Nikola Tesla Books
CHAPTER NINE Tim Richardson, the Canadian who was building a Tesla transmitter, proved to be a difficult man to trace. It took a long series of calls before I eventually contacted him one afternoon. At first Richardson was reluctant to talk about his research and I suspected that he had been pestered by cranks and people trying to exploit his ideas. But as we began to discuss Tesla's patents he relaxed and told me that he was building a transmitter according to the plans left by Tesla. As far as I could make out the project had been funded by several local businessmen and was being completed in Tim Richardson's spare time. I asked him how work was progressing. 'There are a lot of problems,' he told me. 'It has to be built according to we need exactly the right thickness of wire, all that sort Tesla's patents of thing.' 'Are there any other scientists working on it with you?" I asked. 'No, but I did talk to a professor at the University of Toronto. He gave me some help with the design.' There was something else which interested me about these activities in Timmins. 'How did you get onto Tesla in the first place? To tell you the truth, I'd never heard of him until I got involved through writing this report.' 'I've always been interested in electrical experiments and I first read some of Tesla's patents a long time ago. It got me fascinated all those inventions. A bit later I worked with a man called Golka in the States.' 'What does he do?' I asked. 'He's built something like a Tesla tower. It operates at several million volts.' This last piece of news was quite a surprise. I had no idea that anyone else had gone so far as to actually build one of Tesla's gigantic coils. 78
