Watches quit working, their delicate mechanisms welded together. Metal equipment gave off sparks. Dental fillings produced intense pain. All exactly to be expected when you are dumping that much electrical energy into the immediate environment. Transmission to more distant locations is grossly inefficient, as there are so many mechanisms for energy loss, and they are all in effect.
People could not live in such an environment for extended periods of time, and digital electronic devices would be fried even without being turned on. I suspect even some batteries could be made to explode. Bad news for anyone with pacemakers or even hearing aids. Oh, or watches. Or cell phones. Or cameras. Or tablets. Or GPS. Or calculators. Or, or, or ...
Everyone thinks Tesla was a genius, but really, he had a few good ideas at the start of his career and the rest were pretty nuts. In "planning" to transmit free energy to everyone, Tesla did not propose or discover a new source of energy -- it all came from electrical generators operated by burning fuel, or from hydropower. There was nothing inherently "free" about it. When Tesla ran his high-voltage, high-frequency transformers in his lab to demonstrate some spectacular show of discharges or whatever, the adjacent town often went dark, because all the local electrical power was being sucked up by his lab.
Unfortunately, "fans" of Tesla's inventions -- at least those which were never built -- fall into the usual magical thinking of cults everywhere, and insist he was the victim of conspiracies by The Powers That Be who set out to ruin every good idea anyone dreams up. No one had to derail Tesla; he did that himself. He rejected modern theories of physics even after they had passed every test that could be thrown at them. He attributed the inspiration for his inventions and theories to a mythical goddess. And those who adore this kind of 'woo' are his most ardent fans. (One biographer claimed Tesla was from the planet Venus. Her book was printed entirely in green ink. Not the kind of source you should take seriously.) Read the facts on the physics of HOW his inventions actually functioned, and you realize that what he specialized in was the transformation and expenditure of enormous amounts of electrical energy, not its production. No solution to an energy crisis there, but overuse of his ideas could make things a lot worse. There is no forgotten or suppressed magic to save us.
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