"Tesla said his transmitter could produce 100 million volts of pressure and currents up to 1000 amperes, with experimental power levels of billion or tens of billions of watts.(18) If that amount of power were released in 'an incomparably small interval of time,'(19) the energy would be equal to the explosion of millions of tons of TNT, that is, a multi-megaton explosion. Such a transmitter would be capable of projecting the force of a nuclear warhead by radio."
"18. Tesla, Nikola, New York Times, 'How to Signal Mars,' May 23, 1909, pg. 10. He claims to have sent 'a current around the globe' on the order of '15,000,000' horsepower or 11 billion watts."
"19. Secor, H. Winfield, 'The Tesla High Frequency Oscillator,' The Electrical Experimenter, March 1916, pg. 615."
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20040203060110/http://www.frank....
I expect some of our most brilliant minds today may end up with a similar retrospective.
Where did this power come from?
> If that amount of power were released in 'an incomparably small interval of time,'(19) the energy would be equal to the explosion of millions of tons of TNT, that is, a multi-megaton explosion.
Err what?
Watts is a measure of 'rate' not total energy. The smaller the unit of time the less the total energy transferred.
1 megaton of TNT is equivalent to 1.162 trillion watt hours. If you could generate and transmit 1 billion watts of energy, you would need to do this for 48 days and 10 hours before you've released the equivalent of a single megaton.
Or, flipped around, 1 gigawatt over say 0.1s is only ~23.9 kilograms of TNT. A decent amount of energy, but nothing on the order of Tunguska.
(60000000000 MJ) / (1000000000 watts) = 2 years
(69.4 days if you have 10 billion watts)
(60000000000 MJ) / (0.1 seconds) = 6E17 Watts
Your source, Oliver Nichelson, seems to have done the wrong math (or perhaps I did?). 1 megaton of TNT is 4.184E15 J
(4.18400E15 joules) / (1 000 000 000 watts) = 48.4 days
(4.8 days if you have 10 billion watts)
(4.18400E15 joules) / (0.1 s) = 4.1E16 Watts
Also, it doesn't seem like Nichelson is clear about the difference between power and energy.
Power is the energy transferred or converted per unit time. That's why it's measured in watts = Joules/s or the equivalent in other systems.
Energy is just the Joule part of that term. The phrase 'If that amount of power were released in 'an incomparably small interval of time,' is imprecise. It should be 'that amount of energy', which would then give the needed J/s for power. But there's no reference to what that amount of energy was.
Thing is, the power supply was already given, as "tens of billions of watts". You can't release tens of billions of watts - J/s - in an incomparably small interval of time because that's meaningless - power isn't measured in J/s/s.
What you can do is release tens of billions of energy in an incomparably small interval of time. But it would take time - months or even years - to build up that energy with only a 1-10 GW power supply.
The essay you link to doesn't describe how that energy is stored before release. At best is says "build up electric fields", but it still takes days to get that much energy in the first place.
Since the math doesn't work out, since the author seems to be confused between power and energy, and since there's no explanation of how Telsa could have generated 60000000000 MJ of energy, much less release it in a split second, I think it's appropriate to discount the thesis of that essay.