Edison beats Tesla yet again
The Tesla coil has an unshakable hold on a certain type of techie. Some scamster in Russia is trying to exploit that hold by crowdfunding an experimental Tesla power supply system.

Granted, the usual way of doing things is not always best. Too often we get locked into a system or a tech style by financial and emotional investment. After we spend billions of dollars and billions of manhours setting up something that works pretty well, there's no motivation to switch.

Sorry, techboys. That argument doesn't justify using a giant induction coil for wireless transmission of power.

There are several excellent reasons why it won't work.

Power is distributed through wires for the same reason that water is distributed through pipes.

If we distributed tap water the Tesla way, we'd send tidal waves across the land, flooding everything in the area. Houses could conveniently suck up their share of water from the flood. Of course you'd have to replace all soil with perfectly sealed concrete, and you'd have to rebuild all the houses 10 feet off the ground, and you'd have to switch from cars to boats, and you'd have to prevent birds and people from shitting in the water. Trivial. Just a minor engineering problem.

Same with electricity. When you flood the ether with a terawatt-size radio wave, EVERYTHING receives it. You can't turn things on and off. Every metallic object is picking up the waves and producing an alternating gradient. The aluminum siding on your house will be sparking to the rosebushes. The gutters will be sparking to the trees. You'll need to wear lineman's gloves before you touch any metal object. Fillings in your teeth will be zapping your brain. All fluorescent lights will be glowing all the time. Radios and computers will be instantly destroyed. You're basically living inside a giant microwave oven.

Well, I'm sure we can find workarounds. Make everything out of wood (but how do you cut and nail the wood?) and switch to steam-powered computers using high-tech non-metallic ceramics. You won't be able to send and receive anything via radio. No smartphones, no landline phones. All wavelengths will be jammed. Easy workaround. Just write messages on sheets of wood pulp using ink-filled feathers, and use horses with wooden harnesses to pull wooden carts to transport the messages. Trivial. Minor engineering problem.

None of this is impressive to techboy. Techboy no want word. Techboy want NUMBER. EQUATION.

Okay, techboy. Numbers.

Here's a Tesla coil set on top of my brick steampunkish Signal Tower. We've placed a wooden Default Spokane House out at a distance of 1/4 mile (1300 feet) to serve as a single sample point.



Closeup of the house. Note the metal doorknob. Probably won't bother Danbo since she's made of cardboard, so that's OK. Make a note to replace doorknobs with wood or glass before putting a human into the house.



View of the Tesla transmitter from the house.



Now we'll add a sphere representing the waves as they flood out from the transmitter.

The surface area of the spherical wavefront at 1300 ft is 6.7 million sqft.

Assume we can use the roof of house as an antenna to pick up the house's share of the Tesla wonderpower. House is 32 x 28 = 900 sqft; half of that is 450 sqft; angled at 45 degrees = about 600 sqft of receiving surface.



How much power does this antenna get? 600/6.7million = roughly 1/10000 of available power. Not bad.

But if we move the house out to a radius of one mile, it won't get 1/40000 of available power, because the total area of the sphere increases with the square of the distance. So each house at one mile would get 1/160,000 of the available power. Go out to 10 miles and it's 1/16,000,000 of available power.

A radius of 10 miles would be about like Spokane's metro area. Thus: if we want to give a typical house at the outer edge about 1 kilowatt, the radiated power at the central coil would need to be 16 gigawatts.

Back to our 1/4 mile house now: 1/10000 of 16 gigawatts = 1.6 megawatts absorbed by the roof. But we only need about one or two kilowatts, so how do we throttle it down? All the wires will be absorbing their share of the 1.6 megawatts directly, so they won't be able to restrict anything. Transformers? Pots? SCR phase-choppers? All melted when the Tesla turned on. Won't help.

See? Trivial. Engineering problem. Just rebuild the entire society from scratch, and take technology back to 3000 BC. But it's worth all the trouble to have Magic Tesla Power! YESSSSS!

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Alternate universe

  ¶ 3:49 AM