Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 10

height [length] of the antenna and the current in the same,” which is in direct contradiction to what the much-used equation asserts. Tesla’s statement “the current in the same” is especially puzzling, not only because it had been established experimentally but also because he has essentially been using alternating circuit theory, in a strange form, and the device he is employing — an antenna, and a conducting earth — are mathematically linear and should, according to linear circuit analysis, create a response in linear proportion to the current exciting the antenna.

Strange to say, Tesla then uses Austin-Cohen to reject Hertzian waves, saying that, “…I cannot agree with him [Austin] on this subject. I do not think that if his receiver was affected by Hertz waves he could ever establish such relations as he has found.” So, on the one hand, he rejects the famous formula but then embraces it as a means to argue against Hertzian wave theory.

Let us now study Fig. 18, in Tesla’s paper, reproduced here in Fig. 5. He has now introduced a second mountain that is further from the transmitter than the one in the previous figure. He argues that if Hertzian wave theory were true, then the second mountain “could only strengthen the Hertz wave [at the receiver] by reflection, but as a matter of fact it detracts greatly from the received impulses because the electrical niveau between the mountains is raised…” [niveau is a French word for level surface].

What Tesla fails to understand here is that without knowing the wavelength of the radiation, the separation of the two mountains, and the position of the antenna between them, we can make