Tesla tower

From Transformers Wiki

Three weeks later, Tesla got back to New York to find Edison was building a number of "Edison towers".

The Tesla tower is an invention of Nikola Tesla. It uses a large spherical metal ball with an electrical charge to draw energy from the electromagnetic field in Earth's ionosphere, theoretically generating limitless power.

Fiction

Hearts of Steel

Tesla intended to construct a network of Tesla towers across the planet, creating a worldwide field of energy which could be provided in an inexpensive manner. Infestation 2: The Transformers #2 When Tobias Muldoon visited Thomas Edison's workshop in search of a way to generate a million watts of power, Tesla believed his tower could do the trick, and accompanied Muldoon to the Mare Rurek Glacier where Optimus Prime's body lay. Infestation 2: The Transformers #1

As building an actual tower at the site would have been impractical, Tesla instead employed a gas-filled balloon to utilize the same scientific principle. It was duly raised to three hundred feet, and with the help of energy from Wheeljack, Ratchet, Hound and Trailblazer, the "tower" began to build an electrical field. The four Autobots exhausted their power reserves without any apparent movement from Optimus, resulting in Tesla believing he'd failed. After a short while, Optimus did indeed revive, proving Tesla's theory a success. Infestation 2: The Transformers #2

"Strange Visitors" establishes that events identical to those of Hearts of Steel and Infestation 2 occur in the 2005 IDW continuity; however, they happened to Maximal explorers brainwashed by Shockwave into believing they were the Autobots and Decepticons of the Great War.