Re: Variable Capacitance and Inductance

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

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

This entire discussion brings to mind two things...

1) In many ways, arguing about what Tesla meant, wrote, or measured is
somewhat like trying to interpret Fermat's cryptic comment in the margin of
a book. He's not here, he did good stuff, but, we have much better
measurement, analytical and modeling tools now, so we shouldn't view his
analysis through the window of today's capability.  It was variations in the
data reported by various researchers (including Tesla) that, in part, led to
the creation of NBS (now NIST).  I think it is a good thing for the taxpayer
to fund people to figure out how to measure and quantify things very
precisely, to look for sources of error and quantify them, etc. My job
literally depends on the work done at NIST to figure out how to measure
things incredibly precisely (antenna gain, RF properties, signal power,
etc.) (I might quibble with NIST ostensibly developing and/or promulgating
cryptographic algorithms, but you have to "take the roughs with the
smooths.")

2) Terry, since he already lives in Colorado, and is closer, should move to
Colorado Springs to continue his measurements, so that he can remove the
remaining uncertainty from the measurements.  After all, there might be some
astonishing geographical effect.


> Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> At 12:40 PM 5/24/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> Of course, the reason the capacity "increased" is because of the
connecting
> wire and such.  Tesla just did not see or have the tools to see what was
> going on at that time.  Today, it seems obvious...  Could weather and all
> kinds of other things have affected his original experiment?  Obviously,
> yes!!  We could eliminate those effects, at least on the computer, and
then
> pat ourselves on the back for proving nothing...
>
> To make a long story short, what on Earth could be proven or what advance
> will this type of testing give us?  If it was easy, we could just do it
for
> fun.  But there is a full day's work there at least.  There are far
greater
> fights to be fought...  Measuring the top terminal voltage of a Tesla coil
> (directly) is the big challenge of the day.  Never been done...  Big
> payoff...  Big challenge...  ;-))
>
> Cheers,
>