[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Re: Off-axis primary inductance

>
>
> Richard,
>      Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that Tesla was NOT
> trying to make big sparks.  He was trying to generate incredibly high
voltages
> for power/intelligence transmission (the sparks would cause loss of this
> energy for transmission of power).  Is this not why he had the large sphere
> that could be raised through the roof to allow higher voltages to be
generated
> without discharge(or at least minimize them)?  The sparks, then, would
act as
> a safety valve if the voltage got too high.
> Mike

  Yes and No.  Tesla was never absolutely clear in the CSN what his goals were
except in a few specfic studies conducted there.  What his plan was, if
any, is
still a matter of conjecture.

His sparks were his publicity.  Thus, they were quite important to him and his
future ability to latch onto funding.  They were the only thing he gave the
world
upon his return to NY in Jan of 1900.  They were first made public in his much
reworked article "On Increasing Human Energy" in Century Magazine.  Folks
waited
for the other shoe to drop in this article and sought to understand the
grandness
of Tesla's work in Colorado.  Instead, Tesla "dropped the ball" and layed an
intellectual egg with ravings about philosophical matters.  The photos of
spark
were barely touched on in the article.  Folks were tired of Tesla after
this and
his star set rapidly culminating with the abortive Wardenclyffe effort.

 The tiny 30" Coloardo sphere would not handle or supress any kind of real
sparks.  He relied 100% on the capacity of his tower to supress the spark
as his
system was just not capable of breaking out when the full tower was in use.
 To my
knowledge the tower was rarely hooked up after it was constructed.  Other than
measuring its capacity on many occassions, Tesla makes no mention of it in
use one
way or the other in his notes.  His early 1899, pre-Colorado boasts of direct
contact with the Paris Exposition while there were hollow and never
materialized.

The tower would break down to the wooden support structure with 2 foot arcs
and
Tesla only used that structure for 15 days before removing it in favor of the
final guy wired design.  He mentions that the tower in its final form might
handle
1 million volts.  That is not all that high for his system, but quite high
for a
radiating antenna.

If Tesla ever used max power on the tower he never wrote it up.  If he did
and it
did not spark, then it would radiate standard Hertzian waves just like a
standard
spark gap transmitter.
His grounding system there was pitiably poor, and he knew it.  One of his
major
efforts was directed at gaining altitude (1 mile at Colorado Springs) to
obtain
superior results.  He later admits in court that altitude is of no real
advantage
and that this was one of the major things learned in Colorado.

Colorado was a Teslarian side venture funded by John Jacob Astor.  It was a
place
where Tesla formed his crucial ideas. about pounding the earth with
electricity.
Little of this appeared to be gleaned from his researches using the coils
there,
but instead, from a particularly violent thunderstorm on the 4 July 1899.  He
picked up on a few other ideas, but mostly he couldn't wait to return to his
beloved NY City.  He wrote Scherff in August that he would soon return and
leave
the backwater of Colorado.  He made a supreme faux pas when being wined and
dined
by the gentry of Little London (Colorado Springs) by stating that Colorado
Springs
was a fine place to visit if you were a consumptive or wanted to contract
it.  He
genuinely loathed the place, save for the dynamic weather conditions.

Richard Hull, TCBOR