Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER SEVEN The following morning was one of those when I took my time getting dressed. As a scientist, I had long ago learned to trust that desire to daydream, so I made no attempt to hurry to work. When the mind wanders without any conscious attempt at control, daydreams can lead to hunches and intuitions, and often occur along the pathway to some new scientific insight. That morning I found myself recalling Tesla's enthusiasm about his experiments at Colorado Springs. He had been fired by a vision of worldwide power transmission and he believed that broadcast power was an utterly practical possibility. I began to think of the very obvious objections I could raise against Tesla's system. Any scientist would have been struck by the same point, that, if energy is broadcast across the globe, it will be spread so thin as to be of no practical use in powering machinery, heating homes, supplying cooking ranges and any of the thousand and one other jobs electricity is used for. Yet something was nagging me. Of course, the point was totally obvious, for the very same objections I had made must have been known to Tesla himself. Yet in spite of this he had gone on to build a second tower, this time on Long Island. I began to wonder if Nikola Tesla had made fools out of all of us. He had been at pains to point out that his invention was very different from conventional broadcasting using 'Hertzian waves'. Was Tesla transmission based upon some totally new principle? Had he perhaps discovered a way to beam energy directly to a given target without dissipating its power over a wide area? I switched on the radio and another thought struck me. Here I was with an expensive stereo set, one of the few luxuries I could afford, full of tran63
