Robert Golka
Robert K. Golka | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Brockton, Massachusetts; Wendover, Utah; Leadville, Colorado |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Project Tesla, the Wendover magnifying transmitter, ball lightning research, large Tesla coils |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | High-voltage engineering, Plasma Physics, Tesla technology |
Robert K. Golka (died 2018) was an American independent researcher and high-voltage experimenter, best known for Project Tesla — his decades-long effort to rebuild and extend Nikola Tesla's Colorado Springs magnifying transmitter and to produce and study ball lightning in the laboratory. Working almost entirely outside universities and corporate laboratories, largely self-funded and using military surplus and salvaged parts, he built what was for years described as the world's largest Tesla coil, in an aircraft hangar at the former Wendover Air Force Base in Utah. He took seriously two propositions that mainstream physics had set aside — that ball lightning is a real, reproducible, self-contained plasma phenomenon with possible relevance to fusion, and that Tesla's scheme for wireless power transmission through the Earth-ionosphere cavity deserved to be tested rather than dismissed.
Biography
Golka was a native of Brockton, Massachusetts. His interest in Tesla was lifelong, and to obtain primary data he travelled to the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade — reportedly on three separate occasions — to copy the inventor's Colorado Springs laboratory notes. Those notes became the working basis for his own reconstruction of Tesla's apparatus.
In the early 1970s he moved to Wendover, Utah, taking up residence in a large aircraft hangar at the deactivated Wendover Air Base, where he assembled his magnifying transmitter. He remained there for roughly nine years. In 1980 the U.S. Air Force transferred the inactive base to the town of Wendover; a very large increase in his rent followed, and after a period of disputes and litigation he left the site.
He later relocated his work to the Colorado Rockies, where at the end of the 1980s he erected a second, higher-altitude installation near Leadville, at an elevation of roughly 11,000 feet, intended to test the wireless-transmission side of Tesla's ideas.
Accounts of his life consistently describe a researcher who lived very modestly and who declined to convert his work into a business. He died in 2018, reported to be eighty years old.
Project Tesla and the Wendover coil
The centrepiece of Golka's work was a full-scale reconstruction of the Tesla magnifying transmitter, a three-coil resonant system in which a driver (primary and secondary) feeds an "extra" resonator coil rather than the two-coil arrangement of a conventional Tesla coil. Golka built the machine at Wendover in 1973–1974. It was among the first serious attempts at the magnifier circuit since Tesla's own experiments, and Golka's practical findings — in particular his observation that the extra coil need not be mounted coaxially with the secondary driver — contributed to modern understanding of how the magnifier actually operates, and have been cited by later coil builders.
Output figures quoted for the machine vary with the source and with the configuration in use: a figure of about 12 million volts is commonly given for the coil itself, while discharges of twenty million volts and more are reported for the installation during its Air Force test years, with peaks cited as high as 25 million volts.
From roughly 1973 to 1982 the coil was used at Wendover for long-arc simulated lightning attachment testing, work associated with the U.S. Air Force electromagnetic hazards effort, in which artificial lightning was used to test and harden aircraft and composite airframe structures against real lightning strikes. Golka documented this work in a paper presented to the IEEE, giving his unconventional installation a foothold in the conventional engineering literature.
Ball lightning research
Golka's stated scientific goal at Wendover was the deliberate laboratory production of ball lightning. He regarded ball lightning as a self-contained plasma sphere — a naturally occurring confined plasma — and argued that understanding how nature confines such a structure without magnets or massive machinery could point toward a route to practical, comparatively clean fusion power, an approach very different from the tokamak programmes that were absorbing the mainstream fusion budget.
Tesla had reported producing fireballs at Colorado Springs, and Golka worked from Tesla's notes in an attempt to reproduce them at scale. By his own account the result was only partial: over years of operation the coil yielded the phenomenon only once or twice. He reported his experimental results publicly rather than quietly, including in the popular technical press, and continued to maintain that the phenomenon was real and reproducible in principle.
Wireless power transmission
The second strand of Project Tesla concerned Tesla's proposal for global wireless power transmission. Golka held that electrical impulses could be propagated through the Schumann cavity — the resonant space between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere — with lower loss than through copper conductors. His plan was to excite the cavity with repeated impulses at a low repetition rate in order to establish a standing global oscillation, from which receiving stations anywhere on Earth could draw power.
The stated objectives of this phase of Project Tesla were to demonstrate that the Schumann cavity can be resonated by an open-air vertical dipole antenna, to measure the power insertion losses, and to measure the power retrieval losses both locally and at a distance. The Leadville installation, with a large air-core resonating coil and an elevated insulated tower, was built to carry out these measurements. Golka reported that his transmitter delivered detectable energy to a distance on the order of tens of miles rather than to global range, a result he treated as a starting point rather than a refutation.
TeslaTech and the Tesla Society
Golka was a long-standing figure in the independent Tesla-technology community that grew up around the International Tesla Society in Colorado Springs and its successor organisations. That community — the Tesla symposia and the Extraordinary Science meetings of the 1980s and 1990s, and later the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference run by TeslaTech under Steven R Elswick — provided one of the few venues where full-scale Tesla-coil and wireless-transmission work of Golka's kind could be presented to a technically engaged audience and published in proceedings. Golka's Wendover coil and his Project Tesla results are among the most frequently cited practical achievements to come out of that milieu, and his name appears in the programme material for TeslaTech's 2018 ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference, the year of his death.
Works
- Golka, Robert K., "Long Arc Simulated Lightning Attachment Testing Using a 150 kW Tesla Coil", 1979 IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, 1979.
- Golka, Robert K., "Project Tesla — In Search of an Answer to Our Energy Needs", Radio-Electronics, February 1981.
- Golka, Robert K., "In Search of Fireball Lightning", Radio-Electronics, March 1985.
External links
- Robert K. Golka at Tesla Universe — collected articles and photographs
- "Long Arc Simulated Lightning Attachment Testing Using a 150 kW Tesla Coil" (IEEE, 1979)
- "Remembering Robert Golka" — first-hand recollection of a 1987 visit
- Archive news footage of Project Tesla at Wendover Air Force Base