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Coming soon: Tesla FAQ


Greetings all,

Just to let everyone know, I am taking an initiative and currently
most of the way through preparing a first draft of a "Tesla FAQ"
(Frequently Asked Questions).  I have put in about 30 hours on
this so far, including a lot of research and going though books
and back through email archives, and I am determined that it
should be a complete as possible "introduction" and "jumping
off point" to the work of Nikola Tesla.  I have been interested
in Tesla's work for 16 years so I have a fair idea of what is around.

It is currently 950 lines and 43K bytes long and uses the standard
FAQ layout.  It does not contain any specific construction details for
Tesla Coils. When finished it should be less than 1500 lines long.
I will take responsibility for maintaining it, and it probably should
be posted to Chip's Tesla List at regular intervals (every 2 months?)
and be available on ftp.funet.fi.  It will rely on people emailing
corrections and additions (eg. book & www reviews) to me.

The 'Table of Contents' currently contains:

  1.  Introduction to the FAQ (~10 lines)
  2.  Table of Contents
  3.  Introduction to Nikola Tesla (~25 lines)
  4.  A short biography of Nikola Tesla (with references)
      (~150 lines)
  5.  The Tesla High Voltage High Frequency Oscillator (Tesla Coil)
      and its General Principle of Operation (~130 lines, including
      3 ASCII art schematics)
  6.  Reference Books - Biographies, Other References, Books
      specialising in Tesla Coils - (~10 bibiographic references &
      growing; needs short reviews; should only have about the main
      15-30 books here)
  7.  Internet Resources (~45 WWW & FTP locations and reviews)
  8.  Internet Mailing Lists (6)
  9.  Societies around the world (5)
  10. Safety (5 lines, probably needs to be longer)
  11. Version History of the FAQ
  12. Disclaimers and Conditions (~25 lines)

I am aware of two previous efforts on this List to start a Tesla FAQ:

>From Chip Atkinson <tesla-at-grendel.objinc-dot-com> 14 Mar 1995:
Tesla FAQ V 1.0 3/14/95 (106k) contains suppliers, books, CAPACITR.ASC.

>From Kristian Ukkonen <kukkonen-at-cc.hut.fi> 28 Jan 1996 & 27 Apr 1996:
tesla.faq [15k] version 1.0 28.01.1996 contains coil types, components,
information.

I thank and respect the work of these people.

The new FAQ is totally impartial and I do not in any way wish
to offend or mislead anyone, and if anyone thinks this is the
case, then I will gladly change it.

Before I post the first draft to the List, I would like to give
the opportunity for anyone to comment on the subject of an FAQ.

Yours sincerely,
Glenn Baddeley <gbaddele-at-vitgssw.telecom-dot-com.au>
Australian Nikola Tesla Society (ANTS),
BH +61 3 9253 8072 (time-zone Z+10)
Victoria, Australia