Nikola Tesla sketched this out over a century ago. He was already building the framework for wireless energy when he erected his Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island in 1901. If history had gone differently, we might have grown up in a world where plugging things in was as archaic as sending a telegram.
The Tower That Could Have Changed Everything
Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower was not a science fair stunt. He built it with funding from none other than J.P. Morgan, the same titan of banking who practically defined modern corporate capitalism. Tesla’s pitch was simple but radical. Transmit electricity wirelessly across distances using the Earth itself as the conductor. Free power. No transmission lines. No burned coal. No tankers moving oil across oceans.
Tesla wanted to power homes, factories, and even vehicles without cords. Imagine cars in 1905 running on silent motors topped up by invisible energy fields. He believed internal combustion was a dead end before it even got started.
But Morgan cut him off. Why? Because you can’t meter the air. Free power meant no infrastructure profits. It threatened oil, coal, and the very business models Morgan and his associates had built. In 1917, armed forces dismantled the tower under the claim it might be used by German spies. In reality, its greatest danger was to the bank accounts of the fuel barons.
A Century of Oil Instead
Because Tesla’s vision got buried, the world leaned into oil. That choice dictated the entire 20th century. Cars grew around gasoline. Nations built economies on pipelines and refineries. Wars flared where oil flowed thickest. From the Middle East to Latin America, resources dictated foreign policy, coups, and conflict. The car you own today exists in its current form not because it was inevitable, but because freedom from oil was cut down at its root.
Wireless charging vanished into history books. Edison got the spotlight. Ford got the Model T. Standard Oil built the empire. And for more than a century, the automotive dream was chained to petroleum. Every silly gas crisis, every oil price shock, every soldier sent overseas to secure “stability” ties back to this pivot.
Imagine the Alternate Road
Picture this. By the 1920s, major cities filled with clean, silent electric cars topping themselves up from wireless fields. Without demand for gasoline, oil becomes just another industrial material, not a political weapon. The Suez Crisis never happens. Neither does the Gulf War. Air in Los Angeles never turns brown from smog. Entire landscapes remain un-scorched because drilling is a niche activity instead of a global addiction.
Motor racing evolves with electric torque from the start. Instead of waiting until Formula E in the 2010s, maybe we get high-speed electric Grand Prix racing when the Beatles are still on tour. Tuning culture is about squeezing volts and amps instead of turbos and octane. Imagine street kids in the 1970s building wild underground EVs powered by hacked public transmitters.
How Porsche’s Move Feels Like Déjà Vu
Now Porsche says the Cayenne EV will park on a pad that delivers power wirelessly. Drivers will marvel at it like it’s science fiction becoming reality. That headline should sting. Because it’s not a breakthrough. It’s the resurrection of a vision silenced by boardroom greed over a hundred years ago.
We should have had this baseline convenience before the Great Depression. Instead, it arrives in 2025, painted as progress, when in reality it’s the catching up of a century of lost time.
The Harsh Truth
If Wardenclyffe had kept running, the car world would not be what it is today. We’d talk about mechanical differences between electric cars, not existential debates about leaving gasoline. Whole cities might have developed without gas stations at every corner. Energy poverty could have been slashed at the knees. Our generation might not even know oil wars as a concept.
When Porsche rolls out wireless charging for the Cayenne, soak up the innovation. Then remember it’s not new at all. It’s Tesla’s dream. A dream strangled so a few men could count their money in peace.
Final Thought
Cars have always been about more than engineering. They reflect choices made long before we were born. The Cayenne’s wireless charging is convenient, yes. It’s also a ghost. A flicker from a future that should have been here long before the oil age locked the wheel.
