Re: Tesla Coil RF Transmitter

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

>  >>>2) If successful, would destroy all global
> communications . . .
>  >It will significantly improve global
> telecommunications. . . .

I wish people would get over this!! The fact is that
Tesla's World Wireless System WAS developed, and is in
use to this day. All the aspects of it that were found
to work, were followed up and refined, while the
aspects that didn't work were dumped.

Stubby towers with big spherical top hats were
replaced by big nets of long thin wires, as people
realised that the "Driving the ground" thing was a red
herring, signals really did travel by "Hertz waves",
so you had to get as much wire in the air as you
could, and pump as much RF current through it as you
could. (This improvement was down to Tesla's old pal,
Marconi, and it got him across the Atlantic.)

After a lot of empirical investigation, it was found
that these "Hertz waves" could travel round the globe
by ricocheting between the ionosphere and the ground.
Almost, but not quite, what Tesla had in mind.

Wavelengths got shorter, and spark oscillators were
replaced by vacuum tube generators, and finally
transistors.

Claude Shannon discovered certain laws relating
bandwidth of a channel to the rate of information flow
through it. This made frequencies get even higher to
make room for more "stuff".

The name was changed from "World Wireless System" to
"Radio". Radio is fairly common nowadays, and it has
lived up to every expectation Tesla had for it, EXCEPT
for the power transmission and weather control stuff.

Still, I think if I could travel back to 1899 and show
Tesla a cell phone, a GPS, or a Wi-fi card, he would
be mighty pleased and not at all surprised. These
things are just the logical conclusions of the stuff
he was dreaming about 100 years ago. I think he just
vastly underestimated how much work it would take to
make them happen.

Steve Conner
http://www.scopeboy.com/