Editor's note: Our offices are closed Wednesday, December 24 and Thursday, December 25 for Christmas. Because of this, we won't publish Altimetry Daily Authority. Please look for your next edition on Friday, December 26.
On behalf of the entire Altimetry team, we wish all who celebrate a safe and merry Christmas.
The Wardenclyffe Tower's metal dome topped a wooden lattice base like the cap of a king oyster mushroom...
In the summer of 1901, the world was scrambling to harness electricity on a global scale.
And pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla believed this new tower – which stood 187 feet above a stretch of Long Island farmland – was the solution.
Most electrical projects to that point relied on driving a current through a wire... But Tesla had become convinced that the Earth itself could conduct electricity.
In his Colorado Springs lab, he famously powered light bulbs from 30 meters away with no physical connection. These experiments made him confident that he could transmit energy through the air.
In Tesla's vision, the globe would act like a single circuit. He understood that the Earth was full of electrical potential. With a powerful tower, he could transmit energy and information across wide ranges... potentially across the entire world.
Tesla figured that with proper equipment like his tower, factories and cities would draw energy straight from the planet...
That meant no need for poles covered in cables spanning from power plants to end users.
Most of the scientific community called it science fiction. But one man believed it enough to bankroll it...
Finance magnate J.P. Morgan gave Tesla $150,000 – about $5 million today – to build the first test site at Wardenclyffe. Construction began in 1901 on a squat brick lab and the massive tower behind it.
But when Tesla tried out his expensive new tool, he found that the energy he could transmit dropped rapidly with distance. What worked across his Colorado lab couldn't stretch across the Atlantic.
It didn't take long for Tesla to run out of his seed money... with very little to show for it. The tower never even finished construction before Morgan refused to provide more funding.
By 1917, the Wardenclyffe Tower was dismantled for scrap.
Tesla's dream of a wireless world has come half-true...
Today, everyone walks around with devices that transmit information wirelessly. They can even charge wirelessly, just as Tesla dreamed.
But that "wireless" world still depends on the one thing Tesla wanted to erase...
It all still runs on power lines.
And because the Earth itself didn't prove viable for electrical transmission... rising energy demands mean more power lines.
Thanks to the surge of power-hungry AI data centers, utility companies are building and connecting new power plants at a breakneck pace.
And you don't need pie-in-the-sky technologies like the ill-fated Wardenclyffe Tower to profit.
Look for the behind-the-scenes enablers... the companies playing a vital but little-noticed role in supporting the world's cable-based electrical infrastructure.
Regards,
Joel Litman
December 23, 2025
