Tesla's ether is rather difficult to define. Indeed, after researching
and reading all of the data I could find on how Tesla viewed the ether,
I only came up confused and guessing (I find the man to have been
diabolically vague on this point.)

However, my best guess is that Tesla's ether is akin to a three
dimensional model of "Newton's Balls of Force." For those not
acquainted with physics labs and the balls of force, Google awaits you.

But, my guess is that Tesla pictured the ether as composed of particles,
indeed, logic dictates it must be composed of some sort of basic
building blocks (given you can muster the faith the size of a mustard
seed in the ether's existence.) These particles are either resting
against each other, or their "force fields" are (since we can't see
them, we must guess-anything is possible.) Now, if a force is created
which can act against these particles which the force contacts, the
force will be conducted into the next layer of particles, then those
particles will again influence the next layer of particles, and so-on
and so-on. the same way Newton's Balls of Force react to a force
applied to the ball at either end of the "string" of balls and conduct
the force through all of the balls and into the far ball. Now, the
force "flowing" though these layers of particles can be viewed as a
"wave" but, when the farthest layer of ether particles lays against
material of our universe (matter we can see, touch and which we consider
real) it will act as a force of the particles of the ether "striking" or
"impinging" the "real matter." Much like the far ball in the sting of
balls of force would do if "touched" by some other material object at
the far end from the applied force. Indeed, the force "flowing" though
the sting of the balls of force is much like the "ether wave" I am
attempting to describe here; when the "wave" has no more balls of force
to "travel" though, the end ball containing all the force from the
"wave" must move in an attempt to "dispose" or "convey" its' energy
into some form of matter.

Now, liken all the above to light. Light travels as a wave in the
ether, yet when striking a surface of some matter it behaves much as
particles would when striking such a surface. Strangely enough, we
still ponder this mystery to this very day. why light behaves both as a
wave and as a stream of particles?

The above is kludged together and is difficult, probably, for others to
grasp on a first reading, and I admit this reflects much of how my
thinking is going when attempting to grasp how Tesla was viewing things
when he wrote about "frequency", "vibrations" and such in his works and
notes. however, from the above, I believe one can imagine how Tesla
would see an antenna interacting with the universes ether and
"transmitting" its "wave".

Now, all of that said, how the "Einstein Antenna" would function would
even be more difficult to comprehend. sometimes leading one to come up
with "magic numbers" to describe it in mathematical terms.

But, if one ponders the above to terrible depths, one is left with the
expectation of finding the ether's particles to exhibit no mass
what-so-ever, and frankly, I find that impossible. go figure.

Or, consider I just made the above up! Or, I just dreamed it all! Or,
Tesla never said any of that at all! grin

JS

Hmmm, John... Physics and our belief system about what these things we
measure with electrical meters and telescopes in the physical world
really mean changes with time... We went from the animus earth
placating the trees, rocks, etc., to placating the gods in the
heavens above, to earth air water and fire, to Phlogiston/Aether.. Then
Einstein, Dirac, and many others, came along and this group decided
that there was no phlogiston, et.al. and we went to the concept of the
empty space, open universe... Then the telephone guys had problems
with noise spoiling long distance transmissions and detected low level
background radio signals which caused the physicists to again revise
their equations and declared it mean't 'kablammo' a closed universe,
eternal expansion, and heat death.... And since then
the Big Bang has been dragged along, patched up, shored up, repaired,
and redecorated, until it looks like the house that Topsey built...
BTW, note that to go along with the expanding closed universe that
Einstein had to revise a number of his equations to dump a nasty little
term that implied that empty space was not empty, that it contained
energy - and energy is mass... And unmeasured mass in empty space
means the Hubble constant is all wrong... And whammo, down comes
Topsey's house...

Now, to get back to antennas, the radio wave we launch off our antennas
is a photon in motion... Like electrical charges in motion on a wire
have a field around them, a photon in motion has a field around it...
That force field we call an E+M wave... If we use instrumentation to
measure the E+M field we declare that radio is a 'wave'... If we change
our instrumentation so that it responds to photons instead of E+M
forces, voila, we find that radio wave is magically now a 'particle'...
So, consider this: Your antenna is a magic box... You pump electrons
down the antenna wire and it gets rid of this excess energy by
converting the electrons into photons and radiating them away...
Somewhere out there the photons ram into another wire, dumping energy
into it... This magic box then reconverts the photons back into
electrons, and you detect a signal...

OK, now the physicists find themselves back in the hot seat because new
findings strongly suggest that each cubic inch (or CC's for you
metrically handicapped types) of empty space contains a measureable
amount of energy/mass equivalent...

*** An aside: For a non mathematical explanation why energy cannot be
directly converted into quarks/mass, read Lawrence Krauss's book
ATOM... Highly recommended by me..***

And other new measurements are interpreted that there is a Dark Force
pushing quarks/mass/galaxies apart against the contraction of that
nasty Gravity Field can you say, "Phlogiston"?... All of which has
sent the phsyicists back to the loo where they now sit stroking their
equations... Sooner or later they will exclaim, 'Voila!' and we will
be presented with Einsteins scribblings with that nastly little term
re-inserted for energy/mass in a vacuum and they will strut around
declaiming they knew it all along... This has been the most fun to
watch and chuckle at over my lifetime... After they proudly show their
revised equations explaining all this within the next decade, I hope to
live long enough to see the next wave of 'new measurements' that sends
them thundering back to the loo...

cheers ... denny