Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER FOUR at the turn of the century Tesla's ideas may not have been all that farfetched. Given that the earth behaved like a giant electrical conductor, how did Tesla intend to transmit and distribute this electrical energy from the Niagara Falls power station across the entire globe? He seems to have found a clue in his observations of lightning storms, though he was quick to point out that his method operated in a different way from conventional 'wireless' or radio broadcasting â an approach which Marconi would have been working on at around the same time. The circuit he planned was to be 'the diametrical opposite of a transmitting circuit typical of telegraphy by Hertzian or electromagnetic radiation'. In a conventional radio broadcasting system, electrical messages are sent through the atmosphere (or through the vacuum of space in the case of communication between rockets or satellites) by means of electromagnetic radiation or Hertzian waves (as Tesla called them). These electromagnetic waves are generated by electrical oscillations pumped into the transmitter. This electrical energy radiates at the speed of light outward in all directions from the transmitter. Radio waves spread out from the transmitter just as sound waves spread from a loudspeaker or ripples expand away from the splash caused by a stone thrown into a pond. Tesla, however, wrote that his system worked in a very different way from this conventional radio broadcasting. The electromagnetic radiations being reduced to an insignificant quantity, and proper conditions of resonance maintained, the circuit acts like an immense pendulum, storing indefinitely the energy of the primary exciting impulses and impressions upon the earth and its conducting atmosphere uniform harmonic oscillations and intensities which, as actual tests have shown, may be pushed so far as to surpass those attained in the natural displays of static electricity. His idea seemed to be that a transmitter would be used to pump electrical energy into the earth where it would then circulate until it was 'picked up' by a suitable detector. 52
