Massive Tesla Tower Suddenly Appears in Field Outside Waco, TX
Drivers traveling east along the I-35 corridor between Waco and Dallas have been intrigued by a tall, oddly shaped tower looming in the middle of a field in the small town of Milford, TX. For many, the tower is a confounding sight, but those familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla have been quick to point out that the lone pylon looks strikingly similar to a Tesla Tower.
Though construction began almost two years ago, it wasn’t for at least a year until the tower began to draw attention from local news outlets and various corners of the internet.
But now that the company behind the project has been uncovered and some of the project’s goals have been elucidated, much of the speculation has been confirmed; the tower is in fact based on the same idea behind Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower constructed on Long Island.
The precise electrical mechanism behind it however, is known as Zenneck surface wave technology, named after electrical engineer Jonathon Zenneck, who discovered that low-frequency electrical waves could be transmitted and received through the curvature of the Earth, to and from a singular location.
Based on the titles and affiliations of those involved in the project, it’s unclear whether this tower will be used to realize Tesla’s dream of transmitting free energy to everyone in the world – if it’s even possible – however, the company behind it claims it intends to bring energy to rural parts of the world that currently have trouble accessing energy efficiently.
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That company is Viziv Technologies and it has partnered with Baylor University in developing methods of wireless electricity distribution over long distances. It also says it plans to develop the technology to transmit navigation and sensing signals for GPS and various communication technologies.
“Currently about 17 percent of the world’s population have no access to electrical power, and for many more people, availability is spotty and unreliable,” Truell Hyde, Baylor’s Vice Provost for Research, said in a press release. “This technology has the potential to raise the standard of living for people around the world. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of something like that?”
With over $50 million in funding from investors, in addition to its university partnership, this may be the first time the technology has had significant investment since Tesla built Wardenclyffe in 1906. Let’s just hope the private interest from those investments doesn’t lead to its demise, like it did for Tesla in 1917.
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For more on the Wardenclyffe Tower and the legacy of Nikola Tesla, check out this biopic Free Energy of Tesla :
About the Author
Is a Tesseract a Wrinkle in Time?
Did a coming of age story set in a science fiction context plant the seeds of quantum physics in popular culture in the 1960s? When Madeleine L’Engle wrote “A Wrinkle in Time” in the late 1950s, quantum theory was in its infancy, but was being nurtured by the likes of Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and a cohort of other theoretical physicists.
In 1962, L’Engle entered new literary realms with the adaptation of quantum physics in the form of the “tesseract,” a theory of dimensional travel. She also brought a female protagonist to the male-dominated science fiction genre, another groundbreaking move. That was 50-plus years ago — now the tesseract model, essentially a 4D analogue of a cube, appears in fiction, comic books and film, and is used by science to describe dimensional processes and systems such as DNA sequences.
After being rejected by at least 40 publishers, L’Engle’s book  “A Wrinkle in Time,” was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and went on to win the prestigious John Newbery medal in 1963. The book, an instant classic, continued to garner honors over the following five decades. Fourteen million copies of “A Wrinkle in Time” have sold since the first edition.
The word “tesseract” was invented by eccentric British mathematician and science fiction writer Charles Howard Hinton, who coined the term in his 1888 article, “What is the Fourth Dimension.” Quantum theory is now common parlance in theoretical physics. But L’Engle’s prescient story-telling introduced tesseract theory to generations of young readers. This notion of interdimensional travel via the tesseract was seeded into collective consciousness and continually appeared above the pop culture waterline in the form of comic books and film.
