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Could Tesla's Broadcast Power System Work?
Pinball Wizard asks: "I ran into a nice Web site while doing some research on the life of Nikola Tesla. Turns out PBS is doing a special on him, beginning Dec. 12. In case you're not familiar with the man, he invented alternating current and radio, as well as the basic concepts behind all of our wireless control and communication. Besides alerting the Slashdot population to the documentary, I thought I'd pose a question to the EE's in the crowd. Tesla was a bit of a rebel, and many of his inventions never came to light because they conflicted with the interests of corporations or wealthy people with more influence. The most interesting of these to me is the transmission of electricity through the upper atmosphere. Obviously that would make electricity much harder to meter and control by monopolistic interests. Was his idea feasible? After reading about Tesla, I seriously wonder how much we screwed ourselves by following the interests of money, rather than listening to this scientific giant."
Elaborately constructed, full of fun buzzwords, even a link thrown in for good measure. A 10-pointer! It's not precisely originial but well enough executed to excuse that.
-- Michael
Gee, this beats that whole "Stallman" thing (heh, I bet there's *still* folks who believe there's a real "RMS" person!)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
> By working at specific frequencies, work cycles and high voltages it might be possible to reduce resistance.
Yeah, & if I tap my heels together three times...
Nope, you're still there. Sorry, wishing don't make it so.
Then we get to:
> I believe that Tesla, as the brilliant man he was, knew exactly what he was doing with his Wardenclyffe coil. He didn't have the theoretical quantum physics explanation for what he designed, but he had the practical knowledge to make it work.
>There's a story about Tesla lighting up lightbulbs 100 miles away using such a system. I prefer not to give much credit to this, but I believe Tesla wouldn't fail.
Riiiigghhttt. Like I said, no carnations in the airport please.
I'm gonna go doing something constructive now & I think it's time for your basket-weaving class..
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
> Fantastic transmission losses. Some enormously large percentage of the power pumped in would be lost (as in 'not serve a useful purpose'.)
And based on what do you claim that?
You're thinking of physics in the conventional way, as did Ampere 200 years ago.
You disconsider that Tesla was one of the first people to think about subatomic particles and quantum physics as part of a realm where "normal things don't happen very often".
By working at specific frequencies, work cycles and high voltages it might be possible to reduce resistance.
I believe that Tesla, as the brilliant man he was, knew exactly what he was doing with his Wardenclyffe coil. He didn't have the theoretical quantum physics explanation for what he designed, but he had the practical knowledge to make it work.
There's a story about Tesla lighting up lightbulbs 100 miles away using such a system. I prefer not to give much credit to this, but I believe Tesla wouldn't fail.
> Wildly variable service. In the clear power would theoretically follow the inverse-square law
Inverse-square-law rule? Once again, Tesla's system doesn't deal with classic physics. And even if it did, this system doesn't have much to do with this law.
> but almost anything would mess with this & cause it to vary: trees, streams, underground streams, wet/dry soil, weather (do not operate in a shower!) and that's well before we get to things like buildings, walls, metal-objects, etc.
I believe you may a point when mentioning large metallic structures, because there may be a potential difference from both ends due do improper grounding.
Trees, streams and the like wouldn't be a problem since all of them are at the same potential.
> Hazardous local environment. At the energies Tesla was talking every metallic object nearby would be carrying a hefty charge.
Ground large structures like the Eiffel tower (or better yet, make one of the tesla coils there). You shouldn't have a problem with small metallic structures like satellite dishes.
> Disrupt the very devices it was intended to supply. For simple object like a fluorescent tube Tesla coils are great but the minute you try to run something with sophisticated requirements you're hosed.
No you're not because you can rectify and filter the AC signal, thus making it high-voltage DC. Now run it through a switched power supply and generate AC in any possible voltage and any possible frequency. Rectify again to get DC at that new voltage.
> the supply would vary wildly.
No it wouldn't. You'd regulate the supply the same way you regulate it nowadays.
> Furthermore parts of motors & other devices would be receiving charge almost randomly.
Based on WHAT do you say that?
My God, don't comment on what you don't know!
Flavio
So? If Tesla's system exists you won't be able to explain it using classic physics. Don't digress.
Tesla's work DOES follow from Maxwell's data, but again you digress. Tesla did NOT understand nor use quantum phenomena but based on his observations he conjectured that there must exist subatomic particles with specific laws to dictate their behavior.
And DAMN IT, READ what I wrote: Tesla was one of the first people to think about subatomic particles. I did not write he "claim that Tesla understood, let alone used, any quantum phenomena".
You obviously weren't paying attention because you want to flame me so badly. The whole point of specific work cycles, frequencies and high voltages is to make a quantum mechanics phenomenon more likely to happen than in normal conditions.I'm obviously discussing this with someone with more than grade school knowledge this time, but you don't pay attention to what I write anyway.
As my slashdot history proves, every childish narrow-minded conclusion jumper that disagrees with me calls me an idiot and/or troll. Join the club.
Ironically, you call me someone who practices physics as if it were theology. You must learn some methodology yourself and yet know when to have faith.
You again miss the point. We're not dealing with normal RF propagation through vacuum here, but with electricity transmission using the atmosphere and the ground. You don't even remember what the Ask Slashdot question was about because (again) you want to flame me so badly.
I won't waste any more of my time answering this. If there's any troll here, that's you. And STOP bullshitting (driving a transformer from the ambient field? get real.)
In any case, all you people out there don't think that you'd be able to receive electricity from anywhere in the world by using Tesla's system, right? It's not as magical as "tapping the ether" as Tau Zero wants to do with his transformer.
Flavio
Since when did the propagation of EM fields along a conductor (such as the earth) become such a huge mystery that only the disciples of Tesla can know the secrets?
Since the day people like you proclaimed there's nothing else to learn about them.
Your contempt for Tesla and for everyone who doesn't shoot down his radical thinking is quite clear as well.
> And STOP bullshitting (driving a transformer from the ambient field? get real.)
Oh, really? What do you think the loopstick antenna in a portable AM receiver is?
You're jumping to conclusions again. What makes you believe I don't know that?
I again don't think you've read the Ask Slashdot question or any of my comments. The poster that started this discussion claimed that Tesla's system would invariably have large losses.
You'd have huge losses no matter how large your coil is and no matter how close to Tesla's transmitter it stands. Of course you know that, and it's precisely why you shot down my first reply in the first place.
Now what I want you to consider is that I'm not thinking of Tesla's system in the conventional "textbook solved exercise" most people do. I don't want to get the simplest, dumbest idea that comes to mind like a huge flyback transformer with an air core and try to apply it.
I believe that [in general] Slashdot geeks must have respect and not blast the ones with different ideas by making assumptions which lead to incriminating facts. People in Slashdot are usually more smarter than average but that still doesn't make them smart.
Any jackass can imagine Tesla's theoretical system as something incredibly stupid because I don't believe any of us have seen it at work.
To finish things: the purpose of Ask Slashdot is to give light to some topic, not to break the topic. If you can't think of a way to achieve high efficiency and long range wireless energy transmission, don't claim that's impossible. Making a failed example of that and shooting it down doesn't make wireless energy transmission "a la Tesla" inviable.
Flavio
Tesla invented the alternating current motor, he did not invent alternating current(AC). At the time AC was known to be easier to produce and more efficient to transmit but had to be rectified (turned to DC) to drive motors. this was very inefficient and the motors wore out quickly. AC motors have only 1 moving part so are more economical. this invention revolutionized the electrical industry (power to the people:). we still use basically the same tech today. also Teslas power distribution scheme used the earth to transmit electricity. A separate idea of his was to energize the ionosphere to light up the sky like a huge florescent lightbulb so ships could see at night.
However, I've heard that systems like that are not compatible with wired societies, nor ones using metal-framed structures. Blasting electromagnetic pulses across the countryside will produce a lot of heating and sparks....and never mind your TV and radio reception, because those towers will cross far too many different levels of potential.
And you sit there repeating myths yourself...
Tesla was laughed at for thinking AC motors were possible.
No, actually he was the victim of a fight-to-the-death between Edison and Westinghouse. Edison did everything he could to make the public think that Tesla was nuts - but Science had nothing to do with it.
The scientists of back in the day would practically kill you for merely suggesting that the world might be round.
Wrong again. "scientists" have been calculating the diameter of the globe since at least Aristotle. The idea that people thought Columbus would fall off the edge is a myth. What the people really didn't believe was that little, rickety European sailing vessels could survive the crossing from Europe to Asia. Seeing as how (a) Columbus deliberately distorted the math to make the Earth seem smaller than it actually is and (b) he never actually made it to Asia, they were right.
Go back 200 years and tell them man will fly and clone animals and they will laugh at you.
Really? Da Vinci would have laughed? Gallileo? Newton?
I'm certainly not a member of any Tesla "cult", but being biased on any given side is useless, and Tesla in his life proved the skeptics wrong on a number of occasions, in fact all the great advancements have come from men who go against the grain, not those who blindly cling to it.
Perhaps. After all, every one knows what rebels men like Einstein, Bohr, Teller and Hawking are.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
I think it most likely could have. From what I have read about Wardeclyff, it wasn't going to be a giant Tesla coil as we think of it - throwing off lightning and such. There might have been small streamers, but nothing of great proportion.
Look at his work - the majority involved resonance (heh - though there was the "flying bedframe" patent - Tesla definitely wasn't an aviation pioneer). He once remarked that he knew how to split the earth, using timed dynamite charges to cause the earth to "ring", and crack like a wine glass. Whether this was possible with the tech of the day is questionable (ie, TNT) - but in theory it could be done given strong enough explosives (H-Bombs?). He used to make a variety of mechanical oscillators that could shake entire buildings (causing him to be kicked out of more than one apartment complex), merely by "tapping" them at the proper resonant frequency of the structure (similar to how you can get a pendulum to swing by tapping it at its resonant period). Those who experienced it thought it was an earthquake.
One poster nearly got it right - a ground wave station. Tesla's idea was to pump energy into the earth at resonant frequency, then tap that back out anywhere along the point (probably via one of those aerial earth/sky antenna things - that used the atmosphere as a giant capacitor - he has several patents on these).
Would there have been noise - yeah, there would have. It probably wouldn't have been good for today's electronics. However, if he had suceeded in his plans, and made such wireless power distribution a reality, we may not have gone down the same roads we have since gone down - and probably would have developed our current tech differently to deal with the noise.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The thing that really made AC and killed DC was the cost of generation and transmission. Because DC cannot use transformers, the voltage of generation, transmission and consumption all have to be more or less the same (before resistive losses, which are considerable at voltages like 110). AC was always more desirable, because DC required all kinds of little generating stations everywhere in order to keep voltage drops down to an acceptable level. When Tesla demonstrated the induction motor (which could operate off of AC current), he removed the last roadblock to big, centralized, efficient, cost-effective AC power stations. All the induction motor did was remove a critical amount of the logjam placed there by entrenched interests and Edison PR; once that was gone, it was all over for DC distribution (except in subways and other electric rail systems, oddly enough).
"
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
- Claim that Tesla had some mystical understanding of electricity or whatever which is not part of current knowledge or art, and
- Cannot or will not demonstrate anything to back up those claims.
That's you, in case you didn't recognize yourself. Maybe it was when I said "Since you're already starting with RF, it would make more sense to just have a set of taps on a small transformer driven directly from the ambient field" and you responded "It's not as magical as "tapping the ether" as Tau Zero wants to do with his transformer." It is painfully clear that you had no idea what I was talking about, until I explained it and made a fool of you. In other words, you demand that everyone on Slashdot keep their minds open so far that their brains fall out. (Is that what happened to yours?)I work differently. If it looks like a crank, walks like a crank and sounds like a crank, it has the burden of demonstrating that its ideas do not fall into the zone of crankdom before having the right to be taken seriously. Showing that something works as described is sufficient. I'd even believe Joseph Newman's machine worked if he could hook up a flat battery to it, start it going and come back some time later to a fully-charged battery. I've never heard of him being able to do this under controlled conditions, so he's a crank.
Oh, I'm sure that it's possible. There appears to be nothing physically impossible about creating beams of very short wavelength microwaves and beaming them through space to a receiver a considerable distance away (hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of miles). Space is lossless, and sufficiently large antennas can guarantee that any desired fraction of the transmitted power gets to the receiver. Sending power around the curve of the earth using very low frequencies, using a resistive Earth and lossy ionosphere as the two surfaces of a waveguide, at high efficiency, is a completely different matter. I want some evidence that conventional wisdom is in error before I give it the time of day. People who don't demand such evidence tend to be parted from both their money and credibility in short order. I prefer to give the readers of Slashdot something to chew on when they see fantastic claims. A little critical thinking, that's all I ask. Not of you, you've failed that test, but the others out there reading this will be served well."
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You're throwing around words that sound good to the ignorant ("subatomic particles", "quantum physics", "specific frequencies", "work cycles") and trying to use them to baffle people into taking you seriously. I take you as an idiot or a troll (same difference).
I believe! Halleluia!Anyone with an RF voltmeter and a little bit of gear (more or less equivalent to a crystal radio) could measure the transmission efficiency from an AM radio tower to a receiving antenna of a particular size and design. From this, they wouldn't have much trouble calculating how much power you'd need to light a fluorescent bulb at 100 miles given a similar transmitter and receiver; with the right licenses and equipment you could proceed to actually do it. There is nothing divine about this ability, it only takes a decent education, money and (different from Tesla's day) regulatory relief.
Yeah, inverse-square law. This is modified somewhat if the waves are confined by the ionosphere because you're no longer transmitting to infinite space, but conservation says that all energy has to come from somewhere and geometry says that you spread that energy to cover every point on the surface surrounding the point from which it radiates; if the energy isn't spread evenly, then you have hot spots and dead spots. If you are asserting that you do not have any reduction in areal power density in inverse proportion to the increase of area of the boundary surface, you are claiming that the total amount of energy goes up with distance and energy is not conserved.This is an utterly extraordinary, nay, fantastic claim. State your evidence in support of it.
Since you're already starting with RF, it would make more sense to just have a set of taps on a small transformer driven directly from the ambient field and rectify at the desired voltage straight from those, but that would require understanding what you're talking about. You don't; you're just bullshitting. You're trying to practice physics as if it were theology. I'll give you a hint: your performance is miserable, and you'd be laughed out of any high-school class worthy of the name. "First remove the beam that is in your own eye...""
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
- The window of frequencies which can be used to send power through air, clouds, etc. is low enough in frequency (and thus long in wavelength) that you can't make "really narrow beams that everybody could avoid". The original schemes called for receivers literally miles across, and safe zones for some distance beyond. The power density was only 70 watts/m^2 at the peak, to avoid thermal blooming and defocussing of the beam from atmospheric effects.
- There is no requirement for any "new microwave laser". Any set of amplifiers which can drive a phased array will do the job; electronically-steered radars do exactly this, and prove that it requires nothing more sophisticated than the technology of 20 years ago.
- Having a coherent source doesn't automatically create a tiny beamwidth. You need an aperture that's wide enough to focus the radiation. Ever wonder why big telescopes can see more detail than small telescopes (up to the point where the atmosphere doesn't allow any further improvement)? It's called the diffraction limit; look it up.
All in all, it looks like you should do some studying. You can start with the demonstrations which were done at Goldstone, beaming power through just as much air as a beam coming down from orbit would have to transit. You should find all of this very informative."
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
and yes, i know it was just a joke, son.
sig not found
hmmmm...one point that you (or anyone else so far in this thread) haven't mentioned is the noise factor. To generate that much electricity You'll be creating lots of noise. For those of you who live in the Los Angeles Area, I encourage you to go to Griffth Park Observatory. They have a minaturized version of the Tesla Coil, and they do demonstrations on it every hour or so. It's pretty neat to watch people holding florscent lights and have them magically turn on. The reason they don't leave the display on all the time is that it is *really* loud. I wouldn't want to live anywhere near something so loud!
Doh!
As neat a reductio ad absurdum of Obectivism as anyone could reasonably ask for.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
No, my point is that in an objectivist society, nobody would have heard of Objectivism, as Rand's books are so fucking bad.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I lived under high tension power lines as a kid, and it didn't seem to affect me
You're reading Slashdot for heavens sake
Its marvelously ineffiecient, as well. MASSIVE amounts of power are disappated with his scheme. There's no way around it. Its completely impractacle. We'd have to charge the entire planet, from the top of the upper atmosphere down 10 miles under the ground. Its impossible.
You know why there where people who thought he might not be someone to listen to? Maybe it was the hallucenations. Or maybe it was the disregard for the safety of his own life. Those aren't little trivial details.
Its not like the media was saying that a Yale graduate is stupid, as many media figures have with Bush. These claims are a little more waranted.
There's a fine line between genius and insanity, and Tesla walked it. That's why he's so cool; that's why he's idolized.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Not sure how happy I'd be if I got zapped every time the pilot of the plane I was on went a little to high...
Skeptical Inquirer did a cover story on Tesla and the pseudoscience cult that has formed around him:
Skeptical Inquirer
SUMMER 1994 (vol 18, no 4.): `Extraordinary science' and the strange legacy of Nikola Tesla, by Johnson. Nikola Tesla: Genius, visionary, and eccentric, by Johnson.
Their take on it was that he a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of bad ones, and that the common perception of him as an infallible genius is misplaced.
- Fantastic transmission losses. Some enormously large percentage of the power pumped in would be lost (as in 'not serve a useful purpose'.)
- Wildly variable service. In the clear power would theoretically follow the inverse-square law but almost anything would mess with this & cause it to vary: trees, streams, underground streams, wet/dry soil, weather (do not operate in a shower!) and that's well before we get to things like buildings, walls, metal-objects, etc.
- Hazardous local environment. At the energies Tesla was talking every metallic object nearby would be carrying a hefty charge. Touching any of these could well be hazardous: Local fence-wires would sizzle with charge, metal doors could be deadly. I have no idea what this much radiated energy over a long period would do to local biological activity but the simple random shocks alone couldn't be good.
- Disrupt the very devices it was intended to supply. For simple object like a fluorescent tube Tesla coils are great but the minute you try to run something with sophisticated requirements you're hosed. Good grounds would be difficult, power is DC, the supply would vary wildly. Furthermore parts of motors & other devices would be receiving charge almost randomly. I can't imagine trusting something as basic as an elevator winch motor under these conditions much less microelectronics like my digital watch, cellphone, etc.
Look, Tesla is a fascinating (and tragic) character but some of his ideas, were, well, impracticable.I used to work with Tesla coils almost daily & let me tell you they are not a good solution. Indoors and at comparatively low power they were hazardous & required care to operate, scaled up and put into The Real World they'd have been regularly deadly. Not deadly as in once-a-year power-main-fell-on-somebody or Little-Bobby-put-a-hairpin-in-the-socket-&-zapped- himself deadly but random step in a puddle & die deadly, sit between two angled metals walls & fry deadly, metal-fillings in your jaw grow warm & make you ill deadly.
ps For all of those automatically saying we should re-study Tesla's idea & going for the 'underdog': there's a cult out there waiting for you & no I don't want any carnations in the airport.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.