Wireless electricity using Tesla coils

  A few years ago I began to experiment with Tesla coils, I was able to scrape up the required parts from around the house. From the 10,000 volt transformer to the capacitors. These coils were small but they were relatively efficient for their size and worked rather well. One day I was trying to understand how Nikola Tesla was able to transmit electric power without any wires what so ever. Now today, I have a much better understanding of what he did. I have read several of his patents and built a few of the devices but at the time I had only Wikipedia as a resource and not a rather good one at that.

My new Tesla coil with primary and secondary coils indicated.

After some research I figured out that early radio worked by using a transmitting coil which would resonate at a certain frequency and an identical receiving coil tuned to the same frequency which would pick up the signal. So on a hunch I built a coil exactly Identical to my Tesla coil only I placed an LED on the secondary coil, If you are unfamiliar with transformers there are two coils a primary and a secondary. The primary produces a magnetic field which in turn induces current to flow in the secondary coil. In a Tesla coil the primary is the short thick coil at the base and the secondary is the tall coil made of thin wire (the resonator ). In the case of the receiving coil however the primary is the resonator coil and the secondary is the thick wire at the base.

  Upon turning the coil on the LED on the receiving coil lit up. My idea had worked, I was able to get about 2 foot of distance on my original set up before the LED dimmed away. At that time I was not sure if this is how Tesla had managed his transmission. I now know that this is one of his methods. Tesla's device is shown in US patent no. 645,576. I was satisfied with my results, I had recreated on a small scale what Tesla had done more than a century before. I cut back on my experimentation mostly due to lack of materials. I kept the components and toyed around with them from time to time.

Then in college I offered to bring my coil in for a demonstration. I decided to redesign the coil as my original was kind of shoddy looking, It had been through a lot of experiments that were not all together kind to it. I decided to go this time with a three coil design similar in components to the Tesla magnifier.
This device is US patent no. 1,119,732 (you must scroll up to see the diagram). It was similar in design but not appearance. I tested it and It worked quite well, It even worked with an admittedly impromptu receiving coil. A video demonstrating my device is shown below.

During this time, I could only do it at home on the weekends as every time I ran my coil it would cause interference with my suite mates television. But I made a few improvements as well as noticed an interesting but rather difficult to reproduce phenomenon involving a single LED. At one point I was running my coil and noticed that a small red LED sitting on the table with no wires attached to it, was glowing. And when I went to pick it up it got brighter. So I fiddled with it moving it around my coil and eventually hung a length of wire acting as an antenna off from one electrode whilst holding onto the other electrode and walked away from my coil until the LED dimmed out. I made it a whole 8-9 feet. This is far further than my other method but seems quite intriguing. However this method I cant see having many practical uses.

 Over all it is my opinion that a large scale wireless project might not be completely feasible for really whatever reason you choose, economic, efficiency, there's a number of arguments against it. Tesla I think was slightly mistaken with his theories of how his devices work, of course I am admittedly not an electrical engineer. But I do think that there is one facet of these devices that should b thoroughly explored and that is the ability to produce or stimulate telluric currents (which could have problems of its own). It is entirely possible that using telluric currents you could transmit power much further than from an aerial transmitter, thus it may still be technically possible to have true wireless electrical power. It could still be metered and the electric companies could make money off from it. But there is the question of what effect such a method would have on the environment. But we as humans are already creating telluric currents so we could study what is here and build upon it. Would be the cheapest form of energy transfer? Probably not, but the fact remains it is completely possible to transmit electricity wirelessly.