Nikola-tesla-on-gaining-energy-from-a-medium

Clean energy electricity Nikola Tesla on gaining energy from a medium: 1900, New York City, Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the editors of the Century Magazine requested Tesla to write an article telling of his accomplishments.  When the article was written, Johnson returned it, telling Tesla he had served a mess of cold philosophical stones instead of a dish of hot throbbing facts.  The inventor has made but scant reference to his recent astounding accomplishments, but developed instead a philosophical system in which the progress of humanity was viewed as purely a mechanical process, activated by the sources of energy available.  Three times the article went back to Tesla and was as many times rewritten, despite the high literary quality of the work on each occasion.

Clean energy electricity Nikola Tesla on gaining energy from a medium

Here is an excerpt which impinges on the commonly agreed scientific principles surrounding the subjects of perpetual motion – conservation of energy.  Naturally, we offer no comment on the subject in presenting this extraordinary reference on his own observations, Nikola Tesla writes:

Nikola Tesla

“Here, then, was an idea which, if realizable, afforded a happy solution of the problem of getting energy from the medium.  But was it realizable?  I convinced myself that it was so in a number of ways, of which one is the following.  As regards heat, we are at a high level, which may be represented by the surface of a mountain lake considerably above the sea, the level of which may mark the absolute zero of temperature existing in the interstellar space.  Heat, like water, flows from high to low level, and, consequently, just as we can let the water of the lake run down to the sea, so we are able to let heat from the earth’s surface travel up into the cold region above.  Heat, like water, can perform work in flowing down, and if we had any doubt as to whether we could derive energy from the medium by means of a thermopile (1), as before described, it would be dispelled by this analogue.  But can we produce cold in a given portion of the space and cause the heat to flow in continually?  To create such a “sink,” or “cold hole,” as we might say, in the medium, would be equivalent to producing in the lake a space either empty or filled with something much lighter than water.  This we could do by placing in the lake a tank, and pumping all the water out of the latter.  We know, then, that the water, if allowed to flow back into the tank, would, theoretically, be able to perform exactly the same amount of work which was used in pumping it out, but not a bit more.  Consequently nothing could be gained in this double operation of first raising the water and then letting it fall down.  This would mean that it is impossible to create such a sink in the medium.  But let us reflect a moment.  Heat, though following certain general laws of mechanics, like a fluid, is not such; it is energy which may be converted into other forms of energy as it passes from a high to a low level.”

“To make our mechanical analogy complete and true, we must, therefore, assume that the water, in its passage into the tank, is converted into something else, which may be taken out of it without using any, or by using very little, power.  For example, if heat be represented in this analogue by the water of the lake, the oxygen and hydrogen composing the water may illustrate other forms of energy into which the heat is transformed in passing from hot to cold.  If the process of heat transformation were absolutely perfect, no heat at all would arrive at the low level, since all of it would be converted into other forms of energy.  Corresponding to this ideal case, all the water flowing into the tank would be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen before reaching the bottom, and the result would be that water would continually flow in, and yet the tank would remain entirely empty, the gases formed escaping.  We would thus produce, by expending initially a certain amount of work to create a sink for the heat or, respectively, the water to flow in, a condition enabling us to get any amount of energy without further effort.  This would be an ideal way of obtaining motive power.  We do not know of any such absolutely perfect process of heat-conversion, and consequently some heat will generally reach the low level, which means to say, in our mechanical analogue, that some water will arrive at the bottom of the tank, and a gradual and slow filling of the latter will take place, necessitating continuous pumping out.  But evidently there will be less to pump out than flows in, or, in other words, less energy will be needed to maintain the initial condition than is developed by the fall, and this is to say that some energy will be gained from the medium.  What is not converted in flowing down can just be raised up with its own energy, and what is converted is clear gain. ”

(1)  thermopile: a device consisting of a number of thermocouples joined in series, used for generating thermoelectric current or for detecting and measuring radiant energy, as from a star.

Clean energy electricity Nikola Tesla on gaining energy from a medium

Nikola Tesla

Article entitled: THE ONWARD MOVEMENT OF MAN—THE ENERGY OF THE MOVEMENT—THE THREE WAYS OF INCREASING HUMAN ENERGY:

the above extract is from the section headed: ENERGY FROM THE MEDIUM—THE WINDMILL AND THE SOLAR ENGINE,—MOTIVE POWER FROM TERRESTRIAL HEAT—ELECTRICITY FROM NATURAL SOURCES

Read More… [ source: http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1900-06-00.htm ]