nikola tesla was geniuous i think he used the potential differences from a circuit sach a kapasitor and amplified the voltage due to his needs as a child i thought that it will help to get free energy to prevent wars but it wont help our economy because alats of people work to produce devices that uses oil now we will destroy our economy if we make our cars or home runing with free energy free energy is good if one person uses it for himself but not for publicity the gowemants has right and did it right

1.) His device had an antenna.
So it basically absorbed the energy.

2.) The energy produced did not need to be put through a 60 Hz inverter.
So his device absorbed 60 Hz electricity from the surrounding power lines.

However, this is impossible if you calculate how much of those 60 Hz radiations intersect his antenna on average throughout the New York countryside. So it induced the energy somehow, so that more of the signal routes through the antenna than would otherwise intersect it.

Is this possible somehow? Maybe. Let's just begin with assuming that he did do it.

What occurs to me is the attracting of the photons in the signal being received. This can be accomplished if a massive voltage spike is generated right at the time that the photons are most polarized.

Here is such a device, and it uses 12 vacuum tubes:
http://www.pyrazo.com/

Five minutes of googling produces this. The nephew who supposedly took the ride and relayed the story later doesn't exist. Tesla never had a nephew named Peter Savo. The story is a fabrication.

Also as stated elsewhere, the tubes listed (70-L-7) were not produced until around 1939, despite this supposedly happening in 1931.
Posted by: Pixel J

*While there is no corroborated evidence that Tesla ever built an electric automobile, he is known to have encouraged others to pursue the idea of electric propulsion. He defined this as the use of an engine to generate electricity which was transmitted to an electric motor used to turn a wheel or propeller, instead of turning them by direct mechanical means. If this sounds familiar you're right, as the idea has recently seen a revival by the automobile industry and others under the name "hybrid electric drive."

The earliest reference to electric propulsion is found in the "Problem of Increasing Human Energy" (see online text) in which Tesla advocated the use of an "electric transmission" to drive ships and locomotives. Late in 1904 he extended this "view of future motive power" to include "the application of electricity to the propulsion of automobiles." [Tesla Said, pp. 77-78]  There can be little doubt his best explanation of the principles involved and the rational behind their application appeared in the Feb. 25, 1917 edition of the New York Herald under the headline "Electric Drive for Battle Ships." The concept was adopted by the U.S. Navy, eventually including a variety of different size vessels from destroyer escort to battleship.

One-man show Mike Daisey has a fabulous monologue titled Monopoly! that I had the pleasure of viewing recently in Seattle. It delves into the history of Tessla and the battle of AC (his) vs. DC (Edison's).

As Edison had already started an industry and had plans to continue building out infrastructure across the U.S. and Tessla in fact did intend on making electricity generated "free"...Edison "won," even though his power was burning up the occasional house or electric trolley car. Fascinating stuff, and Mike weaves it into modern day politics and monopolies beautifully.

You can learn more about his show at his site here: http://www.mikedaisey.com/. Not only is it interesting, but its absolutely laugh-out-loud hysterical.

I can't comment on if Tessla did or didn't power that automobile, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had and if the idea was squashed because it 1) conflicted with existing business models/infrastructure and 2) didn't generate cash for anyone, thus not making it a business proposition businesses or government had any self-interest in bringing to light.

This all said, a modern-day aerospace engineer is working on a an engine powered entirely via electromagnetic radiation, and in so doing is generating much interest and debate.

Of course, he has many of the same hurdles to face as did Tessla in terms of politics, but as long as someone can make or save their own money with it he stands a chance of success (and if, of course, it proves to work in a sustainable fashion). To learn more see the recent New Scientist article about it at http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125681.400 (unfortunately you can't read the f/t unless you subscribe, but its a great publication)! An article you can access f/t is at http://www.e4engineering.com/Articles/295931/Microwave%20engine%20gets%20a%20boost.htm.

Tesla was one of the world’s most prolific inventors who received over 800 different patents in his life. Only Edison holds more.
Posted by: Joseph Lado

We do not have whatever he had developed because he got angry at the "doubters" and destroyed it. Yes, you can speculate that he really had invented something. Seems unlikely though. The only evidence we have of the 90 mph drive and other supposed accomplishments is hardly believable.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, there is no vast conspiracy to keep disruptive technology secret. Certainly industries do fight disruptive technology. Witness the death of the electric streetcar in American cities. (Many smaller Japanese cities, by the way, still have them.) But their efforts are hardly hidden.

Any new technological breakthrough that can be proven makes it to the public view. It may not survive there, for reasons that often are not rational or fair. But new technology cannot be seized and hidden by the oil companies, the electric companies, or the car makers. That just does not work.
Posted by: paul peterson

www.freenewarticles.com
Posted by: Garret Von Kallberg

Make a simple electromagnetic and suspend a metal object from it - just heavy enough so that anything heavier will fall. Measure the current and voltage to compute the power used in the electromagnet.

Now, replace the electromagnet with a permanent magnet - come back a week, month or year later. Is the object still suspended? Where did the power come from?

So, the problem is not whether free energy exists, but rather how to access it.

Actually, free energy is semantically incorrect in this context - the energy is coming from an as yet unexplained source.

Check out a series of books that begin with a monetary slant and are working towards the scientific discrepancies in our society...Best wishes to all.

www.axiomhouse.com/EyeofthePyramid/main.htm
Posted by: Terry Krohn

Posted by: Garrett M

In later life he was surrounded by a contingent of opportunists who used his name to sell securities in fraudulent industrial schemes. It is terribly unfortunate, for the man invented the hydroelectric power plant, much of AC power transmission, the first AC electric motors, and participated in the solution of thousands of smaller problems necessary to make the great system actually work.

The Tesla coil was essentially a stunt device, and Tesla freely admitted this. He invented it for exhibitions he would perform at county fairs and other gatherings: in the days before research grants there were few dignified ways for an inventor to raise money.

We know little about his later research, for he refused to publish his ideas and results. About all we can surmise is that nothing much that he tried after his triumphs at Westinghouse ever worked.

There is no free energy. This is not a misfortune, because while our resources may be limited, our cleverness in utilizing and maximizing them is not.

M Kinsler, Lancaster, OH
Posted by: Mark Kinsler

Wireless energy in the form of longitudinal electric waves is excluded by the official physics theories. Therefore I explored the theory of electrodynamcs, known as Maxwell/Lorentz theory, and found it contains very unscientific assumptions about 'gauge conditions'. Then I was able to generalise this theory by adding an extra scalar field, such that Tesla's longitudinal electric wave can be understood SCIENTIFICALLY as a longitudinal electro-scalar wave. Next, we can speculate about the exact form of the ZeroPointEnergy (ZPE=vacuum energy): is it a background spectrum of transversal electro-magnetic waves, or is it a particle zoo of "virtual" particles of mainly electro-positron pairs (among many other types of virtual particles) popping in- and out of existance. I believe there is a connection between Tesla's longitudinal electric wave and the ZPE. ZPE can be tapped by ordering the chaotic wave-phases resulting into a coherent and AMPLIFIED electric field.

Conlusion: never in Tesla's life he became insane or over-eccentric and bizarre. On the other hand, the official science of physics is heavily manipulated in order to conceal the reality of ZPE tapping technology. The over-simplified Maxwell/Lorentz theory (just throw overboard Tesla's experiments, and also the exact experiments by Ampere, Gauss, Weber and Faraday, that were in DISAGREEMENT with this official theory) is just one example. The theories by the notorious plagiarist known as Albert Einstein are another example, where all light-speed measurements that proved a NON NILL result were thrown out of the window. Etc, etc...
Posted by: Koen van Vlaenderen

Perhaps he set up a smaller tower nearby and drove the car around in the vicinity of the tower. This seems more likely than tapping zero-energy sources, etc.
Posted by: Jim Beyer

Here's the URL for submitting story suggestions:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/about/submit.html
Posted by: Bill Moore

Sorry John, wrong. Michaelson-Morley failed to prove the aether exists. Big difference. The lack of evidence, is not evidence of lack.
Posted by: Jerry Koniecki

I have read the story of Tesla’s Pierce-Arrow before and I included it in my thesis. Again, the story came with articles about how it wasn’t true and that Tesla, though a proven genius, was crazy as a loon. (Funny aside, the president of the American Battery Consortium said the same thing about Stanford Ovshinsky, when he announced that his NIMH batteries could last 75 thousand miles in an automobile) I would have put the story off if it was anyone else, but this story is about Nicola Tesla.

I started thinking, if this were true what do we know about the planets and broadcast energy that Tesla could have understood way before anyone else? I was playing with a crystal radio one day and thought a crystal radio is powered by the energy that comes down the antenna. No batteries needed. Then one day I was looking at pictures of the huge parabolic antennas that are used as radio telescopes. It turns out that every star and every planet has its own radio signal that is many times more powerful than their visual light. Planets and stars broadcast radio waves! Then it hit me. Isn’t the earth a planet? Doesn’t the earth broadcast a radio signal? Could Tesla have found the frequency of the Earth and like powering a crystal radio channeled that energy to power an automobile? I don’t know, but someday I am going to get a big spool of copper wire and a discarded cardboard tube from a carpet store and try like heck to find that big radio signal from Mother Earth that she is broadcasting across the galaxy. I think Tesla knew about it and found it.

Posted by: Joseph Lado

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/emerson_dj311.html

I've pondered this story in the past and another possibility I came up with for the antenna was that he was receiving a reference sound. John Keely was reported to use specific sounds to create free energy in the late 1800s and back then there wasn't an electronic method for creating the sounds needed so Keely had to do it mechanically. But in the timeframe of this story there would have been an electronic method. With 1930s electronics it probably would have been difficult and take a lot of equipment to generate the sounds needed in the car and Tesla might have felt it was easier to generate the reference sound in a lab nearby and receive it in the car by radio. That would explain the antenna.

If this is true making the needed sounds today would be easy (assuming you know what they are) using digital technology available on any PC.

Tons of information on John Keely is available here: http://www.svpvril.com/
Posted by: Rick Jaworski

Think about it: could a dozen tubes even handle the power for the electric motor that powered the car?
Posted by: Brian Miller

Now there is nothing saying the input source would HAVE to be nominal line current - any oscillating source would work, including received radio waves, so long as a current could be induced from the oscillations. Light, for example, could not be used without a transducer not available to Tesla, and sound - while it could theoretically be used - would require some kind of mechanical diaphram (like a microphone) to generate an electrical signal.

But this runs into limitations in two major areas for practical application. One is the power source itself. Like any transforming technology, you can't get more power out than you can put in, and tube technology is not particularly efficient, as compared to modern semi-conducter devices or even things like step-up or step-down transformers. And even though tube technology, as compared to modern electronics, is considered 'high power,' tetrodes of this type cannot possibly deliver the kind of DC current required to move a 4,000 pound automobile.

The second problem area for this tube is in frequency response. While it might function adequately for 60 Hertz line oscillations, and even possibly in the lower radio frequencies, it is also true that to couple the power from a half-wave recifier to a DC sink, the device must track the frequency of the signal. Since the amount of energy delivered per unit of time is dependent on both signal strength and frequency, it correlates that the higher the frequency, the more energy available to be delivered over any given distance from the source and amount of time allowed. The tube is simply not 'fast enough' to track a high-powered radio frequency, let alone a signal that could possibly deliver some relative degree of power - microwaves and beyond.

And all this without even considering several other factors, for example like the tube's 'heaters' - the warming current required to heat up and maintain the tube at its operating temperature in the first place, which alone would require more energy than could be derived from a low frequency wave.

So, sorry, ladies and gentlemen, a recifier like this could power something like an old time radio, or something similar in today's world - a printer perhaps, or a portable TV. To get more power, one COULD possibly gang together a very large number of these devices, but the resulting size would be enormous, and the heat it would produce be a very difficult problem. You all remember the stories about the first computers filling an entire room (and have less processing power than a modern calculator)? This class of technology is the major reason 'why.'

Posted by: Donald Worthington

There are people with inventions based on Tesla's reasearch that work and our government will not patent. The other side is the big companies buying the inventions to keep them off the market. I don't buy off on the conspearicy therory's but Ask your self why one of Edisons light bulbs is still burning in Menlo park NJ and we have to buy them every few years.

As far as Einstines work goes he was wrong about a number of things and spent the last part of his life disguarding quantum physics that would have provided him with the answers he was looking for but he couldn't get past the 4th dimention and became stuck in his closed minded paridyme. Edison did the same thing with AC that Tesla was working on. Looks like Tesla was open to any posibility and since the government broke into his safe to get his inventions something must have been of interest. Personally I would like to hear about how Tesla's technolgy ties into the Philadelphia Experiment. Tesla..Way ahead of his time. D
Posted by: Drew Markulin

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While Tesla was a genius, you should be careful about where you get information. In the article cited, A.C. Green suggests that the cause of the electric car would have been greatly enhanced had a generator been installed to 'put a small charge back into the batteries as the car moved... thereby increase[ing] its operating range' Yes, that is suggesting that perpetual motion is possible. The author shows a complete lack of understanding of thermodynamics, and with that wild assertion, I have little faith in the quality of the rest of the article. 10/Mar/2007

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It is called regenative breaking and is used by all modern computer controlled electric cars. It was not described as perpetual motion as you read into it.
Posted by: John Beaman