Tesla's New York Laboratory Up For Sale 183
Ziest points us to NY Times piece on the battle over the site of Nicola Tesla's last failed experiment. Tesla's laboratory, called Wardenclyffe, located on Long Island, has been put up for sale by its current owner, Agfa Corp. Local residents and Tesla followers were alarmed by a real estate agent's promise that the land, listed at $1.6 million, could "be delivered fully cleared and level." Preservationists want to create a Tesla museum and education center at Wardenclyffe, anchored by the laboratory designed by Tesla's friend, Stanford White, a celebrated architect. "In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all. It was the inventor's biggest project, and his most audacious. The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. ... But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory."
If past performance is a current indicator... (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone with electrical knowledge explain this (Score:3, Interesting)
Paging Dean Kamen (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like this would be right up his alley. He always said he wants scientists to be appreciated like sports stars. Here's his chance to enshrine one of the most famous and far thinking of them all.
Re:Is this it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, those are the grounds. The smaller building with the older-looking roof on the southeast of the building complex is the actual laboratory building (the one with the small tower in the center of the roof), and I presume his 187-ft tower was located in the concrete octagon to the south of the lab.
I think the idea was to couple to the ionosphere.. (Score:5, Interesting)
How would these towers effectively transmit electricity? I'm having trouble seeing how this would work effectively given the inverse square law.
I'm not Tesla but I can take a guess.
I think the idea was to couple to the ionosphere - treating the conductive ground and one of the layers of the conductive ionosphere as the two walls of a resonant cavity and pumping one of its resonances. The energy would not propagate away into space but would stay in the cavity until removed by a load or resistive losses due to the imperfect conduction of the cavity walls and its contents (dirt, buildings, birds, people, ...). It would be an extremely high impedance - enormous voltage (because of a nontrivial voltage gradient - in the ballpark of the atmospheric DC bias - multiplied by an enormous height) combined with minuscule currents through the tiny (though physically large) apacitances.
At the relatively low (compared to radio) frequencies involved you wouldn't have appreciable currents in anything that wasn't also a resonator and strongly coupled to the cavity (by being tall and broad at the top), i.e. a "raised capacitance" (Tesla's term for that big sphere-ish conductive shape on the top of the structure) and a big coil between it and ground, forming a tank circuit tuned to the carrier frequency and cavity resonance.
Buildings and metal towers might have nontrivial unintentional currents. But they'd be reactive currents because of the low resistance of the buildings' structural members. So they wouldn't suck out much power - just shift the phase of the power carrier signal in the area near them.
But a resonant circuit between a big raised conductor and ground would be able to efficiently power out of the cavity and couple it to a secondary coil around the main coil - shifting the voltage/current ratio from the extraordinarily high impedance of the transmission system to a lower impedance more convenient for use (though still at the carrier frequency so probably in need of rectification or other frequency conversion).
At least I think that may be what he intended. Whether it would work or not is still "up in the air", pun intended.
One nice thing: At the frequency involved you shouldn't be interfering with any existing information services. If the losses are low enough for it to be practical for power transmission it would be constantly "ringing" from lighting excitation. (Or maybe that's the ELF band where the US is talking to submerged submarines...)
(Heh. Thinking about this I just recognized the details of the broadcast power that was a throwaway background item in Eric Frank Russel's novel _Wasp_. Cars were "dinos" with the car body for "raised capacitance" and a dynamotor for frequency conversion. Disconnecting the "intake lead" and striking it against an "earth terminal" would produce a thin thread of arc if the distant power transmitter was on. And the energy density necessary to operate an automobile on this was completely ignored, of course. B-) )
Re:Someone with electrical knowledge explain this (Score:4, Interesting)
while point-to-point transmissions of a couple hundred watts, with lousy efficiency, tuned directional antennas, and an EE to man the thing, are still in the realm of laboratory/trade show curiosity.
Did and done back in 1975. [youtube.com]
34 kilowatts, 1.5 kilometers with an efficency of over 82%. That's hardy "a couple hundred watts, with lousy efficiency".
amazing how this news keeps changeing (Score:5, Interesting)
I work across the street from his old lab (on Tesla st no less) The place is in serious disrepair, but it would be nice to see it preserved. His transmission towers are in wreckage all over the DEC property on the south side of 25a in rocky point.
Last I heard 1 week ago the museum was a go, guess things change.
C'mon, folks! (Score:4, Interesting)
This perhaps the single greatest opportunity ever to cross paths with Slashdot!
If we each pitch in a buck a piece...
Can you imagine the fun a few million /.ers can have with this stuff?
Projects/experiments can be decided democratically (!) via the moderating system and we can further fund the entire project from the click-throughs generated by poster signatures.
Tesla was right (Score:1, Interesting)
Methinks Tesla was 100+ years ahead of his peers, much like Pons and Fleishman were 20 years ahead of theirs. (Cold Fusion [slashdot.org] became legitimate again last month. Nuclear reactions at room temperature, oh my!)
The Orion Project mentioned Tesla [theorionproject.org] in one of their mailings this spring. People like to scoff, but the ones who scoff the loudest eventually have to hide the crow feet hanging out the side of their mouth.
I'm certain that Tesla's vision of free wireless power will come to pass - probably even in the next few years. This would be a black swan that would prevent the economic collapse from developing into a new dark ages.
Re:Is this it? (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah - you can see the remnants of the original building from the older looking roof - i believe the windvane is still on top there .. there were train tracks that ran a separate line behind the laboratory, and yes - the octagonal shape i believe is the foundation for the tower that was blown up by the US Army in 1917 (they were worried that the Germans might use it either for a landmark for their submarines or as some sort of communication device) .. it was rumored that it took multiple attempts to actually destroy the tower given the solid construction and size of the wooden beams that were used.
It looks like much of the connecting area between the laboratory and the tower where the tunnels/connections should be are now filled in .. presumably AGFA was dumping their toxic photographic chemicals there - i guess filling it all in with cement constitutes their long cleanup ..
Re:If past performance is a current indicator... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Someone with electrical knowledge explain this (Score:4, Interesting)
even if he did not encounter the financial issues due to a lack of full understanding of electrical theory
His financial troubles were caused by a much more wealthy and sinister Edison whose inferior design did not match up to Tesla's. Edison constantly and consistently tried to undermine Tesla evidenced with the famous plug-a-cat-into-ac-adapter demonstration. There is also speculation that Edison has something to do with Tesla's lab mysteriously bursting into flames.
In the early days when Tesla first moved to the US, He partnered with Edison only to have his plans stolen and the promised research money never delivered.
Where Tesla was an inventor, Edison was a businessman. To me, Edison having a museum is like Warren Buffet or Donald Trump having one, a waste of good museum real estate.
Tesla was ahead of his time (Score:1, Interesting)
The feats that he performed with static electricity (Holding fireballs in his hands, etc) were nothing short of amazing and have never been recreated to this day as far as I know.