Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER FOUR are received through the earth, water, or atmosphere by suitable apparatus on the moving body. What Tesla had designed was a form of radio control as is made clear by the following sentence from his patent: Finally, I may avail myself, in carrying out my invention, of electrical oscillations which do not follow any particular conducting-path, but propagate in straight lines through space, of rays, waves, pulses, or disturbances of any kind capable of bringing the mechanism of the moving body into action from a distance and at the will of the operator by their effect upon suitable controlled devices. Here was the transmission of electricity without wires â broadcast power. Just a few years after his original invention of the electrical generator Tesla was working upon devices which would dispense with the need for connecting cables to transmit electricity. I hunted out those patents for the year 1888, with their diagrams of the elegantly simple generators and induction motors which formed the backbone of the Niagara Falls Power Project. By a stroke of genius the young Tesla had thought up a motor in which the magnetic fields are 'induced' without the need for direct electrical connections. In a way the motor itself is a living example of his belief that energy could be transferred direct, without the need for an intermediary connection. Yet, to draw power from is generators, Tesla needed heavy electrical cables. When it came to transmitting electrical current from his power station to a distant town or remote farmhouse, he was forced to string cables the entire distance. As I looked at Tesla's drawings I had the illusion that I could see directly into his mind. For a moment I could sense his feeling of irritation with these transmission lines and electrical interconnections. They destroyed the perfection of his scheme. They were ugly intrusions into his otherwise faultless drawings. Tesla, after all, had been able to create light inside glass globes without the need for direct connections of wire. He had shown the world how he could control the movements of a powerboat by broadcast 44
