Wardenclyffe Tower
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Wardenclyffe Tower
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| Basic data | ||||
| Place: | Shoreham | |||
| State: | new York | |||
| Country: | United States | |||
| Coordinates: 40 ° 56 '51.3 " N , 72 ° 53' 53.5" W. | ||||
| Use: | Telecommunications tower | |||
| Demolition : | July 1917 | |||
| Tower data | ||||
| Construction time : | 1902-1905 | |||
| Data on the transmission system | ||||
| Position map | ||||
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The 57-meter-high Wardenclyffe Tower , built in 1901, was an experimental, incomplete radio tower built entirely of wood by Nikola Tesla near Shoreham, on the northern coast of Long Island , USA . The dome of the tower was 20 meters in diameter.
history
Tesla began planning the tower around 1898. In 1901 the tower was built on Long Island (architect: Stanford White ; design: White's colleague WD Crow). JP Morgan was the main sponsor of the project . Tesla presented this system to JP Morgan as a radio station for the transmission of transatlantic news and as a direct competitor to the systems of Guglielmo Marconi at the time . In 1902, Tesla built a new laboratory directly on the tower, but it was also never fully completed.
In contrast to Marconi's popping spark transmitter with an output of 18 kW, with which Marconi succeeded in the first wireless data transmission across the Atlantic, the system in Wardenclyffe had a projected output of 300 kW in the form of AC voltage generators from Westinghouse Electric . Wardenclyffe Tower was huge, expensive, and complicated compared to Marconi's facilities.
While Tesla sold this project to his financier JP Morgan as a high-performance radio transmitter, he himself believed in being able to distribute electrical energy wirelessly through the earth with the help of what is now known as the Tesla transformer , in principle a structurally large form of the resonance transformer . When JP Morgan was informed by Tesla of the actual task in September 1902, he stepped out of the project after investing USD 150,000. In the years that followed, Tesla tried to persuade JP Morgan to invest more and more, which culminated in Tesla being kicked out of JP Morgan's New York office in the spring of 1904. Morgan parted completely with Tesla on business.
The tower remained unfinished: it was neither clad nor expanded on the inside as planned and the mushroom-shaped dome was never equipped with the intended copper plates. The extensions under the tower in the foundation also remained unfinished. In 1905, Tesla's financial problems became more and more precarious: Tesla could no longer pay for the employees and coal supplies for the operation. In the following years the facility fell into disrepair.
In 1915, Tesla had to sell the site including the unfinished and now dilapidated facility to hotel operator George C. Boldt because of unpaid hotel bills. At that time, Tesla was living permanently in the luxury Waldorf-Astoria hotel on credit. A tax debt from 1909 of years of unpaid land tax for Wardenclyffe led to a public court case in 1916, in the course of which Tesla's precarious financial situation became known, with the result that the Wardenclyffe project was finally lost for Tesla.
On June 4, 1917, the Waldorf-Astorias hotel operator sold the site to the demolition company Smiley Steel Company , which proceeded on July 15, 1917 with the demolition and utilization of the remaining parts of the plant at the price of materials. The tower was blown up with several loads of dynamite in September of the same year .
function
The very large coil designed by Tesla would not have worked. For while it was assumed for years that a kilometer-long secondary coil would still work, provided it could be designed to be mechanically stable, there would be electrical problems with this size because the frequency of the alternating current generated by the resonance is lower and lower as the coil length of the secondary coil increases. Therefore, the ionized channels through which the spark discharge, once initiated, would be sustained, could not last long enough. With a coil length of around 40 meters, the point would be reached at which the spark discharge would break off in the phases of polarity reversal.
The underlying function of radio stations at that time were the so-called pop - spark transmitters or extinguishing spark transmitters , from which the term "spark", which is common in German for wireless transmission, is derived. This means that no voice transmission is possible, only Morse code. In the first third of the 20th century, spark transmitters were replaced by technical developments such as machine transmitters and then tube transmitters with electronic tubes .
Trivia
- The character of Marko Dragic appearing in the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 owns a laboratory that is modeled on the Wardenclyffe Tower. Dragic himself is inspired by Nikola Tesla.
- In the utopian novel Towers Radiate Death (originally The Tormented City ) by Edwin Charles Tubb (as Charles Gray), under the pretext of supplying the whole earth with such towers through wireless transmission with electrical energy, the annihilation of humanity by an alien planned.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Engineering - University of Toronto: Electrical world . [New York McGraw-Hill Pub. Co., etc.], 1883 ( archive.org [accessed October 25, 2018]).
- ↑ a b Michael Krause: How Nikola Tesla invented the 20th century . 1st edition. Wiley, 2010, ISBN 978-3-527-50431-2 .
- ^ "A Bright Bouncing Boy" Stranger Mission Guide - RDR2.org. Retrieved May 8, 2019 (American English).
- ↑ "Towers radiate death" SF loan book. Retrieved April 24, 2020 .