Wardenclyffe Tower

Established in 1901, the 57 meter tall Wardenclyffe Tower was an experimental, not perfect and completely built wooden radio tower of Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, on the northern coast of Long Iceland, United States.

History

Tesla began around 1898 with the design of the tower. In 1901 the tower was built on Long Iceland (architect Stanford White; design: Whites colleague WD Crow ). Main sponsor of the project was JP Morgan, in his worldview, however esoteric Tesla's vision of " free energy ", which he wanted to realize with this tower did not fit. Tesla presented this system compared to J. P. Morgan as a radio transmitter for transmitting transatlantic news and as a direct competitor to the former facilities of Guglielmo Marconi dar. 1902 Tesla built a new laboratory directly at the tower, but was also never quite completed.

Unlike Marconi's Slam radio transmitter with an output of 18 kW, with the Marconi succeeded the first wireless data transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, the plant had a design capacity of 300 kW in the form of alternating current generators of Westinghouse Electric in Wardenclyffe. Wardenclyffe Tower was compared to the facilities of Marconi huge, expensive and complicated.

While Tesla sold this project his backers JP Morgan as a high-performance radio transmitter, he believed in his own power, with the help of this now called the Tesla coil construction, in principle, a structurally great form of resonant transformer to be able to wirelessly via the ionosphere distribute electrical energy. When JP Morgan was informed of Tesla on the actual task in September 1902, he rose after investment of $ 150,000 from the project. In subsequent years, Tesla ever more intrusive JP Morgan tried to persuade them to invest, culminating in a Tesla expulsion from the New York office of JP Morgan in the spring of 1904. Morgan parted business completely by Tesla in a row.

The tower remained unfinished: it was not disguised as planned, developed and still in the mushroom-shaped dome was never equipped with the provided copper plates. Also the extensions under the tower in the foundation remained unfinished. In 1905, the financial problems of Tesla's were always precarious: So Tesla could no longer pay the employees and coal supplies for the operation. In subsequent years, the facility fell into disrepair.

In 1915, Tesla had to sell due to non- glichener hotel bills the site, including the unfinished and now dilapidated facility to the hotel operator George C. Boldt. Tesla lived at that time permanently in luxury hotel Waldorf -Astoria on credit. A tax liability from 1909 years of unpaid land tax Wardenclyffe led in 1916 to a public trial, during which Tesla's precarious financial situation was known, so the project was finally lost for Wardenclyffe Tesla.

On June 4, 1917, the hotel operator of the Waldorf- Astoria sold the site to the demolition company Smiley Steel Company, which proceeded with the demolition and recycling of the remaining parts of the plant on 15 July 1917 material price. The tower was blown up with multiple charges of dynamite.

Function

The Tesla projected very large coil would not have worked. For while one for years assumed that a mile-long secondary coil would still work, as long as they could be constructed mechanically stable, there would be at this size electrical problems because the frequency of the alternating current generated by the resonance always be lower with increasing coil length of the secondary coil. Therefore, could the ionized channels through which the once initiated spark discharge would be maintained, not last long enough. At about 40 meters length of the coil, the point would be reached at which the spark discharge would break off in the phase of polarity reversal of the voltage.

The underlying function at that time radio stations were the pop radio stations and so-called quenched gap transmitter, which is also the standard of the German term " spark" for a wireless transmission is derived. You basically no voice transmission possible, but only Morse code. Radio transmitters were replaced in the first third of the 20th century by technical developments such as mechanical transmitters and then the tube transmitters with vacuum tubes.