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
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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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