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RE: Spheres vs Toriods


Dennis,

The Wardenclyffe terminal was a brilliant use of distributed isotropic 
capacities to fool mother nature into thinking there was a smooth "oblate" 
for the giant terminal.  This only works with huge voltages and ultra large 
surfaces.  At the amateur level of toroid size the small "cups" would be 
very tiny indeed!  A screen tire toroid if smooth and continous would 
perform as well as a ultra highly polished spun aluminum job of the same 
size!  I constantly see buffed and polished toroids with there owners 
explaining how this gives a higher breakout voltage.  This just isn't so and 
is a pipe dream.   A severely dented and dinged toroid will, effectively, 
reach the same voltage as the brilliant polished one of the same dimensions. 
 These statements are for Tesla coils only.  In whimpy electrostatic 
systems, where the rate of applied energy is in the microwatt/second range, 
a piece of dust on the terminal of a van d'graff generator will be ruinous 
to voltage collection,  It will bleed off charge as fast as it is applied. 
 Tesla coils appliy their energy to the terminal in the megawatt pulse 
range!  As long as the terminal is nearly smooth, a few milliwatts or even 
tens of watts of leakage will not affect the system.

For any given terminal dimension, there is a given perturbance size related 
to the radius of curvature of the perturbance, where the electrostatic field 
will remain undisturbed.  Tesla knew and utilized this idea at Wardenclyffe. 


It is interesting to note that I and a number of others believe that Tesla 
was to have the coil within the top terminal, itself!!!  With this being the 
case the "oblate" was a good shape for this system.  The toroid is best for 
a coil which lies outside of the terminal.

Richard Hull, TCBOR
 ----------
From: tesla
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Subject: RE: Spheres vs Toriods
Date: Monday, April 08, 1996 1:02PM