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Re: Tesla's Energy Trans.

Hi Nick,

	Unlike the never ending arguments over energy transmission, spark length
claims are much more on topic and important to us.

At 04:42 PM 12/25/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi All,
>         I hope terry feels like letting this through as I never got around 
>to adding my final thoughts to the discussion.  I think I've set out most of 
>my idea but some of the list were a little scathing about my refs.  
>particullarly the 128foot streamer at resonance.  As I was re-reading a Tesla 
>biog ('The Man Who Invented The 20th Century'  Headline Press 1999)  I came 
>across this:
>'The strike was over 200 feet (61m) in length.  There was a mighty clap of 
>thunder as the electricity ripped the air apart.  The local newspapers 
>reported that the noise could be heard as far off as Cripple Creek, 20miles 
>(32km) away.'

It is easy to "write" things like this, but "proving" such claims is not
easy.  What local papers wrote this and on what dates?  The Colorado
Springs and Cripple Creek news papers are probably still available (and not
that far away for me to go find).  If the references cannot be
substantiated, then I must conclude that these are rumors and not fact.
Since this is a very modern book, the author should be able to give
references which support these rather "unbelievable" spark lengths...
Tesla's own highly detailed notes of the time do not record anything even
near this...

Pikes Peak, Mount Big Chief, Sheep mountain, Cow Mountain, and Almagre
Mountain are ~12000-14000 foot peeks between Cripple Creek and Colorado
Springs and I must point out that the likely hood of a sound traveling over
those peaks or through all that rock is unbelievable to me.  Cripple creek
was a heavy mining area with lots of explosives being used to blow the
local mountains into gold ore at the time.  Big bangs would have been very
common, but not from Tesla's coil...

The design of Tesla's machine simply would not have supported the electric
potentials required to produce a 200 foot arc...

I ain't believing this one ;-))  I'll go "out on a limb" and call these
claims FALSE!!

>The same book also substantiates the claim that the experiment burnt out the 
>alternator at the Colorado springs power company, who's director Leonard 
>Curtiss, Tesla's former patent lawyer, had agreed to provide power at the 
>off-peak rate all the time to Tesla.

The overloading and damage to the power station is fairly well known and
not particularly surprising.

>There is also a detailed description of 200 incandesant bulbs being lit at a 
>range of 26 miles from the plant by a receiver.  The passage unfortunately 
>does not give the wattage or cp rating of the bulbs so that no power figure 
>can be calculated from this.

Where did this passage come from??  The author must have some evidence or
proof of this??  I have not read this book but if it does have new
information it would be very valuable.  If it simply repeats a bunch of the
old "tall tails" about Tesla's experiments that really are not true then...

Sorry to be picky but there has been a lot of garbage written about Tesla's
Colorado Springs coil that is simply not true.  I am more than willing to
beat the truth out of authors that make such claims without any evidence to
back them up...  200 foot spark lengths suggest input power levels in the
range of 2 million watts.  Tesla simply did not have that much power available.

Hopefully the author has good references for these claims in his book that
we can go check or he is "available" to answer the obvious questions this
book raises.

Cheers,

	Terry
	Fort Collins, Colorado

>
>Regards
>Nick Field  
>