Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
SO, if for our own entertainment we make the strange assumption that Tesla
was not just fooling himself, then this assumption has consequences
we can explore.
Well, by all means do some exploring! Build your own Tesla coil and try
transmitting power with it. I bet you'll find that it works great at short
ranges but the power dies off quickly at longer ranges. Tesla never tested
his system any further than tens of miles, and extrapolated the results to
tens of thousands of miles.
He didn't realise that displacement current cancelled out practically all
the radiated power in the far field. The currents that Tesla thought he was
"pumping into the ground" were getting sucked right back out again. This is
understandable since Maxwell had only just "invented" displacement current.
In my opinion, this discredits Tesla's plans to resonate the earth as a
conducting sphere with standing waves. But he also planned an alternative
mode where he would "tap into" the ionosphere using a very tall coil to
send a streamer right up there. The whole ionosphere would then become part
of his "topload".
Again we now know the ionosphere is a pretty lossy conductor. It would
probably be the equivalent of running your coil with a topload made of
slightly dampened string :-/ I don't know of any data that would confirm or
deny the possibility of doing it though. After all, the ionosphere might be
a poor conductor but it has a huge cross-sectional area for passing current.
I noticed Terry said:
>We seem to be able to run Tesla coils today, all over the Earth, without
any >big problem ;-)))
But what if we tuned all our coils to the same frequency and turned them
all on at once :-D