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On his 158th birthday, Tesla’s idea of transmitting wireless energy is still going strong

Catwell

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Tesla’s Wardenclyffe plant being constructed in 1904 to transmit energy across the Atlantic (Archive photo)


On July 10 of this year, famed inventor Nikola Tesla would have been 158 years-old and while he’s been gone for some time now, his technology still lives on. Before coming to America, Tesla attended school in Karlovac (Croatia) where he was able to perform integral calculus in his head and - graduated a 4-year term in only three years. It was during this time that his father started impressing upon him that he should become a Serbian Orthodox priest and follow in his footsteps.


Tesla on the other hand wanted to become an electrical engineer, which was against his father’s wishes. It was thanks to a bout of cholera that Tesla’s father changed his mind and would send him to the school of his choice if he got better. A short time later, he would enroll at Austrian Polytechnic through a scholarship and during his second year, he argued with one of his professors claiming that the Gramme dynamo, suggesting that commutators were not necessary for the function of the DC electrical generator.


Things soon after went downhill fast for the young inventor during that second year where he lost his scholarship and became - addicted to gambling. In fact, during his third year, he gambled away both his allowance and tuition sent by his parents and actually dropped out of school all together! Soon after he moved to Budapest, went to work at the Budapest Telephone Exchange (BTE), and quickly rose to the position of Chief Electrician, where - he was claimed to have perfected the telephone repeater (no patents exist or were filed).


Shortly after working for the BTE, he moved to France and went to work for the Continental Edison Company where he designed electrical equipment for two years and immigrated to New York City to work directly with Edison himself. The AC/DC ‘war’ between the two began almost immediately over a misunderstanding of funds to redesign Edison’s motors and generators. Edison told Tesla that if he could improve both them and make them more efficient, he would give him $50,000 and later reneged on the offer claiming it was a joke.

 

Suffice it to say, he resigned and went on to do bigger and better things, literally. Sure, he designed the AC electric generator, radio, which still hasn’t changed much over the years, but he had a loftier goal in mind, one that could bring free power to the world and destroy invading armies at the same time!


In 1901, Tesla began construction of the massive - Wardenclyffe Tower for transmitting wireless energy and radio signals over long ranges. It was reported that it could also be used to power sea-fairing and crazy airborne ships as well as for destroying armies on both land and sea. The tower itself was only partially completed and would have used the earth as a capacitor of sorts, with the ground forming one plate and the ionosphere forming the other in order to transmit electrical energy.

 

Due to lack of funding, the tower was never completed and it was torn down in 1917 by the U.S. government on fears - German spies were harnessing it somehow or using it as a navigational landmark. The tower may be gone but the idea of transmitting wireless energy lives on with scientists looking to recreate their own Tesla Tower using Tesla’s blueprints and technical notes.

 

Leonid and Sergey Plekhanov are looking to crowd-fund their ‘Planetary Energy Transmitter’ using Indigogo to reconstruct the Wardenclyffe Tower to transmit electrical power generated by a massive 196-mile square solar panel array located in a desert somewhere near the equator. The pair have reportedly used ANSYS HFSS numerical software to model Tesla’s transmission attempt and found it to be theoretically sound.


 

It’s unknown how the panels and tower will tie together and their target goal of $800,000 seems a little light for the solar panel array but if it works, it could mean - free energy for everyone on the planet. As it stands right now, they’ve only reached about 4% of the funding they need so chances are we will still be paying for the electricity we use.

 

C

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