…continued from above
More from Cecil:
“Idea?” No. Tesla’s experimental discovery, as recorded in his interview claims and his lab notes, was that the Earth posessed low-freq electrical resonances at 8Hz, 14Hz, 21Hz, on up to about 20KHz. The scientific community of the time rejected this on the grounds that radio waves moved in straight lines, and could not travel over the horizon (a mistake later disproved by Marconi’s experiments, and explained decades later with the discovery of the “Heaviside layer” the Ionosphere.) So… the scientific community rejected Tesla’s discovery without testing it. Nobody COULD test it, since Tesla alone was researching high-power radio of VLF frequencies in 1900. Remember, theories in physics are trumped by experiment, so if Tesla found that radio waves could travel around the Earth many times, any theory which said differently was disproved. But cutting-edge science also requires replication, and the disbelieving scientists of 1900 made no attempts. Then later the Earth’s electrical resonance was accidentally rediscovered by the physicist Schumann in the early 1950s, and came to be known as Schumann Resonance. The resonances are approximate multiples starting around 8Hz and extending up to above 10KHz. Just as Tesla described
http://www.google.com/search?q=schumann+vlf+1952
Knowing this, I find it odd that Cecil neglected to say that Tesla was RIGHT about the Earth being aquiver with electrical vibrations. Or to mention that the topic was verified fifty years later, and is now an entire small branch of the Earth sciences. Cecil’s statement omits critical info, and therefore subtly communicates the idea that Tesla was a crackpot, rather than the genuine idea that Tesla made genuine discoveries which physicists rejected, and which remained unknown to science until many decades later, after Tesla had died. Tesla also made major mistakes, and indulged in subjects like electrical healing machines which are now regarded as crackpot. But the topics Cecil describes were not the crackpot ones.
Again, Cecil neglects to say that Tesla was right. Tesla was right in claiming that worldwide EM waves are transmitted in just that way. For example, because of continuing VLF research efforts, today we know that lightning strikes are constantly “plucking the string” and exciting the Earth resonant cavity. The global EM lightning noise shows up as a “comb” of VLF resonances spaced about 7Hz apart. Information about worldwide lightning and about Ionospheric physics can be had from studying the spectrum, and there are even VLF research stations with realtime online plots of such spectrograms. (I can search google to find one if you wish, or you can do it yourself.)
As with others, this statement seems intended to make Tesla look incompetent. In truth the event more resembles a crash of an untested experimental aircraft: pushing the borders of unexplored territory, the very opposite of incompetence. Tesla was closely associated with the Westinghouse company which was providing his electrical energy. After all, Tesla had designed the AC power grid being used by Westinghouse all over the country (he sold the patents to Westinghouse for over $1M.) Tesla’s Colorado lab had an agreement with Westinghouse where the Colorado Springs’ electric company would provide all the electricity his lab could use, for free. Some Tesla scholars say that this was the reason Tesla chose Colorado Springs for his lab. Tesla in 1899 was performing cutting-edge high-power radio transmitter research, and during the first tests of his huge transmitter he killed a power plant generator (setting it on fire.) Tesla then repaired the generator for the company. Tesla had been a Westinghouse engineer, and was involved with the AC power system right from the start at Nigagra Falls. (Tesla himself even chose 60Hz as the standard frequency used today.) The company owner George Westinghouse then instructed that the local power plant GIVE Tesla that entire generator output for his own private use. The generator was not further harmed as far as we know. And today, hobbyists who build tesla coils usually discover that they can easily kill their AC power transformer. They have to build carefully-designed filters to keep the RF from destroying the 60Hz AC components. I speculate that this is how Tesla killed the big AC generator, and how he solved the problem.
See Cecil’s bias? If he concentrates on the negative side, on the “Tesla was a crackpot” viewpoint, it starts to look like he has some sort of emotional involvement hinging on whether or not Tesla was correct. If Tesla was correct, even partially correct, it makes Cecil look bad. Bad-mouthing based on ignorance is not skepticism, and is not at all a part of the practices of Scientific Integrity. A properly rational person works hard to carefully expunge such biases, and strives to learn both the bad and the good sides; striving for accuracy, for “learning what’s true” rather than “trying to win.”
Adopting a position and then defending it, or “trying to win,” this can easily derail any attempts to see the truth, to find what’s real. “Trying to win” is for lawyers and politicians, scientists cannot afford such things.
Tesla’s claim was never verified. It may or may not be true. (Was Tesla a known liar? Not that we know.)
But hard to believe? Not at all, since Tesla claimed to be exciting the Earth’s global resonant cavity. If such a cavity existed (it does,) and if Tesla succeeded in exciting it (maybe, maybe not,) then we’d expect the same effects known to exist near a Tesla coil… to also appear across the entire Earth. The real question was, did Tesla have a way of receiving large amounts of VLF power? He had a long antenna connected to a hundred-megavolt transmitter tuned to a Schumann resonance. If he was driving the Earth cavity with tens of thousands of watts, was he also able to intercept a few hundred watts somewhere else on Earth? That’s the big question. There are theory papers that support his claim, but also lots of valid skepticism. There are experimental reports that VLF Earth resonance Q value is in the hundreds, and others that it’s around 8. So I think only a competent replication can decide the issue. A couple well-funded fringe researchers have attempted the feat and failed. This might show that Tesla failed too, and the rumor of 26 miles is a lie. But from what I know of these hobbyist attempts, they didn’t exactly duplicate what Tesla was doing, which was to broadcast on a resonance far below 1KHz (possibly below 100Hz.) Big hobbyist coils run at 50KHz or so, which is far outside the 10KHz upper limit of high-Q Schuman resonance overtones.
Ah, that looks like a common misconception: the misconception that Tesla wasn’t using any antennas. He was. Tesla used balloon-borne vertical long wire antennas connected to his huge transmitter coil. He also experimented with long vertical conductive ion paths produced by upward-facing ultraviolet arc lamps and even X-ray tubes.
Yes and no. Compared to a scientist, Tesla was insanely secretive. But compared to an inventor (or to a company engineer) Tesla was normal. He was in business, and not abiding by the rules of science that say “conceal nothing, publish everything, constantly.” Fortunately, after Tesla died his notes were immediately taken by the US government, then later released to his relatives who took them to Yugoslavia, and they now reside in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade. A small portion of his work have been published, called the “Colorado Springs Notes.” More is found in conference proceedings of the yearly Tesla Symposia from the late 1980s.
Some do, many don’t. I did scratch my head, but that was before I started looking into more than just Tesla coil-building articles. Some engineers [Corum&Corum] publish analyses of Tesla’s Colorado Springs transmitter and give all the mathematical details of how it worked. Other engineers write for the TCBA newsletter and ferret out all sorts of insights into his devices. But even since the 1950s, antenna theory textbooks contained information on central Tesla issues: the helical transmission line, and the ability of resistive surfaces to entrain (and bend) electromagnetic waves. Military VLF transmitters still use huge ‘tesla coil’ devices. And over-the-horizon radar is based on rediscovery of some of the very effects Tesla was talking about. If engineer scratch their heads, chances are you’re not talking to antenna designers or high-power RF engineers.
In later papers from Corum, he shows that Tesla’s full-blown world power system would have wasted approximately one megawatt as Earth/ionosphere leakage. This is far less that the power wasted by any country-spanning AC power grid. And Corum shows that the 1MW waste was constant regardless of how much power was being pumped through the system. It’s analogous to HV corona leakage in AC power transmission cables.
Why not say WHY was it abandoned? Leaving out information that detracts from the “Tesla was a failure” viewpoint? That’s what it looks like to me. A more honest description would be to say “The project failed when Morgan pulled out financially, possibly because Tesla intended to distribute electricity for free, with no way to measure how much end-users were consuming.” And Tesla could find no other backers. Former Tesla investor J.J. Astor had just died in the Titanic sinking, and Westinghouse had been bought out of his company. Some speculate that other investors were probably scared off because the country’s top financier turned away. Tesla took other jobs and had to lay off his workers, and finally had to sell off his land and equipment to pay debts. Also, Tesla was laid low by more than one nervous breakdown during this period. Then Marconi came to the fore, using Tesla’s transmitter which Tesla could not afford to defend in US patent court.
Very true of his flying machine, AC mechanical technology, and his high speed disk-turbine engine, but not quite true about Death Rays. Tesla claimed to have built working prototypes of a device which could shoot down aircraft over hundreds of miles range. He attempted to sell it to the USA during WWII, and was also approaching foriegn governments when he died in 1943. Declassified papers show that this secret invention was the main reason why the USA came in and confiscated all his stored collections of notes shortly after his death. The invention was never developed, possibly because they tried it and it didn’t work, or possibly because the govt lacked full information. Tesla claimed to have a photographic memory, and kept much information in his head only. Some of the Tesla notes are public, and we now know that his death-ray was essentially a water-jet cutter using micro-droplets of liquid mercury. Rather than accelerating the droplets with high pressure, he used tens of megavolts in a vacuum, and as a power supply used a VandeGraaff generator the size of a tower. There is info about this in the recent PBS Tesla biography. Would it have actually worked? I’ve never heard of any research in this area. A waterjet cutter is a nasty weapon, but only over a range of inches.
However, one bit of research got the 1996 Nobel prize in Chemistry: a method of creating beams of micro-droplets of conductive liquid. It’s called “Electrospray.” Also search google on “Taylor cone.” It’s used in modern mass spectrometers. From Tesla’s descriptions of his initial discovery of the electrostatic phenomenon leading to the “death ray,” Electrospray fits the bill. As for the lethal range, Tesla claimed that the narrow beam of charged droplets would self-focus, carving out a vacuum channel in the air which entrained the beam. Tesla was wrong: today we know that such beams DO self-focus, “gas focusing” but it’s caused by an ion distribution and a radial e-field surrounding the charged particle beam. But was gas-focussing enough to extend a waterjet cutter’s operation to many tens of miles? As with many Tesla claims, only a seriously-funded research project could attempt a replication and answer the mystery. With the low opinion physicists have of Tesla, there is little chance of this.
On this you’re clearly wrong. Yes, back in 1890-1920 Tesla’s understanding of radioactivity, of nuclear physics, etc., was incorrect. He thought that the speed of light wasn’t an absolute limit. He disbelieved Relativity. He was convinced that x-rays were particles and not EM waves. But he was no expert in modern physics. In the medium in which he worked: classical EM and electrostatics, he was way ahead of everyone else. He invented the modern electric motor and the AC power grid. He founded the field of RF power engineering, taking induction coils from kilovolts and watts and showing the path to hundreds of megavolts and kilowatts. He explored VLF radio physics before the rest of “radio” was even invented. Tesla’s later failures can do nothing to change these areas where he was demonstrably ahead of his time. Was his later failure caused by disbelief and financial disaster, or did his devices not actually work? We can’t know without testing them, without replication attempts. As soon as someone tries broadcasting at 14Hz at hundreds of megavolts, or tries building a water-jet cutter based on electrostatic acceleration and liquid mercury, THEN we’ll know if Tesla was exaggerating or lying… or was correct.
I don’t trust statements that Tesla was crackpot. I discovered Tesla coils as a kid around 1970. As years went by, people studying Tesla have shown that more and more of the silly stuff he said… was entirely correct. Just the example of the Shumann resonance shows that, in some regions of physics, Tesla was way ahead of everyone else.
In my opinion Tesla was also a major idiot. He was a preternaturally-honest son of a minister, the 1890s version of a Nerd, yet he stayed out of academia and became an inventor who dealt with rapacious businessmen. Playing with the Big Boys. It ruined him. But for the efforts of fringe-science fans and crackpots, Tesla almost ended up becoming a footnote in history despite his many important accomplishments. Most nerds belong in academia, and we lack the habit of easy betrayal and anti-cooperation destructive competition trickery needed for American business. The guy should have become a TEACHER, a scientist, a university professor expanding the borders of human knowledge. Expand he did, but, except for the successful products (such as the AC power grid, the induction motor, and the radio transmitter) …he kept his discoveries as trade secrets and proprietary company information. Perhaps Tesla made even bigger discoveries than we now know. If so, unless they’re written in Serbian and sitting untranslated in the Belgrade museum… they’re lost.
Lots of fellow Tesla fans claim that Tesla was suppressed by Government and Corporate powers. But physics journals aren’t easily suppressed. The great suppressor here was the egoistic secretive non-scientist businessman: Tesla himself.
I have measured fields in North Dallas up to 500 mGauss under some high-voltage powerlines and have messed around with extremly light applications. It isn’t ever as much energy as you’d like with ‘CITIZEN BOB Technology’, but I figure someone else will be clever enough to find a way to do more. OPTIMIST’s suggestion of useing ambient Radio waves is no different. EVERY oscillating magnetic field produces current in every possible exposed loop (to some degree) in the presence of it, whether a plate, wire or Neurology. But that is what radio is all about - receiving an EM signal – Einstein/Planck Relationship — Energy = Planck’s_const * Frequency. If you pick up a frequency, you are picking up energy.
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