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Re: text of july 1964 popular electronics article on tesla coils (fwd)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 18:30:03 +0000
From: "John H. Couture" <couturejh-at-worldnet.att-dot-net>
To: Tesla List <mod1-at-pupman-dot-com>
Subject: Re: text of july 1964 popular electronics article on tesla  coils (fwd)

At 03:58 AM 2/28/97 +0000, you wrote:
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Thu, 27 Feb 97 07:13:56 UT
>From: William Noble <William_B_Noble-at-msn-dot-com>
>To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
>Subject: text of july 1964 popular electronics article on tesla coils
>
>I have scanned the article in this magazine called "big TC" - there is another 
>called "little tc" that I didn't bother with (uses a tube and a small coil) - 
>I have tiff pictures of the pages and of the cover, and a word for windows 97 
>OCR'ed version with all the graphics in it. I'm posting just the text because 
>I don't know if the list server can handle attachments, and anyway, I don't 
>want to upload 130K for the article unless there is interest.  I have tried 
>building this coil and as far as I can tell it doesn't work - see a posting 
>called "first coil experiments" for details on this.
>
>************the article, ASCII only******************
>
>-------------------------   Big snip

William -

It is unfortunate that you have gone to so much trouble to perpetuate the
plans for a Tesla coil that does not work. Dozens of these coils have been
built in the past and all of the builders I have talked to said the coil did
not work without making extensive modifications. I know of one museum that
has this coil on display but not working at the time. It was obvious that it
had been greatly modified with many attempts to make it work.

The reason this coil does not work is simple, the primary circuit is not in
tune with the secondary circuit. A few simple calculations will reveal this
problem. In fact if you can do these calculations you have a very good start
with Tesla coil engineering. Several coilers have spreadsheet calcs that
makes the job easy.

There is one questionable advantage to building this coil. All of the
builders I talked to said they learned more about Tesla coils by building a
coil that did not work than by building one that worked the first time.

John H. Couture

PS - The JHCTES computer program will show you why this coil does not work
and will also show you what to do to make it work. JHC