Power-Line Foes Have a New Idea... No Lines At All

By BLAIR CHARNLEY
Minneapolis Star Staff Writer

A novel proposal to solve the power-line dispute was presented to Gov. Rudy Perpich yesterday — use the earth itself as an electrical "conductor" and avoid using power lines altogether.

Two University of Minnesota experts, questioned about the idea, were skeptical but said the idea is not "a fake" to be dismissed as totally irrational.

Three Twin Cities men from the People’s Power Project, a week-old group, gave the governor a petition asking him to set up a task force to study their proposal and said a test will be conducted soon, when a Canadian group attempts to transmit power from Ontario to a Minnesota farm.

PERPICH ACCEPTED the petition, but didn’t commit himself. An aide said the suggestion might go to a science board studying power-line questions.

They said the system is patterned after one built about 1900 by Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current, but it was never used.

The three men, George Crocker and Kris Olsen, both Minneapolis, and Tom Hatch, St. Paul, said power would be transmitted from Timmons, Ontario, to the Virgil Fuchs farm near Belgrade, Minn. Fuchs has been involved in the power-line controversy. They did not know when it will be tested.

They said it would be used to run an irrigation system of a type that power-line pylons might interfere with.

ONE OF THE scientists cited by the three men who presented the petition to Perpich is Marcel Vogel, a senior scientist with IBM Corp. in San Jose, Calif.

Vogel (who said IBM is not involved in this project) explained how the power could be transmitted through the earth in terms of "resonant vibrations," saying that if you can match the vibrations, you can receive them remotely.

He compared it to two violin strings tuned to precisely the same pitch. If you bow one of them, he said, the other one nearby will start vibrating, too.

Vogel said the principle is the same for transmitting energy through the earth, and with a properly "tuned" receiver, power can be transmitted between any two points on earth.

He said it would take a tremendous initial burst of energy to set up such a transmission, but once that is done, it actually would waste less power than electrical lines.

TWO UNIVERSITY of Minnesota electrical engineers, interviewed yesterday, indicated skepticism but said the idea is by no means as harebrained as it may sound.

Allen Nussbaum, professor and director of graduate study at the electrical engineering department, said there recently has been a tremendous increase in interest in Tesla's work. "It's definitely not a fake," he said. "Tesla had hundreds of ideas and people are just beginning to catch up."

At the same time, though, he questioned its practicality.

And Vernon Albertson, a professor of electrical engineering, said he'd heard about it and that the Soviet Union is experimenting with it. He said he plans to do some reading soon on Tesla's idea. However, he said, "I'm very skeptical."