Build Your Own Tesla Radio

[Sentry18]

https://misanthrope.today/2019/11/27/build-your-own-tesla-radio/

Build Your Own Tesla Radio


If you could construct a simple radio that could relay messages from disembodied spirits – would you do it? Thanks to a genuine genius whose ground-breaking scientific contributions have been underplayed by the U.S. government, you can.

Nikola Tesla was born in July 1856, in the Austrian town of Smiljan (now in Croatia) and died on January 7, 1943, in New York, New York. The inventive Serbian American engineer discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field which underlies most alternating-current machinery. Tesla is also credited with coming up with the three-phase system of electric power transmission.


Tesla immigrated to the United States at age 28 in 1884 and worked for a short time for Thomas Edison who disparaged his rival’s work while capitalizing on it. Tesla sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current (AC) dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse. In 1891, he invented the Tesla coil, an induction coil still used extensively in radio technology.

On March 17, 1903, Tesla was granted a patent for his crystal radio which required no power source, neither batteries nor an electrical connection. The ingenious engineer claimed his device could transmit signals from the unseen realm of spirit. Commenting on his new device, he wrote:

“My first observations positively terrified me as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night.”

From Tesla’s mountain laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the spirit radio could pick up lightning strikes at a distance of hundreds of miles away using a system of basic inductor-capacitor circuits and sensitive antennas.

But not every sound captured by the spirit radio could be attributed to natural phenomena, as the inventor attested:

“The sounds I am listening to every night at first appear to be human voices conversing back and forth in a language I cannot understand.”

Where could these mysterious voices be coming from? Tesla expressed his doubts about any possible extraterrestrial origin of the unintelligible conversations in 1918:

“I find it difficult to imagine that I am actually hearing real voices from people not of this planet. There must be a more simple explanation that has so far eluded me.”

A modern-day researcher has built his own Tesla spirit radio from the original plans. Shining a focused laser light beam on the device produces loud, echoing noises. A similar effect is achieved from an LED flashlight – but only when the beam moves across the radio. No sound is produced from a stationary light source powered by direct current (DC).

Further experimentation revealed that the sounds produced by the spirit radio positioned in front of a luminous computer screen change when the colored wallpapers (backgrounds) change.

After going back and forth with the U.S. Patent Office for 40 years, Tesla was finally formally acknowledged as the inventor of the radio, a distinction awarded posthumously in 1943 after his death in January.

Someone else who built a Tesla spirit radio shared voice recordings he captured and translated through the background noise. He connected the radio directly into his iMac computer and recorded sound using Adobe Audition CS6 software. The first message, amplified 400 percent, was:

“Chris, I love ya, buddy.”

This researcher had no idea whose voice he had heard – it wasn’t his father who had never called him “buddy” but “Maybe a passed friend or spirit I have encountered in the past.”

A second recording was picking up local AM radio stations when a brief, loudly distinct yell can be heard. For some reason, this unexpected sound prompted the experimenter to play the first recording in reverse and heard a man’s voice clearly say, “Help!” The investigator decyphered more of the scratchy message as:

“Somebody help us here!”

The researcher immediately ran another identical test and recorded these words:

“We’re here.”

While wondering if his home-made Tesla spirit radio was operating properly, a ghostly voice spoke as if to answer:

“It’s working.”

A third researcher built his own Tesla Spirit Radio and tested it out with a friend. Here is what he noted:

“The 1st test last night was interesting as we heard some odd things come through…a gunshot, and a few voices, some of which were replying directly to me. My buddy was getting spooked and said that I had to be the conduit because he could not get anything to come out in his tests. Who knows, I just know it is a pretty cool device.”

If your curiosity is piqued, you can find plans to build a Tesla Spirit Radio online. The materials cost around $30.

Here is an example of a homemade Tesla radio:

 

[Supervisor42]

An electronic version of an Ouija board!
I know I have all the parts to build one.
It's just too easy to listen to videos of others.
I remember the crystal radio I built as a kid.
Listened to it hours a night for years.
Hook it to the ground wire to the roof TV antenna and listen to WWL radio out of New Orleans clear as a bell in mid Ala.
They still work, as long as AM is on the air.
No batteries.
Edit: And since I can't remember people's name 5- minutes after I meet them; I CAN remember the radio kit costs $1.19 in the ad section of Popular Science magazine. We got a shiny dime and a shiny quarter every day for lunch-money, lunch cost 35¢. I'd wake-up at 5:AM before my mom and make a sandwich, wrap it in wax-paper and stick it in my pocket. I squirreled the coins away and mailed 'em off. Assembling it was a breeze. I had tunes from then on.

 

[viking]

The biggest problem in having a crystal radio is getting a hold of the proper head phones, they need to be 2,000 ohms, otherwise they won't be loud enough to hear. I had a few friends when I was young that had old factory made crystal radios, probably build in the 20's and 30's, that had really great reception and were amazingly loud. I imagine that finding anything like that now days would be pretty hard. I've built a few crystal radios using a 1N34 crystal diode, the old factory crystal radios had a galena crystal stuck in a holder with a whisker spring next to it to probe for a hot spot on the crystal that made it possible to pick up radio signals, sometimes old shaving razor blades were used with a whisker to find a hot spot for picking up radio signals. What those hot spots were are just a place on the crystal that works like a semi-conductor, only passing current one direction, that's what the 1N34 crystal diode would do. When I had radio as a hobby in my teen years, it was all with tubes and the tubes that did the work like crystals do was diode tubes, when the transistor age came, that work was done by very small diodes, not unlike the 1N34 diode that I used as a youngster.

 

[Cnsper]

I thought Teslas came with a radio...

 

[viking]

Actually, Nicola Tesla won a court case that made him the legal inventor of the radio, over Marconi. He was an amazing inventor, he gave us the electric system we all use today, Edison would have had us on DC. Someone just told me the other day that Seattle had just gotten rid of their last DC system that powered a building, I remember my dad telling me that a number of buildings in Seattle ran on DC at one time. Tesla invented motors, generators and lights, I think the fluorescent lights were invented by him. He worked for Westinghouse and developed the polyphase electrical system that allowed for electricity to travel over great distances. Edison on the other had was pushing for all current to be DC, DC can only travel short distances without having too much voltage drop. In the end J.P. Morgan defunded Tesla because Tesla was developing a free system of sending electricity to people over the air rather than with wires. The first radios used spark discharge transmitting, I think that an older movie about the Titanic showed those transmitters working. I imagine that those transmitters splashed noise clear across the radio band and that didn't get better until vacuum tubes were invented and they began to use crystal controlled frequencies.

 

[viking]

Since I got off talking about Tesla, I thought I'd add another amazing inventor, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, the true inventor of the television video camera tube as well as the all electronic television system, invented in 1927, he first started inventing this system when he was a farm boy teenager in school. Look the story up, it's amazing how he figured it all out, the Smithsonian site covers it pretty well.