Oznog said:
Don't look to the Tesla books for real information. The truth is his wireless power experiments were not well documented in a technical sense. A lot of wild claims were made at the time. We do understand the capacity for broadcasting power the exact way he wanted to do it (no magic here) and know the whole idea is impractical, and the stories are probably- well, exaggerated. Since then people have added a lot to the stories, like the wireless electric Pierce Arrow car, which have no basis in Tesla's work at all. That wireless car was totally a made-up story, for one, the principle character is supposed to be a relative of Tesla but we know he didn't even have such a relative. Tesla's known works never claimed to have worked on anything like this, and if he'd had such a practical success you'd think he would have capitalized on it.
How could anybody capitalize on wireless power? Wouldn't anybody with a reciever be able to access the power, without a meter or anything to measure usage? It costs money to generate the electicity, but how would you charge the people using it? Now, if you are raking in huge profits on the poly-phase system (also Tesla), why scrap it for a zero-profit, high cost system, or even allow someone to develop or impliment one?
Now, Tesla's wireless power is high frequency and high voltage, so not much you can do with it. I don't recall seeing any down converters in all his patents or lab notes, so guess he had planned on all new motors and stuff, probably just to screw a bunch of rich guys over...
I have a small Tesla coil, and did many different experiments (haven't fired it up in many years). The plans say 10-14" arcs, closer to 8", its 250,000 volts.
A flourecent tube will glow (not fully or brighter than the arcs come off the coil) 10-15 feet away. I made sort of a helicopter from a "Z" shape piece of tin. It was only suppose to spin, didn't expect it to take off, pretty cool. I kind lost interest after a while, little worried about it messing up other electronics, computer, TV... And yeah, got zapped a bunch of times. It's not painful, or really dangerous, just kind of creepy, kind of like thousands of ants crawling all over your arm.
Personnally, I believe that Tesla worked to make this better for everyone, not to make a lot of money. His A.C. system and induction motors haven't changed very much in 100 years, and still the most popular. Tesla spent many years commited to wireless power, don't think he would have wasted so many years on something that couldn't work.