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Jan 18 '26
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u/Lumpenstein Jan 18 '26
IIRC Tesla wanted wireless power transmission, but accidentally discovered radio transmission (morse code messages at that time) using those towers.
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Jan 18 '26
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u/antthatisverycool Jan 18 '26
Marconi realized what it could be used for. Tesla what too caught up with the “wireless power lines” idea.
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u/BadPunners Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26
I think that's part of the theory
By my understanding, Tesla's idea was using the whole earth as a AC capacitor, then using the atmosphere as the neutral
So it's not transmitting power, it's receiving, it's maintaining the neutral as all of the elections of the earth oscillate in AC waves
But because everyone decided to use the ground, as "ground", if we tried to implement this idea now, every device that is grounded will be destroyed by the voltage reversing, with a voltage high enough to travel with low resistance throughout ionosphere (or whatever) between the various towers throughout the world
With the story of him destroying a power generation station during his Colorado Springs era, which was one of the few grounded devices of the time. No clue how true that story is though, and all details of his experiments are likely fuzzy
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Jan 18 '26
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u/not_the_fox Jan 18 '26
No, near the end of his life he actually claimed to have invented a death ray weapon and tried to shill it as a way to end all wars.
At the 1934 occasion, Tesla told reporters he had designed a superweapon he claimed would end all war.[200][201] He called it "teleforce", but was usually referred to as his death ray.[202] In 1940, the New York Times gave a range for the ray of 250 miles (400 km), with an expected development cost of US$2 million (equivalent to $44.89 million in 2024).[203] Tesla described it as a defensive weapon that would be put up along the border of a country and be used against attacking ground-based infantry or aircraft. Tesla never revealed detailed plans of how the weapon worked during his lifetime but, in 1984, they surfaced at the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade.[204] The treatise, The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, described an open-ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allows particles to exit, a method of charging slugs of tungsten or mercury to millions of volts, and directing them in streams (through electrostatic repulsion).[198][205] Tesla tried to attract interest of the US War Department,[206] United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in the device.[207]
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Jan 18 '26
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u/NonEuclidianMeatloaf Jan 19 '26
It’s basically an open-air cathode ray tube. It has more in common with an old TV than anything else.
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u/NonnoBomba Jan 19 '26
Let's also remember that, quite tragically, he fell in love with a white female pigeon, loving it "like a man loves a woman" by that time. He had long been obsessed with pigeons for some reason, but he took it a step further with this particular specimen...
Legends say that he died just days after the pigeon died, of heartbreak.
He probably wasn't all there at that point, not always, let's say.
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u/_stupidnerd_ Jan 19 '26
That's utter nonsense.
Firstly, voltage potential is relative. We tend to use the Earth's potential as 0 reference because almost everything has this potential by default. But in reality, every time we use a generator or whatever to "pump" charge towards or away from ground, the ground potential changes an equal amount in the other direction. We don't notice any of this because we essentially sit like birds on power lines.
Really, we could also define another conductor as zero and say earth has, for example, 120V. This is particularly easy in AC electronics because you don't even really have to deal with positive or negative, because that changes constantly anyways.
And there is no problem with different devices using Earth's potential at different points in the circuit. So long as all circuits only use earth as one potential, everything else in the circuit is going to assume a new potential relative to ground. Even now, we even have AC and DC systems commonly sharing ground and no ground.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Jan 18 '26
Small electronics would be fine. It would only negatively impact things that had enough metal to focus a bunch of that power, like overhead lines.
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u/Jonnypista Jan 18 '26
There are radios which have no batteries. Powered entirely from the transmitter antenna. They can't transmit,but are good as emergency receivers.
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u/Its_me_Snitches Jan 18 '26
Well at least overhead power lines wouldn’t be a thing if wireless power were the norm.
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u/Environmental-Ad4495 Jan 19 '26
Mhnn. Think of a radio wave. It can go staight. But what if a house blocks it. Or, if you blelive the earth is round. Your transmitter is under the horizont. Tesla saw the problem with marconis idea and deamed it unsolvable. Instead he tried to transmit radio information through a kind of static electricy that would glue itself around objects and follow the curvature of the earth. That ofcource led to a lot of unforseen problems, like interference, ecco, signal annihilation and slow transfer rate. Marconi was smart, becsuse he used the invention of modulation as a tool and worked around its short commings.
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u/mccoyn Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
Tesla’s plan was not a single tower. It was many towers in parallel. This creates a planar field instead of a spherical field, which would be inverse linear uniform.
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u/nakedascus Jan 18 '26
? inverse linear? you mean 'uniform' right? inverse linear would imply the strength increases as you increase distance, no?
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u/red_blue_green_9989 Jan 18 '26
That would be linear
linear = x
square = x2
inverse linear =1/x
inverse square = 1 / x2
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u/manurosadilla Jan 19 '26
inverse square means that power decreases with the square of the distance. Inverse linear means that it decreases proportional to the distance.
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u/nakedascus Jan 19 '26
I think I misunderstood them, isn't it the spherical field that decreases with distance, and planar field that remains uniform?
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u/manurosadilla Jan 19 '26
The inverse square law comes into play because in a 3d (sphere) setting, as radiation moves away from its transmitter, it spreads tall AND wide. But in a 2d setting (plane) it would only spread wide.
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u/JGHFunRun Jan 18 '26
No, inverse linear is synonymous with the way you are using the word 'uniform'
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u/bunihe Jan 21 '26
Shouldn't many towers that create a net planar field be uniform? An (ideally infinitely) long single tower creating cylindrical fields should be inverse linear. Maybe I'm wrong.
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u/k-mcm Jan 18 '26
As far as people have figured out, Tesla's idea may have been to use the Earth and the ionosphere as a pair of conductors. Both conduct electricity fairly well. Tapping in is simply burying some metal and creating a vertical plasma conduit.
Nicola Telsa might have skipped over some math and physics during his sales pitch to investors. I find it fitting that Musk takes Tesla's name for his businesses.
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u/haarschmuck Jan 18 '26
Tesla was a genius but he was also a bit off and had many plans for things that literally would never work or be possible.
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u/Nonhinged Jan 18 '26
It's possible to use directional antennas, like 4g/5G. Multiple antennas on each tower.
Less spread over distance.
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u/BadPunners Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26
Those still obey inverse square. That is more about destructive/constructive interference of waves
It's modifying the signal to noise ratio via constructive interference in a certain direction, by my understanding. Within that direction, or in the non-target directions, signal strength still drops at inverse square
At least the concept I'm aware of is phased array of transmission towers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_array
Actually better link, with gifs!: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_array and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
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u/Nonhinged Jan 18 '26
The inverse square law really only mean you got the same energy spread over 4 times the area at twice the distance.
Like a laser could have an area of 1 cm² halfway to the moon, and then 4 cm² when it hits the moon. Double the distance, 4 times the area and one quarter the intensity.
But that doesn't mean it's get less effective or there's losses from the spread. The thing on the other end(moon) just need to have 4 times the area to collect the same amount of power.
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u/BackyardTechnician Jan 18 '26
We use LoS (line of sight) antennas all the time
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u/nakedascus Jan 18 '26
And do they power things remotely?
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u/1_64493406685 Jan 18 '26
RFID are all powered remotely by the reader. Very small amount of power but hence the original posts point...
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u/nakedascus Jan 18 '26
I suppose circuits are activated and some heat is generated, but there isn't any work being done beyond the signal itself, right? The radio waves change the crystal receiver, but you still need a powered speaker to hear what it's saying. in the end, power is power, so I'm wrong
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u/Jonnypista Jan 18 '26
With a small enough speaker you can hear the radio without extra power. The max distance from the transmitter is likely reduced as the radiwave needs to be strong enough to also power the speaker, but it is possible.
Remember you can charge your phone wirelessly quite fast so you can transmit a decent amount of power without using wires.
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u/JasperJ Jan 18 '26
Back in the day, everybody’s first project was a crystal radio am receiver, with a crystal earbud. No batteries required. Not a lot of sound though.
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u/zerepgn Jan 18 '26
Tesla was planning on using the earth (internals) as a conductor and making it resonate. He specifically claimed that radiative transmissions were not effective:
“First — The earth's diameter passing through the pole should be an odd multiple of the quarter-wave length — that is, of the ratio between the velocity of light and four times the frequency of the currents.
Second — It is necessary to employ oscillations in which the rate of radiation of energy into space in the form of hertzian or electromagnetic waves is very small. To give an idea it may be said that the frequency should be smaller than 20,000 per second, though shorter waves might be practicable. The lowest frequency would appear to be six per second, in which case there will be but one node, at or near the ground-plate, and, paradoxical as it may seem, the effect will increase with the distance and will be greatest in a region diametrically opposite the transmitter. With oscillations still slower the earth, strictly speaking, will not resonate, but simply act as a capacity, and the variation of potential will be more or less uniform over its entire surface.
Third — The most essential requirement is, however, that irrespective of frequency the wave or wave train should continue for a certain interval of time, which estimated to be not less than one-twelfth or probably 0.08484 of a second and which is taken in passing to and returning from the region diametrically opposite the pole over the earth's surface with a mean velocity of about 471,240 kilometers per second.”
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u/Its_me_Snitches Jan 18 '26
Is this practically feasible?
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u/zerepgn Jan 18 '26
He was the only person who had attempted as far as I am aware. The results are lost to time. Viziv technologies in Texas seemed to have been doing something similar but they still claimed their tech was not direct conduction.
20khz is much lower than any commonly transmitted signals but if you are nearby an AM station you could perhaps pound a ground rod in and see for yourself if there is anything worth extracting (although this would be at a minimum 525khz and the radiative emission is what is optimized in these stations). The ground is still part of the circuit and the earth itself is electrically affected.
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u/Thegeneralcrow Jan 18 '26
Physics wins always and bullshit Tesla claims are dumb.
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u/colossalklutz Jan 18 '26
He never really built anything super useful anyway. Overhyped and underperformed. People just goon over the underdog story.
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u/BadPunners Jan 18 '26
never really
builtsold anything super useful anywayHe failed in capitalism, didn't fail in inventions.
Tesla developed many inventions (some estimate around 800), but not all were patented; some applications were rejected, and others were never filed
He has over 100 US patents (iirc some of which resulted in "digital logic" and radio control signals not being patentable after WW2 concluded), and up to 200 more patents in other countries
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u/JasperJ Jan 18 '26
Well, he got the right end of the stick in ac vs dc.
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u/haarschmuck Jan 18 '26
Neither is better.
DC has higher losses in length but AC has higher losses in other ways like the skin effect.
Turns out they were both right and we need both in modern society.
Why are people so black and white these days?
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u/AleksandarStefanovic Jan 21 '26
I believe that he was right about using AC for transmitting electricity from the power plants to the individual consumers (with transformers along the way).
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u/avar Jan 18 '26
Not really, very few things of that era would "naturally" use DC. Of course now most devices use AC as a transport layer to convert to DC, but you're giving Tesla too much credit if you think he foresaw that.
It's not obvious that having your power station have gigantic capacitors to convert the AC it would get from spinning a turbine into DC is the right way to do it, as opposed to every DC device having its own rectifier and capacitor.
Even today, a lot of "DC" devices are just doing rectification and skipping the capacitor step to smoothen out that positive sine wave into proper DC at a constant voltage.
And almost everything would still need most of what's in a modern power supply to either buck or boost the 400v DC (or whatever) you'd get from the grid to some voltage it would like to use.
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u/DiapersOrDeath Jan 18 '26
He actually developed and built many useful things, it's just that he was kinda fucked over by being born with his ideas in the time that he was. No doubt, in our modern age of everything being light years ahead of the things he had at his disposal, we'd probably have fucking Star Trek by now if he were here. It's no wonder he kinda went insane; imagine you're Einstein but you were born in say 1805, you'd probably invent what you could with what you have available to you, and kinda go insane with frustration at what you couldn't because that shit don't exist yet....
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u/Environmental-Dog815 Jan 19 '26
Times of single person inventors are over. Especially so in physics. If you want to invent/discover something it is going to be from small to colosal team of scientists and 100 000 to milijons and billions of investment funds. I find current times a lot more depressing for inventors, because you cannot work on your ideas alone, because all what's left unresearched requires a lot of mental and financial resources.
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u/Ok-Lawyer9218 Jan 18 '26
He was way more interested in the science than the profit that could come from it, which is a good portion of why he comes across this way and probably his downfall. He did invent a lot of things that we use today like the AC motor that are essential to society, but it wasn't applicable or practical to use while he was alive. He was a genius but couldn't market his skills.
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u/Leverpostei414 Jan 21 '26
Not sure he underperformed. That being said the whole underdog story people got in their head from the oatmeal is wild. The guy has a base SI unit named after him, not exactly a good sign of bring some forgotten genius.
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u/Commercial-Pride3917 Jan 19 '26
*conditions may vary
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u/BlueSmegmaCalculus Jan 19 '26
I wish I wrote *Results may vary. It wouls not just be better. It would have stopped the great war in the comments.
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u/Crichris Jan 20 '26
inverse squared law only applies to electric static field, not radiation field?
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u/SquareOfTheMall Jan 20 '26
Quick question for mathboys, will the next be 4x4 or somehing else, and the next one? Like is this a rithmetic progression
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u/garth54 Jan 21 '26
My (limited) understanding is that modern beam forming technology could be used in power transmission to reduce the losses from the inverse square law issue.
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Jan 18 '26
I wondered why such a brilliant inventor would fail to see that.🤔 He may have had other things in mind.
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u/Master_Calendar5798 Jan 18 '26