Tesla’s Proof of Concept—Before Colorado Springs

This photo comes from a March 1899 article Tesla wrote in Electrical Review. What you’re seeing isn’t a trick or a publicity stunt. Tesla is lighting a disconnected vacuum bulb—no wires—using only high-frequency currents. The photo was taken by the light of the bulb itself, which had a brightness of about 1,500 candlepower. In his words, the bulb was several inches from the coil, and yet the gas inside was brought to full incandescence.

So what’s going on here?

Tesla had spent the previous few years developing a system that could safely and efficiently generate millions of volts using high-frequency, high-potential currents. This wasn’t just theoretical. In this article, he laid out the entire progression—step by step—of how he refined his transformers and oscillators to get to this point. He shows how he moved from closed-core coils to open-core, and then to his single-terminal coil design. That final version operated with a quarter-wavelength resonant secondary—just like what he would use later at Colorado Springs. He even detailed how he figured out the role air played in breakdown, and how removing or managing gases let him push voltages ten times higher without discharge failure.

The setup in this photo is most likely powered by the apparatus described in U.S. Patent 568,180, filed in 1896, which uses a spark gap to charge and discharge a condenser into a low-inductance circuit. This creates rapid bursts of oscillating current—what we now call radio-frequency energy. The transformer design he’s using aligns with his later 1897 patent (No. 593,138), which calls for a flat spiral coil wound to produce maximum voltage at the free end. Together, these let him light bulbs wirelessly, transmit energy across the room, and demonstrate that the air itself could be used as a medium for power transfer.

In short, this article—and this image—was Tesla’s declaration that his wireless system worked. He had a working prototype. What he needed next was space and scale. That’s why he went to Colorado Springs later that same year: to see how far and how powerfully he could push the system using the Earth and atmosphere as conductors.

So while Wardenclyffe is often viewed as the big goal, this article shows that Tesla had already proven the concept in his New York lab. Colorado wasn’t about proving it worked—it was about scaling it to the planet.

#NikolaTesla #science #history #wireless #electricity #technology #proofofconcept #aheadofhistime #aheadofourtime 

(Copyright: Dr. Nikola Tesla )