Tesla coils creating energy

We know Tesla coils can send energy through the air without the use of wires. But Tesla's dream was to have Tesla coils built around the earth to capture energy from the earth and then resend it out as electromagnetic waves to power houses for free.

He said the air was a great insulator meaning it could hold a good charge before any kind of release. I'm thinking he was trying to capture the static charge from the air around the coil.

Is this possible?

 

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I'm sorry to say that I don't know enough about the Tesla coils to give you some good feedback. I'll start reading about it, but first would you be so good as to give myself and the other members of the forum a backdrop on how Tesla coils work and the principals the govern them?

 

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What Tesla seems to have had in mind was something like this. If you have a resonant circuit and allow a dc pulse to jump across it, the circuit will resonate. Do a search on "spark gap transmitter". Just don't try to build one, the FCC will come and throw rocks at your house. (Actually confiscate your equipment and fine the ...you know what... out of you.

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Anyway, the conversion from dc to ac can be reasonably efficeint. What he seems to have wanted is to use a big Tesla coil to cause a breakdown to the upper atmosphere and essentially capture the energy of electrical storms. I personally have some serious misgivings. You would wind up with lots of ozone from the continuous corona discharge, smog. You would make radio communications impossible due to interference. And while he likely thought he could get a controlled continuous discharge, I would bet that the first thunderstorm that came along would blow his apparatus to copper vapor.

That's my guess anyway. He didn't really tell for certain. Kind of secretive. He was an inventor remember and not a scientist. I admire a lot of his accomplishments but he was given to some impractical flights of fancy. And he didn't always have a solid grip on some of the theoretical side of things. Often he was just plain wrong. Especially later in life, when he was broke and made up some tall tails to impress reporters for a few bucks.