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Tesla's New York Laboratory Up For Sale
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."
We'll level the place. We still can't figure out how some of his projects worked and much of his work was seized after his death, according to the History channel. Might as well level it and trash any chance at learning his knowledge while we're at it. Brilliant man.
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.
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-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
34 kilowatts, 1.5 kilometers with an efficency of over 82%. That's hardy "a couple hundred watts, with lousy efficiency".
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.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!