I think, we don't really know how far he actually got. His papers...uh, disappeared...

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Very cheap energy, perhaps, or wire free.

Tesla is one of my heroes. He made Edison rich and then Edison royally screwed Tesla. Tesla then developed technology that beat Edison, and then Edison screwed Tesla again. One of the greatest engineering minds of all time - but he died alone and pennyless. I don't want to *be* Tesla - but I sure wish I had known him!

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He didn't get lucky on anything, or at least not more than any other scientist. He may have become a bit obsessed later in life but that doesn't mean that any of his early accomplishments can be attributed to something other than intelligence.

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No completely free. Once the engine was started by a charge it would run off magnets which pulsed it... perhaps similar to how the LHC operates?

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Correct. AC is what allowed us to power the country. Based on what I have read, DC has way too much of a capacitance in its transmission of power. That made power transmission extremely inefficient. Tesla and his AC push was a revelation. Edison was a dick and got all the mainstream credit by screwing Tesla when he was an apprentice so to speak.

Nikola Tesla was one of the smartest scientists ever. He was an unappreciated genius, and in a just world, his popularity, reputation, and respect would far eclipse Edison. His research on resonances was brilliant.

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Absolutely, I agree. I still believe he was somewhat mad though, coupled with his genius he came out with some world changing stuff.


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I'm unsure as to his exact design but I've seen these things before. They're rubbish. Free energy does not exist at all.
It's got nothing to do with the LHC either. The LHC uses magnets to accelerate charged particles around a ring. Tesla's invention (attempts to) use magnets to oppose each other and spin.

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Not yet. There are people who are working to make that a reality, but for now there is just too much power at once for it to be safely harnessed.

I think one of the worst examples of how far Edison was willing to go to discredit AC power during the War of Currents was when he funded the development of execution by using an AC-powered electric chair, including filming the electrocution of a Coney Island circus elephant and then tried to get the human execution method to be known as being "Westinghoused". Edison was a piece of work.

And who invented radio? I'll bet 90% of the people who would even give an answer would say "Marconi". After all, Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1909 for his contributions to wireless communications. But, in 1943, the US Supreme Court ruled that Tesla's invention & patents predated Marconi's. Unfortunately, that ruling came a few months after Tesla's death. Tesla should have shared in the vast fortunes made from radio - but he received nothing.

Maybe it was for the best he was poor. Some of the best artists are starving, and ones who get rich get fat and lazy, and therefore stop all further contributions to society

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I was going to mention the thing with the elephant. There is a 10 second video of it floating around somewhere.

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There isn't much point. Lightning is powerful stuff but only exists for a very short time so the energy you can obtain from it isn't high at all. That coupled with the nature of the power grid and the inefficiency of storing the power and rendering it suitable for transmission across the grid means that you'd lose far more money then you'd make from lightning.

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How about using some completely different method for extracting some of the energy from lightning. For example, using the instantaneous heat generated at the point of the lightning strike to drive some sort of thermodynamic generation system. Since energy in lightning is "free", you don't necessarily need to recover the electrical potential directly to have it be worthwhile. No?

Maybe there are also other aspects to a lightning strike that could be useful - the pressure differential caused by the shock wave, a large amount of x-rays, magnetic induction, etc.

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This isn't true. There is a lot of potential in lightning. There is a huge amount of energy in a single bolt and when you consider the thousands of bolts of lightning that hit talk buildings every year that is a ton of energy that is just put straight into the ground. The problem with lightning is that it is such a huge amount of power that it wouldn't be possible at this time to try to trap it in batteries or any other method of storing or dealing with electricity.

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I will never understand the crazy conspiracy ideas that get latched onto Tesla. The man did a lot of great inventions, the least of which his contributions to AC technology helped it become a commercially viable means of power transmission. But the laws that govern electromagnetism have been around for 130 years. Tesla was at the infancy of research and development around electromagnetics. So it is not surprising that some of his ideas and inventions are very important, but a lot of other ideas would have gone nowhere. Wireless power transmission does not work, it is very inefficient. I do not blame Tesla for looking into it, after all, Marconi did not prove the ability for long range radio transmissions until the early 1900's. So he, and other scientists of the time, were looking at a very early field. We know now, after over a 100 years of research into antennas and transmission, that it is not a very feasible idea. There are products that do it on a small scale today, but nothing like what Tesla wanted.