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From
Feed Line No. 8
THE WIRELESS TRANSMISSION OF ELECTRICAL
ENERGY
by Gary Peterson
It is possible that Nikola Tesla is best known for his
remarkable statements regarding the wireless transmission of electrical power. His first
efforts towards this end started in 1891 and were intended to simply "disturb the
electrical equilibrium in the nearby portions of the earth... to bring into operation in
any way some instrument." In other words the object of his experiments was simply to
produce effects locally and detect them at a distance. By 1899 the electrical potential of
his transmitter had increased to the point that more room was needed for the sake of
safety. This and other considerations led him to temporarily shift his wireless
experiments to a location just outside of Colorado Springs.
At this Colorado "Experimental Station" Tesla had
some early success in wireless power transmission. One photograph shows that "a small
incandescent lamp was lighted by means of a resonant circuit grounded on one end, all the
energy being drawn through the earth [from a nearby transmitter]." In 1907 he even
went as far as to make this statement:
"... to make the little filament glow, the entire surface of the planet, two
hundred million square miles, must be strongly electrified. This calls for peculiar
electrical activities, hundreds of times greater than those involved in the lighting of an
arc lamp through the human body [a far more spectacular demonstration]. What impresses him
most, however, is the knowledge that the little lamp will spring into the same brilliancy
anywhere on the globe, there being no appreciable diminution of the effect with the
increase of distance from the transmitter."
It is not at all clear that Tesla was referring to effects produced by his large
Colorado transmitter. It is quite possible that he was writing about what he
felt could be done
with an even bigger transmitter such as the one that he was developing in New York. If the
Wardenclyffe communications facility had been finished, the 187 foot tall mushroom-shaped
tower would have permanently housed a set of large coils including an immense helical
resonator that would have served as the main transmitting element. Directly below the
wooden tower there was a 120 foot shaft where deep underground Tesla had installed a
radial array of iron pipes that served as a connection between the oscillator and the
earth.
The Wardenclyffe plant was a major milestone in
Tesla's researches into the application of alternating electrical currents to wireless
communications and power transmission, an effort which drew a considerable amount of
Tesla's attention during the period between 1891 and 1912. In the article "The Future
of the Wireless Art" which appeared in Wireless Telegraphy & Telephony,
1908, Tesla made the following statement regarding the Wardenclyffe project on which he
was then working:
"As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to
dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or
elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber
on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive
instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or
land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of
science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however
distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred
from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant
of this kind. More important than this, however, will be the transmission of power,
without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction. These few
indications will be sufficient to show that the wireless art offers greater possibilities
than any invention or discovery heretofore made, and if the conditions are favorable, we
can expect with certitude that in the next few years wonders will be wrought by its
application."
In the end, Tesla was never able to complete the
Wardenclyffe plant, although he was able to conduct some performance tests. Nevertheless,
if the above stated predictions were to be true, an interesting feature of Tesla's World
System for global communications, had it gone into full operation, would have been its
capacity to provide small but usable quantities of electrical power at the location of the
receiving circuits. He predicted that further advances would have permitted the wireless
transmission of industrial amounts of electrical energy with minimal losses to any point
on the earth's surface. Had he been able to complete the prototype station on Long Island
and use it to demonstrate the feasibility of wireless power transmission then a plan would
have been implemented for the construction of a pilot plant for this larger system at
Niagara Falls, site of the world's first commercial three phase AC power plant. |
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