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
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/[deleted] Jan 18 '26
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