ATDTDA (1): De Forest and Kimura (29:32-3)

[David Casseres]

Thank you, Monte.  Tesla's woo-woo is a lot of fun, but it's still just a
bunch of woo-woo.

On 1/31/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > Comparing to power transmission without wire,
> > Tesla said sneering that the wireless telegraphy was not at
> > all such a great invention.
>
> The central tenet of the Weird Science cult of Tesla, as I understand it,
> is
> that if you can broadcast *signals*, then you ought to be able to
> broadcast
> *power*. (Science fiction fans might remember the backdrop of broadcast
> power in Heinlein's 1942 story "Waldo".) A little bit of speculation is
> usually followed by a lot of ideologically charged riffing about how that
> would liberate us all from the grasping, evil utility monopolies, about
> how
> the Powers That Be suppressed Tesla's potentially world-changing
> technology,
> etc. etc.
>
> But there is -- and always was-- a boring, quantitative problem right at
> the
> heart of the idea. The strength of any electromagnetic field that is
> omnidirectional (= "broadcast") falls off as the square of the distance
> from
> the source. Sun, lightbulb, KCUF transmitter... visible light, UV, radio,
> X-rays, ... all the same. Picture a series of concentric spherical shells,
> with a given amout of energy passing through a portion of the surface at
> distance X; geometry tells you that at distance 2X the energy flux is 1/4
> as
> much per unit area, at distance 3X it's 1/9th as much, and so on.
>
> For *signals* that's OK. Your radio doesn't care that its little antenna
> is
> intercepting only a kazillionth of a watt from KCUF's 500KW broadcast,
> because what it cares about is the "information* -- the tiny variations in
> amplitude (AM) or frequency (FM). It uses *local* power (battery or wall
> current) to amplify them multi-kazillionfold (see: De Forest et al) and
> drive a speaker. The power can be arbitrarily small; as long as the signal
> it carries is reliably distinguishable from other signals and from ambient
> electronic noise, you're in business.
>
> But for *power* transmission, that's not the case. If you want your
> foot-square Teslantenna (TM) a thousand miles from Wardenclyffe to be able
> to draw say 1 kilowatt, the same-sized antenna at 100 miles would
> experience
> a flux of 100 KW... at 10 miles, 10 megawatts... at 1 mile, a gigawatt...
> Are we seeing some potential environmental issues here? Is it occurring to
> us that while our bodies (and everything else) are effectively indifferent
> to femtowatts of *signals* passing through on the way to far-away
> receivers,
> they would hardly be indifferent to nuke-the-ramen  levels of *power*
> passing through?
>
> When you talk to Tesla cultists about this, you get a lot of jive about
> "ground currents" and "using the Earth as a resonating circuit" and so on.
> Well, yes, between terrestrial and solar electromagnetic fields, lightning
> and auroras and so on, there *are* some big numbers for power involved.
> But
> now we're talking about currents in circuits, aren't we -- no longer about
> "broadcast" at all? And if you want to start manipulating power -- not
> signals -- in circuits involving six sextillion tons of planet with two
> hundred million square miles of surface area, in a magnetosphere of
> billions
> of cubic miles, you're going to need components that are significant
> fractions of that mass, area, and volume. Could run into money.
>
> In his youth and in his prime, Nicola Tesla grasped electromagnetic theory
> and practice far better than I ever will, and accomplished things that
> changed the world. But gradually, along the way, "change the world" took
> priority -- and increasingly in his last decades, whatever bending of the
> science might be necessary to make that possible, so be it.
>
> In other words... fun and titillating as it may be to say "Vibe, Morgan,
> the
> GTE-Siemens Bulb Cabal et al plotted to derail Tesla's efforts and
> discredit
> him as a crackpot"... foax, he really *did* become a crackpot.
>
> -Monte (designated wet blanket)
>
>
>
>
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