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Using the air as a wire – was Nikola Tesla right? [video]

71 points| peter_d_sherman | 3 years ago |youtube.com

50 comments

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[+] marcodiego|3 years ago|reply
Nikola Tesla was a genius. PERIOD. That is it. He didn't have magical powers, he couldn't disobey natural laws and he wasn't close to inventing a revolutionary way to transmit electric energy or a ray of death. He died crazy and broken.

We have to honor his legacy, but people talking about him like he was in the brisk of changing the world (again) are ignoring significant facts.

[+] isk517|3 years ago|reply
Nikola Tesla is one of those people that is either under appreciated or over appreciated but never simply appreciated.
[+] zafka|3 years ago|reply
I think the fact that he was in love with a pigeon near the end of his life is extremly touching. As for his character, the fact that he was pals with Mark Twain (Clemens) says it all for me.
[+] iasay|3 years ago|reply
I think they’re mostly leveraging the fact that their audience doesn’t understand those facts. Which is exactly how Tesla himself operated with the odd success here and there.
[+] aeternum|3 years ago|reply
He also wasn't quite as open-minded and forward thinking as some believe:

“I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.”

[+] dsego|3 years ago|reply
There's a good yt video debunking all the myths that surround him.

Tesla Fact vs. Fiction: Why the Public Perception is Wrong https://youtu.be/6331JXvOUGY

[+] AndrianV|3 years ago|reply
According to what I understood, Tesla intended for the coil of the tower to resonantly interact with the capacitance between the ionosphere and the Earth. Anywhere else on Earth, he reasoned, the same configuration with the same resonance frequency would effectively capture the energy.
[+] FunnyBadger|3 years ago|reply
Yes. This is the large part of it. And it's why his primary investor, J.P.Morgan was not happy about it - the energy CAN NOT be metered and thus charged for. So he pulled the plug on Tesla.

The other aspect: when you resonant between Earth and ionosphere, you do NOT get 1/r^2 losses because you are effectively inside a parallel plate capacitor that nearly is uniform and no r dependence other than the surface area average of the Earth's surface - the power put in is uniformly distributed across the area of the Earth.

The other part: Tesla's system is exactly the same as hydrogen - it's NOT an energy source but a distribution medium of CONVENTIONALLY GENERATED electrical power. So you still need fossil, nuclear, etc. power to source the power and then you pump it into it. It's NOT FREE ENERGY as many claim. Not remotely.

[+] causi|3 years ago|reply
I don't understand how Tesla could be that bad at math. Resistance, distance, and the inverse square law would make the efficiency of such a system absolutely abysmal.
[+] kleer001|3 years ago|reply
Maybe before all the radio frequency population we have now. Now a days this would be a horrific noise monster.
[+] akomtu|3 years ago|reply
I think there are at least two ways to transfer electricity over air. One is to form a temporary wire, a dynamically stable structure like a small tornado, but made of charged particles. Another is to send electricity in the form of a dynamically stable toroidal vortex made of charged particles.
[+] 35mm|3 years ago|reply
What about inverse square law?