POWER OF WIRELESS

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 May 1924, Page 2

POWER OF WIRELESS

ITS HIDDEN TERRORS.

One can with the eye of vision foresee the day when a New Zealander _ settling in the Old Country can switch on his own home town electric supply to cook his chop and ring his door bell. For to-day the story is released of how Tesla has in hand a means of wirelpss transmission of electric power. But there are less pleasant uses to be anticipated. Tesla, it will be recalled, is one of the great brains contemporary with Edison —with whom, indeed, he worked for some time —to whose inventions early electric lighting owed so much. Many of Tesla’s inventions were bought up—some of them by English engineering firms. His method of wireless trarismisof power holds in it terrible possibilities. .For one thing, it could be

directed towards supplies of explosand. blow them up! Tesla, interviewed in New York, declared that the electric power wirelessly conveyed could be directed to definite s,pots—only on such a supposition could the explosion of munitions be done.

Tesla, as a pioneer in electric light apparatus, considers that his new invention will have its most desirable use in the lighting of isolated homes by means of vacuum tubes that will consume little energy, require no connecting wires, and will last indefinitely.

When Tesla began his experiments it was believed that above the insulating air stratum surrounding the earth there was a shell of rarified air, highly conductive. . If that were true, the earth would be an electrical condenser of enormous capacity. Only very slow impulses could be transmitted through it to a small distance. But he made the discovery that the earth responded to currents impressed upon it exactly as if it were completely insulated in space, without a conducting envelope.

His discovery therefore shows that the most complex and rapid electrical ascillations, human speech, and even power can be transmitted through the earth far better than through cable or othei* artificial conductor —or so it is asserted!

Discussing the definite directing or wireless —it being the accepted view that an electric impulse is transmitted in all directions, that most of it is lost or dissipated in space, only what is picked up being utilised, he declared that his transmitter produces an effect over the entire globe, but it is only force that is conveyed to every point, not energy. Only a properly constructed and adapted receiver is capable of collecting energy. Suppose, it was instanced, the earth was a hollow reservoir into which water was forced by a pump. It does not require much scientific knowledge to perceive that pressure will exist everywhere, yet energy will not be consumed. The moment the reservoir is tapped and water is permitted to drive an engine, energy is derived from the pump. In his system energy is released by something like a combination lock; only those knowing the combination can draw’ on the source. How will this power transmission compare with that obtained from cables, in which the loss of energy in current transmitted sometimes amounts to one-fifth?

Tesla says he can definitely announce that loss in transmission to the greatest terrestial distance, say 12,000 miles will not amount to more than a quarter of This does not take 'int’o e ‘iiicBbunt certain unavoidable losfedij? irnDthe" transmitter and the receiver,' amounting to about 4 per cent? in the aggregate.