World Wireless System

By the end of 1900 he had convinced banker J. P. Morgan to finance construction of a wireless station (eventually sited at Wardenclyffe) based on his ideas intended to transmit messages across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea.

[6][7] He duplicated those experiments and then went on to improve Hertz's wireless transmitter, developing various alternator apparatus and his own high tension transformer, known as the Tesla coil.

The first experiment was the operation of light and motive devices connected by a single wire to one terminal of a high frequency induction coil, performed during the 1891 New York City lecture at Columbia College.

The wireless energy transmission effect involves the creation of an electric field between two metal plates, each being connected to one terminal of an induction coil's secondary winding.

[21] Between 1895 and 1898, he constructed a large resonance transformer in his New York City lab called a magnifying transmitter to test his earth conduction theories.

Upon returning to New York City from Colorado Springs in 1900 he sought venture capitalists to fund what he viewed as a revolutionary wireless communication and electric power delivery system using the Earth as the conductor.

Almost as soon as the contract was signed Tesla decided to scale up the facility to include his ideas of terrestrial wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's radio based telegraph system.

[32] Tesla told a friend his plans included the building of more than thirty transmission-reception stations near major population centers around the world,[36] with Wardenclyffe being the first.

If plans had moved forward without interruption, the Long Island prototype would have been followed by a second plant built in the British Isles, perhaps on the west coast of Scotland near Glasgow.

Each of these facilities was to include a large magnifying transmitter of a design loosely based on the apparatus assembled at the Colorado Springs experimental station in 1899.

[37] Tesla's description of his wireless transmission ideas in 1895 includes its humanitarian uses in bringing abundant electrical energy to remote underdeveloped parts of the world, as well as fostering closer communications amongst nations.

[16] In 1909 Tesla stated: He also held beliefs that high potential electric current flowing through the upper atmosphere could make it glow, providing night time lighting for transoceanic shipping lanes.

[54] Tesla made a claim in a 1916 statement to attorney Drury W. Cooper that in 1899, he collected quantitative transmission-reception data at a distance of about 10 miles (16 km).

The Wardenclyffe Power Plant prototype, intended by Nikola Tesla to be a "World Wireless" telecommunications facility.
Illustration of Tesla in 1891 showing two partially evacuated tubes illuminated by a rapidly alternating electrostatic field created between two metallic sheets. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
Tesla sits in front of a spiral coil from a high-voltage transformer at his East Houston St., New York laboratory in 1896
Drawing from the 1897 U.S. patent 649,621 "Apparatus for Transmission of Electrical Energy" (along with U.S. patent 645,576 ), shows Tesla's concept of transmitting electrical energy through the upper atmosphere via terminals supported by balloons tethered at up to 35,000 feet above sea level.
In Colorado Springs, a Tesla coil receiver tuned in resonance with a Tesla coil transmitter illuminates a 10-watt incandescent lamp. [ 24 ] The distance from the transmitter's ground plate to the point of reception is 1,938 feet (591 m). [ 25 ]
Tesla's explanation of the wireless power system in the 1919 issue of "Electrical Experimenter" with the analogy that pulsing electric power through the Earth would be similar to pumping air into a ball
1925 artist's conception of what Tesla's wireless power transmission system might have looked like in the future, powering aircraft and lighting the city in the background.