

Sunday, 11 March 2012

Tesla's Fuelless Generator

Tesla's Fuelless Generator

In the 1880's, Nikola Tesla invented the alternating current system we use today. By the 1890s he was working on a new type of electrical generator that would not "consume any fuel."

This paper documents where in his writings the description of this new generator is found, a theory of how a fuelless generator could work and a suggestion as to how Tesla's new device might have operated.

Nikola Tesla’s Later Energy Generation Designs

 by Oliver Nichelson

Ten years after patenting a successful method for producing alternating current, Nikola Tesla claimed the invention of an electrical generator that would not "consume any fuel." Such a generator would be its own prime mover. Two of Tesla's devices representing different stages in the development of such a generator are identified.


While in college Nikola Tesla claimed it should be possible to operate an electrical motor without sparking brushes. He was told by the professor that such a motor would require perpetual motion and was therefore impossible. In the 1880's he patented the alternating current generator, motor, and transformer.


Fuelless electrical generation raises the same objection of perpetual motion as did the generator in use today when it was first proposed. Research Nikola Tesla carried out during his second creative period and the resulting devices that were the basis for his assertion of fuelless electrical generation will be examined. Whether Tesla's fuelless generator was a "perpetual motion scheme" of the sort his teacher warned him against, or a creative application of recognized natural phenomena will be discussed.

Tesla’s Statements

In The Brooklyn Eagle, Tesla announced on July 10th, 1931, that "I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device." Later on in the same article he said that "More than 25 years ago I began my efforts to harness the cosmic rays and I can now state that I have succeeded." In 1933, he made the same assertion in an article for the New York American, November 1st, under the lead in "Device to Harness Cosmic Energy Claimed by Tesla." Here he said:


Dating back "more than 25 years ago" from 1933 would mean that the device Tesla was speaking about must have been built before 1908. More precise information is available through his correspondence in the Columbia University Library's collection. Writing on June 10th, 1902 to his friend Robert U. Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, Tesla included a clipping from the previous day's New York Herald about a Clemente Figueras, a "woods and forest engineer" in Las Palmas, capital of the Canary Islands, who had invented a device for generating electricity without



The device that, at first, seems to best fit this description is found in Tesla's patent for an "Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy," number 685,957, that was filed for on March 21, 1901 and granted on November 5, 1901. The concept behind the older technical language is a simple one. An insulated metal plate is put as high as possible into the air. Another metal plate is put into the ground. A wire is run from the metal plate to one side of a capacitor and a second wire goes from the ground plate to the other side of the capacitor. Then:


This seems like a very straightforward design and would seem to fulfill his claim for having developed a fuelless generator powered by cosmic rays, but in 1900 Tesla wrote what he considered his most important article in which he describes a self-activating machine that would draw power from the ambient medium, a fuelless generator, that is different from his Radiant Energy Device. Entitled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy - Through the Use of the Sun," it was published by his friend Robert Johnson in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine for June 1900 soon after Tesla returned from Colorado Springs where he had carried out an intensive series of experiments from June 1899 until January of 1900.




"This would be an inanimate engine which, to all evidence, would be cooling a portion of the medium below the temperature of the surrounding, and operating by the heat abstracted(2)," that is, it would produce energy directly from the environment without "the consumption of any material."





This same shape turns up in another patent, this one for a "Dynamo-Electric Machine." This patent was filed and granted in the same year that Tesla said he returned to work on the "self-activating" machine, in 1889. The dynamo consists of metal disks that are rotated between magnets to produce an electric current.

. Compared to his alternating current generator, this "dynamo" represents something of a curious throwback to the days of Faraday's early experiments with a copper disk and a magnet. Tesla makes some improvement over the Faraday setup by using magnets that completely cover the spinning metal disks and he also adds a flange to the outside of the disks so current can be taken off more easily - all of which makes for a better generator than Faraday's. On the surface, though, it is hard to see why Tesla patented such an anachronistic machine at this point in his work.

The next piece of the puzzle is found in an article Tesla wrote for The Electrical Engineer in 1891 entitled "Notes on a Unipolar Dynamo." Here Tesla presents an in-depth analysis of the Faraday disk generator, explains why it was an inefficient generator, describes his improved variations on the Faraday machine, and, at the bottom of the third page of the article, states that he has devised a generator in which "the current, once started, may then be sufficient to maintain itself and even increase in strength(4)." Then, at the close of the article, he states that "several machines ... were constructed by the writer two years ago ..."(5) Two years before the writing of that article was 1889. All the evidence points to the turbine-shaped Unipolar Dynamo as being Tesla's first design for a machine that can continue to produce electricity after being disconnected from an outside source of power.




Elsasser then points out that an ordinary disk generator "could not maintain a current for very long because the current induced in the disk is so weak that it would soon be dissipated by the resistance of the conductor [the disk]." This conventional arrangement would not be an answer to "how currents could be built up and perpetuated to maintain the earth's magnetic field." He does, though, propose three options in the dynamo model that would explain the earth's persistent magnetism.

If we had a material that could conduct electricity a thousand times better than copper, the system would indeed yield a self-sustaining current. We could also make it work by spinning the disk very fast... a third way we could make such a dynamo self-sustaining ... is to increase the size of the system: theory says that the bigger we make such a dynamo, the better it will function. If we could build a coil-and-disk apparatus of this kind of scale of many miles, we would have no difficulty in making the currents self-sustaining(6).




In the Faraday unipolar generator "the current," as Tesla noted, "set up will therefore not wholly pass through the external circuit ... and ... by far the greater portion of the current generated will not appear externally..."(7) By having the magnet completely cover the disk, Tesla made use of the whole disk surface in current generation instead of only a small section directly adjacent to the bar magnet, as happened in the Faraday device. This not only increases the amount of current generated, but, by making the current travel from the center to the outside edge, makes all of that current accessible to the external circuit.











Energy, though, can be converted into different forms as it passes from a higher to a lower state. He said, "assume that the water, in its passage into the tank, is converted into something else, which may be taken out of it without using any, or by using very little power(9)." For example, if the energy of the ambient medium is taken to be the water, oxygen and hydrogen making up the water are the other forms of energy into which it could change as it entered the cylinder.

Corresponding to this ideal case, all the water flowing into the tank would be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen ...and the result would be that the water would continually flow in, and yet the tank would remain entirely empty, the gases formed escaping. We would thus produce, by expending initially a certain amount of work to create a sink for...the water to flow in, a condition enabling us to get any amount of energy without further effort(10).

Tesla recognized that no energy conversion system would be perfect, some water would always get into the tank, but "there will be less to pump out than flows in, or, in other words, less energy will be needed to maintain the initial condition than is developed [by the incoming water], and this is to say that some energy will be gained from the medium(11)."

He found that this pumping could be done with a piston "not connected to anything else, but was perfectly free to vibrate at an enormous rate(12)." This he was able to do with his "mechanical oscillator," a steam-driven engine used for producing high frequency currents. The faster the pump would work, the more efficient it would be at extracting energy from the cosmos. Research along this line culminated in the oscillator demonstrated at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. It was not until much later, in the 1900 article, he revealed: "On that occasion I exposed the principles of the mechanical oscillator, but the original purpose of this machine is explained here for the first time (13)."

It was also in 1893 that Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non-mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his "Coil for Electro-magnets," patent #512,340. It is another curious design because, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one.


In the Century article Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a "self-cooling" method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, "This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me(16)."

What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube  enclosing the first(17). The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid.




In order to tap this energy storehouse Tesla had to accomplish two things - make a "cold sink" in the ambient energy and devise a way of making the "sink" self-pumping. Explaining how this process might have worked requires, again, speculation.

Such a "sink" would have to be at a lower energy state than the surrounding medium and, for the energy to continually flow into it, the "sink" would have to maintain the lower energy state while meeting the power requirements of the load attached to it. Electrical energy, watt-seconds, is a product of volts x amps x seconds. Because the period of oscillation does not change, either voltage or current has to be the variable in the coil's energy equation.

In that the double wound coil maximizes the voltage difference between its turns, it is probable that it is the current that is minimized to produce a low energy state in the coil. For the coil to be initially "empty" and at low energy would mean it operated at high voltage with a small amount of charge(19).

The coil, then, would be set into oscillation at its resonant frequency by an external power source. During a portion of its cycle the coil will appear to the earth's electric field as one plate of a capacitor. As the voltage across the coil increases, the amount of charge it can "sink" from the earth's higher energy field will increase.

The energy taken into the coil - through the "small opening" which appears to be the atomic structure of the conductor according to the physics of Tesla's time - is "condensed" into positive and negative components of current, a lower energy state relative to the originating field.

The current is equivalent to the water converted to gases in Tesla's description of the self-acting engine. The current would "escape" from the "sink" into whatever load was connected across the coil. The movement of current into the load would produce a strong magnetic field (the stated intention of the patent) which, when it collapsed, would, again, produce a high potential, low charge "sink" to couple with the earth's electric field.

Because the inflowing energy performs a double function similar to the unipolar generator, supplying current to the load and aiding the pumping function, the system's energy expenditure in moving charge is low, allowing the system to gain more energy from the medium than it expends in its operation. The coil needs no extra energy from an outside source to pump the energy it has extracted.

Energy would come directly from the Sun.


With his prominent position in the world of science at the time, it is curious why Tesla's invention was not commercialized or at least publicized more. Economics, not science, appear to have been the main factor. The adoption of alternating current was opposed by powerful financiers of the period. Michael Pupin, another leading electrical researcher at the turn of the century, noted in his autobiography:

...captains of industry...were afraid that they would have to scrap some of their direct current apparatus and the plants for manufacturing it, if the alternating current system received any support ... ignorance and false notions prevailed in the early nineties, because the captains of industry paid small attention to highly trained scientists (20) (21).

Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten year old technology for yet another new one.



Years later, in 1933, he was more pointed in his remarks about the introduction of his fuelless generator. In the Philadelphia Public Ledger of November 2nd, is an interview with Tesla under the headline "Tesla 'Harnesses' Cosmic Energy." In it he was "Asked whether the sudden introduction of his principle would upset the present economic system, Dr. Tesla replied, 'It is badly upset already.' He added that now as never before was the time ripe for the development of new resources."

It has been nearly a century since Nikola Tesla claimed a radically new method for producing electricity. The need for the development of new resources is greater now than at the end of the last century. Perhaps these overlooked inventions will make his vision of "increasing human energy through the use of the sun's energy" become a reality.


Thanks to Mr. John Ratzlaff of Millbrae, California for generously sharing a variety of Tesla material that helped make this paper possible.


1. Nikola Tesla, U.S. Patent #685,957, "Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy," reproduced in Nikola Tesla: Lectures * Patents * Articles (hereafter LPA), Tesla Museum, Beograd, 1956, reprinted by Health Research, Mokelumne Hill, CA., p. P-344, 1973.

2. Nikola Tesla, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy - Through Use of the Sun's Energy," The Century Illustrated Magazine, reprinted in LPA, p. A-140.

3. Reference 2, p. A-142.

4. Nikola Tesla, "Notes on a Unipolar Generator," The Electrical Engineer," N.Y., Sept. 2, 1891, reprinted in LPA, p. A-24.

5. Reference 4, p. A-26.

6. W.M. Elsasser, "The Earth as a Dynamo," Scientific American, p. 44-48, May 1958.

7. Reference 4, p. A-23.

8. Reference 2, p. A-140.

9. Reference 2, p. A-141.

10. Reference 2, p. A-141.

11. Reference 2, p. A-141.

12. Reference 2, p. A-142.

13. Reference 2, p. A-142.

14. Nikola Tesla, U.S. Patent #512,340, "Coil for Electro-Magnets," reprinted in LPA, pp. P-428-429. He explains that a standard coil of 1000 turns with a potential of 100 volts across it will have a difference of .1 volt between turns. A similar bifilar coil will have a potential of 50 volts between turns. In that the stored energy is a function of the square of the voltages the energy in the bifilar will be 502/.12 = 2500/.01 = 250,000 times greater than the standard coil.

15. Measurements were made by M. King and O. Nichelson at Eyring, Inc., with a HP 3577A network analyzer on 3 inch diameter coils with 43 turns each of number 20 wire.

16. Reference 2, p. A-143.

17. Carl Linde, "Process and Apparatus for Attaining Lowest Temperatures for Liquefying Gases, and for Mechanically Separating Gas Mixtures," The Engineer, pp. 485-6, Nov. 13, 1896 and p. 509, Nov. 20, 1896.

18. "The Amateur Scientist," Scientific American, p. 160, May 1957.

19. This resembles the electrostatic oscillator in Tesla's wireless transmission system: Oliver Nichelson, "The Underwater Communication System of Nikola Tesla," 1991.

20. Michael Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor, Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., pp. 285-286, 1930.

21. Reference 2, p. A-143.

22. For others who followed Tesla with inventions to extract energy from the ambient medium see: Christopher Bird and Oliver Nichelson, "Nikola Tesla: Great Scientist, Forgotten Genius," New Age, p. 36 ff, Feb. 1977.

Copyright 1991 By Oliver Nichelson
333 North 760 East
American Fork, Utah 84003 USA

E-mail: onichelson@post.harvard.edu

From http://prometheus.al.ru/english/phisik/onichelson/lategen.htm

Physics of the Fuelless Generator


This paper argues that Tesla's fuelless generator follows the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that it is not an "over unity" device putting out more energy that it takes in. It is a device that performs little physical work and expends little of its stored energy.

The Second Law Thermodynamics and Tesla's Fuelless Generator
By Oliver Nichelson

During an address commemorating the installation of his electrical generators at Niagara Falls , Nikola Tesla told his listeners:


In 1902, Tesla wrote to his friend and publisher Robert Underwood Johnson that he had already developed a device for using the energy of the surrounding medium to generate electricity (Nichelson, 1993). In the letter he stated that the design principles for this new type of generator were discussed in his June 1900 Century Magazine article (Tesla, 1902) on page 200, "particularly where I refer to novel facts."

An Energy Sink

His reference is to the article "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy - Through the Use of the Sun's Energy" (Tesla, 1900). The "novel facts" are mentioned in a section entitled "Energy from the Medium." It is in this and in the following section where the theoretical and developmental discussions of this new generator take place. Tesla uses two versions of simple graphic image to explain how such an energy extracting generator would work.


In the first example he asks that we consider a closed cylinder

such that energy could not be transferred across it except through a channel or path O... and ... that, by some means or other, in this inclosure a medium were maintained which would have little energy, and that on the outer side of the same there would be the ordinary ambient medium with much energy.

Tesla continues:

Under these assumptions the energy would flow through the path O, as indicated by the arrow, and might then be converted on its passage into some other form of energy. Could we produce artificially such a "sink" for the energy of the ambient medium to flow in [and]... be enabled to get at any point of the globe a continuous supply of energy, day and night (Tesla, 1900).

In the next paragraph Tesla gives another version of how this energy extraction process would take place. He asks if we can produce cold in a given portion of space and cause the heat to flow in continually. Creating such a "cold hole" in the medium would be like creating in a lake either an empty space or a space filled with something much lighter than water.

This we could do by placing in the lake a tank, and pumping all the water out of the latter. We know, then, that the water if allowed to flow back into the tank, would, theoretically, be able to perform exactly the same amount of work which was used in pumping it out, but not a bit more. (Tesla, 1900)

He notes that in such an operation, nothing would be gained by pumping the water out and letting it fall back down the tank. It would be impossible, in this case, to create a sink in the medium.

Tesla, then, asks that we "reflect a moment" and adds:

Heat, though following certain general laws of mechanics, like a fluid, is not such; it is energy which may be converted into other forms of energy as it passes from a high to low level...assume that the water, in its passage into the tank, is converted into something else, which may be taken out of it without using any, or very little, power. For example, if heat [is represented] by the water of the lake, the oxygen and hydrogen composing the water may illustrate other forms of energy into which the heat is transformed in passing from hot to cold.

Corresponding to this ideal case, all the water flowing into the tank would be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen before reaching the bottom (Tesla, 1900), and the result would be that water would continually flow in, and yet the tank would remain entirely empty, the gases formed escaping. We would thus produce, by expending initially a certain amount of work to create a sink for the heat or, respectively, the water to flow into, a condition enabling us to get any amount of energy without further effort.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

Understanding the operation of Tesla's new generator is a two part task - picturing it as he did in terms of 19th century science and explaining it in terms of today's science. Fortunately, he framed his explanation within the context of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as it was being formulated by the leading physical theorists of the day.

Rudolph Clausius put it, in 1850: "It is impossible for a self-acting machine unaided by an external agency to convert heat from one body to another at higher temperature." As given by Kelvin, "It is impossible by means of inanimate material agency to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of surrounding objects." If a machine was able, by itself, to take heat energy out of the surrounding environment and use that energy to run its cooling work, it would be a perpetual motion machine. Cooling the surrounding medium requires energy from an external source.

In his Century Magazine article, Tesla takes up the thermodynamics question in a section entitled "Possibility of a Self-Acting Engine...Inanimate, yet Capable of Deriving Energy from the Medium." He challenges the assertion about the impossibility of a cooling machine's ability to operate from the heat derived from the medium with a simple thought experiment.

If two metal rods ran from the earth to outer space, the temperature difference between the ends of the rods would create an electric current in the rods which could operate an electric motor. This would be a device that would cool the medium and do work from the heat of the medium.

With this example, Tesla does not refute the Second Law of Thermodynamics but shows the limits of its popular understanding. He does not deny the most basic tenant that energy flows from hot to cold, from a high energy state to a lower state. What he asserts is that good engineering can cause work to be done in the change from a higher to lower energy state without creating a perpetual motion machine.

Ambient Medium

How an energy sink can be created on earth requires two additional pieces of information presupposed by Tesla's thermodynamics discussion - the nature of the fluid that makes up the ambient medium and what constitutes a low temperature in this medium.

To understand the concept of the energy of the ambient medium, it is necessary to return to the historical roots of electrical science. From the time of Franklin until the beginning of this century, electricity was pictured as a fluid that flowed through conductors and, like steam that powered the engines of the day, could be condensed out the medium. The capacitors of today were once known as condensers due to this concept.

Before the last paradigm shift at which the universe came to be viewed as atomic particles moving randomly in a void, physics believed all matter was made from a primary substance. It was this primary material, the aether (Dunlap, 1934) of Maxwell and Kelvin, that filled the ambient medium.

As for temperature, Tesla wrote (Tesla, Feb. 1919) that "in light of present knowledge we may liken electric potential to temperature." Creating a low temperature region in the high energy ambient medium meant creating a sustained low electrical potential. Relative to the medium, the device creating this low pressure region could be seen as a self-cooling apparatus.

In principle, the electrical fluid would enter the device, transform into a lower form of energy and perform work as the fluid continued to flow into the device. The nature of this transformation is conjecture at this point, but it seems that the electrical fluid was seen to be transformed into positive and negative potential.

Thermodynamic Work

In accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Tesla's device would make use of energy moving from a higher temperature to a lower temperature, but would be self-sustaining, or self-cooling by converting the energy coming from the environment into a different form in a process that consumed only a small amount of the incoming energy.

This last element in the operation of the device - that it consume very little of the working energy - is mentioned (Tesla, Feb. 1919) in connection with his wireless receiver. He wrote that "energy will be economically transmitted and very little power consumed as long as no work is done in the receiver." Here "work" is meant in the technical sense - power expended over time.

The Tesla device for extracting energy from the ambient medium, then, operated by transforming the input energy into potential and doing no or little work in the device itself. Electrical energy, the units of work, is measured in watt-secs or amperes x volts x secs. Volts and amperes are the quantities of the electrical fluid and because potential is enhanced, the conclusion is that work, or energy, is conserved by reducing conduction current in the device. The new generator appears to have operated by potential variations and with no or very little current. It seems to have been an electrostatic device.

Because the receiver in the Tesla wireless system and new energy generator share the characteristic of using no, "or very little, power," it is useful to examine how the receiver was pictured to have operated. In 1919, Tesla detailed his wireless method in the Electrical Experimenter, using hydraulic analogies.

Twowires.gifA conventional electrical transmission system requiring two wires is equated to a hydraulic system with a reciprocating piston, Fig. 2. The working fluid is pushed and pulled "with high velocity thru the small channel" so "that virtually all the energy of movement would be transformed into heat by friction, similarly to that of the electric current in the lamp filament."

On the other hand, the wireless method is like the one-wire transmission system Tesla demonstrated several times, Fig. 3. A reciprocating cylinder pushes the working fluid through the friction device and into a large elastic reservoir. When the piston has reached the end of its stroke, the elastic reservoir is filled with the working fluid and sends it back through the friction device...the fluid is made to surge thru the restricted passage with great speed, this resulting in the generation of heat as in the incandescent lamp. Theoretically considered, the efficiency of conversion of energy should be the same in both cases. Tesla seems to be saying that for a light bulb of a given wattage, it can be powered either by a commercial power source of a certain voltage and amperage, or by a single wire of much smaller amperage but much greater voltage. For example, a 100 watt light bulb could be powered by 100 volts and 1 ampere  Img1.gifor by 1000 volts and .1 ampere.

For an electrical device to do no work, this arrangement has to be taken another step. Work consists of a force moving something over a period of time. In the case of electricity this is a voltage pushing a charge carrier through a cross sectional area of a conductor. The number of coulombs of charge passing a certain point in a conductor in a second constitutes a current, q/s=i. Doing no electrical work means the number of charge carriers passing a point in the conductor has to approach zero.

Displacement Current

The condition in which an alternating current can be maintained with no translational movement of charge carriers is found in a capacitor. A displacement current consists of the back and forth movement of bound charges within the lattice structure of a non-conducting dielectric material.

No work would be done if the device operated with a displacement current. If a large voltage displaced a small amount of bound charge, the power requirements of a load, like a light bulb, would be met with no conduction current, therefore, with no expenditure of energy.

Tesla's thermodynamic argument with the rods-reaching-into-space thought experiment is that energy differences in the environment can be used to power a device that extracts that energy without being a perpetual motion machine. With his new energy extraction device, his argument is that energy can be taken from the environment, and, if converted to pure potential, can power a load while doing no work within the device. In the first example the long rods will allow a motor to operate until the earth has the same temperature as outer space. In the second instance, he describes a device that incorporates an energy difference within itself and expends no, or very little of that energy in powering a load. Though the second device may appear outwardly to be a perpetual motion machine, it does, as he shows, follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Pancake.gifComprs.gifTesla's comparison (Tesla, 1900) of his self cooling energy extractor with Carl Linde's double coiled apparatus for liquefying air, Figure 4, points to his double wound coil (Tesla, 1894) design, Fig. 5, as one likely embodiment (Nichelson, 1991) of his energy extraction device.

Measurements (Nichelson, 1991) of the same size single and double wound coils, both with approximately the same inductance have shown that, at resonance, both the voltage response and voltage gain to be several orders of magnitude greater for the double wound design . The figure below shows the voltage gain of two 4 inch diameter helix wound coils with the same number of turns. The lower plot is of the single wound coil and the upper curve is that of the double wound coil.

Assuming VinVout.gif this bifilar coil is related to Tesla's design for a new energy device, it can be theorized that it would be driven at a voltage as great as could be tolerated by the wire's insulation and that the amount of stored charge would be at least as great as required by the load at the operating voltage and frequency. To take a purely hypothetical example, if the load is a 100 watt light bulb and the potential in the coil is 5000 volts and the coil is oscillating at a frequency of 1000 Hz, then in a period of a quarter cycle a charge of 5 x 10-6 coulombs would have to be displaced.

This would give a system capacitance of


Like the equations of Maxwell and the AC motor of Tesla, both conceived within the context of 19th century aether based physics and are still used after the physics has been discarded, the new energy device does not require belief in an energetic ambient medium. The concept served only to explain the source of electricity to earlier researchers who naively sought an answer to this fundamental question. Modern engineering practice does not require a primary source of electricity be given, but only a description of how it operates or makes a device operate.

Tesla's new "generator" can be explained solely on the basis of its electrical activity. A bifilar coil is capable of holding more charge than a single wound coil. When operated at resonance, the distributed capacitance of the bifilar coil is able to overcome the counter force normal to coils, inductive reactance. It does not allow what Tesla described (Tesla, 1894) as the formation of "false currents."

Because the electrical activity in the coil does not work against itself in the form of a counter-emf, the potential across the coil quickly builds to a high value. The difference between the turns becomes great enough that (Tesla, 1892) "the energy would be practically all potential." At this point, the system becomes an electrostatic oscillator.

Minimal work is done in the system due to absence of translational movement in the displacement current. As small heat losses occur, oscillations are maintained by the surplus charge stored in the coil. Very low energy expenditure allows power delivery to a load over an extended time period without an external fuel supply. After an initial input of energy from an outside source, Tesla's new electrical generator would operate as a fuelless device.


Dunlap, Orrin E., Jr., "Tesla Sees Evidence That Radio and Light Are Sound," N.Y. Times, X, p. 9, April 8, 1934.

Linde, Carl, "Process and Apparatus for Attaining Lowest Temperatures, for Liquefying Gases, and for Mechanically Separating Gas Mixtures," The Engineer, p. 509, Nov. 20, 1896.

Nichelson, Oliver, "Nikola Tesla's Later Energy Designs," IECEC, 26th Proceedings, Am. Nuclear Society, Vol. 4, pp. 439-444, 1991.

Nichelson, Oliver, "Nikola Tesla's 'Free Energy' Documents," American Fork, Utah, 1993.

Tesla, Nikola, "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency," IEE, London, Feb. 1892, reproduced in Nikola Tesla: Lectures * Patents * Articles (hereafter, LPA), published by the Nikola Tesla Museum, Nolit, Beograd, 1956, p. L-105.

Tesla, Nikola, "Coil for Electro-Magnets," U.S. Patent #512,340, Jan. 9, 1894.

Tesla, Nikola, "On Electricity," Electrical Review, Jan 27, 1897, in LPA, p. A-107.

Tesla, Nikola, Letter to R.U. Johnson, 1902, in the Nikola Tesla Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City. Page 200 of the magazine corresponds to pages A-138 and 139 in LPA.

Tesla, Nikola, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, Century Magazine, June 1900, in LPA, pp. A-109 to A-152.

Tesla, Nikola, "Famous Scientific Illusions," Electrical Experimenter, Gernsback Publications, Feb. 1919, pp. 692-694 ff.

Tesla, Nikola, "The True Wireless," Electrical Experimenter, Gernsback Publications, May 1919, pp. 28-30 ff.

By Oliver Nichelson
333 North 760 East
American Fork, Utah 84003 U.S.A.
© Copyright 1993

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