Tesla may have talked about ionizing the atmosphere in his earlier patents which required raising the termination of the antenna miles into the atmosphere, but

Tesla may have talked about ionizing the atmosphere in his earlier patents which required raising the termination of the antenna miles into the atmosphere, but it's clear from his later writings, especially "tesla on his work with alternating currents", that later iterations called for preventing the energy from leaking into the atmosphere as much as possible. You can see from the design of the toroid on top of the final proposed magnifying transmitter, which is covered with half spheres to increase the surface area, thus reducing the electrical tension at each point on the surface, reducing the possibility of breakdown. (ionization) Lighting flourescent bulbs with high frequency rf energy is nothing special, and really has nothing to do with serious discussion of tesla. In tesla on his work with ac this is what he refers to as "parlor tricks" along with the opposite spectrum of rf energy, the single extremely large capacitive discharge, which he could vaporize wires and sheets of tinfoil with. Tesla on his work with ac was not available until the mid 90s, and the resurgence of interest in tesla in the 80s was not able to benefit from the information, thus much of the experimentation today hasn't taken into account what tesla actually said. These "parlor tricks" are what the wireless energy charger people are pushing today, and it's laughable. It's not at all what tesla was talking about.