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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?
We may find out soon enough since Viziv Technologies has built a Wardenclyffe Tower in Texas and is actively working on the project.
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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 your reasoning, if I hold a large metal block and connect one part to mains electricity, I will be safe.
Radio waves traveling through the air work differently than electricity moving through a conductor, to the point where RF engineering is a specialized field within electrical engineering.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Yeah, those newfangled "lasers" will never work.
There is another thing to consider, an uncertainty which inventors often forget: economics. If you take all the inventions ever made and discard the ones that simply wouldn't work, the successful ones would still be a tiny fraction of what's left.
Tesla's scheme seems to have been to use the entire Earth/atmosphere's electromagetic field as a kind of filter/transmission medium to transfer power from something like a gigantic Tesla coil. Leaving aside the inefficiency of passing a massive white noise signal through a bandpass filter, and assuming the transmission was effective as Tesla believed it would be, you still wouldn't be able to meter or regulate the power usage. Literally anyone with an antenna could use it.
I'm not sure whether the arguments for the system's physical infeasibility based on what is now known about *conventional* radio transmission really apply to what Tesla had in mind, which appears to be forcing the entire Earth's EM field to resonate on a global scale. Presumably it would take some time and a huge amount of energy to get to the point where someone on a distant continent could extract power.
Tesla was inventing by the seat of his pants; he has a basic engineering education and immense ingenuity, but he didn't have the theoretical foundation to judge the feasibility of his scheme; to some degree that knowledge didn't even exist yet, in fact some of it may still not exist. He was making an unjustifi8able leap of imagination from his lab near-field power transmission experiments, which he could see worked with his own eyes, to a global scale. Some elements of his scheme were pure wishful thinking, e.g. creating an ionized path from the ground to the stratosphere and losslessly transmitting power over it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I see you have no clue what the word socialism actually means.
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.
Having studied everything I can find about Tesla's notions behind Wardenclyffe, I could summarize my understanding of it as follows:
1) Tesla was fascinated by resonance wherein small impulses of energy are trapped losslessly in a mechanism, and are aggregated into large stores of said energy - a well-known example of this is case of the "galloping gertie" bridge.
2) Tesla postulated that earth's atmosphere presents an electro-magnetic structure (or mechanism) which would have a resonance condition into which power could be pumped by EM transmissions at that resonant frequency.
3) Similar apparatus could be configured to extract the EM power stored resonantly in the atmosphere.
4) Hence the promise of wireless power distribution.
My take on the whole thing is that he was likely over-optimistic in his ability to fathom and harness a system as vast as earth's atmosphere (Ham radio guys could probably tell him a thing or two). Then again this may be a case where you never really know until you try. What Tesla got wrong was that there is no way in such a system to extract payments from users, hence his capitalist backers bailed out before Tesla could demonstrate the soundness of his conjectures.
BTW, yes I am a physicist.
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.
By your reasoning, if I hold a large metal block and connect one part to mains electricity, I will be safe.
Radio waves traveling through the air work differently than electricity moving through a conductor, to the point where RF engineering is a specialized field within electrical engineering.
one relies on Maxwell's equations and the other...
One relies on Maxwell's equations with permiability and permitivity appropriate for a metalic concuctor, and the other relies on Maxwell's equations with permiability and permitivity appropriate for the gasses in the atmosphere. The different parameters give different behaviours.
If you are trying to imply that lasers don't exhibit the inverse square law in the relation of area power density with distance you are wrong. Lasers do propagate power via the inverse square law once you get past near field effects (same as any antenna), that's why laser beamwidths are spec'ed in milliradians, the angular extent of the beam. Constant angular extent = inverse square law power density. The reason lasers get a reputation for tight power propagation is because they can be produced with very small beamwidths to begin with. That all applies to propagation in a vacuum or a medium which doesn't interact with the laser light, but once you get into mediums which actually interact with the light (to attempt some sort of self-focusing) you start to deal with scattering and losses to heating the medium, too; one reason why the megawatt laser weapons envisioned in the past haven't been fielded.
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise[.]
I think you're missing the real question in your quest to be snarky. The real question isn't whether the physics work or not; that's like saying that time travel either works or it doesn't, but without any evidence either way. Of course that's the case. Just like explosions can be controlled to propel large, heavy objects into space.
The real question is whether Tesla understood physics at a level sufficiently advanced to make wireless, intercontinental electrical transmission work. If so, then he would have expanded our knowledge of physics.
That presumes that such a feat is already allowed by physics, but the mechanism for doing so needs to be discovered by humans. To me, it seems at least plausible. After all, we watch wireless transmission of electricity over multi-mile distances all the time, and we know how it works. Tesla believed that he understood how to manipulate that same energy over vastly greater distances.