Philosopher's Haze

Most of us probably know Nikola Tesla as the inventor of the Tesla Coil, the large shafts sticking out of the ground, with a large ball on the top, that projects powerful beams of electricity like lightning. Some will know have been familiarized with the Tesla Coil when MythBusters tested ideas for a water stun gun. That video can be found here: But a lot of us have probably never heard of another idea Tesla had…a really powerful idea.

What would you say there is a very good chance that we could easily and cheaply produce in a manner that would make it available to anyone, anywhere, anytime for anything needing energy? Would you call me crazy? Well go right ahead…but as it turns out, this may not be such a crazy idea after all.

I found an article on the website Damn Interesting yesterday that really got my attention. The article was called Tesla’s Tower of Power. Written by Alan Bellows back in September of 2008, this article will form the basis of my blog post.

In 1891, Tesla did something that filled a room of scientists with awe. Taking a gas discharge tube, an early version of the light bulb, Tesla was able to electrically power the tube without the use of any wires. To put in context how awe filled they must have been, watch this video on TED.com to see the same principle employed by Tesla to power a light bulb in front of a modern, educated crowd.

Eric Giler demos wireless electricity

After this, at his laboratory at Pike’s Peak in Colorado Springs, he conducted a test to test the properties of the ionosphere. Though his experiment was short lived (he overloaded the power system and Colorado Springs went dark), Tesla was able to take some important readings…and they excited him.

Tesla than began to look for financiers for his project. The idea: a system of power relays that could make energy available anywhere. In 1900 J.P. Morgan was intrigued by Tesla’s ideas, including “a global network of high-voltage towers which could one day control weather, relay text and images wirelessly, and provide ubiquitous electricity via the atmosphere.” (Bellows, 2008) Morgan financed the project, but Tesla’s funding would be challenged by and latter be cancelled altogether due to Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph. Lack of funding led to the project being cancelled in 1905 (an economic crisis which doubled construction costs was another reason for the eventual termination of the project).

Instead the world inherited unfathomable amounts of dirty energy being produced, Chernobyl, oil spills and the ugly littering of landscape upon landscape with power grids – not to mention a very unreal access to energy across the globe (both economic and physical inequalities with respect to access to power).

But Tesla’s ideas are still sound. He proposed each of these high-voltage towers blasting energy 50 miles up into the ionosphere. The energy would then mingle with the Earth’s natural telluric currents and be available everywhere and accessed easily with what would be rather simple devices. Thus, whether you wanted to power your car, your house, a ship out in the middle of the ocean, or anything or anywhere else, and the energy would be accessible, as Tesla’s towers would essentially turn the Earth into a giant conductor of electricity.

We can choose the future we have…and I don’t know about you, but a future with ubiquitous energy sounds amazing. Especially when that energy could likely be made incredibly cheaply (or maybe even free) by tapping into the Earth’s geothermal energy reserves, which are abundant and renewable.

But we have to chose: how many more oil spills can Earth tolerate before we can no longer tolerate it? How much nicer would clean air be rather than this hodge-podge of toxins? How much nicer would it be to have nature looking more like nature?

Above photo from http://www.crystalinks.com/teslalab.jpg.

Originally Blogged February 28, 2011

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