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Possible Duplicate:
Can you create energy out of nowhere ?

I recall reading that Nikola Tesla suggested that electricity could be created from the air. This claim is stated in the following quote from a humourous comic on the Oatmeal:

You know when you need electricity for your home it simply rains down from the earth's ionosphere and charges everything wirelessly? ... Oh right, that was something Tesla invented but didn't share with the world ...

and also, similarly:

One of Tesla's final gifts to the world was a tower near New York City that would have provided free wireless energy to the entire planet. The man who financed the construction of the tower shut it down when he learned that there would be no way to regulate the energy and therefore it wouldn't make money.

Have these inventions since been proven as a viable and useful technology? Do we now understand how these inventions worked, and could either of them have provided energy enough for millions of people around the world to power heat, A/C, lights, computers, stoves, refrigerators, and other appliances?

EDIT I have edited this question so it is narrower than creating energy out of nowhere, specifically limited to those claims about inventions made by Tesla that I found referenced in the Oatmeal comic. (I leave it to a moderator to remove the Possible Duplicate note above and re-open, at their discretion)

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Brian M. Hunt
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    What do you mean "create"? I thought he wanted to transmit electric power through the air, more or less like radio waves. – Mike Dunlavey Apr 14 '11 at 01:48
  • @Mike Dunlavey: You might be right, but I had understood that he had meant "create" to be "extract", as if the energy was already present in the air and he was postulating an efficient way to harness that energy for electrical current. I gather that Tesla's theory was buried because it threatened the electrical generation industry at the time. Perhaps that's an important point to add to the question. :o) – Brian M. Hunt Apr 14 '11 at 02:41
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    @Brian M. Hunt: Perhaps the theory was ignored because it defied the first two laws of thermodynamics, and there was no solid evidence for it. – David Thornley Apr 14 '11 at 03:23
  • Does this question refer to a specific theory? If so, could you link it? – Monkey Tuesday Apr 14 '11 at 03:34
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    This isn't a duplicate, as can be seen by searching for Tesla's ideas. Not all of them were in accord with the laws of physics, but the idea to get energy from the electrostatic difference of the atmosphere at various altitudes could work in theory. – David Thornley Apr 14 '11 at 12:27
  • Meta discussion: http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/542 – Brian M. Hunt Apr 14 '11 at 12:53
  • @David: you still wouldn't get energy out of "thin air", you would get energy out of Earth's EM field. The question as-is is either a duplicate or too vague. Fixed to specify the theory is off-topic. – Sklivvz Apr 14 '11 at 13:50
  • If the energy is in the air, what purpose does the tower serve? Why can't devices extract this energy themselves? – John Lyon May 15 '12 at 04:43
  • @Sklivvz: It's not "out of thin air", it's "through thin air". Transmitting energy via induction or otherwise is possible, so this is not a dupe. – Manishearth May 15 '12 at 05:30
  • @Manishearth the question was completely reworded. – Sklivvz May 15 '12 at 09:45
  • The interesting claim would be about effective transmission of energy through the air, not its creation. This would be more interesting and less of a duplicate. – matt_black May 15 '12 at 23:11
  • @matt_black: Do you mean the claim about transmission of energy from the ionosphere, or energy from a tower in New York? Tesla never spoke of course about creating energy from nothing, only harnessing existing energy. Here is an interesting relevant paper [The Second Law Thermodynamics and Tesla's Fuelless Generator, by Oliver Nichelson](http://home.comcast.net/~onichelson/Thermodynamics2.pdf) – Brian M. Hunt May 16 '12 at 03:50
  • Interesting article on point: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/14/tech/innovation/wireless-electricity/index.html – Brian M. Hunt Mar 15 '14 at 18:19
  • Just dumping this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU49FSIx0_g – Brian M. Hunt May 03 '23 at 19:20

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I found a web site that claimed he had a plan to extract energy from the heat in the air. This is a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that you can only derive heat energy from a difference in temperature.

This site mentions cosmic rays, and then suggests that a sufficiently high wire could bridge a potential difference between the ground and the air, thereby charging a capacitor that could be tapped for power. This could actually work, as there are often potential differences (when they get large enough, we get lightning). Whether there would be enough usable energy to make it worthwhile is another question (and a large enough potential difference would zap right through the capacitor anyway).

David Thornley
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    The thing about Tesla is that, like Gauss, some of the things he made or said aren't really easy to understand by _anyone_. Miss-quotes abound around him. – T. Sar Sep 22 '16 at 15:28