Tesla Coil Mailing List archive (pupman.com)

Investigator (STEP I), run 2026-10-08. Saved page text (evidence trail, not for publication) is in research/pages/. Findings are leads, not verdicts.

Searched

Gary Peterson (16 Oct 2007): "The original account appeared in J.J. O'Neill's Tesla biography PRODIGAL GENIUS and is generally accepted as being apocryphal." He quotes O'Neill: "By piecing together the fragmentary material published in a number of publications, however, it appears evident that Tesla ... tested his power transmission system at a distance of twenty-six miles from his laboratory and was able to light two hundred incandescent lamps, of the Edison type, with electrical energy extracted from the earth while his oscillator was operating. These lamps consumed about fifty watts each; and if two hundred were used in the test bank, the energy consumed would be 10,000 watts, or approximately thirteen horsepower."
Peter Terren's reply questions impedance-matching "200 low voltage 50W light globes from some trivially small antenna" to extract 10 kW (an engineer's opinion on the list).
Peterson also quotes Tesla's 1916 counsel interview (Anderson): there is "no difference whatever ... in the principle" between energy transmission to a telephone or to a lamp.

Claim 2: the 200 lamps / 26 miles figure comes from O'Neill (1944), who says he reconstructed it. The book repeats it without citation. Next run: check Tesla's Colorado Springs Notes (1978) for any lamp test at a distance.