Re: Variable Capacitance and Inductance

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

Original poster: "Ed Phillips by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <evp-at-pacbell-dot-net>

Tesla list wrote:
> 
> 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.

	He may have had a reason, but it's not obvious to say the least.  What
I find most curious is that whatever he was talking about doesn't appear
to have been observed by anyone else.  If they're taken at face value,
I'm afraid that his comments demonstrate the fallability of Tesla, and
NOT the "laws of nature".

> >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?

	That's entirely possible, and we may be interpreting (diffently for
some of us) what he was trying to say.  That's sort of hard to say, as
(at least early on) Tesla wrote with remarkable clarity.  That began to
change after Colorado Springs!
 
> >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

	That will indeed be an interesting experiment.  You're going to have to
figure out how to separate the capacitance of the ball from the
capacitance of the lead to it, which will indeed increase with height.

Ed