3 ms·

Is that Tesla's dream coming true?

• Johnythree 11y ago
  Absolutely not. Tesla may have had a dream, but it was at odds with the laws of Physics. Maxwell laid out the maths and Hertz demonstrated the principles many years before Tesla.
  • njharman 11y ago
    Mathematicians vs engineer. Mathematicians talk, engineers actually try to build stuff. They are both needed. They shouldn't be compared.
• jacquesm 11y ago
  Not really. Tesla's dream was to set up a resonant field around the globe with a few giant base-stations that one could tap into at will to draw power. For many reasons that was an absolutely un-workable proposal, the major ones being that nature put up a roadblock or two on the way to getting that to work on anything but the smallest scale. For one there is this thing called a power-law which required the voltages to be significantly higher than those needed to make a system like this work in a laboratory, the other is the breakdown voltage of the atmosphere, which causes any voltage in excess of this to return to ground, frying whatever it finds in its way (think lightning). It would have made for a hell of a display piece. Of course this does not stop Tesla groupies from claiming the government suppressed the design. On another note: regular radio frequency transmitters put out enough power that so called 'crystal radios' can be powered by the transmitter directly. So in a way 'the system works' but the amounts of power that you can draw from it are minute. Tesla claimed that you could run regular industrial machinery from his technology. There is a funny parallel between the Tesla story and uBeam, the dreams are remarkably similar. 'Wouldn't it be a good thing if wireless power with substantial power transfer existed?'
  • ColinDabritz 11y ago
    I love that the context makes "power law" sounds like anti-competitive regulation, rather than a natural phenomenon.