RE: Variable Capacitance and Inductance

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

Original poster: "David Thomson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <dave-at-volantis-dot-org>

Hi Ed,

>Sorry, no way!  If the quote is correct the man was just plain mistaken, or
talking about something else.

If it were me making the statement, the odds are high that I would be wrong.
But let's give credit where credit is due.  Tesla was well educated and had
an excellent grasp of inductance and capacitance.  He must have had a good
reason for making the claim and it may very well be a claim for a specific
circumstance.

>Not quite sure what you mean by "he probably measured the capacitance
horizontally and then vertically and received a 50% difference between the
two". Do you mean that the lead to his sphere was horizontal for
onemeasurement (everything close to the ground) and that it was
perpendicular for the other?

That was what I was throwing out.  But I didn't see any evidence of this in
Tesla's writings in CSN.  I honestly don't know exactly what he is referring
to.  Perhaps we're missing some of the context of his statements by living
100 years later?

>If you had a sky hook you could run the experiment in a few
minutes.........

I've got a 4" PVC pole support built into concrete.  I'll put it on my list
of experiments to do this summer.  I should be able to construct a 60 foot
PVC pole for dangling an aluminum foil ball like Tesla did.  Maybe I can get
80 feet.  We'll see.

Dave