I haven't researched Tesla but I did watch a good documentary about him which was really fascinating. There is definitely a lot of politics involved with the path of the electricity market that reeks of powerful people buying favors and crushing the competition (Tesla) with government help at the cost of the broader market. Still, I got the impression his research was more about efficiently transmitting energy through the air; not harnessing energy that hadn't been produced somewhere. The problem with that is controlling it. The energy would be in an alternate form all over the Earth and you'd have to control every single device that could extract the energy. It had implications of socialism over capitalism on its surface, though it may have just presented some challenges to capitalize on. The Edison powers managed to propagandize it as being extremely dangerous absent any real evidence and there was a sort of VHS vs. Beta battle of electrical standards and the Edison team won it.
I was under the impression that it was actually competitively efficient with transmitting it through all the hardware we use now. Then consider not having to build all that hardware and having the practical benefit of accessing power anywhere and it makes a pretty good case for taking it more seriously. Just imagine how much work has gone into all that infrastructure over the many decades that might not have been necessary! The resources that could have gone into other things!
Anyway, that's my almost-layman's take on it. I say "almost-layman's" because I'm probably more familiar with the science than most people but It's not my area either and I've only grazed the history of Tesla.
Thank you for actually discussing the topic. I probably saw the same thing (Discovery Channel, History Channel, something like that.) Yes, Tesla was obsessed with the idea o transmitting the energy through the air. Of course, you could still transmit the same energy through high-tension wires. High-tension wires (using step-up transformers) are more efficient than moving it as-is through wires, but there are some inefficiencies anyway. Fortunately, the energy could be captured fairly close to the destination, because it's not a hydro-electric dam or something you can't put close to where the power is used.
I agree that it's worth taking a look at again, for the reasons you mentioned, and especially because Tesla was summarily discounted by established people in politics and the electric industry. There are probably applications which have not been applied.
Yes, from your time on the show, I'd suspect your general knowledge is actually very similar to mine (whereas our specialties have been different) and we probably both have the same attraction to the topic without that much in-depth knowledge to be able to "do" a lot about it. Anyway, thanks again for discussing instead of the typical trolly response it's mostly otherwise gotten.
I don't understand what this video is supposed to prove.
It's supposed to be a demonstration of how you can build a device that will keep running indefinitely, without "plugging in to something," until a component fails. This is not to be confused with a "perpetual motion machine" because it is getting energy from the environment around it.
If you go to the web site listed in the comments, you will find that other people have build the same device in response, and that people have actually used the device to
charge other electronic devices. That is, they're capturing and using energy
now. Think of it as similar to a solar cell, only it doesn't need to be in the sun (nor does the sun doesn't need to be shining.)
wind
sun
Don't work all the time. This works all the time. On the large scale, this is a big deal. You can't have a grid that just turns off when the wind stops blowing, or doesn't work at night.
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Topic: Nicola Tesla's Free Energy (Read 6988 times)