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Re: Tesla's Energy Transmission (Warning: Another Long Post)



Hi all,
Just thought I'd throw in a few comments about this.  Food for thought as it 
were.
>  
>  The Springs system worked at "about" 40kW.  "Similar" power distribution
>  ground systems "I" have worked with can "sink" (gulp) 250 Megawatts with
>  ground effects at 100 yards away being zilch.  Yep, that's here in dry
>  sandy Colorado too...  I think the "ground" can sink one "heck of a lot of
>  juice".
>  
But this was NOT using longitunal waves as Tesla said he was generating.
>  
>  100 MegaJoules????  If I remember right, he used about say 30kV at 60 Hz.
>  That would give a cap value of 1.85mF.  Tesla's salt water caps fell far
>  short of that...  The 1899 Colorado Springs power plant was not in the 100
>  megawatt class...
>  
I seem to remember reading that he used a 60kV Westinghouse transformer.  
That would increase the energy by a factor of 4 from what state above in that 
respect alone.   Also, didn't he use a rotary gap that would deliver a firing 
rate MUCH higher than 60Hz?  This would allow the use of a smaller cap and 
much more power throughput.  I thought he used toothed wheels that allow for 
break rates well over a thousand BPS. 

>  
>  Where is "it written" that Tesla got a 120 foot spark, and where "on Earth
>  in 1899" did he find a Giga Joule????
>  
I thought the 120 foot sparks were indeed achieved once - just before he blew 
out the Colo. Spgs. power company's generators :o).   I was under the 
impression that the longitudinal "ground" waves were to be achieved by 
operating down around 20kHz or less. I am also under the impression that 
Tesla was attempting to excite a natural earth resonance(Schumman resonance 
as they are now called) of about 7.8 Hz or perhaps a harmonic of such.  All 
of this was a result of his observation of lightning (see his paper "The 
Problem of Increasing Human Energy").   
     
>  
>  One has to remember that the output "load" of a Tesla coil is basically the
>  local capacitance of the surrounding objects with loss.  This represents a
>  very "local" effect.  There is little that allows energy to travel outside
>  this local area of a Tesla coil even if it is a "big one" like Tesla used.
>  Tesla made one great "Tesla coil number uno".  However, the world power
>  transmission thing seems to have fallen to pieces.  Sounded good but it has
>  never been demonstrated, proven, worked, etc...  

If I understand what I have read about all this, Tesla's longitudinal waves 
would travel along the surface like the waves in a pond after a rock was 
tossed into it and that with the proper frequency, the waves would 
constructively interfere with each other after reaching the opposite point of 
the earth.  Note that he never claimed to actually transmit current (which 
would be incredibly lossy as Terry points out), but rather, he was intending 
to create nodal points that one could then "pick off energy" by placing two 
strategically place ground rods that would always be at different potentials. 
 With the properly tuned receiver, one could utilize telluric currents and it 
would place no load on his generator.  Incidentally, I also think that what 
he said about getting usable amounts of energy could have been merely a 
matter of perspective.  In his days, there were no televisions or washing 
machines or refrigerators(ok you get the idea).  A usable amount of power 
might have simply been enough for a couple of lightbulbs and a radio 
receiver.  A person in the middle of nowhere might appreciate that amount of 
freely available power.  
    One other note about this is that in order to achieve this,  Tesla 
actually avoided the streamer discharge that we all try to maximize these 
days.  That is why his Wardenclyffe tower was designed with such a large 
topload(I forget at the moment, but wasn't it about sixty something feet in 
diameter?).  Another point is that his tower was over two hundred feet tall.  
There would be no "local" objects to load down his tertiary coil, would 
there?  With such a large radius of curvature, tremendous voltages could be 
achieved without the spark discharge and then the Q of the secondary would be 
very large.  In this mode of operation, I believe the quarter wave theory is 
valid rather than the lumped element notion that is valid with streamer 
discharge.  These are two entirely different modes of operation.  
>  
>  Sorry, but after 80+ years of playing with it, the results are still 
zero...
> 
I seem to remember reading about a system that operated in Canada during 
Tesla's lifetime, although is was not as large as the Wardenclyffe tower.  I 
also just recently read about some so called Scalar weapons and a "Tesla 
Shield" developed by the Russians that are reported to work from Tesla's 
principals.  These were said to have been witnessed by pilots in Afganistan 
who saw the effects from several miles away, so who knows how accurate this 
is.  I just mention it to stir up a little controversy :o)

>  It is easy to "write and say" things like "1 Giga Joule" of energy (even in
>  Tesla's day).  However, "Me thinks" I would notice it, if it was really
>  true ;-)))  Even a Giga Joule is not that much power by today's standards
>  of power generation.  Lasers and other "single shot" systems can easily
>  reach that "standard".  However, no known Tesla coil system comes within
>  0.5% of it....
>  
It is also easy to dismiss Tesla's theories if you are trying to think about 
them in regards to conventional EM theories, but unless someone actually 
duplicates his work EXACTLY,  how can it be proved that he was incorrect?   
Perhaps it is due to my lack of electronic training(I learned most of what I 
know on my own) that allows me to think that there could be more than meets 
the eye in this area.  I have read and reread as much of the available 
material about Tesla in hopes of catching on to what he was really thinking, 
which is difficult to do this since one has to filter through other's 
opinions and ideas as to what Tesla himself was thinking.  All I can really 
say is that he insisted that his longitudinal waves were not like the 
ordinary Hertzian waves and yet we still today try to equate the two.  

>  Cheers,
>  
>   Terry
>  
I won't give up my opinion on this at this point  :o)   I still think Tesla 
had something there that nobody today quite understands as he did.  I will 
not change my mind until someone builds a coil system EXACTLY like Tesla's( 
with a fifty foot plus diameter primary/secondary and the correspondingly 
large tertiary coil and topload etc.), then pumps a few megawatts  into the 
system, and THEN shows that he was wrong.
Mike