page_title: World Wireless System
section_title: Elements
hierarchical_section_title: World Wireless System / Elements
caption_attribution_description: English: Drawing from US patent no. 1119732, "Apparatus for transmitting electrical energy", filed May 4, 1907 by inventor Nikola Tesla. It consists of a design for a wireless power transmitter. The circuit is an advanced version of his Tesla coil which he called a "magnifying transmitter" which Tesla had been developing since around 1896 and in 1900 installed in his Colorado Springs laboratory. At the base of the tower, a capacitor (G) is connected to the primary winding (C) of an air core transformer. When an oscillating current from a generator (not shown) is applied to the primary, it creates resonant oscillating currents that induce a very high oscillating voltage in the secondary winding (A). One end of the secondary is grounded (E) while the other end is connected to a tall, thin "resonator" coil (B) The top end of the resonator coil is connected through a vertical metal pipe (B') to a large torus-shaped sheet metal capacitive terminal (P) at the top of the tower. The resonator coil is tuned to resonance with the transformer and steps up the voltage still further, to millions of volts on the top terminal. The rounded shape of the top terminal is designed to prevent air breakdown and arc discharges. Tesla believed this device could transmit power long distances without wires into homes and factories by exciting standing waves of current in the Earth. In 1901 Tesla began construction of a wireless transmitter based on this design, now called the Wardenclyffe tower, at Shoreham, Long Island, New York. The station was never finished and was torn down in 1916. There is no evidence he achieved long distance power transmission.
context_page_description: The World Wireless System was a turn of the 20th century proposed telecommunications and electrical power delivery system designed by inventor Nikola Tesla based on his theories of using Earth and its atmosphere as electrical conductors. He claimed this system would allow for "the transmission of electric energy without wires" on a global scale as well as point-to-point wireless telecommunications and broadcasting. He made public statements citing two related methods to accomplish this from the mid-1890s on. By the end of 1900 he had convinced banker J. P. Morgan to finance construction of a wireless station based on his ideas intended to transmit messages across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea. His decision to change the design to include wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi's new radio based telegraph system was met with Morgan's refusal to fund the changes. The project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
  During this period Tesla filed numerous patents associated with the basic functions of his system, including transformer design, transmission methods, tuning circuits, and methods of signaling.
context_section_description: Through the latter part of the 1890s and during the construction of Wardenclyffe, Tesla applied for patents covering the many elements that would make up his wireless system. The system he came up with was based on electrical conduction with an electrical charge being conducted through the ground and as well as through a theorized conducting layer in the atmosphere. The design consisted of a grounded Tesla coil as a resonance transformer transmitter that he thought would be able to create a displacement of Earth's electric charge by alternately charging and discharging the oscillator's elevated terminal. This would work in conjunction with a second Tesla coil used in receive mode at a distant location, also with a grounded helical resonator and an elevated terminal. He believed that the placement of a grounded resonance transformer at another point on the Earth's surface in the role of a receiver tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter would allow electric current to flow through the Earth between the two. 
  He also believed waves of electric current from the sending tower could be made to reflect back from the far side of the globe, resulting in amplified stationary waves of electric current that could be utilized at any point on the globe, localizing power delivery directly to the receiving station. Another aspect of his system was electricity returned via "an equivalent electric displacement"" in the atmosphere via a charged conductive upper layer that he thought existed, a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless transmission-reception system developed by Mahlon Loomis. The current was thought to be usable at the receiver for telecommunications, and to drive electrical devices.
  Tesla told a friend his plans included the building of more than thirty transmission-reception stations near major population centers around the world, with Wardenclyffe being the first. If plans had moved forward without interruption, the Long Island prototype would have been followed by a second plant built in the British Isles, perhaps on the west coast of Scotland near Glasgow. Each of these facilities was to include a large magnifying transmitter of a design loosely based on the apparatus assembled at the Colorado Springs experimental station in 1899.
caption: Tesla's basic patent drawing for the grounded resonance transformer used at Wardenclyffe
  U.S. Patent 1,119,732
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