Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA the earth and in this way power would be pumped across the globe. The design was staggering. Had Tesla really built such an enormous magnifying transmitter and tested it in his Colorado Springs laboratory? That really would have been something to see! Later in the day and in a more sober mood I began to consider some practical objections to Tesla's proposal. He might well have transmitted power to receivers in the immediate vicinity of his transmitter but that wasn't the same thing as sending energy to the other side of the world. When it came to wireless transmission of power I had a number of small reservations and one giant objection of principle. First, the small problems: I had no idea how efficient Tesla's transmitter was, for he provided no figures and no data tables in his patent. I asked myself how much of the energy which Tesla supplied to the tower was finally converted into the electrical oscillations, for losses of only a few per cent could make the method a poor competitor of conventional power line transmission. How much of the original energy supplied was lost in conventional broadcast radiation from the tower, in heating of the coils through electrical resistance, in sparking and other useless processes? Finally, how effective was the resonance between earth and transmitter? Was all the energy in the transmitter transferred to global oscillations? Then, what of the receivers themselves? How efficient were they? All these factors seemed to be unknown, but a fraction of a per cent here, a few per cent there, would soon mount into a fairly inefficient operation. I felt that Tesla was letting me down because he provided no records as to the possible efficiency of his brave new system. There was a more serious objection and one which would be clear to anyone who has stood beside a pond and thrown small stones into its still water. There is a splash and then ripples expand outward in the form of concentric circles. At first these ripples are quite noticeable, but the further away they move from the centre of the splash, the smaller they become. The reason is obvious. As the stone is thrown into the water a certain amount of energy is released which produces a strong local disturbance a splash. The energy then radiates outward but the further it moves the more 'spread out' it becomes. In other words, this energy must be distributed over a bigger and bigger volume. 55
