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From: fowler@uw-beaver (Rob Fowler)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: Tesla
Message-ID: <894@uw-beaver>
Date: Tue, 5-Mar-85 23:12:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.894
Posted: Tue Mar  5 23:12:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Mar-85 04:44:57 EST
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Distribution: net
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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I posted something on this to net.rumor, but since Tesla came up again ...

One of the things that Tesla was into was power transmission by novel means.
Fer instance, apparently a lot of the stuff in the Colorado Springs 
lab had portable power supplies consisting of secondary coils coupled
to the huge primary that surrounded the building.

Another scheme that he experimented with was long distance power transmission
(AC) using a single phase and a single wire and using the Earth as the
return path.  I've heard and read about these experiments in several
places, but don't really know anything about the results.  Using ground
loops is something I've been trained to avoid.

About 6 or 7 years ago there were a couple of really bad years of Winter
weather in North America.  The jet stream had wandered all over the place.
The Northwest was relatively dry and sunny.  There was speculation about
"power droughts" (enough to drink, but not make electricity).  The Midwest
and East were extremely cold and were getting hit by blizzard after blizzard.
In the midst of this there was an employee (a "scientist" of undetermined
vintage and credentials) of the National Research Council of Canada who
managed to get the Canadian press to print his version of what was going
on.  To paraphrase it:

It was just another nefarious plot by those damn Russkies!!.  They
had been studying Tesla's work initially because they were interested
in communicating with their submarines.  The idea was to avoid using
a special purpose system (like Project Sanguine in Wisconsin) by using
(parts of) their existing power grid as an antenna.  By
unbalancing the power grid you can somehow create a ground current
that is somehow detectable by a submerged sub.  Well, we don't know
how successful they were at communication, but they apparently
detected some climate modification.  Aha!! says some commisar,
we will wage economic warfare!.  We jack around our power grid,
this pushes global air currents off their normal courses, warm
moist air is sucked up over the Ukraine thus causing bumper crops,
cold Arctic air is pushed off of the North Pole into the middle
of North America causing all kinds of suffering, and finally,
the winter long low pressure systems that usually hang around
off the British Columbia coast head South and flood California!!
A despicable, but brilliant, plan!

This guy from NRC wound up getting the ear of several reporters
over the course of two or three years.  As I recall, he was
explaining North American inaction on his theory by saying
that although the governments recognized the correctness of
his position that they had no reasonable form of retaliation
prepared.  After all, we couldn't just tell them to stop screwing
around with our weather or it's "Nuke City".

So much for the theory.  I'd stumbled across these articles in the Canadian
popular press up until '78 when I left Vancouver. Since then I've seen
nothing.  A couple of years later I happened upon some of the Tesla
biographies/hagiographies, but they are pretty non-technical.

This leads to a couple of questions (discussion topics):

What exactly was Tesla doing w.r.t. power transmission and/or
communication using ground returns?  His tower on Long Island
was going to use this, but how?  Marconi had heard of Hertz and
Maxwell and used the theory of electromagnetic waves.  Tesla's tower
seems to be to be a kludge left over from an earlier, pre-EM era.
(I recall mention of very low bandwidth and using the entire
Earth/atmosphere system as a resonator.  Not so good for Hi-Fi, but
Ok for calling subs?)

What are the power transmission aspects of this?

Does anyone else out there recall anything about the guy in Ottawa
and his weird rantings?  Does he still work for NRC?  
Is there any scuttlebutt about these rumors, theories, accusations?

-- Rob Fowler  ( ... uw-beaver!fowler or fowler@washington.arpa)