Electrostatic Propulsion

Based on Tesla's Wardencliffe Technology

At about the time Albert Einstein was telling the world about his photoelectric effect theory, Nikola Tesla was building Wardencliffe.  Wardencliffe was to be a world wide power and communications transmission system.

The theory behind Wardencliffe is to create a huge electron hammer that would ring the Earth's negatively charged electrostatic field.  Through my years of research of Tesla's patents and writings, I pieced together his Wardencliffe design.  One might think it is possible to simply build a working model of Wardencliffe straight from the patent schematics.  But Tesla was becoming wise about giving out true to scale drawings after Marconi hijacked his radio invention.  The schematics for the Wardencliffe tower are true to function, but the shapes of the coils in the schematics are only for illustrative purposes, not for actual construction purposes.

After Tesla came back from Colorado Springs, Tesla filed a patent for the ideal shapes of secondary coils.  In this patent he clearly extols the virtues of the flat spiral and conical coils.  Even Tesla's later portraits were made in front of his large flat spiral coil.  

In his Colorado Springs Notes, Tesla details his experiments with "extra coils".  The secondary and extra coils Tesla used in Colorado Springs were all solenoid in shape.  But after reading the patents carefully and contemplating the words and ignoring the pictures, I realized the Wardencliffe design most likely used a combination flat spiral and solenoid secondary coil.  There were rumors to this effect as well.  I experimented with these combination flat spiral and solenoid secondary coils myself.

I found that with the combination coil I was setting up standing waves on the top capacitance of the coil.  This manifested as a series of well organized spikes of electron jets flying off perpendicular to the surface of the top capacitance, as seen in figure 1.

figure 1.

In Tesla's Wardencliffe design, the top capacitance was chosen such that it could contain the entire charge developed in the secondary.  Instead of breaking out to produce lightning bolts, the entire charge was discharged back through the secondary and into the ground.  The effect was that he was producing a controlled lightning strike on the Earth.  This would cause a very large wave to propagate around the Earth to the antipode, and reflect back to the power station.  When the wave came back to the power station another controlled lightning bolt was coming down the secondary to add energy to the first wave, and so on.  Eventually Tesla would have created standing waves on the Earth much like the spikes seen in figure 1.  

These standing wave spikes would bring electrons very high into the atmosphere, and likely cause lightning discharges to increase at the location of the standing waves.  This in turn would have affected the weather and possibly the climate.  

Tesla further remarked that he could make these standing waves appear at any place on the Earth by building and controlling other power stations and using a type of triangulation system.  In theory, Tesla could make the standing waves all peak in one particular place, causing who knows what kind of effects?

These same principles can be applied at a local scale.  For example, a 24ft diameter conductive sphere could be isolated from Earth ground.  Three combination coils such as those I built could be placed at three locations around the sphere.  When the three coils are tuned such that a single standing wave is focused at one point, there would be a huge electrostatic potential with a vector being maintained.  This huge electrostatic potential, if pointed to the Earth, would repel the Earth since both are negative in charge.  The repulsion could be strong enough to cause the sphere to remain levitated, or even lift away from the Earth.

A sphere was chosen in the above example because it is easy to transfer the work Tesla did at Wardencliffe with the Earth, to a similar spherical shape.  But there is no need for the shape to be spherical.  It could be saucer shaped, cigar shaped, triangular with rounded corners, or any other shape with rounded corners.  The strong electrostatic potential, pointing toward the Earth, is all there is to the propulsion system.  

Such a propulsion system would not have to be limited to Earth travel.  Creating a charged standing wave on a spacecraft and pointing the charge at the solar wind could provide propulsion.  The charge could be made to repel the solar wind to move away, or be attracted to slow down or move toward the Sun.  The charge could also be pointed toward a planet or moon when close enough.  Since the charge is maintained in a standing wave, it would take hardly any energy at all to maintain the standing wave.  The energy could be gathered from a solar panel.  It may not provide the sole power for the craft, but it would be a cheap and light auxiliary propulsion system for long distance solar system travel.