DekuTree64 wrote ...

There are so many interpretations of Tesla's work, I only trust his own writings. Patent 645576 is the best documentation I know of for his plan to transmit power through the air. I doubt it would have reached globally, and if it did, it would only be at high elevation. But locally, it may even work at ground level. The goal was true conduction, not RF waves.

Patent 787412 covers his ideas for standing waves in the earth, but I'm not sure if that was intended for power transmission or only signals. That's also the patent where he quotes a faster-than-light speed (pi/2 times speed of light), but it's just poor wording. The earth is round, so a wave traveling through the interior gets to the opposite pole in 2/pi the time it would take to go around the surface, hence "mean surface velocity" is faster than light, but 3D space velocity is just regular light speed.

From what I can tell, we're still running on a lot of 1880's era Tesla tech, which was the completion of his dream to hardness the power of Niagara Falls. But afterward, around 1891 (Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency) he started experimenting with short duration, high intensity current impulses, which allows transmitting power over a single wire. And at some point, he realized that the air or ground could be used as part of that wire. 1899-1900 in Colorado Springs, he built a prototype for the tower, and apparently it did what he wanted. I haven't read enough of Colorado Springs Notes to say for sure whether that's the air transmission, ground transmission, or both. But on page 61, July 4, 1899, he describes a thunderstorm where he first verified that standing waves are possible, and occur naturally.

AFAIK, Tesla never cared what Marconi was up to. The failure of the tower was most likely due to the social/political situation of the time. Roosevelt became president in 1901, and quickly went to work putting a stop to the rampant money grubbing of the big monopolies. Tesla was no good at managing money, and just depended on the big players like J.P. Morgan to keep funding his work. So when the money stopped flowing, there was nothing he could do but beg. And since his work was geared toward betterment of humanity rather than profit, Morgan wasn't having it. No big conspiracy, just a case of bad timing and bad financial planning.

But then again, some people worry about health effects of wifi and cell phone towers nowadays, so living in the field of a Tesla tower may have had some side effects that would make it unusable anyway (or least, people would blame all sorts of stuff on it). Still, I'd like to see someone build one and study it.