Tesla Wireless Power Transmission (Longitudinal Transmission)

Regarding the second experiment, and Tamas, please correct me if I am misrepresenting what you are trying to show, it demonstrates a conundrum. Its a good example of this idea that energy in a secondary can light the bulbs where the primary it couldn't. We know the power is the same, but clearly the work produced by that power is not the same. In the primary nothing is lit but in the secondary it is lit. Stepping up the voltage and adding a little resonance allowed work to be performed that otherwise was not performed.

While we understand at some level this is expected according to voltage drops it is a reminder of one of the problems that we face with any device. There are actually a lot of different ways this problem can be expressed. For example, given two systems if we say one is 100% efficient, than is a system that can accomplish the same work in a shorter amount of time more efficient? You would think the answer must be yes, but it is surprisingly difficult to prove that. In fact when you find such a system you may end up just moving the goal post to say the second one is clearly more efficient therefore the first can't actually be 100% efficient.

I think what the problem really boils down too is that we find it is generally difficult to sum up all the work performed since devices may emit energy in multiple forms and we never bother to sum it all up often we are only looking at one aspect.. For example, we might look at kinetic energy, or electrical energy, but completely ignore energy emitted as sound, heat, or em waves or anything else undesirable. Whatever is desirable we measure, and undesirable is ignored or we work to eliminate it. No matter what the results are we declare it is all in balance, yet we never really bother to measure it, but don't worry it must be because the math tells us it is so.