What this patent is commonly claimed to be about but is not about
- perpetual motion
- zero point energy
- harvesting atmospheric electricty
What this patent actually describes
- harvesting ionising radiation and cosmic galactic radiation for power
- demonstrating how the effect can be amplified by using different excitation sources
How does Tesla's approach differ from typical atmopheric electricity harvesting attempts
- Firstly it's harvesting radiant energy, not static charge
- Tesla actually powers his unit with ionising radiation in lab conditions
- Atmospheric electricity attemps harvest positive charge. Tesla's set up can collect positive or negative charge by supplying a reference voltage on the "ground" side of the capacitor. But if you gather positive charge, you will also gather atmospheric electricity just because it's there.
- Tesla knew how to build high voltage capacitors, he said that his set-up will charge a capactor to failure unless the power is periodically drained
Short-N-Sweet theory of opperation If you expose a conductor to ionising radiation and you attach it to one terminal of a capacitor and provide a reference voltage that can supply or recieve electrons, like earth ground or atmospheric electricity, charge will continuously gather on the surface of the plate and in the capacitor until the charge is removed or an arc-discharge circuit failure occurs.
If you do it outside, you will collect cosmic galactic radiation, if that's you're goal, the higher the altitude, the greater the energy density.
How can you build one at home for dirt cheap
- First roll your own capactor by layering plastic wrap and alternately stagered layers of aluminum foil such that a little aluminum sticks off opposite sides of the plastic wrap. The longer the layer the better. The more layers the better. The tigher you roll it up, the better. Tesla didn't have the luxury of foil and thin film plastic, lucky us.
- Get high voltage hookup wire, not house wire, not extension wire, something that can handle kilovolts
- get a smoot metal thing of some desciption to act at the collector and polish it, the more surface area the better
- get a non-conductive pole to mount everything on, the longer the better
- get a ground rod, or something to act like one.
- Mount the collector at the end of the pole
- Mount the capacitor near the bottom of the pole
- Pound in the pole and ground rod in and connect the collector to one side of the capacitor and the ground rod to the other side
- Use some more wire and nuts to make a spark gap 1/3rd of a cm to act as a safety and allow the circuit to peridically disharge if no other drain is provided.
Interesting write up. I have been meaning to look into this more.
IMO it's like a crystal radio.
You can build a radio that needs no batteries.
Not really. The artificial power sources prove it as well.
This is more like a solar panel than anything else, it just happens to catch completely different frequencies of EMR than a typical solar panel and, because it can capture cosmic rays, it continues to work at night.
It also happens to capture atmospheric electricity if you use a ground reference, but you could use an aerial reference instead and collect the opposite polarity of charge.
Really not a radio, more like a solar panel that keeps working at night.
Like the static you hear from a crystal radio.
Something is powering the static.
No.
A crystal radio is not picking or working on static charge like that. It's working on inductive, oscillatory charge. With a crystal radio you make a crystal vibrate by applying oscilating charge to the crystal and use that to produce sound (regular radio replace the crystal with a speaker and amplification circuit)
This is completely different, radio frequencies won't give this any power at all what-so-ever.
This is works on the principles of ionisation, not RF transmission.
This is why Tesla recommended highly polished or amalgamated surface area to give the largest and best possible surface for ionising radiation to interact with.
This is a solar panel. Albeit a very different looking one, It also happens to be able to run on cosmic radiation and, for the simple fact that atmospheric charge exists and is present at the collector plate, atmospheric electricity in the form of ions not radio waves so it keeps running after sun down.
It runs better in daytime with direct sunlight, but continues to run after sundown. It's a really cool solar panel.
The fun occurs when you get a really high tower, insulated tower, or some other way of getting hundreds or thousands of feet into the air. The higher you go, the larger the added effect from the atmospheric electricity.
At 400 feet, the air is ~12,000 volts compared to the ground. All objects seek equilibrium with their environment. So if you stick a plate up there, there might not be a lot of current, but you collect it at 12,000 volts so if you have 20 milliamps you can step that down to 120 volts and get at least an amp or two at 120 volts....
For free, indeffinitely as long as the sun continues to shine, with zero extra work involved.
Add in the effects from the ionising radiation and galactic rays and you get a little more power.
It's not a super amount of power, but it's functionally unlimited and all you have to do is set up the structre to grab it.
It also will have a significantly longer operational lifetime than traditional solar.
Imagine if you had a solid ground connection at the top of a sky scraper and then you stuck a a few telephone poles end, on end (use wood or plastic not to drag the ground field with the pole) and then a giant, polished, hollow copper ball on top of that. Then you follow the set up in the patent.
You'd be collecting a couple hundred milli-amps at 100,000+ volts. Then you could step that down and get small power generation plant levels of power.
Both work off of an electrostatic potential between an antenna and ground.
No.
When one end of the antenna in a radio system is positively charged, the other end is negatively charged or there is a charge wave-form imposed on the antenna and antenna cable.
This (Tesla's invention) accumulates an even, static charge into a capacitor, the charge at any point in the system is equal because this is accumulating static charge in a capacitor. This uses ionising radiation to accumulate static charge.
Radio uses non-ionising RF to imposed an inductive voltage gradient on the antenna. Radio is not a static system. Is an electromagnetically oscillating inductive system.
Saving this for science time. Thanks
Carry On!!!
I wonder what sort of power per metre squared you get.
For reference, solar irradiation is approx 1kw / m2 at peak in ideal conditions with the sun overhead, You'd collect a small percentage of that with a photovoltaic panel, maybe more with solar thermal.
Very low, you're getting milliamps at best, the thing that makes it worth while is that milliamps is a lot of power if the potential difference is kilovolts.
It works better in daytime because the sun gives off ionising radiation, but it continues to work at night because there's still ionising radiation coming from space.
It also captures atmospheric electricity depending on the polarity of electricity you choose as your reference.
This is a more crude and indiscriminate version of what Tesla was doing later in his life. He later realised that you could use resonators to tune the effect and amplify the rate of power draw.
Warden cliff was supposed to work by drawing in highly concentrated cosmically provided power and to use that to increase the charge gradient of atmospheric electricity by re-emitting the cosmic power as electricity in the atmosphere with a giant Tesla coil.
You could then have small receivers built like what's in this patent and they don't have to have 100 foot towers to work well.
Basically, Tesla wanted to energize the capacitor that is the atmosphere and then provide people with a way of drawing energy from the capacitor.
Didn't he say that the earth is a capacitor?
Interesting