Hacker News Reader

I think he is talking about Tesla’s wireless power transmission. If I’m reading Wikipedia right, he ignored Hertz’s work that described inverse-square and straight line propagation because didn’t fit his idea of long-distance wireless power. But Wardenclyffe was a failure and we now know could never work.

View on HN

So I am open-minded and optimistic about Wardenclyffe, due to the fact that a wire hanging in the open air will conduct voltage from upper atmosphere to lower atmosphere. So there is a natural gradient that could be leveraged, somehow.

Ultimately, I think we will never know because funding for the project was pulled and the building demolished. Besides, Tesla made significant nonintuitive advances in his fields which does not make it easy to dismiss his ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com