|
 As
the saying goes, generating power is half the fun. If you really
want to impress people, you have to come up with a really cool way of
transmitting that power-- preferably one that doesn't involve wires.
Wireless power had a real vogue in the years before
the Second World War and many people of a more optimistic nature
imagined that it was only a matter of time that we'd be running about
on wireless roller skates powered by
a remote transmitting station pumping megavoltage into the
æther with gay abandon.
And it wasn't just a fascination with an abstract
idea either. There were any number of schemes being tinkered
with, such as the chaps in the insert on the left who experimented
with lighting lamps with short waves. Then, of course, there
were the strange obsessions of
Nikola Tesla, which promised to be the most revolutionary thing
since sliced fire. But for a real bit of fried gold
you have to admire the system showcased here; the transmission of
power on a beam of light. Invented by Mr. Tom Hettinger,
the idea is
dead simple. Mr. Hettinger reasoned that the upper layers of the
Earth's atmosphere were being constantly ionised by the rays of the Sun.
Since ionised gases conduct electricity very nicely and the
lower layers of air insulated the ionised gases from the ground, he
concluded that if he managed to pump an electric charge into the upper
atmosphere he'd have a ready conduit to send electricity anywhere on
Earth for ready tapping. Just connect the upper atmosphere to
the ground and you've got the makings of a neat little circuit.
How to tap it was the tricky bit, but Mr. Hettinger
was up to the task. Unlike Tesla, who had a similar idea, but
relied on wire-carrying balloons to make the final connection,
Hettinger figured that he could use an intense arc lamp shooting
ultraviolet light into the sky to create an ionised path between earth
and heaven. Into this beam he would insert a metal grid hooked
to a generator, which could then send electric power soaring upwards.
At the other end of the circuit, ships and aircraft would send beams
of their own up (aircraft having to send one down as well to make a
ground connection) and tap this limitless flow of power.
 Even
cities could be powered this way, though Hettinger thought it
impractical to equip every home with an arc lamp. Perhaps the
local municipality would fall back on the Gernsbackian idea of
transmitting power directly through the air like our short wave fiends
mentioned above. If you wonder what the adverse
effects of all this would have been, Mr. Hettinger assured us that
such a constant electric and ultraviolet treatment would be nothing
but beneficial; killing off germs and stimulating the human body until
we became a race of giant supermen. Perhaps its just
as well that Hettinger's idea for turning the Earth into a monstrous
capacitor was about as practical as trying to dye the ocean pink with
food colouring. With enough effort you might stain the odd
beach, but at the end of the day, it's green that will win out. |
