certainly not before he died. He eventually seemed to conclude that time travel was possible, but not controllable, and shelved the idea, putting all his notes away. He lived until 1943, and then died, never figuring the details out.

When he died, the US government recovered what they thought was all his notes, and the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) looked though his notes. The NDRC is perhaps most famous for operating the S-1 Section during WWII, which was renamed later to the Manhattan Project to disguise what it was about. The NDRC were not looking for time travel, of course, they were looking for the ‘death ray’ he’d been talking about.

They didn’t find it, or anything important, and eventually handed those notes along with all this personal effects over to Yugoslavia, and they are currently on display in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, in Yugoslavia in InterAct and in Serbia in Legacy. This includes part of the temporal flux generator he experimented with, although as it is extremely non-functional, it is not considered any sort of security threat.

However, the government missed the box of time travel notes, which had been stashed elsewhere. The hotel discovered the box months later and handed them over. The US government realized what it had in Legacy in 1943, and started working on it.

It apparently never realized what it had in InterAct, at all. It didn’t bother to label the notes and stuck it in a government warehouse. The notes were not looked at until 2006 by an unknown man who bought an unlabeled lot at a government auction, who contacted a researcher he knew who worked at Verge Energy when he realized he had something of Tesla’s. This was not because he thought he had anything useful in physics, but because he just knew stuff of Tesla’s would be valuable and his friend probably had a friend or two who would want it. The researcher glanced at it, realized what it was actually talking about, and immediately got Verge Energy to buy the entire box through a cutout for a massive amount of money before the man could figure out what he actually had.

Verge Energy worked on it for years and eventually joined the Undivided Concord, which classified the research too dangerous, but that classification was reversed later under TA/UC, and they eventually were able to get it working reproducibly in 2023.