Meet Nikola Tesla

On this topic, I read that Mr. Tesla also powered a 1931 Pierce-Arrow with an 80 kW electric motor and some spare parts from a radio store for several days at speeds in excess of 90 mph - with no batteries!! Can anyone confirm / debuke this story? Article: http://www.keelynet.com/energy/teslafe1.htm Thanks, Stephan

I read the several accounts on Keelynet. The more interesting account was the one purportedly told by a nephew of Tesla who assisted in the experiment.

Items left out of the other account included that a battery was used, but only an ordinary storage battery, not able to power such a powerful motor, at least not for very long.

The other was that a six foot long rod stuck out the back of the car. So we have an AC motor, a circuit with vacuum tubes and wires, a small storage battery, and a longish rod, presumably a conductor of some sort.

Somehow, it appears the rod was drawing energy, either from an electromagnetic stream, like a powerful radio antenna nearby, or from the magnetic field of the earth. The first case is not likely, if one is to believe the events reported to take place, as the car was driven "far out into the country". This, presumably, would have left any RF energy broadcast too weak (inverse square law) to transfer a significant amount of power to any receiver in the car. More likely, the moving rod was generating a stream of DC current as it passed through the earth's magnetic field. But could it collect enough energy to seriously power an automobile? Hmmmm...

According to the nephew, Tesla said he was tapping into "mysterious streams of aetherial energy". Aether, or Ether, was a fictitious substance created by early scientist to explain how light, radiant heat, and radio waves moved through space, before we fully (do we really, even now?) understood electromagnetism.

OK, since the car was originally stationary, the rod would not be moving across any magnetic fields, so let us assume the battery was used to provide an intial flow of electricity, something like priming a pump with water to allow a suction to be created, which continues as more water flows through the pump. The battery could also have provided short surges for acceleration. Let us also assume that Tesla was able to construct an efficient DC to AC converter with his vaccuum tube and wire circuit "black box". Once converted from DC to AC, a high voltage current could be easily transformed to a lower voltage and higher current usable by the AC motor. As the car picked up speed, overcoming mechanical and air friction with power from the battery initially, the rod would generate more and more current, allowing the car to go faster still. At some point the mechanical friction and aerodynamic drag forces on the car and the resistive losses in the electrical system would build up to a point where no higher speed was attainable, yet allowed the car to cruise along at speeds "up to 90 mph."

I am not a physicist, nor an electrical engineer, so I do not know if this is possible, given the weakness of the earth's magnetic field. But it seems plausible. At least if the account is true, is there any better explanation?

I read that as well and versions of the story you posted pop up all over the internet, but I can't seem to get a firm confirmation that the experiment was true. I also read that the name commonly given as his nephew is actually false. I only discovered today that there is a museum in Serbia for Tesla. I will contact them and post any further info.

According to this writer, Tesla was using power generated by a Niagra Falls power plant and transmitted through the air (radio broadcast?). Both Buffalo, NY where the experiment began and the farm where he eventually left the car are close to Niagra Falls. The writer calls the device a "gravitational energy converter" presumably because the source of the energy was the falling water of the Falls, rather than that the device tapped into "gravitational waves" emanating from the earth.
On the other hand, could the device have been some type of Faraday energy generator, not unlike the "no battery" flashlights you shake to charge up a capacitor or small storage battery? The poor roads and poor suspension systems of the 1930's would certainly be enough to provide quite a bit of "shaking", and provide power if the "rod" was actually a very long coil or system of coils with a permanent magnet sliding up and down inside creating electricity, with recoil springs mounted at top and bottom to conserve mechanical energy. Would that constitute an impossible "perpetual motion machine" since it would be a closed loop system (unlike the broadcast energy or magnetic field energy theories)? In a closed loop system motion eventually stops due to even the tiniest frictional or radiant energy losses. Also, such a system cannot do work because that would constitute an energy loss with no "new" energy entering the system to replace it.

The city council of Zagreb, Croatia has delivered a posthumous apology to Tesla for failing to recognize his talents. It makes you wonder how history would have been different if the city had accepted Telsa's proposal to install an electric lighting system there.