Ask Slashdot: Could Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower Have Worked? 365
dryriver writes: For those who are unfamiliar with the story, from 1901-1902, inventor Nikola Tesla had a 187-foot-tall experimental wireless electricity transmission tower called the "Wardenclyffe Tower" built in Shoreham, New York. Tesla believed that it was possible to generate electrical power on a large scale in one part of the world and transmit that electrical power to electrical receivers in far away parts of the world wirelessly, using parts of Earth's atmosphere as the conducting medium. Tesla had huge problems getting the project financed -- powerful banker J.P. Morgan didn't play along and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson didn't help a pleading Tesla either. An excerpt from a Wardenclyffe documentary shows the tower finally being dynamited and sold for scrap in 1917. The Wardenclyffe Tower never reached operational status; wireless electrical transmission between continents never happened; Tesla became an emotionally broken man who died regretting that he did not manage to finish his life's work; and to this day nobody knows exactly how the Wardenclyffe Tower was supposed to function technically. To the question: Do you believe that Tesla's dream of electrical devices anywhere in the world essentially being able to draw electrical power from the sky with a relatively simple antenna could have worked, had he gotten the necessary funding to complete his experiments?
Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
EM radiation from the wireless source drops off according to the inverse square law. This has been figured out in the time since Tesla. So no, Tesla's tower could never have worked. Beyond a short distance (like the inches between an RFID card and its reader) power transmission is not feasible because of, you know, physics.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, those newfangled "lasers" will never work.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lasers are coherent and tightly focused beams of light. The Wardenclyffe Tower was an omni-directional transmitter. Both continue to obey the inverse square law. The existence of lasers in no way counter the GP's point that Tesla's tower could not possibly work.
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IIRC, Tesla intended to use the Earth itself as well as possibly the ionosphere as elements of the antenna, so the effective antenna wouldn't have been omni directional.
He was on the right track, but I don't think it would have been directional enough.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Informative)
If you are trying to imply that lasers don't exhibit the inverse square law in the relation of area power density with distance you are wrong. Lasers do propagate power via the inverse square law once you get past near field effects (same as any antenna), that's why laser beamwidths are spec'ed in milliradians, the angular extent of the beam. Constant angular extent = inverse square law power density. The reason lasers get a reputation for tight power propagation is because they can be produced with very small beamwidths to begin with. That all applies to propagation in a vacuum or a medium which doesn't interact with the laser light, but once you get into mediums which actually interact with the light (to attempt some sort of self-focusing) you start to deal with scattering and losses to heating the medium, too; one reason why the megawatt laser weapons envisioned in the past haven't been fielded.
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P.S. If you weren't trying to imply that lasers don't exhibit the inverse square law then I apologize for pedantically pointing it out.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Word to the wise: he also stole your lightening, which is a fine mode of atmospheric power transmission if you can buffer the surge.
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But as they worked, there must be something wrong with your reasoning.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Informative)
Having studied everything I can find about Tesla's notions behind Wardenclyffe, I could summarize my understanding of it as follows:
1) Tesla was fascinated by resonance wherein small impulses of energy are trapped losslessly in a mechanism, and are aggregated into large stores of said energy - a well-known example of this is case of the "galloping gertie" bridge.
2) Tesla postulated that earth's atmosphere presents an electro-magnetic structure (or mechanism) which would have a resonance condition into which power could be pumped by EM transmissions at that resonant frequency.
3) Similar apparatus could be configured to extract the EM power stored resonantly in the atmosphere.
4) Hence the promise of wireless power distribution.
My take on the whole thing is that he was likely over-optimistic in his ability to fathom and harness a system as vast as earth's atmosphere (Ham radio guys could probably tell him a thing or two). Then again this may be a case where you never really know until you try. What Tesla got wrong was that there is no way in such a system to extract payments from users, hence his capitalist backers bailed out before Tesla could demonstrate the soundness of his conjectures.
BTW, yes I am a physicist.
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What Tesla got wrong was that there is no way in such a system to extract payments from users, hence his capitalist backers bailed out before Tesla could demonstrate the soundness of his conjectures.
Mandatory subscriptions. Works for the BBC.
Re: Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very possible to tap into the magnetosphere. The varying layers all have interesting phototropic controls as the earth spins on its axis. It's somewhat static, but changes as we go through the day (add in slight lunar-effect changes, too).
Screw it up, just a bit--- and neutralize it in some way, and watch the atmosphere become damaged beyond your wildest imagination. If you thought Climate Change was fun, strap on.
Gravity keeps the atmosphere and weather somewhat intact against the 1000miles/hr rotation of the earth, but we're also very happy with the shielding the magnetosphere provides, layer densities (so yeah, we can breathe), and the insulations it provides from solar winds.
There is a huge iron core inside the earth that moves around, which is why the north magnetic pole is moving. It plays a huge part in how the Van Allen Belt and the magnetosphere keep this planet's life intact. Muck with this at our peril.
Assumptuous and arrogant (Score:5, Informative)
Your comment starts at assumptuous and arrogant and then moves to being just plain wrong.
Assumption:
You are just assuming he meant by EM radiation. Given his actual patents this is likely not the intended medium of transmission. Tesla's patent 645,576 [teslauniverse.com]drops off according to the inverse square law
Tesla, as much of a "mad genius" as he may have been, was still a genius. I credit his intelligence more, I think, than yours. Even if the inverse square property wasn't known (more later) already, this would have been pretty obvious to him anyway. He had been electric field Geissler tube light induction for at least a decade prior to his tower proposal. I'm pretty sure that he figured out that the light dimmed and went out as per the square of the distance involved.
Just plain wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell's_equations [wikipedia.org]
Now, that being said, what about the actual question asked in the article. Could the towers have worked? Once electricity ionizes the channel, the air resistance is really quite low. If he could have figured out a way to ionize a channel high enough from multiple towers, it's actually conceivable it could work. No one, and I really mean no one at all, has done as much experimentation with the conduction of ultra-high voltage electricity as Tesla did. He knew what it took to create a path between two points. He knew the effect of distance. And he thought he could do it. I credit his knowledge and experience then more than any armchair (read Slashdot) critic today. Also remember this is before powered flight of any sort, so no one cared about what was going on in the sky. Using a tower to open an electrical path into the upper atmosphere wouldn't have been a hazard to anything. I suspect what he was going for was a sort of huge scale porcupine effect. Each tower creating a channel up into the sky up to an altitude where there is already sufficient ionization that the electricity could then be conducted laterally. The whole reason why the post I responded to wasn't alone in just assuming that Tesla must have been (errantly) trying for radio or electric field transfer is that the sheer scale of using "lightning" towers to transmit power directly up into the sky on that kind of scale is, well, at the mad genius level of unprecedented scale. The effects it would have on the RF spectrum, air navigation, electronic devices... renders it into a modern catastrophe more than a workable power transmission system. But back then none of that existed. The sky was just a huge open opportunity for him. He certainly thought big.
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Sorry, a bit of a mis-edit there after I linked in the patent, but I think you get the idea.
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What are you saying exactly? Which field do you believe he was going to leverage if not EM?
And another one who doesn't actually read the patent, my whole (admitedly partially bungled) post, or even do a basic google search on what Tesla was proposing. You're not alone though. Everyone nowadays just hears "wireless electrical transmission" and simply assumes this has just gotta mean by an electric field (a la mutual inductance) or by an electromagnetic field (a la radio).
To answer your question: Which field did he propose? No field!. At least, no more so by a field than electrons moving throug
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There are significant caveats to the inverse square law when the energy source isn't an omnidirectional point source (isotropic).
For example, given a parabolic antenna you have to use a virtual point source that is far behind the antenna and much stronger when you use the inverse square law. In the special case of a perfectly columnated laser (good luck!) or a perfect wave guide (also good luck!) inverse square is irrelevant (but attenuation through an imperfect vacuum still applies).
Tesla intended to use t
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EM radiation from the wireless source drops off according to the inverse square law.
No.
Tesla's concept was that the radiation is confined in the waveguide defined by the space between the ionosphere and the Earth's surface. So, it would drop off as 1/r (at least, up to the point where it's gone halfway around the Earth, at which point it increases).
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By your reasoning, if I hold a large metal block and connect one part to mains electricity, I will be safe.
Radio waves traveling through the air work differently than electricity moving through a conductor, to the point where RF engineering is a specialized field within electrical engineering.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Informative)
By your reasoning, if I hold a large metal block and connect one part to mains electricity, I will be safe.
Radio waves traveling through the air work differently than electricity moving through a conductor, to the point where RF engineering is a specialized field within electrical engineering.
one relies on Maxwell's equations and the other...
One relies on Maxwell's equations with permiability and permitivity appropriate for a metalic concuctor, and the other relies on Maxwell's equations with permiability and permitivity appropriate for the gasses in the atmosphere. The different parameters give different behaviours.
Re: Believe? (Score:2)
Correct, just conventional energy; the magical "energy fields" which "psychics" and newage "healers" bang on about aren't limited by the laws of physics. Magic never is.
Re: Believe? (Score:2)
I'm not sure what your objection is to virtual particles, but your belief that the big bang somehow implies "free energy" just demonstrates that you know very little about physics.
Re: Believe? (Score:3)
'Virtual particle' implies mathematical errors rather than concrete phenomena.
Um, no. The various forces describes by virtual particles are not measurement errors; they are quite real.
As far as I can tell from the literature, they do not appear to exist in a physical sense, only on paper (otherwise they would just be called 'particles' lol).
They haven't been observed "in a physical sense". This may be a valid objection insofar as virtual particles may not "exist" in the same sense as real particles, but the effects which we ascribe to them certainly do exist. Whatever the underlying reality may be, thinking of them as virtual particles is useful until we have some better model to explain it (or until we do observe them). Just like Newt
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You're right about that. I don't think most physicists even stop to understand the concepts behind the math and terms they are using. They indeed appear valid and accurate, but I think many may be relying on false assumptions about the nature of reality.
As a semi-recent example, the Ptolemaic model of astronomy was extremely accurate and made many valid predictions, despite it operating from a completely false set of assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Anyway, from my understanding, a virtu
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The directional radiation you mentioned still obeys the Inverse Square Law.
Antenna Gain means that the radiation in a given direction is increased, but then the radiation in that direction still falls off as Inverse Squared.
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This is only true for great enough distances. But we're not talking about infinite distances, we're talking about just the size of the earth. It wouldn't shock me if there's an antenna that could do that. Unless it literally shocked me.
For example, radiation emitted from a plane does not fall off, but is directional. (This is true for infinite planes, or until you get far enough away you can see the boundary of the plane, then it starts acting as a point source again.)
Re: Believe? (Score:2)
Your wrong.
Itâ(TM)s not observable leaving it in a quantum state of neither working more not working.
Thatâ(TM)s just science. Or science adjacent.
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise
It's about a belief whether there might any physical principle for wirelessly transmitting electricity that Tesla knew about back then and we don't nowadays.
It might be possible, but I believe it unlikely.
Tesla didn't have a viable plan (Score:2)
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Not to dampen your enthusiasm, but there are numerous radio transmitters around the world operating with powers on one megawatt or more on frequencies as low as 24Khz. Not to mention millions of kilometers of power transmission lines unintentionally radiating at bit of RF energy at 50 or 60Hz. You're welcome to string an antenna and try to make use of the "free energy". I suspect if you work at it, you might be able to extract enough energy to operate a simple amplifier. Maybe even enough to dimly light
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Do some antenna work. I have been "bitten" more than 1 time from metal in the sky collecting juice
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Re:Believe? Glad it didn't. (Score:2)
Re:Believe? (Score:5, Informative)
There is another thing to consider, an uncertainty which inventors often forget: economics. If you take all the inventions ever made and discard the ones that simply wouldn't work, the successful ones would still be a tiny fraction of what's left.
Tesla's scheme seems to have been to use the entire Earth/atmosphere's electromagetic field as a kind of filter/transmission medium to transfer power from something like a gigantic Tesla coil. Leaving aside the inefficiency of passing a massive white noise signal through a bandpass filter, and assuming the transmission was effective as Tesla believed it would be, you still wouldn't be able to meter or regulate the power usage. Literally anyone with an antenna could use it.
I'm not sure whether the arguments for the system's physical infeasibility based on what is now known about *conventional* radio transmission really apply to what Tesla had in mind, which appears to be forcing the entire Earth's EM field to resonate on a global scale. Presumably it would take some time and a huge amount of energy to get to the point where someone on a distant continent could extract power.
Tesla was inventing by the seat of his pants; he has a basic engineering education and immense ingenuity, but he didn't have the theoretical foundation to judge the feasibility of his scheme; to some degree that knowledge didn't even exist yet, in fact some of it may still not exist. He was making an unjustifi8able leap of imagination from his lab near-field power transmission experiments, which he could see worked with his own eyes, to a global scale. Some elements of his scheme were pure wishful thinking, e.g. creating an ionized path from the ground to the stratosphere and losslessly transmitting power over it.
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Lots of ways. An invention can be something that *would* work, if you had something that doesn't exist yet like materials with properties unlike any existing one, or motors that are lighter and more powerful than anything available. An invention may be impossible to build, like Tesla's idea of a transit system consisting of a world girdling wall built on top of scaffolding that would get knocked own, leaving the wall suspended in the air. It is conceivable that a science fiction civilization could build
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It is the opposite: either the experiment/observation works or it doesn't. If the result doesn't matches what physics has predicted, the physics needs to be changed.
I think the most educated belief is that the Wardenclyffe tower wouldn't have worked, that Tesla's ideas weren't completely crackpot but he was off by several orders of magnitude. But the experiment never happened so we can't know for sure, there is still an tiny chance that it would have worked and that our physics are wrong. Don't count on it
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The problem is that no one really understands what Tesla was trying to do. A lot of radio engineers say that there would have been a loss of signal with distance that would limit the available power that could be transmitted, even assuming lossless conditions.
Imagine a light bulb at the other end of the room and you have a light meter. The further you get away from the light bulb, the lower the light level that falls on the meter and the reading goes down.... Distance is the problem.
Now fill the room with m
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I know that, and you know that, and 'N' Slashdotters know that, but there are 'N' other people in the world that don't understand that, and since they don't understand that, it's almost impossible to get them to understand that, they think science is some sort of conspiracy that makes things up just to push an agenda. Find a way to get through to 100% of those kinds of people and you'll probably win a Nobel Prize, or be elected King of the World, or at least secur
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What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise.
Perhaps, the questioner is asking /. to double check Tesla's math -- super solid idea. Let's do Einstein next.
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... asking /. to double check Tesla's math -- super solid idea.
Let's do Einstein next.
Go wild, knock yourself out. ...
I was being *super* sarcastic -- (falsely) equating the collective mental prowess of /. with Tesla's and Einstein's. :-)
I thought it would be obvious; sorry I wasn't more clear.
Re:Believe? (Score:4, Informative)
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise[.]
I think you're missing the real question in your quest to be snarky. The real question isn't whether the physics work or not; that's like saying that time travel either works or it doesn't, but without any evidence either way. Of course that's the case. Just like explosions can be controlled to propel large, heavy objects into space.
The real question is whether Tesla understood physics at a level sufficiently advanced to make wireless, intercontinental electrical transmission work. If so, then he would have expanded our knowledge of physics.
That presumes that such a feat is already allowed by physics, but the mechanism for doing so needs to be discovered by humans. To me, it seems at least plausible. After all, we watch wireless transmission of electricity over multi-mile distances all the time, and we know how it works. Tesla believed that he understood how to manipulate that same energy over vastly greater distances.
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That is total BS. You are confusing religion with science. Science is about competing believes, not about there being one fact to rule them all.
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I think there's some belief involved here, because we don't really know whatever the hell it was that Tesla was up to at the time. We don't have enough information, I don't think, about what went on in his head, what he was ultimately doing, to know if he had some theory in his brain that we haven't even come close to rediscovering, or not.
It seems clear that if we had a way to do this already, if we could prove out that this was possible, using the knowledge that we have right now, then we would already b
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Lots of things "work" on paper (math/physics) but making the leap to "really works in real life as a practical functioning object" is the hard part. Too bad Tesla ran out of money before he could test it.
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I don't know anyone who worships Nicola Tesla. ... and a bunch more stuff
However, he did invent a lot of useful stuff so it's hard to call him a failure.
- AC motor / generator
- AC power distribution system
- fluorescent lights
- radio (Marconi just stole Tesla's patents)
- remote transmission of voice, pictures, data (i.e. smartphone)
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*blink*
I'm not sure if you are misusing the word "literally" or you just have no clue what the Nazi party stood for. The main thing the Nazis were
Re: Believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
No socialist ever said otherwise. The socialist contention is that overall we work less for the same things if we don't have rich dudes skimming off a heap of the productive effort so they can have a solid gold toilet seat and play golf all day.
The dudes with the solid gold toilet seats greatly appreciate your ignorance. At least in the abstract sense.
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The problem is that capitalism is the thing we found to keep a much worse and horrible system out, the monarchy.
There is an horrible tendency on people to want a king, and many to be kings, so capitalism (when working), lies to everyone, telling em they can be kings, but thanks to competition, none ends being, well until someone literally buys the right of being the king.
But when you try to replace capitalism with socialism, the system gets immediately corrupted both by those that want a king and those that
Re: Believe? (Score:3)
And the socialist reality is you end up with no one producing anything
Funny how multiple countries survived multiple decades without producing anything. They must have had some secret magic...
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You mean other than a paycheck, right?
Those seem to be good enough for the rank and file here in the U.S.A.
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Those are the Communists. To be fair, they didn't claim there was a free lunch either, but they obviously have other issues.
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Sounds like your god is a total dick of a shitlord troll that should be shunned and avoided at all costs.
Better question (Score:2)
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Well "yes", but that's a different question from "would it work?"
Of course it would have worked (Score:3, Funny)
This I Tesla you are talking about, who would have willed it's function into being, then left scientists decades to explain why it actually worked.
What a shame he was never give more backing to come up with some more amazing things...
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Where's the news? (Score:2)
A link to a year-old documentary doesn't make this news, or stuff that matters. You've been used by a fanatic.
The Truth About the Mysterious ‘Tesla Tower& (Score:5, Informative)
We may find out soon enough since Viziv Technologies has built a Wardenclyffe Tower in Texas and is actively working on the project.
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The Truth About the Mysterious ‘Tesla Tower’ in Texas
Viziv Technologies, the party responsible for the construction of the tower in Milford, has similar goals. If their experiments with the tower are successful, this would mean they can safely and wirelessly transmit energy between any two points on the globe. Their aim is to utilize the Zenneck surface wave, an electromagnetic wave that uses the surface of the earth as a guide, enabling it to carry signals and electricity over long distances. (Electromagnetic waves are results of vibrations between electric fields and magnetic fields.)
The Zenneck surface wave is named after Jonathan Zenneck, a physicist and electrical engineer. He was among the pioneers that studied electromagnetic waves. Zenneck surface waves have not yet been experimentally observed, and Viziv is unique in that its technology only uses these surface waves, as opposed radiated waves.
https://texashillcountry.com/m... [texashillcountry.com]
Re: The Truth About the Mysterious ‘Tesla To (Score:4, Interesting)
There's been more than a few people looking into Zenneck waves. It doesn't change anything as far as power transmission is concerned since it's still limited by the inverse square law. It's a promising concept for communication, which is why people are interested in it, but the idea that it could be a useful method for power transmission is just a pipe dream.
No. (Score:2)
By this time, most of the geeks here have made a Jacob's Ladder device.
These transmit power in exactly the same fashion as Tesla's machine, and have the same limitations; the electrostatic transmission effect falls off after a few feet.
It would have looked cool, until someone pulled funding, which is pretty much what happened.
Running one of these was also a choice between running this, or using Radio; these devices broadcast noise over every radio band, so we wouldn't be using radio or TV either.
So; No, it
Wireless Transmission of Power's Time has Come (Score:2)
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Many houses will in the very near future generate their own electricity.
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Wireless power on the last mile is extremely unlikely.
How would a power provider know you switched on the fridge? Ah ... you sent a signal via internet? Wireless, too I guess?
Probably Not - Tesla Never Demo'd technology (Score:2)
I'm pretty skeptical of whether or not the tower would have worked.
Tesla was able to demonstrate three phase AC quite inexpensively and showed how it could be effectively scaled up (which lead George Westinghouse to basically bet the farm on Tesla). Along with that, the math behind it could be easily followed and demonstrated significant improvements over DC and single phase AC.
Wardenclyffe seemed to be a black hole for money with no real demonstrations coming from it - just a lot of hand waving by Tesla s
Freakout (Score:5, Insightful)
People freak out about a few mW of RF being pushed though cell phones. Can you imagine the freakout if someone said they were going to build giant towers pushing millions of watts of low-frequency RF blasting out in all directions?
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People freak out about a few mW of RF being pushed though cell phones.
Or a few mW of coherent light being pushed through their cornea...
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uh, that actually would fry your retina. stare into a 5 mW laser and let us know if I'm wrong.
The Point (Score:2)
I think that was the OPs point. Though, the OP is making a false comparison - a cell phone antenna is an omnidirectional radiator. A proper comparison would be with a MASER run through a waveguide, which a cell phone is most certainly not.
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It's worse than that. Some of them live in cities teeming with RF going every which way through their house and yet in the utility business the regulators have to carve out special rules so that irrational folks can have meters with no radios. If somebody really has "RF sensitivity" they should be moving out of the city.
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People freak out about a few mW of RF being pushed though cell phones.
They are going to freak out when they find out their local TV transmitter puts out 7 orders of magnitude more power
Belief doesn't matter - Physics do (Score:4, Funny)
As others have indicated, we don't know how the device was supposed to work. It's possible Tesla had a new theory (or, as postulated on Ancient Aliens, received from beyond this planet or realm). But, baring the existence of such a theory, current EM physics would seem to say "No".
we know very well how E&M works on classical s (Score:2)
we DO know how it was supposed to work, you receive remote power on every radio receiver you've ever used including "wifi"... but, at distance it isn't much given normal antenna's radiation pattern.
so yeah, you can send power remotely. you could use focused microwave beam and even send power from solar cell satellite to collector on earth. we know how to do it, there is no mystery, there is no secret.
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As others have indicated, we don't know how the device was supposed to work.
Of course we do. We can see it's construction. It was an high powered omni directional transmission tower. Based on how much of it he built there's only a few variables that are still in play, all of them obeying laws of physics which have been characterised since and would have meant the tower he build would not have worked beyond a very short distance.
Tesla Effect (Score:2)
This is posted just a few hours after I finished Tesla Effect, the Tex Murphy adventure from 2014.
Coincidence?
We will soon find out (Score:2)
Yes, solar (Score:3)
"Do you believe that Tesla's dream of electrical devices anywhere in the world essentially being able to draw electrical power from the sky"
evidence (Score:2)
It's not a question of belief, but of weighing the evidence.
Unlike millions of other "visionaries" and tinkerers and "inventors", Tesla delivered on most of his visions, even the outragous ones. From everything we know about him and his work, it stands to reason that his unrealised inventions were at least on the level of DaVinci - you know, DaVincis helicopters or tanks would not have worked in the exact way he scribbled them, but he got the basic principles right and with a few adaptations...
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Some of Srinivasa Ramanujan's beautiful conjectures were mangled in transmission from Mahalakshmi of Namakkal and were neither true, nor salvageable.
Perhaps he misspelled her name on the Ouija board one night and dialed a wrong number (it's awfully easy to do, even for a genius of his magnitude).
As smart as Telsa was, I don't think he was immune to dropping a stitch, either.
Tesla Earth Maser (Score:5, Informative)
I believe (as I said back in 2014 [blogspot.com]) that Tesla's plan was to modulate the conductivity of the ionosphere, effectively turning it into a MASER, and thus capturing a great deal of the energy imparted by the solar wind and making it available for use.
At the time, it would have seemed unlimited, but long ago I did the math, and if I recall correctly, it would be about 1 Terawatt of power, which is about 8% of our current worldwide power demand.
So, yes... I think it would have worked, but we would have outgrown it quickly enough.
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So basically if you where to build 2 towers or dedicate a landscape to it, you could harvest 1TW directly from the atmosphere?
That do sound pretty great. Why not just build the tower, some receivers, and put some wires from these towers to sell?
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I doubt you could extract it all at one place, you'd have to spread the load out a bit.
Inverse Square Law. That killed it. (Score:2)
Pencils of microwaves to transmit energy? Might work, but difficult to get it approved and built. Birds flying through the invisible beam will be cooked instantly.
Easy answer (Score:2)
No. His concept was wrong, although he couldn't have known that at the time. He didn't even believe in "hertzian waves" (AKA radio). His vision was to drive the earth into resonance, like a big Tesla coil. Disspative sources unknown to him would have required an inconceivable amount of power, most of which would have been wasted or caused the earth to heat up to get any consequential power back out of it. You could make a communication system with it, but vastly, vastly less efficient than radio (check out
It looks like a gargantuan bug zapper. (Score:2)
He may have been lucky that he never got it fired up.
It's a Rorschach Question (Score:2)
We know that it is physically possible to transmit power through the Earth or through the air. That part's not in question. The question is if he could have done it with this equipment, and if it would have been useful. We know that his understanding of physics was a little off from that of the men around him. Usually this indicates a nutter who will potter about harmlessly with free energy machines in their shed. Tesla repeatedly came out with things that worked, so in his case his different understand
Triumph or folly? (Score:3)
There is an intrigue here that goes beyond the mere physics and engineering of it all. This is really about triumphs and folly.
1 - It could be brilliant. This could be the engineering equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorem. A brilliant mathematician has a clever insight to answer an interesting problem, writes the notes on a napkin so the story goes, and then the idea is lost. It turns out though that the math problem is not so innocent or trivial, but no one after Fermat can come up with a suitable proof. Perhaps Tesla's experiment was the real deal, but we cannot know now that he is gone.
2 - It could be pure silliness. This occurred in the same era as early flight and early automotive manufacturing. We have all seen those compilation videos of early flight attempts when people built wacky flying-falling machines in their garage with nothing more than just a nifty "idea" devoid of any bonafide engineering. Tesla had the same focus on early electrical science and technologies, and for each clever good idea he had, he might have had another that was a dog.
Were those who failed to fund him close minded fools or insightful sages?
Nothing is stopping anyone from trying now. There are plenty of people with enough technology wealth to fund the experiment if it seemed worthy, but no one is volunteering. It is telling that a modern company like Tesla can honor him with an eponymous name, but not by funding projects not relevant to modern life, instead focusing on technologies that make sense for now, like electric vehicles.
And, times have changed. Even if the idea was scientifically and technically meritorious, it might not be pragmatic or allowable today. Since then, we have developed a robust air travel industry, vital low earth orbit technologies, an electromagnetic spectrum filled with communications, and an overdue appreciation of the environmental hazards of our technologies. Tesla's invention would compete or interfere with them, so might not survive.
Sue George! (Score:2)
No.. It wasn't going to work.. (Score:2)
Tesla's scheme wasn't going to work. The amount of energy he could transfer over any reasonable distance was exceedingly small and took HUGE amounts of input power.
However, in Tesla's day this wasn't as clearly understood as it is now. I don't blame Tesla for trying, but he really did go nuts about it and blew all his money chasing a pipe dream. Shame how he ended up destitute and bankrupt.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet he was right. AC long distances lines work with very basic technology.
DC long distance transmission lines have some advantages, but the technology is much more complicated and still much more expensive. There are a few around, but usually they are a last resort - only used when AC is not possible.