June, 1931
Potsdam, GermanyDear Mr. Tesla!
I’m happy to hear that you are celebrating your 75th birthday, and that, as a successful pioneer in the field of high frequency currents, you have been able to witness the wonderful development of this field of technology.
I congratulate you on the magnificent success of your life’s work.
Albert Einstein1
For the balance of the wizard’s life, he would continue to speak cryptically about a number of entirely new and revolutionary inventions. These included (a) a machine for harnessing cosmic rays; (b) a means for transmitting mechanical energy; (c) a particle-beam weapon; and (d) a mechanism for communicating with other planets. In addition, Tesla also continued to refer to (e) his Wardenclyffe idea. The identification of each separate invention became a somewhat confusing task for journalists and researchers because each of these ideas involves the transmission of energy to distant places; and the third invention, the so-called death ray apparently, in its final form, comprised features from some, if not all, of the other inventions.
Throughout Tesla’s seventies, that is, from the mid-1920s until about 1934, Tesla continued his practice of traveling to industrial centers throughout the Northeast and Midwest in his quest to market his wares. While commuting to Philadelphia during the years 1924-25 to work on his gasoline turbine (he had worked on the steam turbine in Chicago and Milwaukee), Tesla met with John B. Flowers, inspector of airplanes and engines at the local naval aircraft factory. He had known the inspector since 1917.2 As it became more apparent that the bladeless turbine was stuck in the endless cycle of research and development, Tesla returned to his first love, wireless transmission of power, and began a publicity campaign to espouse its merits. By implementing a series of central stations to pump energy into the ground and surrounding medium, the ultimate conservationist-pragmatist theorized that airplanes and automobiles, equipped with specially designed receiving devices, could operate without fuel onboard; they would simply derive their power from his towers.
On October 10, 1925, Flowers traveled to New York City to confer with the wizard in his suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There they drafted out the entire scheme so that it could be presented to physicist J. H. Dillinger, head of the Radio Laboratory, Bureau of Standards, in Washington, D.C.
In a carefully worded ten-page document, complete with schematic drawings of the earth imbued with Tesla-created standing waves, Flowers unveiled a plan for operating cars and planes powered by electromagnetism. “Dr. Tesla said that the Wireless Power System would supply power to airplanes at any point around the earth,” Flowers told Dillinger. “In addition,” Flowers continued, “Dr. Tesla has already developed the oscillator to provide the power and is willing to furnish the U.S. Government his plans if they agree to build the plant.” Flowers also set up a meeting in Washington to go over the proposal.
In the interim, Dillinger referred the proposal to H. L. Curtis, a fellow expert. After canny consideration, Curtis rejected the plan, his main objection being that “as he understood it, Tesla’s scheme was to create standing electrical waves around the earth as a sphere. There would then be considerable concentration of energy at the nodes and it was at the nodal points Tesla expected to develop his energy. The system proposed by Mr. Flowers does not have this feature. He proposes to collect energy at any point…[Thus] some means would have to be devised for concentrating this energy and making it available. No such method is proposed, and I do not think of any that appears feasible…[Furthermore] I do not know of any wireless apparatus…of sufficient magnitude to warrant the expectation that power can be economically transmitted by radio methods.”3
The basic criticism that the energy would not be available at any point of the globe, but only at the nodal points, was countered on numerous occasions by Tesla (although, apparently, the towers, which were not near power sources, would have to be placed at nodal points). One of Tesla’s favorite analogies was to view electricity as a kind of fluid and his magnifying transmitters as a series of pumps. Just as with a hydraulic system the fluid would be present at all points in equal pressures, so, too, would Tesla’s electrical oscillations. And just as electrical energy is present at every connected electrical outlet in the world but is not used until an appliance is plugged in, so, too, was Tesla’s electricity available, but not used until the receiver was turned on.
In a comprehensive article published in Telegraph & Telephone Age in October 1927, which was probably written as a rebuttal to Curtis and Dillinger, Tesla also explains that the oscillations would spread from the magnifying transmitter
with a theoretically infinite speed, slowing down first very quickly and afterward at a lesser rate until the distance is about six thousand miles, when it proceeds with the speed of light. From there on it again increases in speed, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, reaching the antipode with approximately infinite velocity. The law of motion can be expressed by stating that the waves on the terrestrial surface sweep in equal intervals of time over equal areas, but it must be understood that the current penetrates deep into the earth and the effects produced on the receivers are the same as if the whole flow was confined to the earth’s axis joining the transmitter with the antipode. The mean surface speed is thus about 471,200 kilometers per second—57% greater than that of the so-called Hertz waves.4
Tesla likened the effect to the moon’s shadow spreading over the earth during an eclipse. Here was the first of a number of instances in which Tesla disagreed with the findings of Einstein’s theory of relativity, as the so-called Tesla wave supposedly traveled faster than light.5
In 1928, Tesla traveled to Philadelphia to attempt construction of his helicopter-airplane, probably with John Flowers, and to Detroit to try to market it as a “flying automobile” to GM. On a more practical level, he also peddled his speedometer to the Ford Motor Company.
One of the problems in the speedometer was cost, the Tesla invention having become a premium item only found in the more expensive vehicles. He also visited with his nephew Nicholas Trbojevich, who was helping fund the helicopter, and who was on the verge of becoming very wealthy from his various automobile inventions associated with economizing the transmission and steering. Trbojevich, like his uncle, was somewhat of a workaholic, and Tesla cautioned his wife to give her husband “unceasing care [and love],” as in the long run “your husband is sure to acquire great wealth and when his battle is won, you will have everything to your heart’s desire.”6
Shortly after, Tesla returned to Detroit and met Trbojevich for a late snack at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the city’s “finest.” According to William Terbo, “the maitre d’ suggested they wait five minutes, when the five dollar cover charge would be lifted. Tesla would hear none of it and marched in.” As this was during the Great Depression, when a quarter could buy three hot dogs and two cokes, this wasted expense was enormous, and it became a great point for laughter among the Trbojevich family, which tended to view Tesla as simply their old eccentric uncle rather than one of the most important inventors in the world. When the nephew tried tactfully to bring up the matter of the cover charge, Tesla evaded by responding, “I’ll never die rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out the window.”7
During this period (1925-38) Tesla also negotiated with Myron Taylor, CEO of U.S. Steel. Interested in the steel company for a variety of reasons, the ever-prodigious inventor had developed special equipment for purifying ores, “degasification of steel,” and also conservation of sulphur during iron processing. In the late 1920s he asked Taylor if he could install equipment to see if the procedure worked. Taylor agreed, and so Tesla traveled up to their Worcester plant in September 1931 to install it. Although he hoped for a successful demonstration, this apparently did not occur, since the archives of U.S. Steel have only one short paragraph referring to Tesla’s dealings with the company.8 Tesla’s ultimate plan, which apparently was not tested, was to install his bladeless turbine in the heat exhaust system, with the idea of converting the enormous amount of wasted heat into useful electricity. Ever the conservationist, this was one of Tesla’s most elegant ideas.
From Worcester, Tesla moved on to Buffalo for a top-secret experiment, according to Peter Savo, a cousin living in New York. There the inventor reportedly refitted an automobile that, according to the story, ran on electrical power from an outside source.
The car [was] a standard Pierce Arrow, with the engine removed and certain other components installed instead. The standard clutch, gear box, and drive train remained…Under the hood, there was a brushless electric motor, connected to [or in place of] the engine…Tesla would not divulge who made the motor.
Set into the dash was a “power receiver” consisting of a box…containing 12 radio tubes…A vertical antenna, consisting of a 6 ft. rod, was installed and connected to the power receiver [which was] in turn, connected to the motor by two heavy, conspicuous cables…Tesla pushed these in before starting and said: “We now have power.”9
If this tale is to be believed, it would mean that Tesla had also installed one of his powerful oscillators somewhere near Niagara Falls to provide the wireless energy needed to power the vehicle. An alternative possibility was that Tesla was testing one of his gasoline or steam turbines in the automobile, and Savo mistook it for the wireless device. “The aging inventor, a tall, thin, almost spiritual figure in the sort of brown cutaway suit that older men wore before the World War, received interviewers in one of the public rooms in the Hotel New Yorker, where he lives. Before he would speak of his present work, he reviewed his past achievements, which entitle him more than Edison, Steinmetz or any other, to be called the father of the power age…”10
There was a new king of the hill. Ever since the 1919 confirmation of his theory of relativity, that space was curved and that light traveled at a constant speed irrespective of the movement of its source, Einstein began to occupy the spot formerly held by such technical wizards as Bell, Edison, the Wright brothers, or Tesla. First postulated in 1905, Einstein’s theories not only shifted the prevailing space-time paradigm, that self-assuring Newtonian world that the old guard grew up in; his theories also threatened Tesla’s position as premier mastermind. Although the measurement of the starlight bending around the sun during the 1919 eclipse was experimental proof of Einstein’s new postulate,” for the most part the theoretical physicist was exactly that, a theorist, whereas Tesla, as hands-on creator of new technologies, was able to prove out his assumptions in the everyday world. This was the inventor’s advantage, and he used it to attack the new Nobel Prize-winning upstart.
As Einstein’s theory abandoned the old nineteenth-century ether, it explained the bending of light rays around large bodies as being caused by the non-Euclidean curving of space-time. This, in essence, became the new and more abstract ether. Mathematical equations accurately predicted the precise amount of bending that occurred. “In general relativity, the gravitational field and the structure or geometry of space are identical…The gravitational field is the curved space.”12
Tesla completely disagreed with the concept of space being curved, saying that it was “self-contradictory.” Since “every action is accompanied by an equivalent reaction,” it appeared to Tesla’s “simple mind…[that] the curved spaces must react on the bodies and, producing the opposite effect, straighten out the curves.” To Tesla, the light bent because the large body (e.g., the sun) had a force field which influenced it.13
Ironically, Einstein’s contemporaries at the Carnegie Institution of Washington were using the Tesla coil in their new 1929 experiments in attempting to split the atom,14 while Tesla was discussing a more esoteric source of energy, cosmic rays:
A principle by which power for driving the machinery of the world may be derived from the cosmic energy which operates the universe, has been discovered by Nikola Tesla, noted physicist and inventor…
This principle, which taps a source of power described as “everywhere present in unlimited quantities” and which may be transmitted by wire or wireless from central plants to any part of the globe, will eliminate the need of coal, oil, gas or any other of the common fuels…“The central source of cosmic energy for the earth is the sun,” Dr. Tesla said, but “night will not interrupt the flow of the new power supply.”15
On July 10, 1931, Tesla turned seventy-five. Time honored the senior inventor by placing his portrait on the cover. Tesla’s life was briefly reviewed, and his most recent mysterious research on harnessing “an entirely new and unsuspected source [of energy]” was discussed. Unwilling to reveal more about the adjuvant, the venerated iconoclast startled the interviewer by referring obliquely to his most esoteric invention, the “Teslascope,” a device for signaling the nearby stars: “I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come some day, 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.”16 Hugo Gernsback couldn’t have said it better.
Simultaneously, Kenneth Swezey wrote a flurry of letters to every notable he could think of, requesting a birthday greeting. Accolades poured in (many quoted throughout this text) from E. F. Alexanderson, B. A. Behrend, W. H. Bragg, Lee De Forest, Gano Dunn, Jack Hammond, A. E. Kennelly, Arthur Korn, Oliver Lodge, Robert Millikan, D. McFarlan Moore, Valdemar Poulsen, Charles F. Scott, Georg Graf von Arco, H. H. Westinghouse, and Albert Einstein. VIPs who wrote back to decline included Guglielmo Marconi and Michael Pupin.17
By October, Thomas Alva Edison was dead; the lights in the city were dimmed in honor of the great man’s passing. Perhaps it was the death of his nemesis or the new round of adulation, or Tesla’s advanced age that prompted him to alter his style of avoiding publicity. Whatever the reason, from 1931 on the inventor made it an annual practice on his birthday to invite the press to his flat and announce his latest discoveries. With the talent of a mystery writer, the electrician stretched out the secrets of his various creations, revealing just a little more each year.
By 1935, on his seventy-ninth birthday, Tesla, although exceedingly gaunt, was still exuberant and expected to live past 110. His mind ever evolving, the sorcerer utilized this occasion to lay out in considerable detail the various particulars of a number of his more exotic creations. With movie cameras rolling and the inventor “treating the press, about 30 in number, to a gourmet’s luncheon…Mr. Tesla sat at the head of the table.” Eating little more than bread and warm milk, which he heated up in a chafing dish at the table, the wizard talked while the reporters “feasted.”18
Inventor, 81, Talks of Key to
Interstellar Transmission& Tube to Produce Radium Copiously and Cheaply
Reports of discoveries by which it will be possible to communicate with the planets and to produce radium in unlimited quantities for $1 a pound were announced by Dr. Nikola Tesla yesterday on his 81st birthday at which he was honored with high orders from the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak Governments…
“I am expecting to put before the Institute of France an accurate description of the devices with data and calculations and claim the Pierre Guzman prize of 100,000 francs for means of communication with other worlds, feeling perfectly sure that it will be awarded to me. The money, of course, is a trifling consideration, but for the great historical honor of being the first to achieve this miracle I would be almost willing to give my life.
“I am just as sure that the prize will be awarded to me as if I already had it in my pocket. They have got to do it. It means it will be possible to convey several thousand units of horsepower to other planets, regardless of the distance. This discovery of mine will be remembered when everything else I have done, is covered with dust.”19
In discussing this invention, one runs into murky waters, for it appears that Tesla tied the concept of the radium-producing tube to the interplanetary communicator. These, however, may be two unrelated creations. Another problem was that the inventor was also discussing at this time the idea of capturing cosmic rays that travel at velocities fifty times greater than that of light. If this invention utilized cosmic rays, it would imply that Tesla planned to transcend the speed of light and communicate with other stars.
In reading the text carefully, it appears that Tesla does not mention other stars but, rather, the planets, which are relatively close to the earth; furthermore, he does not really discuss communicating with extraterrestrials so much as transmitting energy. It is known that as early as 1918, while working with Coleman Czito’s son, Julian, the inventor was bouncing laserlike pulses off the moon and testing some type of “scope.”20 Therefore, it is possible that he was working on more than one device to send energy into outer space.
Verification for Tesla that there existed particles that traveled faster than the speed of light were purportedly discovered in the late 1890s when he invented a device to capture radiant energy. The machine, patented on November 5, 1901, comprised, in essence, an insulated plate, resembling a fly swatter, made out of “the best quality of mica as dielectric.” This was attached to a condenser. Stemming from his work with radiant energy, X rays, and Lenard tubes, the device could also capture what he called cosmic rays.21
I made some progress in solving the mystery until in 1899 I obtained mathematical and experimental proofs that the sun and other heavenly bodies similarly conditioned emit rays of great energy which consist of inconceivably small particles animated by velocities vastly exceeding that of light. So great is the penetrative power of these rays that they can traverse thousands of miles of solid matter with but slight diminution of velocity. In passing through space, which is filled with cosmic dust, they generate a secondary radiation of constant intensity, day or night, and pouring upon the earth equally from all directions.22
Since Victor Hess’s discovery in 1911 and Robert Millikan’s confirmation, there have been many scientists who have measured cosmic rays. We now know that emitted uncharged elementary particles known as neutrinos possess the penetrative powers suggested by Tesla, but no researcher, to my knowledge, has discovered rays that transcend the speed of light. This supposed finding of Tesla also violated relativity.
Tesla was insistent that such particles did exist; he saw them as a source which could be converted into electrical power. During the summer of 1932 he told Jack O’Neill that he had “harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device…The attractive features of the cosmic rays is their constancy. They shower down on us through the whole 24 hours, and if a plant is developed to use their power, it will not require devices for storing energy, as would be necessary with devices using wind, tide or sunlight.” When pressed for more details, Tesla revealed that he would tell O’Neill “in a general way [their modus operandi…] The cosmic rays ionize the air, setting free many charges—ions and electrons. These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of the motor.” Tesla also told O’Neill that he “had hopes of building such a motor on a large scale.”23
As the years rolled on, it became a challenge for reporters to wrestle more details about each invention from the wizened prestidigitator, since Tesla continued to maintain his perpetual reticence about revealing particulars. Concerning the cosmic-ray accumulator, the reporters were able collectively to pry from the inventor the following: “My power generator will be of the simplest kind—just a big mass of steel, copper and aluminum, comprising a stationary and rotating part, peculiarly assembled…Such a source of power obtainable everywhere will solve many problems with which the human race is confronted…[The] machinery for harnessing it would last more than 5,000 years.”24
Cosmic rays, he asserted, are produced by the force of “electrostatic repulsion”; they consist of powerfully charged positive particles which come to us from the sun and other suns in the universe. He determined, “after experimentation,” that the sun is charged “with an electric potential of approximately 215,000,000,000 volts.”25
Owing to its immense charge, the sun imparts to minute positively electrified particles prodigious velocities which are governed only by the ratio between the quantity of free electricity carried by the particles and their mass, some attaining a speed exceeding fifty times that of light…
At great altitudes, the intensity of the rays is more than 10,000% greater than at sea level…The energy of the cosmic radiations impinging upon the earth from all sides is stupendous, such that if all of it were converted into heat the globe quickly would be melted and volatilized…Rising air currents…partially neutralize [their intensity]…Those who are still doubting that our sun emits powerful cosmic rays evidently overlook that the solar disk, in whatever position it may be in the heavens, cuts off the radiations from beyond, replacing them by its own.26
Coupled with his view that all bodies in the universe obtain their energy from external sources, and possibly influenced by Walter Russell, an artist, philosopher, and longtime friend of Tesla’s who hypothesized that the periodic table of elements was constructed in a hierarchical spiral of octaves, Tesla was “led to the inescapable conclusion that such bodies as the sun are taking on mass much more rapidly than they are dissipating it by the dissipation of energy in heat and light.”27 Similarly, radioactive decay was not caused by the disintegration of the nucleus of the atom; rather, it was a “secondary effect of external rays and two-fold—one part coming from the energy stored, the other from that continuously supplied.”28 In other words, radioactive material was, to Tesla, apparently a kind of conduit for the ever-present primary substance “Akasa,” which was being absorbed in such a way as to cause the emission of the radioactive material.
These Tesla offerings would appear as evidence of a great mind gone astray, for the various discoveries and suggestions inherent in Tesla’s theory violate not only such accepted theories as relativity and quantum physics but also, on the surface, common sense. The idea that the inventor could construct a simple device made up basically of a receiving plate and a condenser to provide electricity to run motors from cosmic rays harks the reader back to the inane days of the Keely motor and the obtuse concepts of perpetual motion and free energy. Yet underneath the veneer of the theory is an exciting notion that the sun is somehow absorbing energy from the universe and that there does exist some form of it which transcends the limiting factor of the speed of light. Called by other researchers tachyons (i.e., particles that travel faster than the speed of light) and linked to other such concepts as black holes, worm holes, string theory nonlocality, the implicate order, hyperspace, gravitons, and Mach’s principle, Tesla’s theories, when viewed within the matrix of the bizarre new physics, may not be so far-out.
Another of Tesla’s discoveries involved the transmission of mechanical energy to distant places. By strategically placing one of his mechanical oscillators on, for example, solid bedrock, a mechanical impulse could be sent into the ground to accomplish “at least four practical possibilities. It would give the world a new means of unfailing communication; it would provide a new safe means for guiding ships at sea into port; furnish a kind of divining rod for locating ore deposits…; and finally, it would provide scientists with a means for laying bare the physical conditions of the earth.”29 The essential principle behind this invention is, of course, used today in sonar for ships and by geophysicists in studying the interior of the earth, mapping fault lines, studying the core, and so on.
Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death-Beam’
Dr. Tesla…has perfected a method and apparatus…which will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks.30
Tesla’s discovery of a death ray stems all the way back to his work in the early 1890s with his creation of a button lamp that could bounce electrons off of a central filament made of almost any substance (e.g., carbon, diamonds, zirconia, rubies) onto the interior of a self-reflective bulb and then bounce back to the source. This device would not only produce an extraordinarily brilliant light, it could also “vaporize” the button. As stated previously, it was only a short step from this machine to the invention of the ruby laser. For instance, if there was a scratch or imperfection in the coating of the glass, the energy would stream out through this opening in laserlike fashion.
In the late 1890s, Tesla was bombarding targets with X rays at distances in excess of forty feet, and by 1915 he had announced in the New York Times a type of electronic defensive shield which today corresponds to what has been called SDI, or the Strategic Defense Initiative.
During World War I, another Teslarian, Harry Grindell-Mathews, was provided with 25,000 pounds by the British government for the creation of a searchlight beam which he said could control aircraft. A wireless electrician and veteran of the British army, wounded at the turn of the century during the Boer War, Grindell-Mathews eventually refined this invention and changed it into a “diabolical ray.” This new electronic beam, he said, could not only destroy zeppelins and airplanes, but also immobilize marching armies and nautical fleets. Although he would not divulge the specifics of his creation, he made no secret of his admiration for Tesla, whose technologies had “inspired” its groundwork.
In July 1924, Grindell-Mathews traveled to America to see an eye specialist. He probably met with Hugo Gernsback at that time and might also have visited Tesla. Staying at the Hotel Vanderbilt, the British inventor was interviewed by a number of the local dailies. “Let me recall to you the air attacks on London during the [world] war. Searchlights picked up the German raiders and illuminated them while guns fired, hitting some but more often missing them. But suppose instead of a searchlight you direct my ray? So soon as it touches the plane this bursts into flame and crashes to the earth.”31
Grindell-Mathews was also convinced that the Germans had such a ray. They were using a high-frequency current of 200 kilowatts, which as of yet they were “unable to control.”
Working with the French government in Lyons and performing successful tests before members of the British War Office, Grindell-Mathews instituted destructive effects at distances of sixty feet but was hoping to extend the force to a radius of six or seven miles. Asked for specifics, he said that his device utilized two beams, one as a carrier ray and the other as the “destructive current.” The first beam would constitute a low frequency and would be projected through a lens; the second, of a higher frequency, would increase conductivity so that destructive power would be more easily transmitted. The motor of an airplane, for instance, could be the “contact point” at which the paralyzing ray would do its handiwork. He admitted, however, that if the object were grounded, it would be protected against such a force.32
Hugo Gernsback, along with Dr. W. Severinghouse, a physicist from Columbia University, tried unsuccessfully to duplicate the effects using heat beams, X rays, and ultraviolet rays. Doubting Grindell-Mathews’s claims, Gernsback nevertheless featured the “diabolical ray” with characteristic Frank Paulian panache on the cover of his magazine and with a series of exposés.33
Leaders from other countries were less critical than Gernsback, and many proclaimed that their scientists also had such diabolical rays. Herr Wulle, a member of the German Reichstag, announced that “three German scientists have perfected apparatus that can bring down airplanes, halt tanks and spread a curtain of death like gas clouds of the recent war.” Not to be outdone, Leon Trotsky stated that the Soviets had also invented such a device. Warning all nations, Trotsky proclaimed, “I know the potency of Grammachikoffs ray, so let Russia alone!”34
This theme of all-powerful efficient weaponry reappeared during the 1930s as the seeds of World War II were sown. At this time, Tesla began to reveal more and more about his own diabolical ray as he criticized the Grindell-Mathews scheme.
“It is impossible to develop such a ray,” [Dr. Tesla says]. “I worked on that idea for many years before my ignorance was dispelled and I became convinced that it could not be realized. This new beam of mine consists of minute bullets moving at a terrific speed, and any amount of power desired can be transmitted by them. The whole plant is just a gun, but one which is incomparably superior to the present.” The inventor further claimed that the new weapon, which was to be used for defense only, comprised “four new inventions”: (1) an apparatus for producing the rays; (2) a process for producing immense electrical power; (3) a method for amplifying the power; and (4) a tremendous electrical repelling force.35
Working in two undisclosed locations, including a secret laboratory under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, near Second Avenue,36 Tesla perfected his particle-beam weapon, as he conspired with unabashed anarchist and architect Titus deBobula, to design the all-purpose power plant that could generate high voltages or capture cosmic rays and convert them into his defensive electronic shield.37 Believing that entire countries could be protected by such plants, the inventor clandestinely approached the war departments of each of the Allies with his scheme.