Using the Air As a Wire—Was Nikola Tesla Right?

I show you how rarified air can easily make conductive plasma to transfer power.

[NexxuSix]

Well, in a way amateur radio operators have been doing this for some time now. I was able to transmit 20 watts of power using CW (Morse code) and was picked up 5, 590 miles away at a receiving station. Granted, it’s microvolts by the time my signal got that far, but the concept is the same and it does indeed work.

[JD-pice]

This is easily one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen. Absolutely awesome.

[paulkocyla]

From what I understood is that Tesla wanted the capacitance between the ionosphere and the Earth to form a resonant tank circuit with the tower´s coil.
He thought that the same setup with the same resonance frequency anywhere else on Earth would pick up the energy efficiently.

[ncs]

Something really interesting happened to me at 1:47.
When I first watched it, he talks about how the spark grows but I saw nothing but complete darkness in the tube.
When I replayed 1:47 again, however, I saw the spark grow despite seeing nothing there previously.

I knew the video wasn't frozen because I could see the blue part at the left side of the screen still flashing.

After a lot of trial and error, it turns out that the sparks are flashing completely in sync with the framerate, and because I was watching the video at 2x speed, Youtube was skipping every other frame, so depending on which frame you start on, you either only see the frames where there are no sparks at all, or only the frames where there are only sparks.

Go ahead and try watching 1:47 at 2x speed multiple times to see the difference!

[Bobble]

The concept of the tesla coil is misunderstood. The atmosphere is a capacitor and the ground is the wire and in a best case scenario the transmitter would not leak any coronal discharge but instead just cause the ions in the atmosphere to oscillate at the frequency of the coil in order for it to be received anywhere on earth. The key is grounding and tuning through capacitance.

[pdxmusl]

About 15-20 years ago.... there was a group working on this. I forget who. But I saw a live demonstration. It was a several 100s sqft room. I forget how big. I think it was around 500. It was large but not massively larege. It was powered through wireless power. Lamps. Vacuums. Tvs. Etc. Everything in the room. They were trying to scale up. But they got it to work with reasonable power loss in a normal size room or smaller house.

[chris]

Granted it has been sometimes since I researched this, but my understanding was it wasn't about setting up a low resistance to plasma. My understanding was when the tower was big enough. It set up an electromagnetic wave that traveled through that atmosphere with the other half traveling through the ground at a frequency that was in resonance with the planet. I don't remember all the details but I don't think what you show here was as it all what he was trying to do.

[termiterasin]

I like how you reinvented wires, and also fluorescent lighting, worse, in the same tool! Fascinating video!

[srinjayshrinivasshankar]

This video literally shocked me. Your videos are more intriguing and exceptional. Waiting for more Nikola Tesla videos.

[basseldahdouh]

Bro i fell in love with this channel ever since i first saw it. Keep up your work man❤️ you really helping alot of people learn interesting stuff ❤️

[Lampe]

Wow, *The Action Lab* just re-invented the fluorescent tube!

[xulum]

There is another thing, if you use a sharp top load you loose more energy. If you use a ball shaped or toroidal shaped top load it could go even further.

[thecommenter]

What was more interesting to me is that the arcs when from the classic erratic lightning shape to basically a straight line. I've never seen a straight lightning so it was cool

[jerotoro]

If someone did make a "wire" in the upper atmosphere to transmit electricity, how would that interact with the static electricity already in the atmosphere? Would it make lightning more frequent, or less? Change where it hits?

[pirobotbeta]

Earth was the wire, the atmosphere an insulator and the ionosphere was the outer conductor.
He was trying to make a giant coaxial cable with his coils being either feeding elements dumping energy into the air or as resonant taps drawing energy!
Do you guys even read his patents?
The down-side would be the total elimination of all radio-communications...his system would have been the perfect 'radio jammer', dumping megawatts of RF into the air.

[markdavis]

In addition to the inefficiencies, theres the inherent RF noise that tesla coils are notoriously known for that would have the FCC in all a tizzy

[andrewparker]

One other thing is that arcs waste energy which is why you typically want to try and suppress them when optimizing for wireless power. Next time try using a much higher frequency wile also avoiding sharp spikes

[TheStackeddeck]

Texas Tech University was working on this behind closed doors, my professor's colleague and friend was one of the researchers on the project. We didnt get details but he did say this is what they are working on. That was 5ish years ago.

[dingus]

Wow the frame rate of the sparks at 2:00 matched exactly twice the playback frame rate (at least on my iphone), so i was just watching a black screen (it was only playing the black frames) until i rewinded and it synced with the spark frames

[crazyjam]

It was called RC current.
It required receivers in every device used.
Each device had a transformer in it at whatever potential needed