Nexus - 0221 - New Times Magazine-pages

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he transmission of power without wires is not a theory or a mere possibility, as it appears to most people, but a fact demonstrated by me in experiments which have extended for years. Nor did the idea present itself to me all of a sudden, but was the result of a very slow and gradual development and a logical consequence of my investigations which were earnestly undertaken in 1893 when I gave the world the first outline of my system of broadcasting wireless energy for all purposes. In several demonstrative lectures before scientific societies during the preceding three years, I showed that it was not necessary to use two wires in transmitting electrical ener- gy, but that one only might be employed equally well. My experiments with currents of high frequencies were the first ever performed in pub- lic and elicited the keenest interest on account of the possibilities they opened up, and the striking character of the phenomena. Few of the experts familiar with the up-to-date appliances will appreciate the difficulty of my task with the elementary devices I had then at command, as accurate adjustments for resonance had to be made in every experiment. The transmission of energy through a single conductor without return having been found practicable, it occurred to me that possibly even that one wire might be dispensed with and the Earth used to convey the energy from the transmitter to the receiver. Dr Nikola Tesla was once one of the most famous people on the planet. Today he is written out of our scientific and educational textbooks. What did he discover that caused his fall from grace? HIGH FREQUENCY DYNAMO AND "TESLA COIL" Manifestly, currents such as were ordinarily employed in the arts and industries were unsuitable, and I had to devise special generators and transformers for furnishing impulses of the requisite quality. First I perfected high frequency dynamos which were of two types: one with a direct current field excitation, and the other in which the magnet was energised by alternating currents of different phase, producing a rotating magnetic field. Both of these have found employment in connection with my broadcasting wireless system. In the first machine I exhibited, an efficiency of ninety per cent was attained, but it was necessary to run it in hydrogen or rarefied air to minimise the otherwise prohibitive windage loss and deafening noise. In order to overcome the inherent limitations of such machines, I next concentrated my efforts on the perfection of a peculiar transformer consisting of several tuned circuits in inductive relation which received the primary energy from oscillatory discharges of con- densers. This apparatus, originally identified with my name and considered by the leading scientific men my best achievement, is now used in every wireless transmitter and receiv- er throughout the world. It has enabled me to obtain currents of any desired frequency, electromotive force and volume, and to produce a great variety of electrical, chemical, thermal, light and other effects: Roentgen, cathodic and other rays of transcending inten- sities. I have employed it in my investigations of the constitution of matter and radioac- tivity, published from 1896 to 1898 in the Electrical Review in which it was demonstrat- ed, prior to the discovery of radium by Mme Sklodowska and Pierre Curie, that radioac- tivity is a common property of matter and that such bodies emit small particles of various sizes and great velocities, a view which was received with incredulity but finally recog- nised as true. It has been put to innumerable uses and proved in the hands of others a ver- itable lamp of Aladdin. As | think of my earliest coils which were nothing more than scientific toys, the subse- quent development appears to me like a dream. by Dr Nikola Tesla Originally published in Telegraph and Telephone Age 16 October 1927 Reprinted from Borderlands, vol. 1, no. 1 First Quarter 1994 NEXUS ¢ 47 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1994