NIKOLA TESLA
The advances described are the result of my research carried on for many years with the chief
object of transmitting electrical energy to great distances. The first important practical
realization of these efforts was the alternating current power system now in universal use. I
then turned my attention to wireless transmission and was fortunate enough to achieve similar
success in this fruitful field, my discoveries and inventions being employed throughout the
world. In the course of this work, I mastered the technique of high potentials sufficiently for
enabling me to construct and operate, in 1899, a wireless transmitter developing up to twenty
million volts. Some time before I contemplated the possibility of transmitting such high tension
currents over a narrow beam of radiant energy ionizing the air and rendering it, in measure,
conductive. After preliminary laboratory experiments, I made tests on a large scale with the
transmitter referred to and a beam of ultra-violet rays of great energy in an attempt to conduct
the current to the high rarefied strata of the air and thus create an auroral such as might be
utilized for illumination, especially of oceans at night. I found that there was some virtue in the
principal but the results did not justify the hope of important practical applications although,
some years later, several inventors claimed to have produced a "death ray" in this
manner. While the published reports to this effect were entirely unfounded, I believe that with
the new transmitter to be built, this and many other wonders will be achieved. Much time was
devoted by me to the transmission of radiant energy, in various forms, by reflectors and I
perfected means for increasing enormously the intensity of the effects, but was baffled in all
my efforts to materially reduce dispersion and became fully convinced that this handicap could
only be overcome by conveying the power through the medium of small particles pr ojected, at
prodigious velocity, from the transmitter. Electro-static repulsion was the only means to this
end and apparatus of stupendous force would have to be developed, but granted that sufficient
speed and energy could be realized with a single row o f minute bodies then there would be no
dispersion whatever even at great distance. Since the cross section of the carriers might be
reduced to almost microscopic dimensions an immense concentration of energy, irrespective
of distance, could be attained.
When I undertook to carry out this plan in practice, the difficulties seemed insurmountable. In
the first place, a closed vacuum tube could not be employed as no window could withstand the
force of the impact. This made it absolutely necessary to project the particles in free air which
meant that each could hold only an insignificant charge. Thus, no matter how high the
potential of the terminal, the force of repulsion would be necessarily too small for the purpose
contemplated. . . . But by the application of my discoveries and inventions it is possible to
increase the force of repulsion more than a million times and what was heretofore impossible,
is rendered easy of accomplishment. The successful carrying out of the plan involves a
number of more or less important improvements but the principal among these include the
following:
1. A new form of high vacuum tube open to the atmosphere.
2. Provisions for imparting to a minute particle an extremely high charge.
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