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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.
Subscription-free, minus the pictures and maps.
A Battle to Preserve a Visionary's Bold Failure
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: May 4, 2009
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. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. The blinding flashes, The New York Sun reported, "seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand."
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.
Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe - what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.
A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company's real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can "be delivered fully cleared and level," a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.
The ruins of Wardenclyffe include the tower's foundation and the large brick laboratory, designed by Tesla's friend Stanford White, the celebrated architect.
"It's hugely important to protect this site," said Marc J. Seifer, author of "Wizard," a Tesla biography. "He's an icon. He stands for what humans are supposed to do - honor nature while using high technology to harness its powers."
Recently, New York State echoed that judgment. The commissioner of historic preservation wrote Dr. Seifer on behalf of Gov. David A. Paterson to back Wardenclyffe's preservation and listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
On Long Island, Tesla enthusiasts vow to obtain the land one way or another, saying that saving a symbol of Tesla's accomplishments would help restore the visionary to his rightful place as an architect of the modern age.
"A lot of his work was way ahead of his time," said Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, a private group in Shoreham that is seeking to acquire Wardenclyffe.
Dr. Ljubo Vujovic, president of the Tesla Memorial Society of New York, said destroying the old lab "would be a terrible thing for the United States and the world. It's a piece of history."
Tesla, who lived from 1856 to 1943, made bitter enemies who dismissed some of his claims as exaggerated, helping tarnish his reputation in his lifetime. He was part recluse, part showman. He issued publicity photos (actually double exposures) showing him reading quietly in his laboratory amid deadly flashes.
Today, his work tends to be poorly known among scientists, though some call him an intuitive genius far ahead of his peers. Socially, his popularity has soared, elevating him to cult status.
Books and Web sites abound. Wikipedia says the inventor obtained at least 700 patents. YouTube has several Tesla videos, including one of a break-in at Wardenclyffe. A rock band calls itself Tesla. An electric car company backed by Google's founders calls itself Tesla Motors.
Larry Page, Google's co-founder, sees the creator's life as a cautionary tale. "It's a sad, sad story," Mr. Page told Fortune magazine last year. The inventor "couldn't commercialize anything. He could barely fund his own research."
Wardenclyffe epitomized that kind o
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Then someone will assume it's a Labrador Retriever, and PETA will get involved.
Imagine the upper layer of the atmosphere as a copper shell. Any high voltage alternated current deposited there could be harnessed by a sufficiently high tower that could "touch" the copper shell.
Square law doesn't apply because its a conductor that captures the wave and prevents it from spreading in 3 dimensions just like it doesn't apply in wires.
All the viability is in how closely ionized upper atmosphere resembles a copper shell and also in how hard it is to effectively "touch" this layer with lots of air in between you and it.
See http://blogs.intel.com/research/2008/10/rattner_the_promise_of_wireles.php . Tesla was, obviouly, much omre ambitious.
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.
It appears there's a circular spot that had something there...
Tesla's Laboratory?
Magic.
He did a lot of incredibly smart things, but some of his stuff was just loony.
That might not be fair, perhaps experimentally ignorant. But with that time period and electricity, everyone was.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You really want a site that often covers technical issues to avoid polysyllabic words? Okay, I'll try:
Your post makes me sad.
and use it to figure out how to manufacture a pork samich without a bone in it. i will be rich.
Seriously... Blowing a couple of million bucks on the site, along with perhaps a reconstructed museum and tower, is honestly a good way to waste Federal money. There's a big war bill coming out of the House, and get the New York delegation to stuff some money in there for a national museum, and while we're at it, have the President declare it as a national heritage site.
There will be some dopes at the National Review that will bitch about it, but even hard righties like me love national parks and the story of American industrialization and research. It's a lot better than Woodstock. I'd plug it on my right wing site, for sure.
Come on libs, spend some money and save this place!
This is my sig.
I'd ride mine down to cash in my winning lottery ticket, buy the land, and endow part of the fund needed to launch a world-class museum. You can visit Edison's lab in Greenfield Villiage (Henry Ford Musuem, etc) in Dearborn, Michigan - which, if you ever get the chance, do it - you won't be disappointed, I guarantee.
It would be shame if Tesla doesn't become similarly remembered.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
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
The building's dark interior was littered with beer cans and broken bottles. Flashlights revealed no trace of the original equipment, except for a surprise on the second floor. There in the darkness loomed four enormous tanks, each the size of a small car. Their sides were made of thick metal and their seams heavily riveted, like those of an old destroyer or battleship. The Agfa consultant leading the tour called them giant batteries.
"Look up there," said the consultant, Ralph Passantino, signaling with his flashlight. "There's a hatch up there. It was used to get into the tanks to service them."
Tesla authorities appear to know little of the big tanks, making them potential clues to the inventor's original plans.
Boy are they going to be surprised when they open them and find hundreds of hats, dead cats and human corpses with huge bone claws on their hands crammed in there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
What? yes, every person that listens takes power. It's a minute amount of power but it does. In this case it weakens the range of the broadcast.
Do you even think about what you are saying? If that where true we would all be powering our devices from radio signal. You are saying 50K watts of power can power infinite devices, ir be broad cast to an infinite amount of radios with degrading the signal.
THINK!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
I think the better example is how ham radio, or UHF stations can bounce in the atmosphere to reach long distances.
For example when I was a kid in West central Florida, if the weather was right, we could watch TV from Texas with a regular mast mounted antenna (50' tall). We required the same antenna to pick up UHF and VHF stations in the next major city, approximately 100 miles away.
I'm familiar with Tesla's work. It's all really interesting stuff.
There really isn't anything left at the site, which is a terrible shame. It could be recreated, but would cost a fortune, and without Tesla there to make it work (or work out the bugs), it's seriously doubtful the casual hobbyist could make a working replica.
His wireless power on a global scale idea would require much more than just the Wardenclyffe site. The plans indicated many transmitters globally. This would never happen, as it takes the control away from too many huge money making industries. No government would allow it either. During a military operation, one of the first strategic moves is to disable the infrastructure (power, communications, water, and transportation). Once an enemy is blinded, the aggressive forces have a significant advantage.
I was always curious about long term effects. Non-ionizing radiation is proven to cause various illnesses. For example, some schools were built on cheap property in close proximity to large power transmission lines. That caused an unusually high rate of leukemia in the students. Prolonged exposure (living or going to school) at 200 meters raised the chance of getting leukemia by 70%. 200 meters to 500 meters raised it by 20%. Obviously, no research was done with Tesla's unfinished work. And for those asking for citations, search Google for "power lines leukemia" .
Some of Tesla's earlier work in Colorado Springs caused sparks to jump out of water faucets and from peoples feet as they were walking. It would have been interesting to see, but I'm sure quite unnerving after a while. I don't know the Wardenclyffe facility would have caused the same effect, or if he corrected it by possibly changing the frequency that he worked at.
The only people with enough documentation to know are the US Government, who seized all of his work materials when he died.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I am not an electrical engineer (IANAEE) but I have a read a couple of books on Tesla and struggled through some of the papers he wrote and one thing that seems to be constant is that he was way ahead of his time. However, reading through some of the annotated papers something that stands out is that he was actually working with some stuff that we didn't even have the correct terminology for and that Tesla seems to be a lot more of an intuitive experimentalist than someone that worked with electrical theory. Thus, this tends to mean two things, to me at least, in regards to Wardenclyffe, namely that the only person that would likely know what Tesla was planning on doing is Tesla and there is a pretty good chance that people might also be assuming that Wardenclyffe was intended to do more than it was meant for.
I would have to get the books out, but I seem to recall that Wardenclyffe was partly a proof-of-concept demonstration based upon his Colorado Springs, CO experiments so I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't work like he intended. Also, one of his papers on the wireless transmission of electricity explained that a series of towers similar to Wardenclyffe would be needed throughout the world in order to achieve his goals.
However, I am willing to concede that the plans might not have worked out as Tesla had hoped for even if he did not encounter the financial issues due to a lack of full understanding of electrical theory. All told though, it would be a shame to have museums dedicated to Edison here in the US, but you have to the Tesla Museum in Serbia if you want to learn about him outside of books.
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.
There's a big difference between searching google
The plans indicated many transmitters globally. This would never happen, as it takes the control away from too many huge money making industries. No government would allow it either.
He tried to get it funded by JP Morgan. One day, he got a telegraph:
"No interest in wireless power. Nowhere to put the meter."
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
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.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
Prolonged exposure (living or going to school) at 200 meters raised the chance of getting leukemia by 70%. 200 meters to 500 meters raised it by 20%. [...] And for those asking for citations, search Google for "power lines leukemia" .
I did. Half of the results I got were of the "study finds no link between power lines, leukemia" type. The rest seemed to be written by internet nuts with no clue what they were talking about. Assuming then you meant to search without the quotes, I repeated the search. This time I found more that substantiate what you said, but realising that half of them didn't know what they were talking about I repeated it on google scholar (as should anyone interested in what actual scientific research on a subject says).
Results: "no relationship was found between leukemia and electric power line configurations", "Residence near high-voltage lines did not increase risk", [test subjects who lived] within 300 metres [of a power line showed a] relative risk [with] 95% confidence interval [of one kind of leukemia of] 0.8-3.5 [, or for another] 0.7-3.8 [, or if exposure was prolonged] 1.0-4.6 [or] 0.9-4.7" (i.e., for those who don't understand how to interpret that last one, no statistically significant effects -- note that this is the study that's usually cited _in favour_ of arguments about power lines causing leukemia). "the risk was not significantly associated with either residential magnetic-field levels ", "The study provides [...] no support for an association between leukemia and [magnetic field exposure]", "the results suggest that typical magnetic fields of high-voltage power lines are not an important cause of leukemia in adults", "These results provide little support for a relation between power-frequency EMF exposure and risk of childhood leukemia", "For residential exposure >= 0.2 uT, the relative risk for leukemia was estimated at .. 95% confidence interval 0.8-2.2" (i.e. not statistically significant). That's the first page of results finished with; I don't see any evidence fdor your assertion of a 70% increase in risk, and I would be cautious at claiming even that there's a link. Google scholar selects widely cited papers first, and papers with the most provocative results are likely to be the most widely cited. Given the number of studies that have been conducted on this subject, we'd expect at least some to come up with postive results based on random variation. That none of the ones I've looked at have even had statistically significant results suggests there's nothing to this, and it really is just random variation we're seeing.