Although a comprehensive summary of the state of Tesla-inspired research today would be beyond either the scope of this book or the intent of its author, no account of the inventor’s life would be complete without at least some indication of what has become of a few of his major preoccupations. The record, as one might expect, is both mixed and incomplete, but it is no less impressive for that.
To begin, then, with Tesla’s experiments with ball lightning: He had no idea what ball lightning might be useful for when he first encountered it in his Colorado Springs research; to him it was a nuisance, but it demanded an explanation. And so he set about determining the mode of formation of the strange fireballs and learned to produce them artificially.
The technical explanation runs like this: In the highly resonant transformer secondary comprising his magnifying transmitter, the entire energy accumulated in the excited circuit, instead of requiring a quarter period for transformation from static to kinetic, could spend itself in less time, at hundreds of thousands of horsepower. Thus, for example, Tesla produced artificial fireballs by suddenly causing the impressed oscillations to be more rapid than free ones of the secondary. This shifted the point of maximum electrical pressure below the elevated terminal capacity, and a ball of fire would leap great distances.
Yet strangely enough, modern plasma physicists with the best-equipped laboratories, have failed to produce plasmoids with anything near the stability of the true ball-lightning spheres that he created.
Why the fascination with this problem? First, of course, because it is there, an unknown. But second because among other uses, it may hold a vital key in the international race to achieve controlled nuclear fusion—potentially the greatest power source in history. Among those long interested in ball-lightning research have been Peter Kapitza, the great Russian physicist, Lambert Dolphin and his colleagues in the radio physics laboratory at SRI International, Dr. Robert W. Bass of Brigham Young University, and Robert Golka, with whom Bass has collaborated on research.
Golka, a Massachusetts physicist, Tesla disciple, and lightning experimenter, has pursued the ephemeral fireball with the fervor of a hunter of snarks. Like Tesla in Colorado, he has done his research alone in a remote western laboratory in the Utah salt flats, and like Tesla, he has struggled to win the kind of federal support that usually goes only to enormous institutions or corporations.
In the largest hangar at the far end of the ghost base at Wendover, Utah, which was built by the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, big spotlights are often burning as Golka conducts lightning tests. Here, under tightest security in the 1940s, the B-29 Enola Gay was housed and outfitted for delivering the first atomic bombs to Hiroshima.
Golka made two trips to the Tesla Museum to pore over the inventor’s then unpublished notes and concentrated on replicating as exactly as he could in the old air base hangar the magnifying transmitter that Tesla had built in 1899 when investigating the lightning storms of Pike’s Peak.
“He [Tesla] was ‘way ahead of anything we have today in the equipment he built,” Golka says. “Such as the high-powered switches and spark gap switches. The knowledge has been lost; we don’t know how he did it. Some of it was in the diaries, but he kept much of this stuff in his head.”
Golka built a magnifying transmitter at his “Project Tesla” that would discharge 22 million volts, creating almost twice as powerful a chain-lightning storm as the maestro himself had produced at Colorado Springs.
The relevance of ball lightning to fusion research has to do with the problem of confining plasma. The heart of the most common type of experimental fusion reaction involves taking isotopic hydrogen gas and both accelerating and superheating it until the hydrogen nuclei fuse to make helium nuclei, releasing, in the process, staggering amounts of energy. Along the way, while the hydrogen is being charged with vast amounts of kinetic and thermal energy, it enters an imperfectly understood material state known as plasma.* In the penultimate stages of the process, before fusion begins, the besetting problem is to maintain the plasma’s coherence, to confine it within some kind of invisible electromagnetic “bottle.”†
Since the strongest geometric shape is a sphere, Golka believes that ball lightning offers the best potential for containment of the unstable mass. He describes the odd lightning as “a glowing sphere of a variety of colors, a half-inch in diameter or as big as a grapefruit,” and resembling an onion in its “layers and layers of alternate charged particles, positive and negative.” It may bounce along through buildings, fall into water and set it boiling; and sometimes, as at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah, it may knock out the most sophisticated electronic equipment. In the summer of 1978, with the use of CO2 laser beams, he finally managed to produce “bead” lightning, which he believes to be a form of ball lightning, and to photograph it in sequential frames.2
He then sought support from the U.S. Department of Energy for a major program of research for which he proposed to use a device called a pyrosphere, employing five laser beams to create thermonuclear fusion. In a “Fireball Fusion Reactor” only nonradioactive helium is created and, according to Golka, mathematical models indicate it can reach and hold temperatures above a billion degrees.
He also proposed to the Air Force another Teslian concept, a charged particle beam, but again one designed to employ laser technology. Such beam guns, he believes, would have a range of 6,000 miles and could melt and destroy ICBM-type missiles in the air. With a Tesla coil three times the size of his combined coils, Golka believed he could generate 200 million volts of electricity.
But he inherited the usual Teslian problems of a loner, and as he said, “The walls fall in on me when I work for corporations.” His work reached a point where it could no longer progress with improvised equipment, but called for enormous investments. His competitors were large corporations and leading universities engaged in the nuclear-fusion race; and even some of the latter were being cut off from their federal grants. They too were deeply into laser technology, although Golka claims his system is different and unique. By no means the only scientist to have attempted to carry forward Tesla’s work with ball lightning, he undoubtedly has been one of the most singleminded.*
Russia’s Kapitza, who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics with Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of America for his work in magnetism and the behavior of matter at extremely low temperatures, acknowledges his debt to Tesla. “The efficient generation of super-high-frequency oscillations and their conversion back to direct-current electrical energy,” he writes, “discloses possible solutions to the problem of transmitting electrical energy… in free space. The transmission setup will, of course, be similar to that already considered but, instead of a wave guide, a highly directional beam must be used, which, as is well-known, only at short wavelengths will diverge little. Such a setup for the transmission of electrical energy, firstly thought by N. Tesla many years ago, has already been discussed. . . . Although . . . possible in principle, it is tied up with the solution of a series of complicated engineering problems and therefore it can be implemented in practice only in such special situations in which other methods of energy transmission are inapplicable (for example, when energy must be supplied to a satellite).”3
In this field of wireless energy transmission, so directly concerned with the space race, there is progress nearer home. Richard Dickinson, who heads the Microwave Power Transmission project for Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the desert near Barstow, California, traces his inspiration to the early work of Tesla. The concept of bringing electricity to Earth from an orbiting solar-power system via microwaves is daring, costly, romantic, and thoroughly in the style of the maestro.
“We beamed power from our transmitter at Goldstone a distance of one mile,” Dickinson said of the NASA project initiated in the mid-seventies. “All of the microwave energy that fell within our target (of which we could only collect a portion with our existing apparatus), we converted 82.5 percent to useful direct cu
rrent. Thirty-four thousand watts of direct current output carried a distance of one mile. We are well pleased. The next step is to look further into the technology and needs of the satellite power system of the future.”4
William C. Brown of the Raytheon Company, who developed the rectenna used in this microwave-power research, also attributes the idea of sending electricity by radio waves to Tesla’s pioneering in the fundamentals of radio broadcasting and wireless power transmission.
Theoretically, a city the size of New York could be supplied with five billion watts on a winter day by enormous satellite structures in the sky that would orbit synchronously with Earth at a height of 22,300 miles. But admittedly, the cost of such floating power stations would be many billions of dollars, and they would be highly vulnerable to enemy killer satellites in the event of war.
Brookhaven National Laboratory, located just to the northeast of Tesla’s old Wardenclyffe site at Shoreham, also feels a close link with the inventor through the advanced high-energy work being conducted at the laboratory. In 1976 it paid homage to him in a ceremony, and the Yugoslav government sent a plaque to be placed at the still-standing Wardenclyffe laboratory.
Canada, too, has long been a bastion of Tesla Energy System advocates, and because of the country’s rich hydroelectric sources, through-the-Earth transmission—if it worked—could be a boon to areas of power shortage.
But—will it work? Several projects have been planned, and some partially implemented, in Canada, central Minnesota, and most recently in Southern California—to “pump” hydroelectric power wirelessly through the Earth to an area of need, employing the Tesla system as it is understood.5 The U.S. Department of Energy has often been asked to fund projects based on Tesla’s system.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the system ever worked for Tesla, and none that it could work for anyone else. One of the inventor’s problems was that he improperly extended into the electromagnetic domain fluid and fluid-mechanical analogies. Tesla’s patent No. 787,412 provides for the Earth to be excited by a carefully valued wavelength to establish a standing wave condition. Tesla believed the propagation path fell along a diameter. But according to much knowledge developed since 1899, the propagation path would not be along a diameter but, rather, along an ellipsoidal arc somewhere between the diameter and the spherical surface.
A fundamental aspect of wave propagation of power is that no power is transmitted if the wave is standing; power is transmitted solely with a traveling component. Boundary layer propagation, i.e., the mode of lossless propagation of waves at the boundary of two differing media (such as earth and sky), is a viable concept. However, the boundary plane must be smooth and the waves must be properly launched. At the frequencies Tesla was using, such launching apparatus would be an enormous structure. In examining the photographs of his experimental station at Colorado Springs, it is apparent to experts that he did not employ apparatus essential to the launching of such waves.
Tesla probably was mistaken at Colorado Springs in his interpretation of the lightning storms which he observed traveling away from him (eastwardly) across the plains, producing maxima and minima effects upon his instruments. This he interpreted as standing waves being set up in the Earth by the traveling storm, with the crests of the waves passing through his location as the storms advanced. It is believed he was seeing an interference effect caused by the reradiating surface of the frontal range of mountains to the east of his station. The results would have been the same on his instruments.
Dr. Wait, formerly senior scientist at the Environmental Research Laboratories, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in Colorado, describes himself as a “firm skeptic” of the Tesla theory. “The concept that electromagnetic energy penetrates ‘through the earth,’” he says, “is valid only if the frequency is sufficiently low and if the distances are small. It’s all tied up with ‘skin-effect’ phenomena; that means that the field is confined to the surface of a good conductor as in metallic wave guide.”6
Dr. Wait even goes so far as to suggest that Tesla never really accepted the fact that electromagnetic waves could transport energy through the air. “Instead he thought of the earth itself as a conveyor and also thought of the possibility of a return conductor at heights of ‘15 miles above sea level.’ The parallel of this idea to the earth-ionosphere wave guide at extremely low frequencies is striking (see IEEE Journals of Oceanic Engineering, Vol. OE-2, No. 2, April 1977). Also his proposed resonance of the system might be interpreted as the first disclosure of the earth-ionosphere cavity oscillations that have been associated from the early 1960s with W. O. Schumann, N. Christofilos, and J. Galejs, among others.”7
With respect to wireless communication, the U.S. Navy’s Project Sanguine/Seafarer of recent years has evolved from Tesla’s Colorado experiments. In a thermonuclear war, conventional radio communication probably would be disrupted at certain heights and wavelengths. America’s atomic submarine fleet might then be without a means of receiving messages. The U.S. Navy, seeing this danger, turned back to Tesla’s nineteenth-century suggestion of employing 10 Hz signals (ELF or extra-low frequency), to circle the globe and penetrate the deepest waters.
One of the headier speculations concerning Teslian science is a suggestion that Russia has been employing his theories on weather modification to interfere with the jet stream, causing droughts and extremes of hot and cold weather. However unlikely the charge, it is true that Tesla did do a good deal of theorizing (but very little experimentation) on weather control.
He wrote, for example, on the possible use of radio-controlled missiles and explosives to break up tornadoes and the use of “lightning of a certain kind” to trigger rainfall. Of the former he said, “It would not be difficult to provide special automata for this purpose, carrying explosive charges, liquid air or other gas, which could be put into action, automatically or otherwise, and which would create a sudden pressure or suction, breaking up the whirl. The missiles themselves might be made of material capable of spontaneous ignition.” His proposal included a lengthy mathematical formula.8
As with much modern scientific exploration inspired by the maestro, the returns are still not in on weather changing. Scientist Frederic Jueneman, “Innovative Notebook” columnist for Industrial Research magazine, calls attention to the fact that Dr. Robert Helliwell and John Katsufrakis of Stanford University’s Radio Science Laboratory, demonstrated that very low frequency radio waves can cause oscillations in the magnetosphere. With a 20-km antenna and a 5 kHz transmitter in the Antarctic, they found that the earth’s magnetosphere could be modulated to cause high-energy particles to cascade into our atmosphere, and by turning the signal on or off they could start or stop the energy flow.
“The theoretical implication suggested by their work,” says Jueneman, “is that global weather control can be attained by the injection of relatively small ‘signals’ into the Van Allen belts—something like a super-transistor effect.”
But Jueneman’s speculations go further and are eminently worthy of Tesla: “If Tesla’s resonance effects, as shown by the Stanford team, can control enormous energies by miniscule triggering signals, then by an extension of this principle we should be able to affect the field environment of the very stars in the sky. . . . With godlike arrogance, we someday may yet direct the stars in their courses.”9
No biography of Tesla would be complete without mention of his bright following of amateur physicists who build Tesla coils for their personal research, endeavoring to replicate his electrical magic, and the young inventors who pore over his basic patents and still find inspiration from them.
Durlin C. Cox, a Wisconsin physicist who has pondered Tesla’s published writings, has built two Tesla coils, the second of 10 million volts. The reasons: “My own personal interest in high voltage engineering, especially in the field of high frequency rf transformers; to further my studies on the laboratory production of ball lightning; and because the University of Wisconsin at Ma
dison asked me to submit a Tesla coil in their bi-annual Engineering Exposition in the spring of 1981.” He and friends built one Tesla coil for a Hollywood studio for lightning effects, which has been a common use of them.
Electrical engineer Leland Anderson has summarized the major points in design that a coil builder might gain from reading Tesla’s Colorado Springs Notes:
1. The Q’s of the primary and secondary must be as high as practicable.
2. The Q’s of the primary and secondary should be equal.
3. The length of the secondary winding should be one-quarter of the effective operating wavelength.
4. The technique of using an “extra coil” tank circuit (or a variation of it) in the secondary to magnify the voltage should be used. “With these criteria in mind,” he says, “the builder will find that hundreds of turns are not necessary for the secondary winding to achieve high voltages.”
Last but not least, what about Tesla’s death/disintegrator rays? Were his concepts sound? If they were found useful by the U.S. Army Air Force research team, whose top-secret project was rumored to have had the code name “Project Nick,” it may be safely assumed that instead of being “destroyed,” as reported, his papers are still highly classified.