Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early experimental wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, New York in 1901–1902. Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony and even facsimile images across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. His decision to scale up the facility and add his ideas of wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi’s radio based telegraph system was met with refusal to fund the changes by the project’s primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan. Additional investment could not be found, and the project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
In an attempt to satisfy Tesla’s debts, the tower was demolished for scrap in 1917 and the property taken in foreclosure in 1922. For 50 years, Wardenclyffe was a processing facility producing photography supplies. Many buildings were added to the site and the land it occupies has been trimmed down to 16 acres (6.5 ha) but the original, 94 by 94 ft (29 by 29 m), brick building designed by Stanford White remains standing to this day.
In the 1980s and 2000s, hazardous waste from the photographic era was cleaned up, and the site was sold and cleared for new development. A grassroots campaign to save the site succeeded in purchasing the property in 2013, with plans to build a future museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. In 2018 the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The idea is to send the electric energy to the upper atmosphere (ionosphere) where the electric current will flow much easier than in the lower atmosphere. There is an addition with the potential that is build because of the solar radiation and other sources that exponentially add power to the sent energy. The theory was tested with the use of a neon bulb and it was a success.
With the bulb the energy was transferred from the transmitter to the receiver almost fully and without the bulb the receiver didn’t receive enough energy to light up the starter bulb.
So now I’m waiting to start making some money so I can build the big Tesla tower so I can test and see if I can replicate the experiment made by Tesla that sent electrical energy 20 miles away to light up special bulbs with the 1MW of power.
In the meantime I’m making some gadgets and DIY experiments that I’ll sell on my web shop soon.