Tesla's Fuelless Generator

and Wireless Power Transmission

by Oliver Nichelson

Ex invisibilibus visibilia fierent.

E3: The Next Electricity: (2015) "How Bad Science Gave Us Electricity and How a New Electricity Will Change the Future" An overview of Tesla's work on power generation and transmission in the context of the history of electrical technology.

Nikola Tesla's "Free Energy" Documents (1976) reproduces the inventor's 1902 letter to Robert U. Johnson about Tesla's new energy generator that "would not consume fuel". This letter was found in the Tesla Collection at Columbia University Library when attending the IEEE Tesla Symposium in New York in January 1976. This letter will come to be considered as important in the history of electrical science as the papers of Franklin, Faraday and Maxwell. The original version of the difficult handwriting is here.

Nikola Tesla's Later Energy Generation Designs was prepared for the 26th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference in August 1991. The paper documents that Nikola Tesla claimed to have built an electrical power generator that would not consume fuel, where in his writings the description of such a device is found, the theory of how a fuelless generator could be possible, and a suggestion as to how Tesla's new device might have operated. The paper moves from historical fact, the claims for such a generator in a letter hand written by Tesla, to speculation about the operating principles of the inventions. At the time of writing the paper, the historical material was certain, but the engineering explanation of how the new type of generator worked was speculation.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Tesla's Fuelless Generator was prepared for the 28th (1993) IECEC conference. It takes up Tesla's argument for a fuelless electric power generator that does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Though the device appears to supply power without fuel, it is not a perpetual motion machine. Tesla's explanation and a modern analysis is given of the device's operation. This paper presents a more satisfactory theory about the engineering aspects of the new generator than the 1991 IECEC paper.

Since the papers on Tesla’s new type of electrical generator were published there have been a number of inquiries about his Notes on a Unipolar Dynamo about a significant improvement on the Faraday disk generator. Among it's features it is claimed that the unipolar generator would increase in current when mechanical power was removed.