• kalkulat@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    setting the atmosphere ablaze

    Maybe that’s why Tesla took his lab out to Colorado!

    20-30 years later, some of the famous Manhattan project physicists were worried about the atom-bomb doing that too. They went ahead anyways. Cuz, what the hell.

    • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Oh, now that you mention it, I think I may have been mixing memories together. Confusing the nuclear tests with early radio research. 😅

      Edit:
      I couldn’t help but keep wondering about this, so I did some digging to check my memory. Turns out I was right after all!

      The trick, Tesla thought, was to use the air of the upper atmosphere to transmit energy - over any distance, above or through the Earth, even to other planets. Power would be beamed to a terminal in the upper atmosphere, then transmitted to receivers on the ground or in the air. The risks were potentially high - “So strangely do such powerful discharges behave,” he wrote in 1899, “that I have often experienced a fear that the atmosphere might be ignited.”

      • kalkulat@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Good catch! At least Tesla was concerned about potential side effects. (Too bad he gave his patents to Westinghouse … so everyone forgot who invented AC generation and transmission for a century)… or he’d have had the money to do more, better experiments.)

        Unlike many of those ‘Inventing Tomorrow!’ these days … too busy to ‘Save Today!’.