Eric Dollard
Keeper of Forgotten Frequencies
Eric Dollard is a radio-electrical engineer with a deep command of classical electrical theory—especially the foundational work of Tesla, Steinmetz, Heaviside, and Lodge. But unlike most contemporary engineers, Dollard’s focus is not on optimization or commercialization. His work centers on restoration: recovering the principles, experimental methods, and theoretical frameworks that guided the early development of electrical science.
In his view, modern electrical engineering has abandoned its roots. What began as an open exploration of resonance, induction, and field behavior has been reduced to circuit abstraction, digital logic, and safety-driven constraints. Precision has replaced perception. Simulation has replaced sensation.
In an age that seeks to digitize and dominate, Dollard remains analog—tuned not to noise, but to resonance. His lab is not a sterile chamber of algorithms and control systems; it is a reassembled altar of copper, coils, and intuition. He rebuilds old apparatuses not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity—because what was lost must be remembered, not replaced.
His systems are physical, often bulky, built from components deemed obsolete: vacuum tubes, rotating machines, and tuned coils. But they are designed to interact directly with the energetic structure of the world—especially with phenomena that modern tools have stopped looking for, or can no longer detect.
Dollard’s work is not speculative. It is historical. He follows the lineage of Tesla and Steinmetz not only in principle but in practice, attempting to replicate the systems that once demonstrated wireless transmission, telluric propagation, and high-voltage dielectric effects. These are not footnotes to him—they are foundations.
To take Dollard seriously is to consider the possibility that science took a turn—not through disproof, but through institutional narrowing. And to walk with him through his experiments is to revisit a time when electricity was not yet tamed, when the field was still full of mystery, and when resonance was treated not as an artifact—but as a reality to be tuned.
A Spiritual Return to the Field
To engage with Eric Dollard’s work is to witness a quiet rebellion—not against science itself, but against what science has become.
Modern electrical engineering speaks in the language of codes, constraints, and compliance. It is clean, safe, and highly optimized. But in becoming so, it has also become disembodied. Field theory has given way to logic gates. Transmission has become topology. The mystery of electricity has been rewritten as a sequence of control instructions.
Dollard’s work gestures back to something older—something more embodied, and more uncertain. He does not study electricity as a closed system, but as a field in the truest sense: something alive, continuous, and participatory. His instruments are not just diagnostic—they are dialogical. They speak with the medium.
For Dollard, the field is not a metaphor. It is a presence. A space of relationship. Aether may have been banished from the textbooks, but in his hands it is still there—an unnamed fabric, a latent music. His coils do not extract energy; they tune it. They seek resonance, not resistance. Alignment, not domination.
In this way, his laboratory becomes more than a workshop. It becomes a kind of chapel—a space for returning to the spiritual architecture of nature. Not spiritual in the religious sense, but in the relational one: acknowledging that energy is not just a commodity, but a conversation. That voltage and vibration do not exist in isolation, but arise from deeper harmonics woven into the structure of the world.
Dollard is not trying to re-enchant science. He is simply refusing to forget that it once was.
History and Theory of Electricity
In his lecture The History and Theory of Electricity, Eric Dollard offers more than a timeline. He tells a story—a lineage of thought stretching from the earliest electrical discoveries to the present, tracing how wonder gave way to utility, and how systems once grounded in resonance became grounded in regulation.
He begins by outlining the foundational stages of electrical discovery—not as rigid historical checkpoints, but as evolving relationships with unseen forces. Early experimenters did not begin with equations; they began with phenomena. Static shocks, magnetic deflection, the strange motion of charges in glass and fluid. They were observers of effects, not yet theorists of cause.
Dollard emphasizes that the first great minds in the field—Faraday, Maxwell, Tesla, Steinmetz—were not building tools to extract power. They were building mental frameworks to understand interaction. Their diagrams were visual languages. Their machines were questions made physical.
As Dollard sees it, this imaginative and exploratory mode was gradually eclipsed by abstraction. Maxwell’s original field theory—expressed in quaternion form and rooted in spatial relationships—was eventually reworked into more compact vector algebra. While this made the equations more manageable, much of the geometric intuition and field topology was lost along the way.
Dollard credits Heaviside with preserving much of the original spirit, offering interpretations grounded in transmission line behavior and wave phenomena. But in the hands of later engineers and textbook authors, the field concepts became flattened—reduced to symbolic manipulation, detached from the physical media they were meant to describe.
Throughout the lecture, Dollard critiques not only how modern electrical theory has become detached from its roots, but how it has become inaccessible to intuition. Rather than working with natural harmonics and resonant forms, today’s systems enforce artificial constraints: square waves, clamped voltages, digital switching. These are efficient, but they are alien to the original patterns of nature.
“Electricity is not a number,” Dollard says in essence. “It is a phenomenon—dynamic, polar, relational.”
His lecture is not nostalgic. It is diagnostic. It reveals how the language of resonance, once central to electrical understanding, has been sidelined in favor of control logic. And yet, through his reconstruction of old systems, Dollard suggests that this language can be recovered—not by looking forward, but by looking again.
Wye, Delta?
Among Eric Dollard’s many critiques of modern electrical engineering, one of the most telling is his reflection on the transition from Delta to Wye power system configurations. On paper, it’s a design decision. But for Dollard, it’s also a symbol—a shift in thinking that reveals how far the electrical sciences have moved from resonance to regulation, from harmony to fragmentation.
In early power distribution systems—especially those influenced by Tesla and Steinmetz—the Delta configuration was dominant. It formed a closed triangle, where each phase was connected to the next in a loop. This design was inherently symmetrical, self-contained, and balanced. It required no connection to ground. Power flowed within the system, cyclically and harmonically, like a wheel turning in perfect equilibrium.
Dollard sees Delta as more than just a circuit. It is a model of resonant coherence. Each phase feeds and opposes the others in rhythmic balance. It is a closed loop that sings in its own space, requiring no external anchor. A self-sustaining pattern—not unlike the dynamic equilibria described in the older, field-based understandings of electricity.
But as power grids expanded and demand increased, engineers turned to the Wye configuration. Wye introduces a neutral line—typically grounded—which acts as a stabilizing reference. This allowed for dual voltage levels (phase-to-phase and phase-to-neutral) and, crucially, a 173% increase in load capacity without replacing existing transformers. All it required was the installation of a fourth conductor.
It was a clear cost-benefit decision: more power with fewer upgrades. But it came at a price.
Wye introduced asymmetry into the system. It tethered each phase to an external reference—ground—rather than allowing them to resonate in mutual balance. And in doing so, it created new vulnerabilities: susceptibility to electromagnetic interference, harmonic distortion, and geomagnetic disturbances. What had once been enclosed became exposed. What had once turned in perfect balance now reached outward for stability—and, in the process, lost some of its resilience.
For Dollard, this shift is symbolic of a broader change. The move from Delta to Wye reflects the modern tendency to favor external control over internal coherence, efficiency over harmony, and regulation over resonance. It mirrors the broader scientific drift from relational, field-based thinking to compartmentalized, black-box abstraction.