Re: Fast ground rod

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <Hollmike-at-aol-dot-com>

Your coil is 
>  certainly a counterexample to such a dictum. Can you say something about 
why 
>  your large diameter coil is working so well with a small power supply. 
>   
>  Godfrey Loudner 

One of the most interesting coils I have seen was at the old Tesla museum in 
Colorado Springs.   It was a very large diameter coil(3 - 4  feet) with a 
small aspect ratio(less than two).  This design prevents corona/discharges 
from coming off the top windings without the need for a large toroid.  The 
top terminal of this coil was a sphere of 4 - 6 inches in diameter with two 
horizontal pointed rods coming out of the sphere(at the 'equator' for lack of 
a better term).   
  The design of this coil(Named Big Bertha) was certainly contradictory to 
what is popular now.  It  probably has about 300-400 turns of fairly heavy 
gauge wire, which is more on the lines of the way Tesla designed his coils.   
This coil produced 10-12 foot,  white hot arcs.  I imagine it was designed 
with the old quarter wave theory, since it was built long  before the list 
came to be. 
Mike