Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER TWO interest on account of the possibilities they opened up and the striking character of the phenomena. Few of the experts familiar with the upto-date appliances will appreciate the difficulty of my task with the elementary devices I had then at my command, as accurate adjustments for resonance had to be made in every experiment. The transmission of energy through a single conductor without return having been found practicable, it occurred to me that possibly even that one wire might be dispensed with and the earth used to convey the energy from the transmitter to the receiver. I read on and found that Tesla had required special currents for his experiments. First he had designed new dynamos, then, concerned by their limitations, he had turned to novel devices to produce high voltages. I realized at this point that he was referring to something that sounded very much like a Tesla coil. He spoke of this coil in connection with his experiments on radioactivity, which he boasted were 'prior to the discovery of Radium' by the Curies. With the invention of this coil he felt that he had given the scientific world a 'veritable lamp of Aladdin'. These were certainly not modest or self-effacing words; indeed, he sounded like a proud parent speaking of a talented child. Yet, for Tesla, this was only the beginning. As I think of my earliest coils, which were nothing more than scientific toys, the subsequent development seems like a dream. I had the sensation that I was drawing close to the heart of Tesla's discovery when I read of an experiment he had performed in 1899 at Colorado Springs. The result was staggering, for he claimed that, at the turn of the century, electrical energy was sent across the entire globe to return with undiminished strength. It was a result so unbelievable that the revelation at first almost stunned me. I saw in a flash that by a properly organized apparatus at sending and receiving stations, power virtually in unlimited amounts could be conveyed through the earth at any distance, limited only by 24
