IAN KIRKWOOD: Nikola Tesla & grounds for new energy

 Born of Serbian parents in modern-day Croatia, Tesla moved to the United States in 1884 to work with another electrical genius, Thomas Edison, and Tesla’s work for Edison and others (including himself) over the years played a major part in the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system now used in most parts of the world.

But Tesla was much more than your run-of-the-mill engineer; he was a brilliant futurist and inventor, whose extraordinary and often unconventional approach to science put him at odds with the mainstream.

Despite his undoubted contributions to science and engineering, Tesla is generally remembered as a fringe figure who is nowadays something of an icon for those who believe that big business is somehow suppressing a series of ‘‘free energy’’ inventions capable of ending our reliance on fossil fuels.

The Tesla Society (teslasociety.com) is a good place to start on the more esoteric side of Tesla’s output, which came to mainstream attention again last week through two announcements.

The first was the confirmation by the NASDAQ-listed Tesla Motors that its patents for electric motor vehicles would be opened to the public in the hope that others will take up the challenge of making electric cars a serious challenge to the petrol-powered mainstream.

The chief executive of Tesla Motors, 42-year-old Elon Musk, is also head of a private rocket company, SpaceX, which became the first commercial company to send a vehicle to the International Space Station.

An early investor in PayPal, Musk has risen to become one of the most influential figures in the global world of new technologies, and is clearly inspired by the vision that the original Tesla had for invention.

While they are not using any of Tesla’s patents as far as I can see (beyond using an AC motor in their cars), the company’s vision is encapsulated in this post from the Tesla Motors blog: ‘‘Without Tesla’s vision and brilliance, our car wouldn’t be possible. ‘‘We’re confident that if he were alive today, Nikola Tesla would look over our 100 per cent electric car and nod his head with both understanding and approval.’’

The other announcement to catch my eye last week came from Moscow, where a group of Russian physicists is proposing to build a ‘‘planetary energy transmitter’’ based on a Tesla invention known as the Wardenclyffe Tower.

Wikipedia describes the tower, which stood from 1901 to 1917, as an early wireless transmission tower intended for commercial wireless telephony and – this is the important bit – for ‘‘proof-of-concept demonstrations of wireless power transmission’’. Simply put, energy transmission using ‘‘ground waves’’ through the earth.

The original Wardenclyffe Tower was backed by financier J.P.Morgan but he and Tesla fell out big-time and the project was never finished, and its demise has been cited as at least a partial cause of Tesla’s dramatic later-life decline.

Perhaps optimistically, the Russians are seeking $US800,000 ($850,000) in donations through the crowd-funding website Indiegogo.

Information on the company’s website (easily found on Google) says the young Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology graduates behind the plan have gone to Tesla’s patents and diaries in their effort to build their modern 10-storey tower.

Pages of scientific equations and explanations – at least some of it apparently Google-translated from Russian – take the reader through their claim that the ‘‘tower creates current and voltage resonance in transmission line being the entire Earth’’.

The lure of free energy has proved an irresistible magnet for many over the years, but while there is no such thing as a free lunch, Einstein’s famous equation – energy equals mass times the speed of light squared – shows that the amount of energy encapsulated in all matter is unimaginably immense.

Given the various problems raised by fossil fuels, even the more unlikely methods of harnessing nature’s power are worth a look.