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And I have no evidence of this, but I'm pretty sure that the huge explosion in Tunguska back in 1908 was caused by Tesla trying to build a time machine. Or something. Here, go read it yourself. I have the day off tomorrow, so I'm already half in the bag.

http://www.teslasociety.com/tu...

OK settle down, Gramps... finish off that bottle of Wild Turkey, tuck yourself into bed, and say "night night". I am a huge Tesla fan, but you can't ignore the science of the Tunguska site. Now you're just sounding like an undiscerning fanboy instead of a thoughtful admirer.

I have a Yugoslavian one hundred billion dinar note from when there was hyperinflation in that country a few decades ago. It's got a nice picture of Tesla on the front.

His birthday is also the same as my wife's.

I'm posting this comment apropos of nothing. But Tesla was one bad ass. And was so cool that David Bowie played him in a movie. And I have no evidence of this, but I'm pretty sure that the huge explosion in Tunguska back in 1908 was caused by Tesla trying to build a time machine. Or something. Here, go read it yourself. I have the day off tomorrow, so I'm already half in the bag. Catch me in an hour or so, and I'll tell you my theory about Tesla actually being the immortal Count of St. Germain, who still lives today developing Android apps and smoking DMT.

http://www.teslasociety.com/tu...

Electromagnetic fields in this power range are well studied and totally harmless. None of this is new at all. http://www.teslasociety.com/tesla_tower.htm

Hydro is abismal, it destroys millions of acres of land with flooding and disrupts the river ecosystem. Migratory freshwater fish all around the world are rapidly facing extinction because of hydro power.

Wrong. Why do so many people keep saying this? I'll just paste in what an AC wrote above:

Um well no, you do not need a damn dam to use hydro. It may be more effective to build a dam so you can store water. But if you remember way back in the early days of electric power, you know that AC DC battle between Tesla and Edison? Yeah, well Tesla built his hydro plant at Niagara Falls without a dam. You need fast flowing water to turn the turbines. Dams create this artificially by storing water behind the dam and using gravity to turn the turbines, in essence creating a waterfall that in turn turns the turbines. The water wheal is all you need to create "Hydro" electric energy.
http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikola_Tesla&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop

Documentary video - http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/nikola-tesla-the-genius/

PBS Nikol Tesla page - http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/index.html

Animats, You need to go back and study your Tesla 101. He already knew it would work due to the experimentation he did at Colorado Springs. Power transmission over tens of miles was demonstrated using Tesla magnifying transmitters and far, far less power than was planned to be broadcast at Wardenclyffe. He determined the resonant frequency of the atmosphere by working out that the electrical interference from lightning discharge grew stronger and weaker with distance from the observer LIKE A WAVEFORM. The receiver is actually the true genius behind the whole shebang. It's barely more than a pair of copper coils tuned to the specific resonant frequency of the transmitter. Ergo he didn't NEED anything "new" on the receive side. A more elegant receiver you will never see in your life. Try this for size: http://www.teslasociety.com/teslarec.pdf The biggest problems with his plan were: 1. How to monetise it. Bigger customers could have their own metered receiver. Today you could "charge" large groups of people via something similar to taxation but back then not everyone even had electricity. Also, doesn't stop people in other countries stealing your power either. But imagine how much effort and resource this tech would have saved the world. 2. Massive interference and unintended discharge. Back in 1900 this wasn't too big an issue. Today loading megawatts into the atmosphere would be a big problem because none of our electrical/electronic devices are shielded well enough for it. IF that whole industry had grown up in that environment then we'd be just fine today, but as anyone who runs their own hobby magnifying transmitter knows you keep the bloody thing well away from any electronics! Shielding everything we have now is not an option. During the Colorado Springs experiments, electrical discharges were seen from plumbing 24 miles from the transmitter and some horses went nuts because power was received through their shoes! 3. Does the cost of wireless transmission losses outweigh the cost of poles/wires and substations? Maybe one day the cost of copper will be so high that we have no choice but to go wireless.

The only Tesla myseum right now is in Belgrade http://www.tesla-museum.org/ http://www.teslasociety.com/ www.teslasociety.com/ in cooperation with the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. Tesla Corner. ****Nikola Tesla St. **** It was founded in Buffalo, New York in 1979. It is the oldest Tesla Society in Buffalo, 59-27 Woodbine Street, New York, NY 11385

or how about tesla on currency? http://www.teslasociety.com/various_tesla.htm

"He was also smart enough to realize that Tesla was a crackpot who had one good idea, three-phase alternate current."

And radio waves, and the transformer, and the capacitor, and wireless power transmission. Of course those were just a few of Teslas good ideas which came to fruition. His really good ideas are (officially) untested but theoretically sound.

Tesla wasn't a crackpot and he didn't have any ideas for 'free energy' in the classic sense. The energy was to be produced by normal natural means using generators that Tesla invented, built, and had successfully implemented in massive installations. http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm

Using a massive stream of energy his (simplified) plan was to send a stream of electricity up to the ionosphere (big lightning). This would ionize the air between creating a highly conductive path of ionized air. Tesla could then send ac current at a particular frequency into the ionosphere and that energy would propagate through the ionosphere and could be picked up by a coil at any point in the world tuned to that frequency.

Essentially, Tesla wanted to use EMF to transfer energy (and therefore information) with almost no loss from wherever it was generated to any point in the world where you needed it. The problem is that to a non-technical listener radio sounds like the same thing, in fact an understanding of radio is implicit to the scheme indicating Tesla is the one who discovered radio first and simply had a different idea of how it should be used.

But there was no 'free energy' in the scheme or even anything involved that isn't sound in theory. Free distribution, and no obvious way to meter usage, but there is no reason it couldn't have been commercialized and eventually provided a medium for global communication that computers would likely be using today. It just wouldn't make Morgan as much money and would cost him more money. Even that assumes that he understood the difference between Teslas idea and radio.

Actually, to some degree the idea has been reinvented in the form of the HARRP project.

i always wondered what that coil was for
NicolaTesla
he was recharging his ipod!!!

The tower was blown up in 1917. All that remains is a brick building which has been stripped and used as a factory.

http://www.teslasociety.com/wardenclyffe2.htm

You won't find any Tesla insight at Wardenclyffe. Better to spend your time reading his papers.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=rwekkS3oD0EC

An out of control Nikola Tesla experiment with Wireless Energy.
http://www.teslasociety.com/tunguska.htm

Nice for some applications (think of public phone charging points / laptop tables with power + wifi) but its only just wireless. It's more like plugless, you have to be on the pad (though I wonder if it could be scaled up to power electric cars for instance, think about an electric highway!)

Tesla had a more practicle wireless power solution in his tower. That crystal radio that you built as a child is wireless power in my book, even if it is only a trickle. (You're not a geek until you build a crystal radio. Hope we never switch over exclusively to digital)

I have heard rumours about someone living under a transmitter being prosecuted after he was found with a large number of coils in his roof, using them to provide heat, but i have my doubts about this one.

For decades after Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio in 1897

but Tesla invented the radio.

Go to :

www.teslasociety.com/radio.htm

I rather like his radio-controlled robot submarine from 1898.

What I find more interesting is that NO ONE has said anything about Nicola Tesla. While I don't think he invisioned microwaves, he DID invision, and bascially PREDICT electricity without wires, and spend a good deal of his life working toward this. His ideas were both out of time(r) and often wrong, but his foresight was amazing.

Once again, he has been redeamed in his belief that it could be done. While some of his claims are a bit overstated, the majority of his work was so advanced, he deserves the name "man out of time", which is also an excellent book about him by Margaret Cheney.

If you haven't read enough or really know who Nicola Tesla is, here are some misc. links about him, including his patents. (Not to be confused with the very excellent band named Tesla.)

Enjoy the links, at least until they are slashdotted.

Tesla's fans these days are mainly counterculture freaks who have never spent a day in an electromagnetism class and hence have no idea what they're talking about. Tesla failed because his stuff didn't end up working. End of story.