Of course, it's still rather impractical. I mean, why transmit electricity when you can just generate it?
Remember that Dr. Tesla was interested in
fuelless generation of electricity. That is accomplished at Niagara Falls and all other hydroelectric plants by harnessing gravity via the falling water. Of course that is geographically limited to places where there are waterfalls.
So the point of
economically distributing power is to generate it where it can be cheaply generated (hydroelectric, geothermal, solar array, or near a source of fuel such as coal, oil, gas etc. so the fuel doesn't need to be transported to the generating plant) and then transmitting the generated electricity to where it is needed. He stated this in either a patent or an interview that I can't locate right now.
Another potential benefit of his transmission system is that electrical power may be obtained in remote locations where it is not economically profitable to build and maintain transmission lines such as the northern regions of Canada, the Australian outback, the depths of Africa, Siberia, etc. Keep in mind that very little of the planet was accessible in his day. There were no pipe lines or airplanes or petrochemical fuels. Railroad engines and ships were powered by coal and only a few cities even had electrical systems.
You could sell or lease the receivers, but once someone knows how to make one, then everyone has one.
Tesla has several patents that concern the individualization and noninterference off transmitted signals (US 685,953-685,956, US 723,188, and some foreign patents - if I remember correctly, British and German). Keep in mind that the receiver had to be be tuned to a specific pattern of transmission pulses to work. I don't see why those same methods couldn't be applied to power transmission. He was always talking about transmitting industrial scale power, i.e. enough to light a city. It would then be distributed from the receiver via wire to the individual users.
This individualization somewhat negates the argument that it would be "free" electricity because it gave him the ability to shut off the receiver by ceasing to transmit that particular pattern of pulses should the customer not pay. He could also measure consumption at the point of origin since the transmitter required only a small amount of power to maintain operation while increased demand required increased generation at the transmitter.
This is not to say that any of this energy is "free". Free if you steal it, but not free to generate at the transmitter.
Keep in mind the industrial scale of the transmitted power. It wouldn't be easy for an individual to build a receiver of that scale while cities and/or large corporations could undertake the endeavor and then bill their consumers. And, again, he could always shut it off for nonpayment.
Personally, I don't think he ever had any intention of transmitting free electricity. I saw a quote somewhere that he said (I'm paraphrasing) that the reward for a development should be equal to the effort expended in achieving it. He was also aware of the huge amounts of capital necessary to build the transmitters and was quite aware that he could not hope to raise those capital investments without returning a profit.
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Topic: Tesla's Magnifying Transmitter (Read 151225 times)
