Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Could Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower Have Worked?
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?
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise
Could Elon Musk monetize it?
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes.
http://vizivtechnologies.com
No, it wouldn't have worked.
Tesla was a brilliant, prolific inventor, but his reputation/image is undeservedly buoyed by mystics, kooks, and unthinking fanboys.
For example, saying DC is better for long distance power transmission is fighting words to a Tesla fanboy. They can't say why, they just think AC is better. When pressed they'll say DC wastes heat or something.
A link to a year-old documentary doesn't make this news, or stuff that matters. You've been used by a fanatic.
We may find out soon enough since Viziv Technologies has built a Wardenclyffe Tower in Texas and is actively working on the project.
-----
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...
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
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 never worked, and never will work.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
With 5G phone, cable, and Internet will be delivered wirelessly, the last wire to the house is electrical. The power companies are going to have to pay the full cost of maintaining the last mile of wires to the house. This cost has always been split across the different providers. Power bills are going to increase and the companies are going to need to figure out ways of limiting expenses. Wirelessly providing energy is going to be looked at again. We may see a distributed generation of power or some kind of wireless transmission of power.
the problem was bot whether it would work. it worked and works now, though his prototype had many issues - primarily on the effiency of energy transfer and safety around transmitting stations.
the problem was always how to finance such a system, as it would be effetively impossible to tell who was using the energy.
so the question was - invest into something that would be financed by state and free for everybody to ise, or on the other side, use vibrant space of private enterprises who were working on wired solutions and could fund the rollout as a business venture. Choice was clear.
Needless to say, there are thing we wanted to be free - like radio and TV which use same concepts, but transfer much less energy - signal - and therefore donâ(TM)t suffer from problems of efficiency and safety.
It's a giant tower throwing energy out into the Earth's atmosphere to be picked up by remote receivers. How do you put a meter on that so you could bill customers properly?
... it's not like it would power a fridge 1 mile away.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Sound of Silence
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 saying "trust me".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Perpetual motion and something for nothing have nothing on this guy
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".
If it had been workable, we'd be living in what amounts to a microwave oven (only one with longer wavelengths). Think of the people who think non ionizing radiation gives them cancer as is!
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
This is posted just a few hours after I finished Tesla Effect, the Tex Murphy adventure from 2014.
Coincidence?
-- Cheers!
They have since uncovered other mysteries about where he was living -- the theory being that Tesla was in fact working secretly with the US GOV'T. The hotel he was living in, in some respects was a giant Wardenclyffe in disguise. Had its own power, etc. I suspect this is true and only a part of it.
...And we know it travels well. It seems more fathomable to focus beams of light from space.
Since they're actually doing this for reals in Texas, we will soon find out: https://texashillcountry.com/m...
"Do you believe that Tesla's dream of electrical devices anywhere in the world essentially being able to draw electrical power from the sky"
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.
Nikolas Tesla has been called on the web, "the wizzard of electricity."
We don't know the tricks of the wizzards, and they don't want to share them, "for it's too dangerous."
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...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I believe (as I said back in 2014) 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.
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.
Nikola's physics education was contemporaneous to Maxwell's discoveries. There is no indication that Maxwell's equations were considered by Tesla.
Even if there is some break through in physics that allows this to happen, people can continue to dream. Even near field electricity transmission is loosy, can't imagine you won't have even worse problems over distance. Then there is the small matter of conservation of energy, where will all that energy from transmission loses go? But there is a sucker born every minute.
If by some miracle this can be made to work, if the receiving endpoint is cheap and plentiful, then what is the incentive for the power companies to provide OTA power unless it is too cheap to meter and provided as a public good. What are the chances the powers that be in a capitalistic society will get behind this? But pump and dump to the gullible is a standard wall street play, so you will always have people peddling faith based unicorns.,
The question asked is an example of Schrodinger's Cat. Tesla's experiment both works and doesn't work at the same time.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Isn't this what Apple is touting for their next gen phone?
Just don't tase me bro.
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.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Tesla did not have a viable plan. In Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, W. Bernard Carlson explains that Tesla's plan was to transmit radio waves through the air and use them to draw electrical current through the ground to complete the circuit. Tesla had similar problems with other inventions of his later years; the physics didn't work. His early work on electricity was brilliant, and he was a visionary about the potential of radio signal transmission, but in his later years he fell behind the cutting edge of technology. The same happened to many other brilliant inventors.
Cold fusion too!
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 645,576drops 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
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.
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 what it takes to talk to submarines through VLF).
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. - Nikola Tesla
I have Lots of Tesla's patents I mean lots. This leads me the think he knew what he was doing. I will give him between 70 t0 80 %. chance of being able to do it. As to his mistake. He should have redone his contract with Westinghouse. NO money until Westinghouse started to make money.
So electromagnetic waves of low enough frequency (ELF/VLF) propagate efficiently in waveguide modes between the surface of the earth and the ionosphereâ(TM)s D-layer in what is called the earth-ionospheric waveguide. If you could efficiently couple all of the Earths generated electrical power into this waveguide, and efficiently decouple and rectify it at the receiving end, you could in theory eliminate the need for wire transmission of electrical power.
Of course, you cannot practically do these couplings efficiently. Efficient radiating and receiving structures would be on the order of a quarter-wavelength, which would be several to many kilometers tall. I^2 R losses in these structures would be high, shorter more practical structures would be less efficient due to their lower radiation resistance. Energy would be inefficiently distributed over areas where it wasnâ(TM)t needed.
We regularly pass power wirelessly, with transmitted power levels in the Watts to Megawatts and received powers in the sub-microwatt levels over great distances. There are wireless energy harvesting systems that can recover tiny amounts of power. Anything more is going to require some breakthrough which there is no sign Tesla had found.
Maxwell's equations were modified by Hertz and Heaviside to only account for transverse waves using vector equations while the original Maxwell equations that Tesla used were based on Hamiltonian algebra with both vector and scalar components which accounted for the transverse and longitudinal waves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SR4vF_pug
He may have been lucky that he never got it fired up.
And claim the visitors from the stars used the pyramids for this purpose.
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 understanding bumps him into the category of "genius", not "nutter". Things often look clear, simple, and obvious after a genius has passed by that were completely invisible before.
What was he doing up there? I don't think we quite know. Was he going to resonate the Earth? The Ionosphere? Ionize something? Quick fry passing seagulls? Use microwaves, or radio waves, or VLF, or those crazy ground hugging waves that I don't know anything about? He had a gift for taking ordinary everyday processes and tweaking them into something new, different, and beautiful. Was this one of those things? Or was this just his biggest failure all lined up and ready to happen?
I think how you answer this question reflects mostly on how much you respect the memory of a great man. It might have caught fire, exploded, fallen over and sunk to its doom deep in the Earths molten core the first time he turned in on, I don't know. I do know I will choose to respect someone one was greater than I am, regardless of whether we understand what he was doing here.
I say it would have worked.
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.
You don't have anything better to do with your time?
we know that it was us that scorched the sky.
Who knows what the hell Tesla was up to? Whatever it was, it was probably brilliant, it probably would've worked, and might well have had wildly unforeseen consequences.
Permanent lightning storm everywhere, perhaps?
It would have worked it wasn't for the anti-cellphone/WiFi activists threatening to sue Westinghouse for causing all of their health and sex life problems.
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
As a ham radio operator, I have enough trouble with power line interference locally. I can't imagine the amount of electrical interference coming from the whole atmosphere being an electrical conduit. Radio communications would have come to a standstill. No air traffic control. No police radio dispatch. No military communications. Radio interference circuitry is actually fairly new. It was a good choice to send him packing.
Yes it is possible, but only through the original Steinmetz/Heaviside mathematics. Quaternions posess a magnitude quantity that is not conveyed in the Lorentz vector simplifications. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No. Simple answer. There's no mystery over what he intended - every electronics enthusiast who has done anything with high voltage knows the basic circuits involved, including the resonant transformer. They are described in detail in some of his many patents, and it's obvious what he was trying to do: Generate a very high AC voltage tuned to the resonant frequency of the LC circuit formed by the ground and the atmosphere, so that it might be extracted at a distant point using another tuned resonant circuit in the form of a very high voltage, low-current source suitable for operating a gas discharge lamp.
It's an interesting idea. And it works, at laboratory scales. But the power requirements defy comprehension - he would have to electrify such a vast area, with every tree and lamppost drawing power, that it would require a government-bankrupting megaproject. The voltage gradients near the transmitter would be so high as to pose a serious danger of starting fires. The equipment would need continuous adjustment for atmospheric conditions, and sometimes wouldn't work at all. At most it could be used to light up a few bulbs near to the transmitter, which is exactly what Tesla was able to achieve. He was limited to working with the theories of his time, for all his genius, and with a more modern understanding of the electromagnetic properties of the atmosphere we can easily see that the idea is fundamentally flawed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTHV_Wk8tao
?v=7ATxLkr9JXk
Youtubage re viziv technologies
Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of what I am talking about here.
Could a transmission tower be built were all you would have to do is screw a light bulb in the ground and have illumination? That sounds like it would have too many other unwanted consequences.
But taking the idea of quantumness where you could have a signal appear in two places at the same time and the idea of phase accurate exactness, you might make a receiver that would turn a particular-ized signal of energy from a broadcasting source into usable energy at the reciever. Along with data. Like that early home networking scheme that carried computer network data over household voltage lines.
You know, sometimes great men, get less great as they age.
That doesn't make the peak of their greatness any less.
It just makes them more human.
In Soviet America, Lightning strikes Sky.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He was insane. In the tube era the requirements for power were enormous and could not have been supplied over the air by his facility. And considering that the transmitted power would have decreased by the cube of the distance you certainly could not get significant power to another continent. Besides, very little of the power would have been intercepted in any case. Most would have been totally wasted. Financially and technically it was a project for a deluded mind - more the product of obsessive compulsion than genius.
E Proelio Veritas.
It's a sad reality, but more often than not, it's simply not enough to have a great idea. In order to see a vision realized it often takes money and resources and this particular project required quite a bit and was developed and presented to the investors as something entirely different. As I understood things, once they caught wind of the true nature of the project and that it could potentially supply free power to everyone, they immediately shut it down - since that was in direct conflict to their goals. Whether or not all of this is true and correct, I would guess like anything else there are elements that have been distorted, points left out and some truths to it all. The government may know the answer however, as they swooped in and grabbed all his documents once he died, and I'm certain that if he financially was unable to build his dream, that at the very least he would have had the plans to build it all worked out on paper. So there may be hope that eventually his work comes to light and perhaps his vision can be built and realized, although those that have the information are probably more likely to use it for financial gain or power and control.