A solar flair is enough to screw up lots of tech. I feel his device would have made the early 1900's much much better, but at the cost of cripling advancements with computers.
Well that's what I'm saying though they would have found a way around that kind of stuff... batteries and power plants aren't exactly the same as they were back then... but tesla coils basically are so their could potentially be a way to fine tune a coil/tower to seek a receiver and only the receiver save for a surge in power