Tesla's World Wide Wireless Power Tower

I've heard so many stories of the much abused and misunderstood Tesla, usually coming from people I'd politely call "free-energy wackjobs". Even this article, which is one of the fairer versions I've heard, doesn't touch on why this has never been implemented or experimented upon further. It can't be for lack of interest or ignorance or for startup cost either (or else I'm sure YC would have funded someone to build these towers).<p>So HN, anyone with more electrical knowledge than I know why this doesn't work or why it wouldn't scale or any other engineering challenges that have kept this from being more than a pipe dream?

I remember reading this when it was originally posted to DI's site a couple years ago. Pretty cool stuff, I'm sure some folks here who haven't read this will appreciate it. DI truly has some Damn Interesting articles!

I had a wonderful physics teacher who brought in a bunch of different inventions made by Tesla and I always thought they were interesting but the theory of wireless electricity is so different to people it always blows my mind that it works ,despite all the physics attributed to it, if this becomes popular soon we will have to find a phrase to replace "plugged in."

Tower of Power reminds me of Frank Zappa :-)