Wireless Transmission: A Century of Power Politics Tussles Over “Free” Energy’s Pricetag

Hidden political interests repeatedly block attempts to bring this energy-saving and cost-saving technology into being. How long will the drama continue before North Americans are able obtain access to that which Russians scientists have already achieved?

by Mary-Sue Haliburton, Ottawa, Canada
Pure Energy Systems News
Copyright © 2006

Act I: Binary Code, Key to Pricing "Free" Energy, 1898

Among his many inventive pursuits, Nikola Tesla had created a "teleautomaton" boat which could be remotely controlled. He used multiple transmitters and differing frequencies to start, stop, steer and drive a four-foot-long model, as well as to turn lighting on and off. It was a practical demonstration unit for a submarine guidance system that Tesla was proposing to the military. After the sinking of the Maine at Havana and the launch of the Spanish Civil war, a stealth submarine ought to have had a strong appeal; it seems shortsighted now that the Navy of that day dismissed the idea.

At the Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden in 1898 Nikola Tesla was every inch the showman. To maximize audience reaction, he even made it appear that the unmanned craft was responding to his gestures and words, rather than to the signals being transmitted wirelessly by code. However, it was only for a private audience of potential investors (including J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt) and not for the general crowds that he dramatized his presentation, and therefore reporters did not publicize Tesla's invention. Instead the newspapers focused on Marconi's much less advanced remote detonation system. Not even having the ability to tune frequencies, Marconi's demonstrator Tom Edison Jr. accidentally blew up some explosives stored in a desk as well as those planted in advance in the model ships. (Ref. 1)

Two aspects of Tesla's robotic boat are remarkable. First, this represented the earliest use of wireless broadcasting publicly displayed, though Tesla's experiments with it went back several years. The other is that, as part of the submarine proposal, Tesla had invented binary code and was using it as early as 1896.

Thus, decades later when IBM came to adopt this on-off zeroes-and-ones coding as the basis of machine language, the company was not able to patent it and thereby failed to obtain a monopoly. Because Tesla had described it in his 1899 patent, binary code was already in the public domain. (Ref. 2a)

Act II: No "Free" Energy (Niagara Falls vs. Wardenclyffe)

Scene 1: J.P. Morgan is Disgruntled

Briefly, the essential feature of Tesla's wireless transmission of power was charge separation. The power was to be divided into scalars with the opposite charge pushed into the ground, and the two aspects recombined at the receiving end. Tesla planned to experiment with various frequencies to measure wavelength, voltage and velocity, and to assess nodal points along the equator and at the pole opposite the point of generation. The two poles of the wireless broadcasting tower would be independent of the existing magnetic poles of the planet.

The 187-foot-tall Wardenclyffe tower stood over a 12-foot diameter shaft sunk 120 feet down. At 307 ft, overall, this structure was a bit over half the height of the 600 feet that was originally conceived, possibly close enough to the exact half to be harmonic with it. (Ref. 2b) The underground structure was included a spiral staircase to the bottom and iron "terrestrial grippers" which were pipes extending 300 feet out from the core. Further, Tesla built four stone-lined tunnels large enough to crawl through, angled back toward the surface and emerging 300 feet from the tower. All of these contributed greatly to the cost of the facility.

click for enlargement

Wardenclyffe diagram (by MSH)

Approximately to scale but guessing as to vertical placement of shafts, pipes, etc., a representation in simplified form showing what lay beneath the famous iconographic shape. Tesla may have hoped to use resonating capacity of the aquifer that was slightly below his shaft (and which may have limited the depth he could delve to in that location).

Originally having agreed to develop his world-wide broadcast tower at Niagara where there was an abundance of cheap power, Tesla had infuriated J.P. Morgan by moving the project to Long Island. With no nearby waterfall newly equipped with turbines of his own design, Tesla would have to generate electricity more expensively by using fuel. Other than his wanting to live in at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, there didn't seem to be any good reason for the move.

Seeing this somewhat illogical (and possibly self-indulgent) move as a breach of contract (Ref. 3), Morgan then withheld funding from the inventor. As he was controlling 51% of the company, Morgan was able to block others from investing as well.

Tragically, the tower was never finished, and creditors removed parts soon after the impecunious Tesla first fired it up. In the few days that it was in operation, Tesla was able to do some tests. In a letter to J. P. Morgan written in 1904, Tesla stated that he had transmitted a commercial quantity of electric power to Los Angeles with only a 2% loss. (Ref. 4)

Since over standard transmission wires, losses of over 30% would be considered normal for such an extremely long distance, this was an exceptional achievement. Not only that, but a century later there is still no long-distance direct transmission line from New York State to California. Prohibitive losses of both power and money would result from trying to send power some 3900 kilometers by conventional wires.

Scene 2: The Myth of "Free" Energy Takes Root

Enter another player, Bernard Baruch, then a bright young stockbroker. According to Andrija Puharich, it was this man who planted in J.P. Morgan's ear the misconceptions that have persisted to this day. Baruch told the financier that Tesla was crazy, that he was offering this broadcast energy for "free", and that investors would go broke supporting him. (Ref. 5)

Baruch's source for this notion may in turn have been an article in an 1896 Sunday magazine section of the World, which announced Tesla's wireless broadcast of a song. With a view to protecting his secrets, Tesla had confused the reporter by not explaining that the energy for this musical transmission had come from one of his oscillators on the other side of Pike's Peak, four miles away. Thus this article planted the erroneous idea that Tesla's wireless transmission had been possible because the earth was filled with unlimited "free" energy. (Ref. 6)

A canny but cautions investor, Morgan had got rich by thinking ahead. To protect his other corporate structures, including the banking and mining aspects that would be greatly enriched by the building of networks of wires, he sabotaged the Tesla business he controlled. The concepts of a wayward inventor, however brilliant, would have required him to gamble too much on a single throw.

Scene 3: Tesla's Dream: A Profitable Monopoly

Although he did expect and state that conventional means of distribution would be rendered obsolete by his broadcast power, Tesla was not so stupid as to give away this continually-needed renewable product. Although political and financial conflicts later forced him to back down from his original royalty demand, he didn't start out by giving away electricity. In his original patent deal with George Westinghouse, Tesla and his partners had attached conditions, and had obtained a commitment to pay a royalty of 2.50 per Watt!

In descriptions of experiments with electrocution – with which Tesla was not involved – AC power got bad press by being associated with torturing dogs and other large animals. Worst, a first human execution in the "electric chair" was botched, causing widespread revulsion. Because it was believed to be too dangerous, investors refused to pay for converting to the 60 cycles per second needed to drive Tesla's AC induction motor. George Westinghouse had to yield to their fears, and for several years longer he retained his original 133 cycles per second. (Ref. 7)

What Tesla had offered to Morgan was a world monopoly, which would have been financial as well as informational. The patented binary code would have enabled Tesla selectively to provide power for those paying for it, and to block the flow of energy to anyone with a receiving station who was in arrears.

This was the essential fact that neither Mr. Baruch nor news reporters of that day could grasp – and which is still missing from typical discussions of this and similar technologies today. Everyone is still repeating the misconception fed to Morgan, i.e. that this wireless energy was to be given away for free. That was never part of Tesla's plan.

Act III: Secret Policy blocks Wireless Transmission in Canada

Scene 1: Canadian Cabinet faces Energy Crunch, 1976

The Prime Minister of the day, Rt. Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was confronted with the dismaying prospect of, for the first time, putting the country into a deficit in order to fund not just the east-west pipeline, but also the James Bay hydroelectric development and nuclear plants for Ontario. A pipeline from Ellesmere Island to bring gas south from the rich Arctic fields was turned down as too risky politically as well as too expensive.

To place this decision in context, in 1974 the Trudeau government had agreed to adopt the so-called "free market" approach to public debt. Prior to that and since 1938 when the central bank was nationalized by the Canadian government, it had been creating capital for infrastructure improvement by borrowing at nominal interest from its other pocket. Only about 1% interest was needed to cover the public Bank of Canada's operating expenses. (Ref. 8)

Under this system , Canada climbed out of the "Great" Depression in less than two years, financed a war effort against Hitler (while America still sat on the sidelines), and lent money to a beleaguered Britain. After WWII, this government-created money built megaprojects such as the St. Lawrence Seaway without incurring substantive debt. Similarly, the American colonies had financed their war of independence using their own government-created money, and had paid off the debt within decades. In contrast, George III's England had used bank-created money to finance its colonial war against the rebellious colonies in 1783 and the British people are still paying interest -- amounting so far to about four billion -- to their financier class. The original 500 million principal borrowed two centuries ago has never been paid down. (Ref 9)

However, having turned its back on low-cost financing from its nationally-owned bank, the Trudeau government would now have to borrow from the private sector to realize these energy mega-projects. In effect, this policy entailed "competing" with other nations to see who could pay the most interest! Interest rates had skyrocketed in the 1970s, and combined with compounding, were now a serious threat to national solvency.

Projected to be about five billion dollars; cost overruns, notably on the nuclear plants, would eventually drive the expected deficit up to several times that amount. The chief cost for the James Bay hydroelectric project was the transmission system; the dams were constructed for about six hundred million. "It's an ill wind blows nobody good," or so ‘tis said. Wall Street and Montreal brokers, and suppliers such as Alcan were, of course, very happy with the subsequent contracts for tower construction and wires.

Scene 2: PACE presents cost-saving alternative

Before all that went down, however, Canadian Senator Chesley W. Carter (Ref. 10a) from Newfoundland attempted to head off social and financial disaster. As a member of the Senate Special Committee on Science Policy, and a co-founder of PACE, the Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Carter was in a position to put forward the wireless-transmission proposal.

In July 1976, working with Drs Andrija Puharich and Michrowski, Chesley Carter prepared a proposal that would provide for the country's energy needs without ballooning debt. Based on worldwide multi-year, background research managed by the Senator, who conducted his enquiries with experts invited to contribute their data, the project was presented to Trudeau.

To replace of all these expensive constructions and prevent the indebtedness that would follow, Senator Carter advocated wireless energy transmission. What the PACE proposal outlined was specifically a Wardenclyffe setup for Canada that would take advantage of the country's geography, transmitting power to where – and more importantly to when – it was needed.

A significant percentage of electrical generating capacity is required only for peak electricity consumption hours. In a country spanning four time zones, using charge-separation wireless transmitting allows time to be part of the energy equation. The part of the country that is still asleep and consuming less energy (British Columbia) can transmit its excess to provinces where morning peak load is in full swing (Ontario and Quebec), three hours earlier by the clock. A few hours later, the roles can be reversed. That would be a true "national energy policy."

Using charge separation and recombination at the receiving end is practical because, according to Puharich, also a founding member of PACE, the energy transmission is fast – probably faster than the speed of light. And the planet would behave like a balloon being scraped. Being transmitted by the medium contained within the skin, the energy is felt all over its surface.

Carter had conveyed further proof of the validity of Tesla's concept to the Prime Minister in the form of experimental data from Arthur H. Matthews, the last living technician who had personally worked with Nikola Tesla. Matthews provided a map showing the extent of transmission experiments performed in Quebec from 1828 to 1932. (Ref. 10b) According to Matthews, they transmitted power over a distance of 150 miles with only 2% loss, consistent with the Wardenclyffe result Tesla had reported to Morgan in 1904. (Ref. 10c)

Senator Carter had also taken the precaution of sending Puharich's paper on the Tesla transmitter to the Research Division of the Library of Parliament. PACE still has on file the reply from Dean Clay, who verified that the equations used to explain the Tesla wireless transmission were valid.

Clay admitted that the interpretation (of the electrical phenomena) seemed to move into a philosophical area he didn't feel fully able to address. He stated, "… physicists appear not to have ascribed a physical significance to the advanced potential since it seems to violate our notion of causality. And I would anticipate that the engineering profession would be even more inclined to disregard this half of the solution to the inhomogenous wave equation, being more pragmatic in their use of the physics." (Ref. 11)

That cautiously balanced reply did not really set the stage for the devolution that followed.

Scene 3: hitting the brick wall

In a reply to a handwritten request from the Prime Minister to consider carefully the Tesla wireless electricity transmission proposal, the National Research Council discredited the concept. Dr. David Peat – the well-known science writer – had been engaged by NRC president Dr. Schneider to draft this letter.

The content of this infamous letter can be inferred from quotes attributed to Peat in a newspaper article published in that period. Peat scoffed at the notion that the Russians were experimenting with wireless transmission, and made various other statements showing that he was not familiar with the scientific documentation. "Tesla worked at a time," says Peat, "when we were fairly ignorant about the ionosphere and about electricity in general."

This astonishing statement, implying a widely acknowledged master of electricity was as ignorant as the least of his contemporaries, could only come from someone who knew little about Tesla's expertise in adjusting voltages, frequencies and energy systems, not to mention his study of earth currents and weather effects.

Peat is also quoted as saying that Tesla's method would be "incredibly inefficient" and that it "wouldn't pay" to do it that way. He also explicitly misrepresents PACE's position: "The proposal seems," says Peat, "to involve exciting the ionosphere, oscillating it, and extracting more energy that you put in." In making this smear, Peat was clearly attempting to tar Carter and associates with the much-maligned "perpetual motion" and "over-unity" brush. However, to "over-unity" the Carter/PACE proposal made no mention and no claim. PACE documentation refers only to lossless transmission as the goal, and to 2% loss as an actual achieved experimental result. (Ref. 12a)

In reaction to the NRC's negative posture, Trudeau wrote to Senator Carter with the comment that the NRC people were "agnostics". (Ref. 12b)

And so, history was made, and Canada went into debt over the James Bay hydroelectric dams and transmission lines (now possibly facing white-elephant status as water levels decline (Ref. 13); over nuclear (Ontario's aging reactors need expensive repairs or even more expensive decommissioning); and over maintaining the oil and gas status-quo by building the trans-Canada pipeline from Alberta's gas fields into Eastern Canada.

Because of this debt arising from a dishonest manipulation of science, Canadian taxpayers will be throwing good money after bad for at least another generation – and probably much longer since Ontario has just decided to build a new nuclear plant.

Later that year, Dr. Schneider was rewarded by receiving an Order of Canada designation, the country's highest honour.

Scene 4: Extracting the skeleton from the closet

Later, Senator Carter summoned to a Senate inquiry the author of NRC's negative letter. Dr. Michrowski, who also attended this inquiry, recounted how Carter became red in the face when he found out the dynamics behind the stonewalling. Dr. Peat explained that his superior, the President of the National Research Council Dr. William George Schneider, had instructed him – offhand and without giving him permission to examine the modern-day scientific explanation of the Tesla system – to reject the proposition.

At the inquiry, Carter asked Peat if he realized that he was writing this letter to the Prime Minister of the country. When Peat answered, "yes", the Senator's face again reddened with anger.

As a science writer, Peat merely did the assignment he was given. And over time it became apparent that the negative conclusion was not his own, nor was it his last word on the subject.

Later in the spring as he observed first-hand the Timmins project (see below) designed to demonstrate Tesla's principles, Peat's attitude was beginning to be more positive. (Ref. 14) Later still, he collaborated on a book with Dr. Bohm, exploring the Bohm-Aharanov effect – which describes how scalars can recombine into standard electromagnetic phenomena – and which also shows the soundness of the scientific arguments presented by PACE. Peat's later work thus soundly contradicts the content of this letter that as part of his job at NRC he'd had to write to the Prime Minister dismissing Tesla's principles.

Scalars are the key to the Tesla wireless energy transmission, which, as Tesla stated, involves "non-Hertzian" electromagnetics. Now known as Higher Symmetry Electrodynamics, this theory is currently being articulated by various scientists, including Dr. Myron W. Evans, Thomas E. Bearden, and a Canadian, J.P. Vigier. In 2005, Evans was singled out by Queen Elizabeth II for special recognition when she bestowed upon him the rarely-granted Civil List Pension for outstanding and exceptional contribution to modern science. (Ref. 15)

Scene 5: blocked at every turn

Son of a Falconbridge engineer, Tim Richardson of Timmins, Ontario, wanted to use an abandoned mine to send power without wires to anywhere that it was needed. He reasoned that if Tesla had constructed a deep shaft for Wardenclyffe, then a mineshaft could be converted to this purpose, and that only the top part of the tower would need to be built over it.

As Project Enersave (a make-work project under the auspices of the Energy Conservation Branch of the Canadian federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources), Richardson was able to get a low-cost lease on a working space, and received donated equipment including building materials, cables, insulators and other items used for testing. He set up a 10-foot pancake coil for small-range tests in the Timmins area of Northern Ontario.

His technique would have been based in part on the very positive Tesla wireless transmission replication experiments that had been conducted in the preceding months by a group of Winnipeg electrical engineers, most of whom were working for Manitoba Hydro. This group, which called itself WERG (Winnipeg Energy Research Group), was led by Fred A. Jost. (Ref. 16) This man had managed to find a Croatian priest to translate from Serbo-Croatian to English Nikola Tesla's 1899-1900 Colorado Springs scientific notebook. This gave to WERG the details of his many experiments in wireless electricity transmission, and the Winnipeg engineers took advantage of this source. Every participant donated his time.

Concerned about possible negative effects of transmission-line EMF fields on their livestock, as well as wanting to forestall loss of their land to the power company (Ref. 17), a group of farmers in Minnesota had expressed interest in having a receiving station for the long-range test. These farmers were willing to put up $276,000 toward the project. In co-operation with Richardson, their group went ahead with building a receiving coil.

The Ontario Hydro office in Timmins was also willing to supply 20 MW of power for the experiment. However, when the Toronto head office of Ontario Hydro got wind it, management blocked the proposal by refusing to supply the electric power -- even if it was paid for – to do the experiment.

Not willing to give up, in 1977 Carter took the Timmins proposal to his home province, requesting that the provincial government have a test done to transmit 20 MW from its generating plant at Churchill Falls on the mainland to St. John's, the provincial capital, located on the island,

In the days before Grand Banks gas extraction, in order to export the power generated at its Churchill Falls installation in Labrador, the province had to sell it at very low cost to Quebec, which is the adjacent administrative territory that is part of the same land mass. Quebec then cheerfully boosted the price about ten times to sell to New York, and reaped the profits, now into the $700 million range annually.

Wireless transmission would have enabled the easternmost island province to export electricity directly, and to gain needed revenue. Carter was aware of additional potential hydroelectric sites on the Lower Churchill which could be developed outside the terms of the Quebec contract. (Ref. 18) Wireless transmission of this power could have given his home province the ability to sell directly for competitive rates to the maritime and eastern-U.S. energy markets.

However, the Newfoundland government (since then officially named "Newfoundland and Labrador" to underscore the importance of the Churchill Falls generating station against possible claims from a future independent Quebec) said that it did not have even $5,000 to put up toward this experiment. That figure represented their estimate of the cost of setting aside and cleaning up a small section of a transformer yard.

Checkmate.

Scene 6: the cat jumps out of the bag

A few years later, PACE chairman Dr. Andrew Michrowski received a phone call from retiring NRC president, chemist Dr. William Schneider. Astonishingly, this man who had previously blocked PACE's efforts now had the effrontery to ask them to hire him. "Now I will finally be able to do what I want, since you do the most exciting work in the country," he said.

Dr. Michrowski took the opportunity to find out what really happened when the Prime Minister's wireless transmission initiative was snubbed by Schneider's direct orders. The telephone conversation went something like this.

AM: "Why did you tell Peat to block Trudeau's proposal?"

WS: "Because of the North American Energy policy."

AM: "What ‘North American Energy Policy'?"

WS: "North America is supposed to use oil, gas and coal, nuclear, and microwave transmissions from satellites, in that order. "

Michrowski then asked Senator Chesley Carter, with whom had frequent conversations, whether he had ever heard of this "North American" energy policy. Although he was a member of the Upper House of Parliament, co-founder of PetroCanada, and developer of the massive Churchill Falls hydroelectric facility, Chesley knew nothing of this policy. Further, he stated that Trudeau, the Prime Minister of the country, did not know about it either.

This "North American" policy was apparently being dictated from Washington, DC, or perhaps from an international cartel of energy interests, and enforced by the simple, effective means of covertly using a few key highly-placed scientific administrators, and a science writer, to ridicule any paradigm-shifting proposal.

Act IV: Canadians Try Again, 1987 - 1988

Scene 1: The Prime Minister's Wife

Unlike practical proposals, ideas are hard to kill. Because of her Yugoslavian background, Mila Mulroney, wife of the new Prime Minister (Brian Mulroney), was aware of Tesla's achievements and theories. On this new go-round, it was she who approached Marcel Masse, Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources Canada, to urge implementation of the great Serbian inventor's wireless-transmission concept.

Dr. Andrew Podgorski, of the Canada National Research Council's Division of Electrical Engineering and one of the directors of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), wrote a positive critique of the proposal submitted by PACE. Their updated proposal called for Canada to designate an electrical power source anywhere in the nation, and to transmit a commercial quantity of this power – at least 100 MegaWatts – wirelessly to a receiver in an Electrical Engineering building in the West Virginia University campus.

In his response to his superiors at National Research Council, and ultimately, to Mila Mulroney, Podgorski stated, "It was always my opinion that the old Tesla RF generating scheme was actually correct. I am convinced that a scale model of Tesla's arrangement could be easily duplicated."

There was much excitement at this response.

Scene 2: Heavyweight Backers Assemble

This time the proposal had more backers, including Claude Bélanger, a venture capitalist from Montreal, who wanted to finance it to the tune of one million dollars. He emphasized that he was not offering charity; this would be a business venture.

Professional scientific support came from McGill University (Prof. David Brooks), University in Montreal (Prof. Kimon Valaskakis), and the West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV (Prof. James E. Smith). Not least, an industry heavyweight, the Battelle Institute of Columbus, Ohio (Dr. James F. Corum), the largest private research organization and think tank, had endorsed the idea.

Further, although the company's legal staff had advised caution about going outside the corporate charter, numerous IBM personnel were keen on the idea. Senior research chemist, inventor of the floppy disk, and founding PACE member, Marcel Vogel (Ref. 19a) was aware that it was Tesla who had created binary code originally. Anticipating a monopoly in computers, IBM had been thwarted and its highest corporate levels had "discovered" Nikola Tesla when the US Patent Office had turned down that opportunity because of Tesla's "prior art" in binary code (1899).

A creative outside-the-box scientist, Vogel had been promoting, with Senator Carter, within the IBM corporate command, the commercial significance of efficient, pollution-free wireless transmission of electrical energy. The company was following closely the turn of events since Mila Mulroney's stewardship of the idea. (Ref. 19b) Vogel took a leave of absence from the company to come to Ottawa and participate in the negotiations.

The McGill study indicated that there would be no adverse environmental effects. West Virginia's Governor John D. Rockefeller intimated to the university in his state that if they could get the Canadian government involved, the state would support them as well. (Ref. 20) His interest in the project could have been related to the state's coal producing area; the hope of being able to generate power and sell it farther afield might increase the profits above what could be made from merely selling and shipping the unprocessed coal.

Along with a group of electrical engineers based in Richmond, Virginia, the Morgantown research group had conducted experiments duplicating Tesla's turn-of-the-previous-century Colorado Springs wireless experiments on a sequential basis. In a the research paper issued by West Virginia University for PACE, the authors concluded that for repetitively processing electrical energy, Tesla's transmitter had "a power processing efficiency orders of magnitude superior to anything available today." (Ref. 21)

The West Virginia group offered to transmit electricity from any place in Canada to any other location in the country, no matter how far – east to west, the arctic to the south, whatever. They were ready to take on a challenge. This being a two-summer make-work project to benefit the University and its students, the budget officially attached to the proposal was four and a half million dollars. However, as a scaled-down exercise, the actual work could have been done by the Canadian NRC for about $200,000 per year for three years, according to Dr. Podgorski. (Ref. 22a)

Given this cohesive corporate and intellectual backing, one might have expected a breakthrough.

Scene 3: NRC Squelchdown, an Encore Performance

However, at a whole-day meeting between the interested parties and the National Research Council, NRC's Vice President in charge of Technology Transfer, Dr. Keith Glegg, was the only opponent of the plan. And it was this one man who blocked it. He called the idea crazy and, to the amazement of the Canadian university and business representatives present, Glegg stated that Tesla's ideas should be left in the past.

Committed to its vast transmission-line system and to profits from Newfoundland's Churchill Falls, Quebec firmly turned its back on the potential available from wireless power. Along with a negative letter to the Quebec Minister of Energy, the Director of Hydro Quebec's Research Institute (IREQ) submitted to the provincial government a paper rejecting the PACE proposals as impossible.

With echoes of the Peat letter to Trudeau (which could have been circulated among institutions in Quebec), M. Boulet repeats the notion that 100 years ago, Tesla didn't understand the properties of the atmosphere. The pronouncements made in this paper indicate that IREQ did not analyze any of the experimental data supplied by Matthews, but applied a different set of standards to discredit it.

The IREC paper goes on to claim that the characteristic impedance in the air would cause a 50% loss of power at the transmitter and another 50% would be lost at the receiving end. The conclusion he draws is that this would render Tesla's system much less effective than conventional transmission over wires. (Ref. 22b)

To Michrowski, once again stymied by an official roadblock at the highest level, all of this did not add up. How could one man's opinion based on error and on denying validated research stand in the way of a vast array of very credible scientists and universities, this time even joining forces with a strong private-sector backer and think tank?

Was this the "North American Energy Policy" rearing its ugly head again? The symptoms were similar: one highly-placed official in a government scientific organization manages to discredit dozens of well-qualified researchers, to negate their experimental work, and to thwart carrying out of the all-important practical experiment that would provide more modern confirmation of Tesla's theories.

Scene 4: The Bronfman Skirmish

Something similar occurred during the 1979 United Nations Conference on Long-Term Energy Resources in Montreal, where PACE was represented by Fundamentals-of-Physics Professor Elizabeth Rauscher of University of California in Berkeley, and by Dr. Andrija Puharich, an expert in advanced electromagnetics.

One evening, Barbara Bronfman invited the PACE group to her Westmount residence to make a full-scale presentation on the Tesla wireless transmission technology to the entire Bronfman clan. In the light of a positive full-scale technology-assessment and due-diligence study by the Montreal investment analyst Lafferty, Harwood, the proposal deserved attention from movers and shakers. The Bronfmans were and are known to be top-level financiers and would have been capable of singlehandedly funding a worldwide wireless transmission system.

Well into the presentation by the PACE scientists, which lasted several hours, suddenly there was a violent outburst from two "science attachés" who came from the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.. These two men adamantly poo-poohed the whole technology.

Dr. Puharich, who had worked in Israel with top-level government officials there, was able to identify one of these "science advisors" as a MOSSAD (Israeli secret service) agent, whose tactical object may have been to disable civilian application of the technology. And, especially since the Bronfmans had the clout to enable it on a meaningful scale worldwide, apparently their initiative had to be nipped in the bud. The incident has taken a tragic turn, since it was shortly followed by the break-up of the Barbara's marriage to Charles Bronfman.

Scene 5: Final Exit, The Prime Minister's Wife, 1990

In a dismissive one-page answer to Dr. A. Michrowski, listing Mrs. Mila Mulroney as receiving a copy, William C. Winegard, Minister of Science in the Mulroney government, put a final nail in the coffin of his leader's wife's initiative. (Ref. 23a)

Winegard states, "It is understood that such a system would use the earth/ionosphere cavity as an electromagnetic resonator to achieve the transfer of large amounts of power. Although this approach is possible in theory, the current sensitivities of the general populace about long term exposure to lower level electromagnetic fields raises a large practical problem for any wireless power transmission system."

Coming from a Minister of Science, this letter shows a dismal lack of willingness to grasp the difference between conventional electromagnetics which cause magnetic fields due to leakage of energy, and scalar transmission which is virtually lossless and which is not EMF. Ironically, this lip-service to the public's distrust of electromagnetic fields leads to continuation of the very type of transmission lines which do cause the problems about which people continue to raise health concerns.

After inadvertently admitting to this ignorance in saying, "Based on our present knowledge [?] of the Tesla Technology and the practical problems it would have to surmount in use," Winegard concludes, "we do not feel that it offers a viable alternative to the electrical power transmission technology now in use."

Both Mila Mulroney and Dr. Michrowski could see the lack of science in this reply. The story doesn't end there, however.

Act V: Post-communist Russians Embrace Tesla

Scene 1. (Flashback) Mysterious signals, 1977

A Soviet scientist was reported to have been in Quebec interviewing the last assistant to Nikola Tesla known to be still living, Arthur H. Matthews, concerning this wireless technology. Concerned about cold-war politics, Matthews was reluctant, as quoted by the newspapers, to tell anyone with a Russian-sounding name anything that would be useful. (Ref. 23b)

However, these interviews were actually part of a massive multi-year, interdisciplinary National Academy of Sciences exercise. The objective was to get a handle on not-yet-applied technologies originally discovered or researched by Nikola Tesla.

PACE went to the Canadian Department of Communications to request monitoring of extremely low-frequency energy signals emanating from then Soviet Russia.

In response to PACE's request, the Canadian Department of Communications turned on all nine radio-frequency listening stations across the country. This system was able to determine that although these signals were originating several thousand miles east of Canada, the same signals rebounded from the South, in an anti-pode located in the ocean off New Zealand west, and with greater intensity, half an hour later.

This phenomenon of signal magnification had been reported by Nikola Tesla in his Colorado Springs wireless energy transmission experiments. This antipode data suggested that the Soviets had cracked the non-Hertzian (scalar) electromagnetic aspect of Tesla technology. Because of complaints about communications being disrupted, the Russians reduced the frequency and duration of the signals, making them harder to study. (Ref. 24)

Dr. Puharich and other US and Canadian scientists in the PACE network analysed the waveforms and non-linearity of the Soviet emissions. However, all public reports at the time were highly speculative, as there was not the coming and going between Russia and "the West" that occurred since the "Iron Curtain" was scrapped.

Nevertheless, the Soviet emissions did solicit widespread interest in the military and intelligence community.

Scene 2: (Flashback) Military Intellectual Containment

In 1978, Canada's Department of National Defence recommended that its military officials were no longer to engage in any scientific activity – nor to co-operate with the international PACE network – especially if the work was associated with Tesla technology. This directive was shared with military scientists at the NATO Ramstein AFB and Kirtland AFB.

After admitting that he was not qualified to evaluate "the feasibility of the purported applications of Tesla's work", the Director of Strategic Analysis warns, "investigations of this heretofore ‘fringe' subject can still be fraught with danger to an academic career." (Ref. 24) He expressed concern about the "kook factor" in new-age aficionados cosying up to Tesla and degrading the air of scientific respectability.

Also in the late 1970s, Senator Carter had traveled to Washington to try to defend the proposal. The CIA and US Defense groups held technical sessions with Dr. Puharich, and even Senator C. W. Carter in trying to size up the assessments and analyses that had been made in Ottawa.

Unfortunately, because of the novelty and the advanced state of the Tesla technology, this influx of information divided specialists within the US security establishment into confrontations. Some US-based PACE scientists found themselves put into personal risk situations, including fire-bombing of their homes, forcing them to seek refuge in other countries.

Similar divisions appear to have occurred within the Soviet bloc, where some were questioning whether the new Tesla technology applications must be confined only to military uses, and not also to have any civilian application and benefit. This question was discussed openly especially after an Ottawa presentation by PACE, which several dozen staff from the Soviet embassy attended.

Scene 3: Russian Science Achieves the Goal

After the fall of the Soviet system, money was very scarce in Russia, notably for scientists. There was none left over to pay for towers and wires, especially in remote regions. By implementing Tesla wireless transmission, Russians achieved what the West could not, blocked as it was by a retrograde policy being enforced at the highest levels.

The Russians' technological feat was announced in an international renewable-energy conference hosted in Montreal by Natural Resources Canada in the year 2000. This technological development was part of the "fallout" of the massive Soviet Academy of Sciences research of the 1970s, which had been mostly directed towards military objectives. In 2001, PACE released a report authored by several Russian scientists from a division of the world's largest (at the time) energy company. This report explaining their work was endorsed by the All-Russian Research Institute for Electrification of Agriculture. (Ref. 25).

Unfortunately, the various details explained by Prof. Strebkov about how the technology was designed and implemented did not seem to engender any interest among the audience, although this included top Canadian energy experts. Also present were the self-described "green technology" decision-makers in Hydro Québec, McGill University and such organizations as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. These groups are still ignoring the wireless technology.

Scene 4: SWEPS takes Centre Stage

The Single-Wire Electric Power System (SWEPS) utilizes a modified Tesla transformer at the generation site to produce a high-frequency reactive capacitive "acoustic-electrical" (or longitudinal) current. At the receiving site is a reverse-wound Tesla transformer, a standard rectifier, and an inverter which turns the received signal back into standard transverse-wave electromagnetics. These bring the reactive high-frequency electric power back to 50 or 60Hz standard mode.

According to their experiments, the Russians state that SWEPS has quasi super-conducting properties, and that there are no conduction-resistance losses for copper, aluminum, steel, tungsten, carbon, water or even damp earth. Prototypes tested include 230V, 10KV and 200V. The Russians expect that GigaWatt levels of transmission could be successfully transmitted.

The SWEPS system confers an obvious advantage on the Russian economy for developing agriculture and saving costs. Not least, it avoids the instability of relying on wind and other intermittent sources of off-grid power. The Russians propose an Asia-European superconducting wireless power trading system to connect solar generating systems of equal capacity, including Spain, Astrakhan near the Caspian Sea and one in the far eastern zone. These could supply solar power in the summer. During the winter, solar power could be transmitted to the north from Africa, India and Australia.

This wireless seasonal trading in energy would balance need with capacity, and reduce losses from transmission. The Russian scientists' report provides detailed equations along with an analysis of the methods to be used.

In comparison, with its reliance primarily on fuels, the "North American Energy Policy" sounds like something from the stone age designed to keep us in the past. In the face of mounting debt and prices, we have to ask, "Who benefits from the status quo?" And is it only about money, or is a supposed military advantage what is being sought to the detriment of all else in society?

Postscript

Wireless transmission is an idea whose time has come, not once, but many times. We who are stuck in North American can only envy the freedom of scientists in the eastern hemisphere to pursue the objectives that eluded both Tesla himself and all Western scientists since his time, apparently due to financial and political interests who prefer the existing technology.

Advances in programming and encryption beyond what Tesla envisioned when he created binary code should provide a way for the costs of this broadcast energy to be recovered from subscribers, plus a reasonable profit level. If we can now lay to rest the fiction that the broadcast energy would in any way be 'free' and thus anathema to those in the energy business, that financial resistance to wireless energy can finally be removed.

And none too soon. The wire-based grid is aging, as is the population of linesmen who are able to maintain it. According to a representative of the Ontario trade union, few apprentices have been hired in recent years to replace them. While private energy companies like the idea of making money by charging for electricity, no one likes paying the costs of keeping all these wires strung up everywhere. Every windstorm causes long-lasting power outages as poles and wires are damaged by wind and blown debris or tumbling trees. The need for a new system is becoming more obvious all the time.

Wireless energy would address all of these cost problems, as well as removing a major eyesore from cities and countryside alike. Lands tied up in easements could be released for redevelopment as deemed suitable by local administrations. To achieve twenty-first century efficiency demands a phase-out of the costly, obsolete, wire-based transmission system.

# # #

References

Ref. 1. WIZARD: The Life and Times of NIKOLA TESLA, Biography of a Genius, by Mark J. Siefer. Citadel Press, 1998. ISBN 1-8065-1960-6 Pp.193-5.

Ref. 2a. Interview, Dr. Andrew Michrowski, Chairman, Planetary Association for Clean Energy (PACE). Dr. Michrowski's documentation, and his reminiscences concerning key players in this unfolding drama, form the basis of this article.

Ref. 2b. The height of this tower is variously reported to be 175, 178 and 187 feet (see < http://www.wr6wr.com/newSite/articles/features/olderfeatures/tesla.html >). The latter is the number that adds up to 307 total height of the working charge-separation shaft-tower combination given in Wizard, Chapter 33.

Ref. 3. Wizard, p. 285

Ref. 4. Letter seen and read by Dr. Michrowski while visiting the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Ref. 5. As quoted in Wizard, P. 300. Baruch later rose to become a Wall Street banker, and as part of the Wilson delegation attended the Versailles Peace Conference.

Ref. 6. Wizard, p. 166.

Ref. 7. Wizard, pp. 53-60.

Ref. 8. In the 1930s, a five-hour exposé in Parliament by respected Canadian attorney Gerald McGeer revealed evidence stricken from the public record but provided to him through secret service agents who had been at the John Wilkes Booth trial. McGeer recounted that it was powerful international bankers who, angered by Lincoln's creation of the debt-free "greenback", had fought the president throughout the civil war and topped it off by arranging for him to be murdered. He stood in the way of their plans for worldwide control of money.

A report in the Vancouver Sun on 2 May 1934 broke the story in Canada and made it an election issue. The Liberals came to power on the promise that they would change the newly-created private central bank – set up by the Conservatives in imitation of the privately-owned "Federal Reserve" (which is not federal and has no reserves) ¬– into a public institution.

Ref. 9. The Evil Empire: Globalization's Darker Side by Paul Hellyer. Chimo Media, 1997. p. 31. A Cabinet Minister in the Trudeau government and retired founder of the Canadian Action party, Hellyer outlines the problem of debt-based currency in detail.
For an overview, see: < http://www.cfoss.com/hellyer.html > and (< http://www.canadianactionparty.ca/Main.asp?SetLanguage=English > The CAP site provides a user-friendly version of economics in "comic book" form – to turn pages, click "Next" at bottom of image.). Also see MELTDOWN; Money, debt and the Wealth of Nations, William Krehm, Editor COMER publications, 1999. The website <http://www.comer.org/> provides concise summaries of monetarist policy and its ramifications.)

Ref. 10a. At that time, Senator Carter was meeting several times a week with Dr. Michrowski to discuss the scientific and technical issues. Though the current Conservative government may soon change this, Canadian Senators are still being appointed to office. Since he did not have to play to a constituency or face re-election against a corporate-funded smear campaign, Chesley Carter was free to pursue original scientific initiatives. Though not all appointed senators deserve equal admiration, some such as Carter became experts in various fields and worked hard for the benefit of the country.

Ref. 10b. Letter from Senator C.W. Carter to David Schreck, 10 May 1977. From Senator Carter's "Correspondence on Clean Energy" (MG 32 – C33 Vol. 3 File 12), now in "The Rooms", the Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, which provides photocopies upon request for a moderate fee. (http://www.therooms.ca/archives/contact.asp)

Ref. 10c. Letter from Senator C.W. Carter to Nikola Fodor, who originated from Tesla's homeland. 21 May 1977. (Preserved in TheRooms archive.)

Ref. 11. Letter sent 2nd February 1977 from Dean N. Clay, Chief of the Science and Technology Division to Senator C. W. Carter, from a copy in the PACE files.

Ref. 12a. "Scientists agree to disagree on value of energy without wires", by Ed Ungar. Unfortunately the name of the newspaper is not within the image-frame of the photocopy obtained from the Carter archives, nor is its date, but its content suggests it was published early in 1997.

Ref. 12b. Both Dr. Michrowski and Senator Carter had read this letter, and testified to its contents. Unfortunately it seems that no copy of the original has come to light, as far as this author has been able to find out as of publication date of this article.

Ref. 13 Northern Tidal Flows: Reliable New Power Source for Quebec? by Harry Valentine. (internal link)

Ref. 14. See below. Letter from Chesley W. Carter to A.H. Matthews, 7 May 1977. "I had a telephone conversation with Tim Richardson yesterday and he seemed quite pleased with the progress he was making. He told me that Dr. Peat, who …compiled the report for the NRC, has changed his attitude considerably and has become quite interested." (From Carter's correspondence file 3/12., from TheRooms Archive)

Ref. 15. http://www.bangor.ac.uk/~mas009/gal2/guft.htm
Evans, who is from Wales, is the only living scientist with this status. Two previous Civil List recipients were Michael Faraday, (1797 - 1867), and James Prescott Joule (1818 - 1889)."

Ref. 16. Jost was designer of the DC High Voltage line that spans from Northern Manitoba to the Dakotas, Later, he was to become director of the research arm of the Canadian Electrical Association, which is made up of stakeholders for the Canadian electric utilities, manufacturers and academe.

Ref. 17. Letter from Sen. Carter to Nikola Fodor (President of Electrovert, a Montreal-based high-tech company), 21 May 1977. Carter recounts progress of the Timmins project, and describes the Wisconsin farmers' involvement. (Carter archive 3/12)

Ref. 18. Letter from C.W. Carter to Frederic Stoessel (former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union) 16 July 1977. (Carter archive 3/12.)

Ref. 19a. Before joining IBM, Vogel held about a dozen patents on his own. Having become wealthy through his invention of fluorescent colours, he worked purely for enjoyment.

Ref. 19b. Was IBM hoping for a business opportunity in writing the code for a worldwide power transmission system? No information to confirm or deny this possibility has been disclosed to date; however, if that was in the company's wish list, Tesla's idea for coding wireless power to subscribers might well have served as the inspiration.

Ref. 20. Dr. Michrowski's verbal report based on knowing the West Virginia University professors personally. Why was the Canadian government needed = to take on the project? Was this because Rockefeller knew about the North American Energy Policy? Did Washington's opposition to Tesla's science mean that the U.S. might interfere with these experiments?

Ref. 21. "The Distribution of Electrical Power by Means of Terrestrial Cavity Resonator Modes", co-authored by James F. Corum, Department of Electrical Engineering, and James E. Smith, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, PACE, 5 December 1986.

Ref. 22a. Letter from Dr. Andrew Podgorski, PhD, to Dr. Andrew Michrowski as President of PACE, 3 September 1987. (Copy in PACE files.) Podgorski stated that he believed a long (6 km) ionized channel would be needed to create excitation of the earth cavity. He was not sure whether "lossless" excitation was possible, and therefore advocated a scaled-down laboratory experiment to demonstrate whether the concept would really work.

Ref. 22b. Letter from M. Lionel Boulet, Directeur, IREQ, to M. Claude Dumas, Chef du Cabinet du Ministre Délégué à l'Energie, 16 join 1977. In French; rough translation by author follows.
Actual wording:
(a) "… les hypothèses de depart de Tesla, au début du siècle, reposaient sur une mauvaise connaissance des propriétés de l'atmosphère."
(b) "Le problème de la transmission de l'information au moyen d'une antenne est simplement l'adaptation de l'impèdance d'un émetteur à cette impedance caractérestique de l'espace, mais dans ce processus, y a perte de la moitié de l'énergie, et une perte équivalente à la réception."
Forwarded to Dr. Michrowski by M. Dumas.

Ref. 23a. Letter from William C. Winegard, Minister of Science, to Dr. A Michrowski, President, Planetary Association for Clean Energy, 8 June 1990, CC to Mrs. Mulroney.

Ref. 23b. Ottawa Journal 1 Feb 1977, and Globe and Mail, 2 Feb. 1977. Matthews had not been so cagey with Canadian colleagues, and gave to PACE much important data. He had also offered his farm, strewn with technological relics of his work with Tesla, to the Canadian government as a research station and museum. Although strongly advocated by Michrowski in a 17 February 1977 letter to the Privy Council?s economic adviser Dr. Ian A. Stewart, unfortunately in a letter to A.H. Matthews dated 7 May 1977, C.W. Carter makes it clear that this museum proposal was not implemented. (Archive 3/12)

Ref. 24. Letter from LCol M.V. Cromie to Capt. Claude Laporte, 17 November 1978. (PACE file copy)

Ref. 25. Dmitry S. Strebkov, Stanislav V. Avramenko, Aleksei I. Nekarasov, "New Technology of Electric Power Transmission". The Planetary Association for Clean Energy, Inc., 2001. ISBN 0-919969-13-5

Wireless Transmission: A Century of Power Politics Tussles Over "Free" Energy's Price Tag

References

See also