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He had discovered and invented a great many things. Post and Discuss your findings.
Just saw a docco on hime recently
HAVE you seen this http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1
All electric
Sexy!!
An entertaining docu called "The missing secrets of Nikola Tesla", not exactly 'Horizon' but a fun watch all the same.
Tesla I believe proposed a weapon known as a Tesla coil. It would be used as a defensive perimeter weapon rather like a minefield, or in this case an electric fence without the fence. Towers would be erected that would be highly charged with electricity and when ever anything, like an enemy tank advance, got close the electricity would use these tanks to 'earth' frying the tank on the way through. Rather like static jumping from a giant high voltage Van der Graff generator.
The problems at the time are pretty obvious and many, but why has this not been re-visited in more recent times.? Afterall It works fine on the Command and Conquer games.
I believe that Tesla was aiming at a system of wireless electric power distribution with his coil.
The one I built in high school was used by myself and members of the science club to get 'burnt out' flourescent lamps to light up when we fired the thing up.
We can thank Tesla for AC power systems among other inventions. The world might be quite a different place if he hadn't got in a dispute with Edison and left (he later joined Westinghouse and was responsible for much of their success in the power field)....
Telsa also did a lot of the very early work in radio.
As far as weapons systems though, I think his actual contributions were mainly in the way of radio control boat and trial torpedo systems for the military... although he did spend the later years of his life working on a charged particle beam weapon.... but this was not the Tesla Coil ... I never pursued that area enough to know if he actually made any headway as Lasers were of course the area that we budding mad scientists of the 60s really wanted to get our hands on.
@Bric
Thanks for that.
I can't swear to this, but I do believe the Soviets worked on weaponizing Tesla's wireless power transfer coil.
I should perhaps let you in on the secret that the whole thing about the coil - above- was me working my way up to making the Command & Conquer gag.
On the subject of laser weapons I am looking forward to seeing if Taser's new 'Phaser' rifle works.
(Star Trek has arrived!)
woo! C&C!
Red Alert 2 rocks 
I do remember hearing about Tesla's vision of wireless power transmission using a series of towers to just send a bolt of electricity from one to the other across long distances
Which you have to admit, would look a million times cooler than the pylons we have now
jr.... ahhh that's obvious when I read it in the light of day ... I shouldn't try conversing after my eye lids start closing involuntarily at 3 am....
S-K ....The beauty of the system was that with a proper dome enclosure, no sparks were jumpting across the landscape... power being sent from one station to the next in the same sort of fashion as radio waves from transmitter to receiver... no visible artifacts across the landscape.
well thats a lot more efficient sounding, but much less cool sounding
I think that might actually be being developed as a way of charging things like phones or laptops wirelessly - transmitting the charge as a form of EM radiation that only interacts with something on a resonant frequency, so only the device in question is able to receive the energy
I haven't read very much in the field much less kept up to date on recent developments but that is exactly where Tesla was heading (and got patents on the basic technology in the 1880/90s) .
"Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe."
-- "Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency" (February 1892)
Does anyone recall seeing bone fide work in bringing this into practice along thelines S-K suggests?
Yes, recently. It's called WiTricity. I think I made a gag about it on line, somewhere else, if not here in Tangler.
It was reported that the theory was tested and proved to work, if only over very short distances, 2 metres or so.
I would like to add, that the image S-K 's suggestion conjures up, of the electricity grid flashing across the countryside in great big thunderous lightening cracks, is, as he suggests, very cool.
Of course no one would get any sleep. And the power output that would be required, just to run a light bulb at the domestic end, would be the "Of The Gods" variety.
I was thinking of a continuous lightning bolt - an unbroken chain of crackling electricity instead of flashing around in bolts, don't know if that has any effect on the power loss issue, but it might reduce the sound created
Although the other issue would be birds flying into the "beam" - there are concerns about those windmill power generators (possibly about them killing bats as opposed ot birds) but a lightning bolt shooting across long distances is bound to fry a few flying creatures of some description
Using 120v input in the lab (sorry I can't recall our output figures) at high school we were lighting 4 foot flourescent tubes 5 - 10 feet away...
For a 5 watt radio station, at the right frequences, the signal will carry substantial distances....
Tesla wasn't about shooting lightning bolts across the distance -- so I think the birds would be ok....although what the other long term effects might be we don't know.... We aren't really sure what the ULF emissions given off BART or other similar transportation systems are either ... but frying birds in flight isn't one of them.
Probably has a lot to do with the frequency of the energy wave. I suspect if the wavelength is sufficiently log to avoid heating up water molecules it would probably be ok. After all, we have 50KW AM radio stations, and they don't fry anything. You can take a long piece of wire an attach one end to a low power light bulb and the other to ground and it will light up if you live near one of these transmitters.
You can take a long piece of wire an attach one end to a low power light bulb and the other to ground and it will light up if you live near one of these transmitters
hehe.. awesome, I might have to go find a nearby radio tower and try that out
Theoretically, with a long wire enough antenna (oooh look transliteration: that's "long enough wire antenna"), you should be able to 'liberate' stray energy from just about anywhere. I believe you can even buy kits from some obscure web sites.
I really need to try this out some time
It needs to be a long piece of wire. AM (MW) radio stations have wavelenghths of between 200-400 Metres, so probably a 1/8th wave antenna may work. The higher the field strength of the signal (closer to transmitter your are) the shorter the antenna you'll need.
This is the base principle behind the old crystal radio set.
Indeed it was Tesla's work in the field of 'power' that led to demonstrations of 'wireless data transmission' (and his patent for what we now call Radio; although David Hughes had apparently transmitted Morse Code before this time). Both of these demonstrations occuring long before Marconi began his experiments using equipment constructed by J.C. Bose (Marconi who has widely, though mistakingly, been credited with the 'invention' of radio has one of the weakest claims to it, although he did improve it to the point where he could commercialize it with the world's first radio station and wireless factory).
Tesla's early work was with magnetic receivers rather than the iron filings of many of the other early experimenters.
Telstra or Tesla?
Wow is that a freudian slip. I haven't been involved with work with Telstra since 2005... must have been having one of those flashback thingy's.... (note to subsequent readers... I've gone back and changed the two "Telstra" references to Tesla.
)
hehehe I thought it might have been
Gave me a good chuckle!
Just got your 'phone bill?
Great where can we get one? (or two)
Get in line will ya!
I asked first!!
But I was already in line
why line up just snatch and grab!
If you like Tesla, watch these:
Im waiting for wireless electricity!!! I would pay a fortune to get rid of all the cables!
Aren't they supposedly making a little bit of headway on that? There was an article in Anandtech recently about using electromagnetic coils to generate wireless electricity.
@corticalaxon
If you look back up the topic thread ^^^ I made some comments and posted links on this. It's called, for now at least, WiTricity.
right. that's what it was.
