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Colorado Springs, 1899. I built a magnifying transmitter capable of generating millions of volts and photographed myself reading in the laboratory while artificial lightning twenty metres long crackled above my head. The photograph required a double exposure. I was not actually in the room during the discharge — the current would have killed me.

But the image was accurate to the idea, which is what matters. I was proving that electrical energy could be transmitted without wires. The earth itself is a conductor. The resonant frequency of the cavity between the earth's surface and the ionosphere can be used to deliver power anywhere on the planet simultaneously.

I never built the full system. Pierpont Morgan withdrew his funding when he realised there was no meter to put on it. You cannot charge people for energy they receive from the air. That, in the end, was the problem that defeated me — not physics, but accounting.