Tesla worked simultaneously in two directions. Only one can be easily known from his lectures, articles. The second one we knew only from rarely spotted comments, usually cut in the middle by saying something like " I'm not able yet to go into details"

@Farmland:

Full Ack!!!

As Tinsel already  stated, I think much of the misunderstanding from people reading Tesla is based on poor electrical knowledge coupled with an expecting biased view.
Like that people interprete complete wrong things into Tesla's words. E.g. Lyne is a famous example. If you take the parts, he cites about Tesla mentionedn the Anti-Grav or OU, you clearly recognize that Tesla meant something completely different, and only someone without knowledge in (HV) electronics can interpret it that way.
Like Lyne with his generator many people seem to think, that if you accumulate energy in an oscillator, that you get OU.
"Look, there's now more energy in the oscillator, than the input energy". But they do not seem to realize that this is just accumulated energy, and that you cannot get continuous output energy with such a high power. Many of the QEG supporters also seem to make this error.


Just ask yourself:
Tesla proposed to transmit energy from all around the globe to where it shall be used, with his magnifying transmitter.  But he himself stated, that now such transmitting towers can be built directly at the power plants. Like that power plants, like water, geothermic, wind, ... can be built everywhere on the world, where they are economic and you just have to place such a tower beside it to transmit it globally.

Why should he propose transmitting energy with his tower from conventional power plants, if he had any OU device???
Tesla surely thought and speculated, that maybe it is possible to make an OU device.
But actually Tesla never said, he had made an OU device.
Well except for one exception. And as from his description of this invention it is clear, what it was: A heat pump. And yes, a heat pump is OU. But not the type of OU we want.
You must be aware, that at Tesla's time it wasn't yet known, that some types of energy are less "in quality" than others. That's the reason, why you cannot make a self looping device from a heat pump. As any conversion back to mechanical energy from the heat pump OU heat difference has a reciprocal efficiency that equals or is less than the heat pump efficiency for generating the temp difference.

Just my 2 cents...

Quite true ! However... the same way you can state that moon has only one side...visible one 

 tesla talks about " its will come that man will attach his machinery to wheel work of nature"  and  " the use of coal, gas, fuels is not nessisary and energy is available in unlimited quantities" what is he talking about exactly

tesla talks about " its will come that man will attach his machinery to wheel work of nature"  and  " the use of coal, gas, fuels is not nessisary and energy is available in unlimited quantities" what is he talking about exactly

ambient medium , check again - he is very precise about it when he describes the methods of tapping sun energy during centuriesnothing complicated, just try to open your eyes to analogies

It's great to see someone actually citing Tesla himself instead of all the woosters who use his name and patents in vain.

Except that the long distance power transmission system isn't analogous to an electromagnetic transformer, I don't think. Long distance transmission is possible, you don't have to be close-coupled. Adding my own "woo" to the interpretation of Tesla's ideas, and putting it into modern language, I think Tesla saw the Earth as a big LC tank with very high Q. He intended to provide the necessary inductance by the Colorado Springs and later the Wardenclyffe installations. (Check out the subterranean features of these towers, the forgotten Earth connections....). And the Earth-ground-atmosphere-ionosphere system provides the capacitance. This capacitance is distributed worldwide. The tank is "sloshed" by stimulating the inductors strongly at the transmitting point and the system responds by ringing, and another tuned inductor at a distant location can ring in resonance, since it is using the same capacitance. The capacitance fluctuates like the air pressure in a sealed vessel that is struck like a bell. Hence the idea of "longitudinal scalar waves" or the analogy to sound waves which are compressions and rarefactions, tiny local variations in air pressure.

/woo

 

@Tinsel:
I completely agree. And the picture with the world as a ballon with pressurized air is actually from Tesla himself, when he explained, how the tower should have worked.

http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/1660/telsawireless.png

(It's from the article: Famous Scientific Illusions, Electrical Experimenter Feb 1919)

Also his idea about longitudinal waves, as you said is obvious, and as he meant it also correct. An electric conductor can have such waves.
He just was IMHO wrong about his interpretation of the Hertz-Waves...

And Tesla himself stated how important the earthing of the tower was to get a good grip to the earth. He went down about 30m 'til groundwater and from there he went out on 4 sides and drove 12 steel shafts almost a further 100m down into the earth. Although he stated in the later court trial it were 16, later sonic measurements only showed 4*3=12 of them. Still impressive. He made a special device to drive these steel shafts down...

IMHO it is actually quite forward how the tower(s) should have worked, as Tesla explained it several times in several different articles.
(e.g. this article: http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1919-05-00.htm
 a nice comparison picture can also be seen in this article: http://teslacollection.com/tesla_articles/1912/modern_electrics/nikola_tesla/disturbing_influence_of_solar_radiation_on_wireless_transmission_of_energy
and obviously also in a subchapter of the famous "THE PROBLEM OF INCREASING HUMAN ENERGY")

(there are actually a lot of articles adescribing his system, this was just a small sample. But I guess you all know them anyway...)

To achieve this close coupling from primary to secondary I think is needed and described in the last transmission patent. No loose coupling for efficient power transmission transformers.

That's IMHO actually one of the main points for the reason of a magnifying transmitter.

IMHO the history is quite obvious (but that's just my 2 cents):

To have the most impression on the earth capacitor you need to oscillate a lot of energy. So what you want is a resonator with a very high q factor.

But Tesla had to recognize that in a normal "Tesla coil" the lose coupling between the secondary and the primary was still limiting the q factor, for the primary circuit still damped the secondary circuit.
 Additionally the lose coupling is a big problem if you want to couple a lot of energy continuously, what was intended for a running transmission system.

Both these problems are solved with a magnifier system:
* Very high q factor.
  Simply because the extra coil as main resonator hasn't any inductive coupling to another circuit, so no energy get's coupled again out of the resonator.
 * Very high Power-Coupling
  Simply because you have a very high coupling between the primary and the secondary. Like that in each period a lot of energy can be coupled into the resonator. The important thing here is, that the secondary impedance is very small compared to the extra coil.

That's why he used as primary/secondary a coil with big diameter and only very few turns secondary.

Sure, there is some coupling out through the secondary, as the secondary is obviously also part of the resonator. But this is why it is important that the impedance of the secondary is very small, for then only a marginal part again get's coupled out of the resonator into the primary.

The funny thing is, almost all the magnifier constructions I saw on the net are IMHO not magnifier constructions. There they often feed the output of one Tesla coil to another Tesla coil. But this again just limits the power and is not the idea of this construction.

But I have my serious doubts if this transmission system would really have worked, as IMHO the losses would probably have been quite big...
But that's surely just a guess...

Edit:
BTW: It's already offtopic, but when I'm at it...

Often it is said that the evil J.P. Morgan crashed Teslas plan of a FE tower as he egoistically wanted to continue selling his power.

Nothing could be more far away from the truth.

J.P. Morgen wanted a way to communicate with his transport ships on sea and his divisions in other countries. This would have been a huge economic advantage for him.
And Tesla said, he could do that with his tower.
So Morgan gave him the money to make the tower.
But then after some time Marconi made his first transatlantic transmission. Then Morgen wanted to have a serious talk with Tesla, why he made such a large and expensive tower, while Marconi does the same just with a simple and cheap setup.

Tesla then had to admit, that his tower wasn't just for communication with e.g. the ships but at the same time also for power transmission, e.g. to power these ships.
The obvious immediate question which came back from Morgan: If my ships can receive this power, then what prevents others to receive that power?
There Tesla then had to admit, that this would have been possible and unpreventable. But as Morgan would have had to pay for the power, which has to be fed into the tower, and as you cannot put a meter on the receivers as anyone on the world can put up a receiver, the project was surely a complete "no go" for Morgan anymore, and has been abandoned.

So no conspiracy here, just true logic. Also no free energy here. Well it's the same kind of free energy as if you tap your neighbours' power line. Just someone else has to pay for it...(but it's free energy for you )