Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER SEVEN Tesla had them in mind. You get thunderstorms in the lower part of the atmosphere and he talks about the upper atmosphere as the source. You see, thunderstorms occur as air currents build up electrical charges on thunderclouds. The air rubs together - it's the same thing that happens when you rub your feet on a nylon carpet. In the end you build up a big electrical charge. In a thundercloud, it gets up to several million volts, and, when the atmosphere is full of rain, the whole thing begins to discharge as big electrical sparks. A thunderstorm certainly has a lot of power but it's not fixed in one place and it depends on so many atmospheric factors. It's just too unpredictable to be Tesla's mysterious power source.' 'Well, go on,' my friend encouraged. 'I've been wondering if the power transmission bit could have some connection with electrical layers in the upper atmosphere. You know, the particle belts around the earth. I wonder if they could be used to focus energy transmission?' 'What are you going to do about it?" I thought for a moment. 'I suppose I'm going to try and find out.' A few hours later I was at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics finding out about the electrically charged layers which are situated about the earth. I was talking to one of the scientists and had asked him to go fairly slowly. 'Let's look at it this way,' he began. 'The sunshine you get at the seaside may seem pretty strong but you've got to remember that it is passed all the way through our atmosphere and the most powerful wavelengths have been filtered out by the time it reaches the ground. Pure unfiltered sunlight, the sort of thing which hits the upper atmosphere, contains X-rays and ultraviolet light. It's got so much energy that it can break up the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the air. What happens is that the molecules absorb so much light-energy that internal stresses tear them apart into electrically charged atoms and electrons.' He drew some equations on a piece of paper to demonstrate the processes involved. 'If you send a rocket high into the atmosphere,' he continued, 'it registers an increasing number of charged particles or ions. You get oxygen and nitrogen ions, ozone and even free electrons. If you go right to the outer 68 89
