Will Wireless One Day Drive The Railway Train?

The beam would have to be coherent, not dispersed, to reserve as much energy as possible, and for the output to drive a train, you'd probably have to receive it from space to avoid cooking the passengers.

The Russians, sorry, the Soviets experimented with it until the late seventies, and gave up on it, hopefully not grilling their experimenters to crisp.

If this gives you the apparent idea, why not build a model, in which you'd transmit a focused microwave beam to a remote steam boiler engine...

I agree 200% with you.

What i intended to show is that an idea a informed person had 70 years ago did not advance to something. Because it would be (almost) impossible. New claims are made regularly without considering past results. But as Aurizon noted we must have dreams.

The almost was included because somebody may invent user friendly beams that can be combined to produce the energy.

As a boy of 12 the book had me thinking. I had a crystal (actually a diode) set and knew that it was possible to receive energy (although very little). I visited the radio station and they confirmed that energy is transmitted. My dad had a wire recorder (predecessor to a tape) with broadcasting capabilities and it were possible to transmit and received sound energy.

beam power like this can never work. It is easy to voice an idea, like Star Trek transporters would be a very good idea. Cover the eatth with then. no more cars and planes for freaight and transportation.

sadly they will never make them, now will beam power ca 1935 work efficiently. You can make a working beamed power demonstration that wastes 90-99% of the energy, but that is no good

Right-on (the spot).

Dreams we all must have, howhever

The Japanese have a train they hope to run from on board fuel cells, the only problem is having enough hydrogen available to give sufficient power for a reasonable speed of travel and a good distance of travel. So far it can go for just a few miles before needing refueling. When we can extract hydrogen from the air on the move and convert more to electricity then it may work out ok.

Your question about using beamed energy was first thought of by Nikola Tesla in the early twentieth century. It was given up on because the generating companies thought that it would be impossible to meter and there for impossible to collect any money from their customers. Money as always corrupts everything.

wireless transmission failed because you had to have a large cubic volume energized so thatany device could receive the energy. The volume did not stay energized, so you had to feed it with huge amounts of high frequency energy. We now know that if we energized and maintained a large volume with some reasonable power level, say 100 gigawatts for a hemisphere 10KM in diameter that the lucky few able to tap this energy for their uses would have to wear faraday shield suits, lest they be cooked.

A lower level might be OK for home heating, just heat the people, but 'ware setting the thermostat too high, and the cats might be startled?

In his day all he could make were long waves, and only a few % could be intercepted.

Direct vertical transmission via microwaves and rectennas has been played with, and platforms kept up this way have been proposed. You could send energy to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, but at 22,400 miles the smallest beam you can make with a large dish requires a huge antenna to intercept it. Laser heat can be beamed and a heat engine used to create electricity, but solar cells are better.

So unless you want to walk in the near field, forget Teslas concept. Back in the dawn of radio there were hundreds of concepts thought up. Some were workable, some were not.

It had nothing to do with vested power interests being unable to charge people for power used.

It all went wrong when an accident blew up a test rig and took out a power generation plant also Westinghouse his main backer ran scared when his shareholders threatened to sell all their shares and leave him high and dry. In the end it was money that spoke not because it could not work people took fright.

Not true. He kept going for higher and higer power and still he failed. Always thinling more power sollved the problem. Westinghouse had input that some advisors had calculated the nature of the problem and realized he could never enegize the world.

Westinghouse had the shareholders $$ already. They protested because they joined up to roll out AC systems, not engage in research unrelated to AC systems.

Had Tesla not blown the cash he could have worked on AC and flattened edison earlier and had a longer run of monopoly AC patents and by then the theoretical basis of what Tesla wanted to do with radiated power would have been better understood and he could be shown why it could never work.

But he was a manic type. That worked well when he was correct. When he was wrong it wasted his resources.

I have researched Tesla and he did blow up up a power plant after a test went wrong. This cost plenty to put right and this put off his backers.

I had not heard of that, but it would indeed cause problems if the power company found him liable. I guess in the early days they did not have fast acting breakers

Recent prosecutions of individuals living close to high-power radio broadcast transmitters, and using tuned antennae to tap into the RF power available so as to power their homes, have been successful.

yes, that would distort their pattern and that is how they will know about it....if they do not see the large aperture antenna that is.

...and using tuned antennae to tap into the RF power available so as to power their homes, have been successful...

Thus reducing transmission range?...

Radio stations usually try to steer their pattern in the direction of the city close by. The cost of land downtown is high and unless you have a spot on a tower building, say the empire state building you do not want an omnidirectional pattern in the burbs. You want to distort the lobe from a circle to a cardioid in the dorection of the city. This can give you another 2-3 DB = more listeners and lower power.

A parasitic structure nearby can draw power from the pattern, distorting it and decreasin the coverage in that direction. Large and high chain link fences, metal bridges, and thieveing neighbours fall into this category. Usually they site the antenna to avoid high chain link fences and other conductors that will distort the pattern. They also use fencing for the pattern, they bury it to give a good ground plane for the array. Sometime they bury radial wires for the same reason. It all depends on the ground conductivity and frequency

...chain link fences and other conductors that will distort the pattern...

Not only those. I happen to live near an air-field packed with radio and radar gear, and you cannot catch any radio stations around. The solution here is "radio through cables", not joking, that's it. Take it or leave it, authorities say.

My ponder is, are the field governors rigging radio jam to avoid the radar being interfered?

"Radio through cables", being some two hundred perfectly received stations, but this is besides the point of their rigging the FM, and AM different ranges, especially shortwave, for incoming overseas transmissions.