Original subtitles

They were once the most advanced buildings and structures on the planet.

The best achievements in design and construction .

Today they are abandoned, polluted and deadly.

These empty buildings are filled with the lost lives of real people,

leaving many questions unanswered and mysteries unresolved.

In this series, we connect to the history of electricity and explore,

or a huge structure rusting in a contaminated zone near Chernobyl

could have unleashed World War III.

150 meters high, 450 meters long, and then?

It has a fraction of the computing power of any computer from the 70s

and if something had gone wrong, World War III would have started.

We explore the remains of Nikola Tesla's generator on Long Island and ask,

whether his plan to supply the planet with unlimited electricity would have worked.

He tried to develop the transmission of electricity without wires.

Because Tesla coils create and transmit radio waves.

A sophisticated control room in the heart of Hungary 's oldest power plant

reveals the belief that electricity will create a new and better world.

We see it as a projection of the future for everyone.

Trying to show your country and people that you are progressive,

that you are entering a new era.

And we ask why the brilliant mathematician has been forgotten,

although the construction he invented

have been used to create the world's largest buildings.

It is a work of art and engineering, it is mathematics.

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

The strange power of electricity has puzzled mankind for centuries.

By the end of the 19th century, scientists discovered the possibility

how it can be applied in addition to electricity production .

As a result, life on Earth became quite different.

In eastern Ukraine near the Russian border

houses one of the most unusual electrical facilities ever built.

A huge network of steel beams and cables rises above the ground,

which, if it is not blowing in the wind at the moment, stands perfectly still.

Once the whole world could hear this amazing machine.

This is Duga's "Woodpecker".

Looking at the woodpecker, you think, "Oh, this is post-apocalyptic."

This is a movie setting where you could see James Bond or Bruce Willis.

The eerie silence here makes you think,

so that a film could be made here about a civilization that abandoned Mars.

500 meters long and 150 meters high.

Duga "Over the horizon" radar system

was created in the dark days of the Cold War.

But what role did it play in decades of global tension?

The idea of ​​an over-the-horizon radar was born in the late 40s,

before that, the Americans had built the so-called Early Warning Line,

which consisted of an array of dozens of radar devices

and the Canadian Far East was covered by radars

and even if you put them on mountain tops,

cannot see with such radars even in the best conditions

further than about a hundred kilometers away.

Over-the-horizon radar

gives the ability to scan the area

within a radius of thousands of kilometers.

Duga was a modern facility that was supposed to take advantage of the ionosphere

The upper layer of the Earth's atmosphere.

It must be remembered that the Earth is, of course, curved,

it sets limits on any wave,

that the radar could send out. Basically to the horizon.

So if you want to see things further away,

you have to make the wave bend around the curvature of the Earth.

Fortunately, we have the ionosphere,

which reflects the low frequencies sent by the radar

they don't get through it, they bounce back

you can aim your waves further and then back again.

Of course, this can be done with the help of computers,

which calculate possible frequency changes,

which is needed to bounce the waves back from the ionosphere

and of course to come back from the ionosphere

and your radar must have a powerful transmitter and receiver.

Even for the most sophisticated modern radar,

like the Over the Horizon apparatus, these things can't be tiny.

These devices were huge.

Having the ability to detect approaching missiles,

Duga would have been on the front lines of every future war.

But would it have worked?

It is not known how this thing would have worked, now we know more,

we understand the ionosphere and things like that better,

as the picture has become clearer,

we know that the ionosphere is not a perfectly smooth layer,

there are variations on this.

That means it's not as easy to triangulate with

as with normal radar where the signal is currently coming from,

how far it is since the signal can bounce in many ways.

The Soviets knew that a nuclear missile could arrive in a few minutes,

so fast and accurate signal reading was vital.

A wrong reading could spell disaster.

There is always a human element involved in such things.

Unfortunately, even the best scientists,

the human brain can detect patterns that are not actually there.

Yes, under tension you can see things, imagine things,

think about what time it was then: the Cold War and the like.

People under stress want this warning system to work.

There could have been a huge number of warnings.

The woodpecker is a confirmation of the fact that big does not mean best.

150 meters high, 450 meters long, and then?

It has a fraction of the computing power of any computer from the 70s ,

which meant that the results had to be interpreted by an individual,

who is human to begin with. And when a person errs,

if he thinks a missile is approaching, not a bird,

what caused this fluctuation, so what?

Then World War III begins.

Like all similar facilities,

the construction and work of Duga was shrouded in secrecy.

But it was a mistake by the Soviet authorities with the frequencies,

which betrayed the whole game and gave Duga a nickname.

The Russian radar was almost like a woodpecker,

when you heard those radar signals, it went tock-tock-tock-tock-tock.

The radar signals themselves tended to interfere

and interrupt normal civil frequencies,

including aeronautical frequencies.

They should have changed the frequency due to international complaints .

Woodpecker's intervention continued until 1986.

The location of the dugout was chosen in such a way that it would receive sufficient electricity

from the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

When the fourth reactor of the power plant exploded on April 26,

radiation contaminated a huge area.

The entire Duga complex and accommodation for its thousand workers

was left overnight.

Woodpecker brilliantly sums up the entire Cold War.

Science and technology did not develop fast enough at that time,

thus was built on a large scale. To discourage.

In the end it was never used.

And now it stands quietly decaying in the middle of the Chernobyl danger zone.

Maybe this is the picture in front of our eyes when we look up at Rähn.

Thank Heaven it was never used.

The once powerful Woodpecker lies abandoned in the Ukrainian forest

as a degenerate reminder of the fear of an all-destructive nuclear war.

Its demolition is too expensive and impossible to use.

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

Duga Rähn is not the only notable remnant of the Cold War.

In the Istra forest near Moscow

is a smaller but equally horrible facility.

Looking like a relic from a sci-fi movie,

Marx's machine is actually an electrical generator.

But the energy generated by Marx's machine dwarfed its rivals.

In a fraction of a second, it was able to create an artificial lightning bolt,

which had more energy than all Russian power plants combined.

But what was its purpose?

In the 70s, the East and the West had nuclear arsenals

too equal to risk attacking first.

So Nsvl looked for a way to block US missiles.

Both sides had very different fences and systems.

We had a pretty good idea of ​​their missile capabilities.

And I believe they knew quite well,

what are the capabilities of our weapons.

One of the side effects of exploding nuclear weapons is that

that they generate a powerful electromagnetic pulse

or EMP knocking all electronics out of line,

including missile targeting systems.

Lightning also produces an EMF.

Soviet scientists believed that if they created a machine,

which would apply the crushing force of lightning,

they could cripple the US missile arsenal.

We had cruise missiles, which were our most powerful weapons.

To attack Soviet airspace because they flew low

and it was very difficult to catch them on the radar

certainly not to the early warning system radars of the 1970s .

The technology used in the Marx machine

began with the invention of the 19th century, the electric generator, or coil.

Coils are good at generating and receiving radio waves

or electromagnetic waves of any kind.

In addition, they inherently carry energy,

so you turn electrical energy into electromagnetic energy,

which can now be transmitted.

Most of the work on electromagnetic energy

were made by the German scientist Edwin Marx in the 1920s

and Russian Vladimir Arkadyev.

Working under cover of secrecy, the Soviets developed their own theories,

to create their own Arkadyev-Marx High Voltage Research Center.

To apply these electricity and magnetism tricks

into something useful that changed the world.

There is an instruction.

Airplanes, for example, must not fly closer than 30 km to a thundercloud,

strong electric fields are located in the atmosphere of a thundercloud

and the plane can control lightning.

Every plane gets one or two electric shocks in a year.

The machine was able to fire 150 meters of artificial lightning,

but only for 100 microseconds.

The next step would be to check the artificial lightning.

But the machine used a lot of energy and was also very expensive.

But now it became clear that the USA is also experimenting with the EMP

and in the case of war, the Soviet Union would no longer have a technological advantage.

In 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed

and the money for Marx's machine simply ran out.

What could have been the world's ultimate weapon,

from then on, he stands silent and lonely in his corner of the forest.

Another revolutionary electro-magnetic field generator

stood at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, United States.

In a beautiful area east of New York , hidden under the trees, something

which is the aftermath of a grand plan to reshape life on Earth.

The plan would have made Wardenclyffe the energy center of the entire planet.

Would this incredible plan have even worked?

And who was the mysterious, obsessed inventor behind the plan?

Today, we take electricity for granted.

But at the end of the 19th century it was news. It was a miracle.

It was a panacea for almost everything

and its potential was limitless.

Now all that remains of Wardenclyffe is a demolished laboratory building.

People come from all over the world to explore these dank corridors

and look for clues about what happened here.

In the early years of the 20th century

rumors spread of mystical experiments,

of strange flashing lights and a reclusive figure,

who worked here and who was half genius and half mad.

His name was Nikola Tesla.

Neil Bagget works at the Tesla Research Center in Wardenclyffe.

He believes that Tesla's ideas were capable of changing the world.

Tesla was a unique person. He was very reclusive.

He worked all the time. His obsession was invention.

He wanted to help the world, to do things that would benefit the whole world.

The scale of Tesla's visions becomes clear from his plans with Wardenclyffe.

It required a technique that had never been seen before.

We are standing at the foot of the Tesla Tower.

57 meter high tower made of wooden beams

and on top of it a large hemisphere of copper wires,

which was actually a high voltage capacitor,

which could charge millions of volts.

The voltage was so high that it exceeded the capacity and threw sparks,

sending out lightning bolts.

This unique capacitor is Tesla's most famous invention

and was used in dozens of experiments.

It was supposed to trigger an electric current directly into the ground

into a special underground chamber.

From there, the electricity would have traveled through radial tunnels into the earth's crust.

He tried to develop the wireless transmission of electricity,

because Tesla coils create and transmit radio waves

or electromagnetic waves of any kind.

He believed he could create within the earth's crust

standing electric potential wave.

A standing wave is like a wave with a rope attached to it - a jump rope.

By moving it, you get a standing wave that does not move forward.

These voltage spikes and dips would spread all over the world.

By connecting to them, you could take electricity

or information, by modulating the wave you could send information.

It is a new way of creating and sharing energy through the network,

something that we have adopted, not directly from Tesla,

but this is another thing that was needed to change the world

and we did it.

However , powerful forces were gathering against Tesla Wardenclyffe's plans .

His decision to use alternating current instead of direct current in his machine

brought him into conflict with another electrical celebrity - Thomas Edison.

Edison had direct current and Tesla had alternating current

and there was a rivalry between them, a real war between them

and Edison was a better marketer than Tesla,

who was very focused on science and its possibilities

and who rather thought about the future

and how to change the world, which we eventually did.

However, alternating current is better than direct current for transmitting electricity

and now that's what we're using, direct current is just in batteries,

we do not use direct current for any other purpose .

Alternating current is easier to produce in power plants,

it is easier to transmit through wires

and even Tesla started talking about it,

which we are currently trying to develop and that is wireless electricity.

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

In competition with Edison, Tesla's biggest enemy was himself.

His mysterious experiments and obsessive behavior

made it easy to portray him as a freak.

Edison managed to blackmail him,

he showed the dangers of alternating current,

electrocuting elephants to make people think:

"No, direct current is the right thing to do because it's safer and cleaner."

Tesla fell into depression, he became ill

and died a very poor man.

As we sadly learned after his death ,

he was right, he was on the right track with AC,

maybe he even invented the radio

before Marconi even started working on it.

So even though Tesla was right, he was not appreciated in his lifetime.

Tesla's main backer - leading financier JP Morgan

there was no other option but to end the Wardenclyffe project.

Even the tower was demolished

and only a large circle of foundation stones remained.

Really disappointing thing about the Wardenclyffe Tower project

was that it was discontinued allegedly due to lack of funds.

Really? JP Morgan has no money?

Or it happened because Tesla created free energy,

that no one can profit from? We need to look into it carefully.

Today, people work in dark research laboratories all over the world

some dedicated supporters of Tesla's ideas ,

who want to realize his Wardenclyffe dream.

But the inexhaustible energy potential also has its more sinister side.

Tesla himself presented the idea of ​​creating a superweapon using energy

and in the 1980s the US Air Force did.

experiments in creating artificial lightning.

In a distant corner of the forest, the Marx machine of the Soviets followed the same path.

The world is yet to see if Tesla 's visions of the future of electricity will be fulfilled

be it good or bad - will become a reality one day.

At the beginning of the 20th century, conventional power plants spread throughout the world.

In the Kelenföld district of Budapest, the capital of Hungary

is one of the oldest and most beautiful power plants in the world.

This is the Kelenföld power station.

When it became operational in June 1914 ,

there was no rival in efficiency and power to Kelenföld in the whole world.

Today, electricity generation is a common industrial process

and the stations are constructed as efficient and cheap as possible.

However, Kelenföld's constructors wanted to create an electric temple.

Generating electricity is actually very simple.

You take something incredibly simple,

a turbine that spins in a coil around a magnet, and that's it,

but in order to use it, you have to add regulators

and other extras. For example, a transformer,

systems that would make the turbine rotate at a constant speed.

All these things had to be worked out

and this technology is very old.

Now we do it the same way it was done back then,

many things had to be thought of when creating these things

and be ingenious in making alternating current useful.

To produce electricity, Kelenföld needed steam to run turbines.

There were stacks of coal in the huge furnace room

and the nearby Danube

hundreds of thousands of liters of water were delivered .

Coal and water create steam

and make the magnets inside the coil rotate,

basically it is the same form of science and physics point of view

and it shows that we haven't found a better way to generate electricity.

Even with nuclear power, we still heat water

and the turbines are exactly the same.

Yes, electronics and transformers could be better,

we lose less energy sending it through the masts,

but if you go to the heart of this electricity generation,

then the best I can say is that we do it exactly the same way.

Kelenföld was built at a time when the Art Deco design style

transformed utilitarian structures.

Art Deco influences are immediately apparent in Kelenföld's unique control room .

The room's curved walls and dramatic glass ceiling show

how much effort went into turning the power plant into a work of art.

Tibor Horvath is the director of the power plant that replaced Kelenföld.

Kelenföld was always famous for the latest technology

in terms of improvement and use.

The control room was very important for regulating the power plant

and for managing electrical equipment.

Technology such as transformers and switches,

was ranked first in Europe in terms of its design .

For the next 20 years , Kelenföld was very famous.

It must be taken as a projection of all futures

and therefore may have design elements used for it

you try to attract people on board, you try to show your country and people,

that you are progressive, that you are entering a new era

so why not use new design elements for this.

The new power plant soon became an exhibit in Hungary

and its layout and design were copied throughout Europe.

I think it's nice that they tried to use the Art Deco style,

make it exquisite and it is still beautiful.

It's fantastic. I don't know how practical it was,

were there any problems with the sound and other things like that.

I don't see why design and functionality can't go hand in hand.

Although I MS broke out only two months after Kelenföld started working,

the brand new station escaped unscathed.

20 years later, the station became the target of Allied bombing raids.

Its design now got a new purpose.

Concrete one- and two-man shelters were built throughout the station ,

including a decorated control room.

Bunkers were built during World War II.

Fortunately, the control room and bunker were not needed

no protection

as only one bomb fell and that too outside the station.

The bombs did not damage the buildings and the roof.

Bomb shelters in the middle of the factory or in production buildings

make me wonder a lot.

Of course, it makes sense to make shelters deep underground,

but the idea of ​​putting individual shields right in the middle of the target

seems quite strange.

And this completely contradicts all research,

which was made in the 20s and 30s by German engineers,

who studied possible future war

and designed factories to minimize damage

and repair and firefighting would be easy,

should an airstrike take place,

After the war, Kelenföld remained the center of Hungarian energy supply,

until it stopped working in 2005 after 91 years of operation .

Even after years of decay and neglect

his glory is still admired throughout the world .

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

Abandoned Buildings

Energy demand

It stands abandoned by the river Okaa in eastern Russia

revolutionary high voltage mast.

This amazing tower is 120 years old

the result of the developed construction technique,

which can be seen today in the world's largest facilities.

It is a unique combination of art and architecture.

The Sukhov Tower is very striking.

You look at it and you don't know why,

but you feel that there is something different about it.

Looking at this thing is a bit mesmerizing

it seems to you that all this steel is curved,

but you have to remember that every piece there is straight.

It is a work of art and engineering, it is mathematics.

Tatjana Vinogradova has studied its constructor all her life

a man who pushed the boundaries of mathematics and technology.

That man was Vladimir Grigorevich Sukhov.

You know, the most interesting thing is... I myself think a lot about Sukhov.

Maybe it's naive, but every person has two hemispheres.

One is responsible for figurative thinking,

the other is for math and analytics.

Some have more of one hemisphere, some the other.

Sukhov had both hemispheres working brilliantly .

This mast worked. It was not built simply as a memorial

to the hyperboloid mast. He had his own function

and that function was to support power lines.

From where we stand now, the power line went to the other side.

In order for the electrical wires to go to the other side,

it was necessary to install a whole number of masts

there was not one but eight masts.

In my opinion, Sukhov's idea was very avant-garde,

as masts must be practical

we need a large height with as little steel consumption as possible.

But in my opinion, Sukhov penetrated deeper into the problem.

He thought how to make it beautiful

and mathematically as accurate as possible

and he came up with this beautiful and unusual structure.

Sukhov Tower was one of eight,

which was built in 1927 to carry electric wires across the Okaa River

to important industrial enterprises in the city of Nizhny Novgorod.

It was one of two 130-meter masts standing on the north bank.

But did Sukhov's revolutionary design cope with the weight of the wires

and by the influence of the winds blowing across the open country?

He had to do so many calculations,

to make sure this thing is feasible

and he kept it simple, elegant and beautiful design.

It is almost transparent. All beams are very thin,

so one can imagine the wind passing through it,

without causing the slightest trouble,

so it's a very efficient and possibly complex design.

Any engineer who designs a mast hundreds of meters high,

must consider the effect of wind.

The wind can be very strong even if you don't feel it on the ground.

There are forces acting on the pole above that try to overturn it.

Looking at the Eiffel Tower, you can say,

that it is a stout structure, it has a wide base,

it is narrower at the top and looks quite solid.

The Sukhov Tower is not like that, it is much more graceful.

In a way, he put his mathematical thinking into practice

and created masts that are graceful but still get the job done.

Sukhov even developed a new way of constructing his masts.

The way Sukhov's masts were built was quite clever.

The various pieces were placed at the foot of the pole and then raised.

They worked in the same direction,

so they had to lift up, not up and aside,

so it made the operation a little easier.

Sukhov became a world leader in 1896,

when he constructed a water tower with a light but very strong mesh structure,

known as a hyperboloid construction,

in which straight beams mounted on a round base are used.

Each beam was tilted to the side and inward at a specific angle

and thus a gradually tapering tower was obtained.

It has an arched profile, it is arched in shape.

However, its details are long and straight.

How do you calculate how strong it will be,

how resistant it is to wind and stuff like that.

It's almost incomprehensible how he came up with it.

It is unlike anything that has come before.

Before him, calculations of these structures did not exist.

So he came up with the calculations himself

and his intuition helped him guess how the structure would hold itself up.

Although Suhov also used his system for light buildings,

it was his mast design that immediately caught the eye.

Over the next twenty years , he performed almost two hundred suits.

He further planned to construct a 335-meter radio mast in Moscow,

but Russia was in the grip of revolution,

there was not enough steel and he had to limit himself to only 150 meters.

Shabolovka mast completed in 1922

was the first major construction project of the new Soviet Union

and it confirmed Sukhov's reputation as a brilliant structural engineer,

but would his huge mast have worked?

Next to Sukhov's mast, the Eiffel Tower would have been tiny,

it would have been the length of three American football fields.

Imagine that for yourself.

I believe that Suhov would have completed a 300 m high mast,

because its structure was so incredibly elegant and light

and so perfectly oriented with all its various steel beams,

which create the necessary stability so that he would have done it.

Sukhov did not build more towers,

but his genius inspired other engineers to copy his design.

Hearst Tower in New York and Kings Cross Station in London

there are only two world-famous buildings that were inspired

of his diagrid hyperboloid.

Sukhov's name may be unknown to many people today,

but his legacy lives on.

In the late 19th century, electricity was a mystical and almost magical force.

However, it became indispensable in less than a century

to a large part of the world's population.

Relics of the early years of electrical inventions

and the way in which it became important in both war and peace,

is a reminder to us of how far we have come.

Having stood abandoned for decades,

the location of Tesla Wardenclyffe has been saved from oblivion.

It is planned to preserve the remnants of his revolutionary energy system

and are encouraged to study and understand his life and work.

He achieved so much during his life that it's a pity,

that it is not there as a kind of memorial

about how brilliant he really was.

It's a real shame that it was torn to pieces.

Duga Rähn's location in the radioactive contamination zone of Chernobyl

helped keep him going for the last 30 years.

The huge steel radar system has become a lasting monument.

To the paranoia of the Cold War years.

Today, Rähn looks as if it has been frozen in time.

It's dead, it's post-apocalyptic.

It was something that was so strategic and important,

it has a kind of scary aura about it

it is something that could have caused World War III.

Similarly, like Tesla and Sukhov,

modern engineers and scientists are also expanding its boundaries,

what can be achieved with electricity and how it can be delivered.

Inevitably, these new discoveries also become modern technology

in many awe -inspiring abandoned structures.