Thomas F. Valone • President, Integrity Research Association
1220 L Street NW #100-232 • Washington, DC 20005
(202) 452-7674 • http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org
- Introduction
- This year is the Wardenclyffe Tower Centennial (1903-2003), a monument to Nikola Tesla’s visionary genius. The new book, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla’s Science of Energy, contains several papers from prominent physicists detailing an unusual method of pulsing a broadband Tesla coil at a repetition rate of 8 Hz to resonate with the Earth’s Schumann cavity.1 Nikola Tesla, the father of AC electricity, is responsible for recognizing that an atmospheric and a terrestrial storage battery already exists everywhere on earth, for the benefit of mankind. This is perhaps the “wheelwork of nature” that Tesla was referring to.2 A century later, only a handful of visionary scientists recognize the untapped renewable reservoir of terawatts of electrical power that sits dormant above us, waiting to be utilized.
- Background
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In 2001, the Bush-mandated National Transmission Grid Study (NTGS 2001) was designed to identify the major transmission bottlenecks across the U.S. and identify technical and economic issues resulting from these transmission constraints. With deregulation of our nation’s utilities and the lack of jurisdiction for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the U.S. is fighting an electrical energy crisis which right now, costs consumers hundreds of millions of dollars annually due to interregional transmission congestion. There is no longer any economic incentive nor any FERC eminent domain for states to provide rights-of-way, besides the lack of Federal compensation to utilities to build new transmission lines.
Historically, the creation of electrical utilities was beset with scandal, such as the six years of Congressional hearings starting in 1928 in which “thousands of pages of testimony revealed a systematic, covert attempt to shape opinion in favor of private utilities, in which half truths and at times outright lies presented municipal systems in a consistently bad light.”3 Today, US AID funds the U.S. Energy Association to train utility representatives from the former Russian states on how to reliably monitor electricity usage and collect money from customers in their respective countries, while those economically challenged people struggle for sufficient wages.
At a Washington DC conference which this author attended, called “Implementing a National Energy Strategy: Breaking Down the Barriers” also sponsored by the US Energy Association (12/01), only the depressing news about unresolved US electricity headaches were discussed. Editor of Energy Daily, Llewelyn King finally concluded, “We are using 19th century technology for electrical transmission.”
He then called for a paradigm shift toward new technology and cited the “monster infrastructure problems” within the U.S. as compared to the developing countries. A year later (June, 2003) the US DOE held an emergency meeting with utility heads as a natural gas crisis looms from the lack of diversification of new electrical power generation facilities. “Innovation in new technology and renewable sources are needed in the long term to improve the environment and meet rising demand,” summarized an Investors Business Daily editor about the crisis.4
In November, 2002, the American Council for the United Nations University called for wireless energy transmission to circumvent the need for transmission lines as part of their “Millennium Project.” In cooperation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and the Electrical Power Research nstitute (EPRI), the beaming of microwave energy and the creation of a world energy organization was seen to actively address the 2020 challenges to global electricity supply, especially in areas of massive urban concentrations.5
In 1940, “the United States prided itself on using half the world’s electricity.”6 Since 1980, the U.S. has also doubled its dependence on foreign oil and doubled its electrical transmission grid inefficiency. From 31 Quads (quadrillion BTUs) generated, a full 2/3 is totally wasted in “conversion losses” with only about 11 Quads (3.7 trillion kWh) delivered to the end-user. 7 Instead of trying to build 2 power plants per week (at 300 MW each) for the next 20 years (only to have a total of additional 6 trillion kWh available by 2020), as the Bush-Cheney Administration wants to do, we simply need to eliminate the 7 trillion kWh of conversion losses in our present electricity generation modality.
US Patent 645,576 was issued March 20, 1900 and provides the basis for Tesla’s system for the wireless transmission of electrical power . - History of Tesla’s Wireless Energy
- The fateful decision in 1905 by J. P. Morgan to abandon Tesla’s Warden-clyffe Tower project on Long Island (after investing $150,000), was a result of learning that it would be designed mainly for wireless transmission of electrical power, rather than telegraphy. No more money was forthcoming for the project that Morgan initiated, even when the equipment cost alone cost about $200,000. Morgan believed that he would “have nothing to sell except antennas (and refused) to contribute to that charity.”8 Tesla tried and tried for years until in 1917 the U.S. government blew up the abandoned Wardenclyffe tower because suspected German spies were seen “lurking” around it. With Edison as his willing ally, Morgan even publicly discredited Tesla’s name, so that all of the five school textbook publishers of the time removed any reference to him. Any wonder why even today, 100 years later, hardly anyone knows who Tesla is?The rest of this article will present a physics and electrical engineering argument for a subsequently forgotten engineering alternative for energy generation and transmission.
As Tesla experimented with a 1.5 MW system in 1899 at Colorado Springs, he was amazed to find that pulses of electricity he sent out passed across the entire globe returned with “undiminished strength.” He said, “It was a result so unbelievable that the revelation at first almost stunned me.”9 This verified the tremendous efficiency of his peculiar method of pumping current into a spherical ball to charge it up before discharging it as a pulse of electrical energy, a >“longitudinal” acoustic-type of compression wave, rather than an electromagnetic Hertzian-type of transverse wave. It was therefore, more akin to electrostatic discharge than wave mechanics.
Tesla also planned to include a stationary resonant wave creation globally, within the earth-ionosphere cavity, as part of the wireless transmission of power. Examining the pair of 1900 patents #645,576 and #649,621 each using the same figure on the first page, we find in the first patent that Tesla has designed a quarter-wave antenna (50 miles of secondary coil wire for a 200 mile long wavelength). More importantly is the sphere on the top which is supposed to be a conductive surface on a balloon raised high enough to be radiating in “rarefied air.”10
As Tesla states,
That communication without wires to any point of the globe is practical with such apparatus would need no demonstration, but through a discovery which I made I obtained absolute certainty. Popularly explained it is exactly this: When we raise the voice and hear an echo in reply, we know that the sound of the voice must have reached a distant wall, or boundary, and must have been reflected from the same. Exactly as the sound, so an electrical wave is reflected, and the same evidence which is afforded by an echo is offered by an electrical phenomena known as a ‘stationary’ wave – that is, a wave with fixed nodal and ventral regions. Instead of sending sound vibrations toward a distant wall, I have sent electrical vibrations toward the remote boundaries of the earth, and instead of the wall, the earth has replied. In place of an echo, I have obtained a stationary electrical wave, a wave reflected from afar. 11
Nikola Tesla’s discovery of pulsed propagation of energy does not resemble the standard transverse electromagnetic waves so familiar to electrical engineers everywhere. Many engineers and physicists have dismissed Tesla’s wireless energy transmission as unscientific without examining the unusual characteristics and benefits of longitudinal waves, which are the z-component solutions of Maxwell equations.
Tesla wrote,
That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, I have unmistakably established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative. These have demonstrated that it is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles – to the opposite end of the globe. 12
Tesla was an electrical genius who revolutionized our world with AC power in a way that DC power could never have accomplished, since the resistance of any transmission lines, (except perhaps, superconductive ones), is prohibitive for direct current. He deserved much better treatment from the tycoons of his age, than to spend the last 40 years of his life in abject poverty. However, he was too much of a gentleman to hold a grudge. Instead, regarding the magnifying transmitter, Tesla wrote in his autobiography, “I am unwilling to accord to some small-minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.”13
Second of two diagrams by engineer J.B. Flowers in 1925 which illustrates the usefulness of Tesla’s wireless power transmission. - Tesla’s World System
- Tesla’s “World System” was conceptually based on three inventions of his:
1. The Tesla Transformer (Tesla coil)
2. The Magnifying Transmitter (transformer adapted to excite the earth)
3. The Wireless System (efficient transmission of electrical energy without wires)Tesla states, “The first World System power plant can be put in operation in nine months. With this power plant it will be practicable to attain electrical activities up to 10 million horsepower (7.5 billion watts), and it is designed to serve for as many technical achievements as are possible without due expense.”14Tesla’s calculated power levels are conservatively estimated and recently updated with contemporary physics calculations by Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher. For example, Professor Rauscher shows that the earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere contains sufficient potential energy, at least 3 billion kilowatts (3 terawatts) respectively, so that the resonant excitation of the earth-ionosphere cavity can reasonably be expected to increase the amplitude of natural “Schumann” frequencies, facilitating the capture of useful electrical power.
Tesla knew that the earth could be treated as one big spherical conductor and the ionosphere as another bigger spherical conductor, so that together they have parallel plates and thus, comprise a “spherical capacitor.”15 Rauscher calculates the capacitance to be about 15,000 microfarads for the complete earth-ionosphere cavity capacitor. In 1952, W. O. Schumann predicted the “self-oscillations” of the conducting sphere of the earth, surrounded by an air layer and ionosphere, without knowing that Tesla had found the earth’s fundamental frequency fifty years earlier.16
“All that is necessary,” says Dr. James Corum, “is that Tesla’s transmitter power and carrier frequency be capable of round-the-world propagation.” In fact, Tesla (in the L.A. Times, Dec. 1904) stated,
With my transmitter I actually sent electrical vibrations around the world and received them again, and I then went on to develop my machinery.
Dr. Corum notes in an article on the ELF (extremely low frequency) oscillator of Tesla’s that the tuned circuit of Tesla’s magnifying transmitter was the whole earth-ionosphere cavity.17
Corum explains that a mechanical analog of the lumped circuit Tesla coil is an easier model for engineers to understand.18 From a mechanical engineering viewpoint, the “magnifying factor” can be successfully applied to such a circuit. “The circuit is limited only by the circuit resistance. At resonance, the current through the circuit rises until the voltage across the resistance is equal to the source voltage. This circuit was a source of deep frustration to Edison because voltmeter readings taken around the loop did not obey Kirchoff’s laws!” As a result, Edison claimed such a circuit was only good for electrocution chairs.
Nikola Tesla: the Visionary! The diversity and breadth of Telsa’s ideas and visions for a better world are aptly captured! - Earth’s Renewable Energy
- Tesla’s world system activates the earth’s renewable electrical storage battery which normally sits dormant except during lightning strikes. Regarding simply the electrostatic energy storage capacity of the ionosphere, Dr. Oleg Jefimenko, author of Electrostatic Motors, explains that during one electric storm, the atmospheric electric field dissipates at least 0.2 terawatts (billion kilowatts), indicating that the entire earth must have even more total available energy.19Furthermore, the power loss experienced by Tesla’s pulsed, electrostatic discharge mode of propagation was less than 5% over 25,000 miles. Dr. Van Voorhies states, “…path losses are 0.25 dB/Mm at 10 Hz,” which often is difficult for engineers to believe, who are used to transverse waves, a resistive medium, and line-of-sight propagation modes that can dissipate 10 dB/km at 5 MHz.20 The capacitive dome of the Wardenclyffe Tower, like the conductive balloon of Tesla’s ‘576 patent, is a key to the understanding of the longitudinal waves. Dr. Rauscher quotes Tesla:
Later he compared it to a Van de Graaff generator. He also explained the purpose of Wardenclyffe…’one does not need to be an expert to understand that a device of this kind is not a producer of electricity like a dynamo, but merely a receiver or collector with amplifying qualities.’”21
Only a few great physicists like Drs. Elizabeth Rauscher, James Corum, and Konstantin Meyl, 22 have realized that Tesla was very practical when he proposed the resonant generation and wireless transmission of useful electrical power. Tesla’s knowledge of atmospheric electricity transduction was so extensive and reliable that Jim Corum, who has been funded to continue Tesla’s work, recently told me, “You just have to do exactly what Telsa did and you will consistently get the same results he did.”23
After returning from his experiments at Colorado Springs in 1900, Nikola Tesla stated:
If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations. 24
In view of our present fossil-fuel-caused global warming, Tesla seems very prophetic from his vantage point of a century ago.
- High Transmission Integrity and Low Loss
- Tesla clearly states,
As to the transmission of power through space, that is a project which I considered absolutely certain of success long since. Years ago I was in the position to transmit wireless power to any distance without limit other than that imposed by the physical dimensions of the globe. In my system it makes no difference what the distance is. The efficiency of the transmission can be as high as 96 or 97 per cent, and there are practically no losses except such as are inevitable in the running of the machinery. When there is no receiver there is no energy consumption anywhere. When the receiver is put on, it draws power. That is the exact opposite of the Hertz-wave system. In that case, if you have a plant of 1,000 horsepower (750 kW), it is radiating all the time whether the energy is received or not; but in my system no power is lost. When there are no receivers, the plant consumes only a few horsepower necessary to maintain the vibration; it runs idle, as the Edison plant when the lamps and motors are shut off.25
These amazing facts are explained by Corum(s) and Spaniol, “…the distinction between Tesla’s system and ‘Hertzian’ waves is to be clearly understood. Tesla, and others of his day, used the term ‘Hertzian waves’ to describe what we call today, energy transfer by wireless transverse electromagnetic (TEM) radiation…no one wants to stand in front of a high power radar antenna. For these, E and H are in phase, the power flow is a ‘real’ quantity (as opposed to reactive power), and the surface integral of E x H (Poynting vector) is nonzero. The case is not so simple in an unloaded power system, an RF transformer with a tuned secondary, or with a cavity resonator. In these situations, the fields are in phase quadrature, the circulating power is reactive and the average Poynting flux is zero – unless a load is applied. They deliver no power without a resistive load. These are clearly the power systems which Tesla created. The polyphase power distribution system was created by him in the 1880s and inaugurated at Niagara Falls in 1895. The RF transformer was invented and patented by him in the 1890s. Terrestrial resonances he experimentally discovered at the turn of the century. And, for the next 40 years he tried to bring through to commercial reality this global power system. Today, millions of us have working scale models of it in our kitchens, while the larger version sits idle.”26
Note for a spherical, electrostatic pulse discharge, E is radial and H is helical since J is radial (longitudinal or irrotational current).27
- Biological/Economic Impact
- Another common criticism of the Tesla wireless power system is regarding its possible biological effects. Calculating the circulating reactive power, Corum(s) and Spainol find a density of a microVAR per cubic meter at 7.8 Hz, which is quite small, while it is well-known that such a frequency is very biologically compatible.28 The authors also look at the present 100 V/m earth-ionosphere field and again find that raising it by a factor of 4 to 10 will pose no ill effects. (Thunderstorms do it all of the time around the world.)In terms of economic theory, many countries will benefit from this service. Only private, dispersed receiving stations will be needed. Just like television and radio, a single resonant energy receiver is required, which may eventually be built into appliances, so no power cord will be necessary! Just think: monthly electric utility bills from old-fashioned, fossil-fueled, lossy electrified wire-grid delivery services will be optional, much like “cable TV” is today. In the 21st century, “Direct TV” is the rage, which is an exact parallel of Tesla’s “Direct Electricity.”
Let us fulfill this prophesy of Tesla, making it a triumphal success, by supporting a philanthropic, international wireless power station installed on a remote island to electrify the whole world. The benefits, immediately making direct electricity available everywhere, are too numerous to count. (Coincidentally, in Tesla’s homeland, the Electric Power Company of Serbia raised their monthly rates by 50% on the day Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature was sent to the publisher, while California is now up to 15 cents per kWh, double the nation’s average.)__TV
- Footnotes
- 1 Valone, Thomas, Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla’s Science of Energy, Kempton, Adventures Unlimited, 20022 “..it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.” –Tesla addressing the Amer. Inst. of Elec. Eng., 1891
3 Utility Corporations, Document 92, U.S. Senate, 70th Congress, 1st Session, 1928. See summary by Ernest Gruening, The Public Pays: A Study of Power Propaganda, New York, Vanguard Press, 1931.
4 Stavropoulos, William “Natural Gas Woes Won’t Disappear Unless Government Acts” Investors Business Daily, Perspective, June 2, 2003
5 “Wireless Transmission in Earth’s Energy Future” Environment News Service, Nov. 19, 2002, http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2002/2002-11-19-01.asp
6 Nye, David, Electrifying America, Social Meanings of a New Technology, Boston, MIT Press, 1997, p. 387
7 “National Energy Security Post 9/11” U.S. Energy Association, June, 2002, p. 34
8 H.W. Jones, “Nikola Tesla, Generator of Social Change,” Proc. of the Inter. Tesla Symp., 1986, p.1-89
9 Nikola Tesla, “World System of Wireless Transmission of Energy,” Telegraph and Telephone Age, Oct. 16, 1927, p. 457.
10 Patents are now available online from www.uspto.gov or www. GetThePatent .com or from http://gb.espacenet.com/espacenet/
11 Nikola Tesla, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” Century, June, 1900
12 Nikola Tesla, “The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace,” Electrical World and Engineer. Jan. 7, 1905, p. 21
13 Nikola Tesla, My Inventions, Ben Johnston, Ed., Austin, Hart Brothers, 1982, p. 91
14 Ibid., p.88
15 Rauscher, Elizabeth, and W. Bise, “Harnessing the Earth-Ionosphere Resonant Cavity,” in Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla ’s Science of Energy, p. 233
16 W.O. Schumann, Z. Naturforsch, 72, p. 149-154, 250-252, 1952. (See also Jackson, JD, Classical Electrodynamics, New York, J. Wiley, 1975, p. 363)
17 Corum, James, and Ken Corum, “Tesla’s ELF Oscillator for Wireless Transmission,” in Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla’s Science of Energy, p. 219
18 Corum, James, “Tesla & the Magnifying Transmitter: A Popular Study for Engineers,” in Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla’s Science of Energy, p. 198
19 Jefimenko, Oleg “Original Electrostatic Energy Resources, Electrostatic Generators, and Electrostatic Motors” Future Energy: Proceedings of the Conference on Future Energy, May 1, 1999, p. 70
20 VanVoorhies, Kurt, “Prospects of Worldwide Wireless Power,” in Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla’s Science of Energy, p. 151
21 Rauscher, p. 236
22 Professor Konstantin Meyl sells a “Demo Set” that is a miniature dual dome like Tesla’s US Patent 645,576, a wireless longitudinal wave demonstration kit, available at http://www.k-meyl.de/Demo-Set/body_demo-set.html (Enter this link at www.freetrans-lation.com for English).
23 Corum, James, private conversation, June 15, 2003.
24 Nikola Tesla, 1900, as quoted in “Great Scientist, Forgotten Genius, Nikola Tesla” by Chris Bird and Oliver Nichelson, New Age, #21, Feb. 1977, p. 42
25 Nikola Tesla, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the AIEE,” May 18, 1917.
26 Corum, James, and M. Spaniol, K. Corum “Concerning Cavity Q,” Proceedings of the International Tesla Symposium, 1988, p. 3-15
27 Jackson, J.D., p. 222 (See also Section 7.6 and 7.9 for pulse propagation through a highly dispersive medium like the ionosphere or magnetosphere.)
28 Ibid., p. 3-16
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