>>12759869In 1899 Tesla set up a laboratory at Colorado Springs, CO. He believed incorrectly that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy. His observations led him to believe a high voltage used in a coil at an elevation of a few hundred feet would "break the air stratum down", eliminating the need for miles of cable. In 1901, at Shoreham, Long Island he began work on Wardenclyffe Tower, but by 1904 funding provided by J. P. Morgan dried up and the facility was never completed.
Tesla failed to make a commercial product out of his findings but his resonant inductive coupling method is now widely used in electronics and is currently being applied to short-range wireless power systems such as wireless chargers for smartphones and other devices using low-voltage lithium batteries.
It is theoretically possible to transmit electromagnetic energy through highly focused microwaves and even lasers, but there must be a line-of-sight receiver at the other end, which makes such a system impractical. Modern applications of wireless transmission of energy have succeeded in doing so only for a few feet, and not the hundreds or thousands of miles Tesla envisioned. Tesla’s failure was simply a matter of mistakenly believing electrical energy could be transmitted through the Earth itself, which was a common misconception at the time.
