#wardenclyffe

Let’s set the record straight—Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower was a high-voltage experimental transmission system grounded in quarter-wave resonance and electrostatic conduction—not Hertzian radiation. And the math behind it? It was solid—just often misunderstood by people applying the wrong physics.

In May 1901, Tesla calculated that to set the Earth into electrical resonance, he needed a quarter-wavelength system with a total conductor length of about 225,000 cm, or 738 feet.

So Tesla’s tower design had to evolve during construction. In a letter dated September 13, 1901, to architect Stanford White, Tesla wrote: “We cannot build that tower as outlined.” He scaled the visible height down to 200 feet. The final structure—based on photographic evidence and Tesla’s own testimony—stood at approximately 187 feet above ground. To meet the required electrical length, Tesla engineered a system that combined spiral coil geometry, an elevated terminal, a 120-foot vertical shaft extending underground, and radial pipes buried outward for approximately 300 feet. This subterranean network, together with the 187-foot tower and carefully tuned inductance, formed a continuous resonant conductor that matched Tesla’s target of 738 feet. He described this strategy in his 1897 patent (No. 593,138) and expanded on it in his 1900 and 1914 patents, showing how to simulate a longer conductor using high-frequency, resonant components. Even with a reduced visible height, Tesla’s system achieved quarter-wave resonance by completing the rest underground—proving that the tower’s electrical length, not its physical height, was what really mattered.

Tesla calculated his voltages to be around 10 million statvolts (roughly 3.3 billion volts in modern SI), so he had to consider corona discharge and dielectric breakdown. That’s why the terminal was designed with large, smooth spherical surfaces—to minimize electric surface density and reduce energy loss. This was no afterthought; it’s a core feature of his 1914 patent and clearly illustrated in his design sketches.

Now, about that ±16 volt swing across the Earth—what was Tesla talking about?

He modeled the Earth as a conductive sphere with a known electrostatic capacity. Using the relation:

ε × P = C × p

Where:

ε is the terminal’s capacitance (estimated at 1,000 cm)

P is the applied voltage (10⁷ statvolts)

C is the Earth’s capacitance, which Tesla estimated at 5.724 × 10⁸ cm (based on the Earth’s size)

p is the resulting voltage swing across the Earth

Plugging in the numbers gives p ≈ 17.5 volts, which Tesla rounded to ±16 volts. That’s a theoretical 32-volt peak-to-peak swing globally—not a trivial claim, but one rooted in his framework.

Modern recalculations, based on updated geophysical models, suggest a smaller swing—closer to ±7 volts—using a revised Earth capacitance of about 7.1 × 10⁸ cm. But that’s not a knock on Tesla’s math. His original ±16V estimate was fully consistent with the cgs system and the best data available in 1901, where the Earth was treated as a uniformly conductive sphere.

The difference between 7 and 16 volts isn’t about wrong numbers—it’s about evolving assumptions. Tesla wrote the equation. Others just adjusted the inputs. His premise—that the Earth could be set into controlled electrical resonance—still stands. Even if the voltage swing changes. The vision didn’t.

Wouldn't that ±16V swing affect nature or people? Not directly. It wasn’t a shock or discharge—it was a global oscillation in Earth’s electric potential, spread evenly across vast distances. The voltage gradient would be tiny at any given point—far less than what’s generated by everyday static electricity. Unless something was specifically tuned to resonate with Tesla’s system, the swing had no noticeable effect on people, animals, or the environment. It was a theoretical signature of resonance, not a hazard. While some early experiments in Colorado Springs did produce disruptive effects—like sparks from metal objects or spooked horses—those involved untuned, high-voltage discharges during Tesla’s exploratory phase. Wardenclyffe, by contrast, was a refined and carefully grounded system, engineered specifically to minimize leakage, discharge, and unintended effects.

And Tesla wasn’t trying to blast raw power through the ground. He described the system as one that would “ring the Earth like a bell,” using sharp, high-voltage impulses at a resonant frequency to create standing waves. As he put it:

“The secondary circuit increases the amplitude only... the actual power is only that supplied by the primary.” —Tesla, Oct. 15, 1901

Receivers, tuned to the same frequency, could tap into the Earth’s oscillating potential—not by intercepting radiated energy, but by coupling to the Earth’s own motion. That ±16V swing wasn’t a bug—it was the signature of resonance. Tesla’s transmitter generated it by pumping high-frequency, high-voltage impulses into the Earth, causing the surface potential to oscillate globally. That swing wasn’t the energy itself—it acted like a resonant “carrier.” Once the Earth was ringing at the right frequency, Tesla could send sharp impulses through it almost instantly, and tuned receivers could extract energy.

So—was it feasible?

According to Tesla’s own patents and 1916 legal testimony, yes. He accounted for insulation, voltage gradients, tuning, and corona losses. His design didn’t rely on brute force, but on resonant rise and impulse excitation. Tesla even addressed concerns over losses in the Earth—his system treated the planet not as a passive resistor but as an active component of the circuit, capable of sustaining standing waves.

Wardenclyffe wasn’t a failure of science. It was a casualty of cost, politics, and misunderstanding. Tesla’s system wasn’t just about wireless power—it was about turning the entire planet into a resonant electrical system. His use of electrostatics, high-frequency resonance, and spherical terminals was decades ahead of its time—and still worth studying today.

in 1899, nikola tesla posed for one of the most iconic photographs in the history of science. he is sitting in a chair, calmly reading a book, while millions of volts of artificial lightning explode from a giant coil behind him. the image is a long-exposure composite — he was not actually in the room — but it tells you everything you need to know about the man. tesla lived his entire life surrounded by forces most people could not understand and were afraid of. he was never afraid. he just kept reading.

tesla was born in 1856 in smiljan, in what is now croatia. according to his own account, he was born during a lightning storm. the midwife said it was a bad omen, that he would be a child of darkness. his mother replied "no. he will be a child of light."

from childhood, he could visualise entire machines in his head — rotate them, test them, refine them — without ever putting pencil to paper. he built things in his mind first, and the physical versions worked on the first try. while walking through a park in budapest at twenty-six, reciting goethe, the concept of the alternating current motor appeared to him fully formed. he drew the diagrams in the dirt with a stick.

in 1884, he arrived in new york with four cents in his pocket and went to work for thomas edison. tesla told edison that alternating current was the future. edison dismissed him. according to tesla, edison promised him fifty thousand dollars to improve his generators, and when tesla delivered, edison laughed and said "you don't understand american humour." tesla quit.

what followed was the war of currents. edison publicly electrocuted animals to make people fear tesla's invention. but tesla found an ally in george westinghouse, and together they won the contract to light the 1893 world's fair in chicago. when two hundred thousand lights blazed to life powered by alternating current, the debate was over. tesla's system would go on to power the entire modern world.

then came colorado springs, where tesla built the largest coil ever constructed — producing artificial lightning over 130 feet long, audible fifteen miles away. he experimented with wireless energy and became convinced the earth itself could transmit power without wires. it was there, in a laboratory crackling with millions of volts, that the famous photograph was taken. a man sitting peacefully at the centre of a storm he created himself.

he returned to new york with his grandest vision — wardenclyffe, a tower that could transmit wireless energy and information across the globe. he secured funding from j.p. morgan. but morgan pulled out when he realised tesla wanted to give energy away for free. "if anyone can draw on the power," morgan reportedly asked, "where do we put the meter?" the tower was demolished for scrap. tesla was devastated.

after wardenclyffe, everything unravelled. the man who had once dined with mark twain and lit up world's fairs was living alone in hotel rooms, moving from one to another when he could not pay the bill. he developed an intense bond with a white pigeon that visited his window and said "i loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me." he died alone in room 3327 of the new yorker hotel on january 7th, 1943. he was eighty-six. the fbi seized his papers.

here is what tesla gave the world. alternating current electricity. the tesla coil. foundations of radio, radar, x-ray imaging, remote control, and robotics. concepts for wireless energy that engineers are still working on today. every time you plug something into a wall socket, you are living in nikola tesla's world. and yet for most of the twentieth century, edison got the textbooks and tesla got a footnote.

he tore up his royalty contract with westinghouse — worth millions — because westinghouse was struggling financially and tesla refused to bankrupt the man who had believed in him. he gave away what could have made him one of the richest men in the world because he thought it was the right thing to do.

he was born during a lightning storm and spent his life trying to give that lightning to everyone. the world was not ready for him. maybe it still is not.

i really like Tesla and i enjoyed this telling of events, especially with the lens of a trans man as the narrator

highly highly recommend to others. it’s only about 130 pages and it reads fairly quickly, especially if you have interest in Tesla and the fantastical

Excerpt from the editorial in The Journal of New Historical Perspectives, Vol. 3, #4, 2011:

On the night of July 15, 1903, Nikola Tesla powered up his 190-foot tower in Wardenclyffe on Long Island's north shore. The bolts of energy radiating from the apical dome were visible as far away as New Haven, Connecticut. This was the first and last time anyone would witness such a display. Three years later, broke and unable to secure further funding, Tesla abandoned the Wardenclyffe tower and his dream of worldwide wireless power. He returned to Manhattan where he promptly suffered a nervous breakdown. 

So say the history books.   

But new evidence has surfaced that a shadowy fraternal order stepped in and provided generous funding after J. P. Morgan reneged. Witnesses state that testing of the tower continued but only on foggy days when the discharges would not be noticed. The final test took place on April 18, 1906. Around dawn, in heavy fog, the tower was charged to maximum capacity; across the Atlantic, in Abereiddy, Wales, two copper prongs attached to a 50-watt lightbulb were thrust into the ground. The bulb lit.  Tesla had proved that worldwide wireless power was possible.

Nikola Tesla: Faster Than Light

We know that Einstein’s Theory​ of Special Relativity says that the kinetic energy of a body (e) equals mass (m) times the speed of light (c²), or "e=mc²." The equation expresses a theory that mass and energy are the same physical entity and can be changed into each other. It also asserts that speeds greater than 186,300 miles per second (speed of light) are impossible in the universe. It is literally one of the principal tenets of the theory; that the mass of a body increases with its speed, and would become infinite at the velocity of light. Hence, a greater velocity is impossible.

Nikola Tesla positively denied that Einstein’s theory was true, not just because he rejected the idea that matter is convertible into energy, and energy into matter, or even the existence of space-time, but because he himself had measured speeds traveling faster than light.

As far back as 1896 he conducted experiments on cosmic rays where he measured cosmic ray velocities from the star, Antares, which he measured to be fifty times greater than the speed of light, thus demolishing one of the basic pillars of the structure of relativity. The apparatus and proof of this was unfortunately lost in his Houston street laboratory fire in that same year. Also, in 1899 at Colorado Springs he established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative, that the currents from his transmitter traveled around earth and back to his receiver at a mean velocity of 471,240 kps, or *292,814.96 miles per second*. On April of 1900 he published a patent on this transmitter titled the “Art of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through the Natural Medium”, which was just a play thing compared to his Magnifying Transmitter patented in 1914.

Tesla found a way to use the earth and its conductivity as a wire substitute to send his currents through the globe and back to his receiver. And to be clear, Tesla’s currents do not traverse straight through earth’s core, but through the earth following its curvature around the circumference of it. He hypothesized that since the earth is an oblate spheroid owing to centrifugal force, but is nearly a prefect sphere (btw *it is not flat* like the derps of the internet tend to believe 😂😂😂), his currents proceed with a speed varying as the cosecant of the angle which a radius drawn from any point on earth under consideration forms with the axis of symmetry of the waves. At the start the current’s speed is faster than light, but gradually diminishes until a quadrant is traversed, then slowing back down to the velocity of light. From there it increases again, becoming infinite at the opposite side of earth. In other words… His currents propagate through the earth, first faster than light and then gradually diminishing velocity until at a distance of about 6,000 miles (near a quarter of earth’s circumference (which is 24,900 miles)) back down to the speed of light. From there on it will proceed with increasing velocity, reaching infinite value at the opposite point of the globe.

The electromagnetic waves we use today in radio and wireless technology travel through the air and propagate with the speed of light, but they do not follow the curvature of earth so they eventually diminish with distance, hence, why we can only receive radio signals at a certain distance from the station, or have to use satellites to see and communicate around earth. The waves of today are also 90 percent radiation and 10 percent current waves, while Tesla’s technology is 95 percent current waves and only 5 percent radiation.

Whether you believe Tesla witnessed and measured such speeds or not, his statements should still be given due consideration. After all, both Einstein and Tesla were remarkable scientists, but Einstein relied on abstract mathematics, while Tesla followed the scientific method like a religion and was solely dependent on actual experimentation. Tesla’s work and theories have yet to be proven wrong to this day.

Here are 6 quotes from Tesla critiquing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Enjoy (((:

“What is ‘thought’ in relativity, for example, is not science, but some kind of metaphysics based on abstract mathematical principles and conceptions which will be forever incomprehensible to beings like ourselves whose whole knowledge is derived from a three-dimensional world.”  –NT  (“Great Scientific Discovery Impends.” Sunday Star. Washington D.C., May 17, 1931.)

We read a great deal about matter being changed into force and force being changed into matter by the cosmic rays. This is absurd. It is the same as saying that the body can be changed into the mind, and the mind into the body. We know that the mind is a functioning of the body, and in the same manner force is a function of matter. Without the body there can be no mind, without matter there can be no force. Einstein has for years developed formulas explaining the mechanism of the cosmos. In doing this he overlooked an important factor, namely the fact that some of the heavenly bodies are increasing in distance from the sun. This is the same as writing a business letter and forgetting the subject you wish to write about. In order to explain this phenomenon Einstein has invented the quantity “lambda.” My theory of gravitation explains this phenomenon perfectly.” –NT  (Tesla’s statement relating to force and matter, to Einstein’s theories, and Tesla’s own theory of gravitation. Courtesy of Nikola Tesla Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. April 15, 1932.)

“I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved, is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.” –NT (“Pioneer Radio Engineer Gives Views On Power.” New York Herald Tribune, September 11, 1932.)

“[The Theory of Relativity] is a mass of errors and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.” –NT (“Tesla, 79, Promises to Transmit Force.” New York Times, July 11, 1935.)

“The kinetic and potential energy of a body is the result of motion and determined by the product of its mass and the square of velocity. Let the mass be reduced, the energy is diminished in the same proportion. If it be reduced to zero the energy is likewise zero for any finite velocity. In other words, it is absolutely impossible to convert mass into energy. It would be different if there were forces in nature capable of imparting to a mass infinite velocity. Then the product of zero mass with the square of infinite velocity would represent infinite energy. But we know that there are no such forces and the idea that mass is convertible into energy is rank nonsense… “According to the relativists, space has a tendency to curvature owing to an inherent property or presence of celestial bodies. Granting a semblance of reality to this fantastic idea, it is still self-contradictory. Every action is accompanied by an equivalent reaction and the effects of the latter are directly opposite to those of the former. Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curvature of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies and, producing the opposite effects, straighten out the curves. Since action and reaction are coexistent, it follows that the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible. But even if it existed it would not explain the motions of the bodies as observed. Only the existence of a field of force can account for them and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are also all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena.” –NT (“Dynamic Theory Of Gravity.” July 10, 1937. Prior to interviews with the press on his 81st birthday observance.)

“Whether we can get an answer or not depends on who is there. More than likely the first answer for my neighbor will be:

“Well–well–at last. We have been calling you the last ten thousand years.”

–Nikola Tesla

[ Image description: classic and very famous black & white photo of Nikolas Tesla looking oh-so-fine. End ID ]

Hey gurl

I know I’m super hot, but I didn’t mean for my lab to catch fire…

…TWICE

(I’m so hot I set it on fire the second time from beyond the grave)

Anyway, there isn’t any currency in Nerd Heaven (besides the kind made of electrons, and the other kind made of <waggles eyebrows> SAXXY) so if you can spare any of your local coin to help my peeps keep my place safe, cool, and if you can’t because you need it for other stuff, also cool. I still love you. <smoulder*>

* the not lab-burning-down kind of smoulder