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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?
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
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
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.
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".
Many houses will in the very near future generate their own electricity.
-- Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
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.