Prize Goes Unclaimed in Alternative Energy Contest

By BETH LINNEN
Times Staff Writer

What would you do if you had a contest with $6,000 worth of prizes and nobody entered?

A year ago a group of alternative energy supporters issued a challenge backed up by three $2,000 prizes to anyone who could successfully transmit electricity without wires.

The deadline for the contest, July 10, 1979, has come and gone with no winners. In fact, there was not a single entry, according to Will Mische, a spokesman for the contest sponsor the People's Power Project.

But Mische said he is not discouraged. "Some of these things take time," he said. The prize offers will be renewed each year until someone wins, he said.

The lack of entrants is not surprising, Mische said, because most scientists are secretive about their research. They fear that someone will copy it before they have arranged to market an invention.

The contest was a shot in the dark, Mische said, in hopes someone working on the project would be willing to share their knowledge with the public.

The People's Power Project was formed to try to duplicate the experiments of an obscure Yugoslavian scientist, Nikola Tesla, who first transmitted wireless electricity around the turn of the century.

Tesla's theory, as explained by Mische and others, is that the earth is a big conductor. If electrical energy waves are "pumped" into the ground they can be tapped, somewhat like radio waves, in the atmosphere, and converted to usable power.

Many of Tesla's followers in the People's Power Project are also opponents of the high voltage power line crossing Central Minnesota. They constructed a Tesla receiver of cable, aluminum, and glass gallon jugs on the rural Belgrade farm of Virgil Fuchs, an outspoken opponent of the power line. Fuchs hoped the rediscovery of Tesla's theory would replace the high-voltage power line that crosses his land.

The People's Power Project raised the $6,000 through donations to find someone to transmit power to Fuchs's receiver.

Mische said there were two or three serious inquiries from people in California. The specifications for Fuchs's receiver were sent to them and, Mische said, someone may yet send electricity to the Belgrade receiver.

Despite no entrants in the contest, Mische said, development of wireless electricity is not far off. One researcher in California has successfully demonstrated it, and the Soviet Union is also testing the theories, he claimed.

In 1900, when Tesla first demonstrated his theory, he said it would probably take 80 years before wireless electricity would be used by the public, according to Mische.

"It would be interesting if he was accurate in his prediction of 80 years," Mische said.

Meanwhile, the Tesla receiver stands still on the Belgrade farm, waiting to receive a signal that has not yet been sent.