Tesla Coil on the News

To: tesla-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com
Subject: Tesla Coil on the News
From: Tesla List <tesla-at-stic-dot-net>
Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 22:36:28 -0500
Approved: tesla-at-stic-dot-net
Subject:  Tesla Coil on the News
  Date:   Mon, 26 May 1997 02:10:14 -0400 (EDT)
  From:   Jeremy Bair <pwac-at-flinet-dot-com>
    To:  Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>, Tesla-2 <tesla-2-at-emachine-dot-com>


Two days ago a friend woke me up at around 11:30 to tell me that he saw
some sort of Tesla Coil coming up on the news. So I got up and stuck a
blank tape in the VCR :)

When I woke up the next day and played the story, it started out
informing
us of power company struggles with customers, one customer in
particular,
his name was Phillip Cambell of Tallahassee Florida (I don't expect any
other coilers here have seen the report, it was probably only run in
Florida, but I would like to be aware of anyone who saw it in or out of
Florida *please reply*).

Basically what happened was FP&L (Florida Power And Light) cut this guys
power off because he wasn't paying his bills, so he decided to live
without consumer electricity. They never mentioned how he was currently
giving his house juice, but I take it he had some sort gas powered of
generator. 

The whole news report was stupid (in my opinion of course), they were
hinting (Although not directly implying) that he was trying to develop a
way to transport electricity wireless to move the power from land lines
to
the air. Using what they called "Age old methods". This report was a
crock, they never even mentioned the name Nikola Tesla throughout the
whole report.  After recently reading the biography of Nikola Tesla
(Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla - Marc J. Seifer *very good
book*) I became very pissed off at this report.

I called up the station and they told me it was from an affiliate
station
and they thought it looked "cool" so they decided to take up the rest of
the time with it.

It looks like this guy *may* be trying to take credit to reinvent Nikola
Tesla's system of wireless transmission, all I got to say to him is good
luck. But I doubt he will get anything accomplished. He looked so poor I
doubt he is going to get any support from anyone concerning this, and I
bet he is going to have some REAL fun with the FCC if he tries something
like transmitting electricity.

On Tuesday I'm going to try to get in touch with the news channel that
did the report in Tallahassee and see if I can get anymore info about
who
this guy is and if they know how he was powering his house.

Oh, and by the way. The coil he was demonstrating with was REAL poor,
you
sound have seen it, the secondary was rapped on a piece of PVC pipe that
looks like he cut it from some construction site, it wasn't coated or
sanded (You could read the writing on it), and he was using ALLOT of
black
electrical tape to hold his coil together.

The primary was even worse, it was about 4-5 turns of copper way below
the
secondary, and his connections were maxed out at the end of copper (I
guess thats all he could rip out of his old frig). 

Guess how he was tuning his coil? By placing items like tools and spark
plugs on top of his secondary! I'm sure that looked real nice to display
in front of a camera, a corona covered spark plug... 

Anyhow, thats enough from me, let me conclude that the lady I talked to
at
the news channel (the program director) could not even understand what
the
story was about. I think she ran it because of the pretty blue sparks :) 

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