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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
EM radiation from the wireless source drops off according to the inverse square law. This has been figured out in the time since Tesla. So no, Tesla's tower could never have worked. Beyond a short distance (like the inches between an RFID card and its reader) power transmission is not feasible because of, you know, physics.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise
It's about a belief whether there might any physical principle for wirelessly transmitting electricity that Tesla knew about back then and we don't nowadays.
It might be possible, but I believe it unlikely.
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.
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.