Re: Anyone ever successful with Ball Lightning generation here. . . .

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

Original poster: "Gary Peterson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <glpeterson-at-tfcbooks-dot-com>

> > With the power guys are running now anything he saw
> > should have been seen again.

> . . . I
> would like it if it turns out to be a real phenomina.
> Especially one that's lab reproducable.  But the
> evidence out there seems to be lacking severely.

With all of the eye-witness accounts, haven't we gotten past the debate as
to whether ball lightning is a real phenomena?  The object now is to learn
how to predictably create it.

Tesla was operating his spread-spectrum magnifying transmitters in a CW or
near CW mode, at power levels just below that point at which sparks would
break out from the elevated topload.  The available descriptions suggest
this is the regime in which the phenomena should be most readily produced.
In the patent APPARATUS FOR TRANSMITTING ELECTRICAL ENERGY it says,

"The accident is apt to occur when, the transmitting circuit being strongly
excited, the impressed oscillations upon it are caused . . . to be more
rapid than the free oscillations. . . .  To increase the safety, I provide
on a convenient place, preferably on [elevated] terminal D, one or more
elements or plates either of somewhat smaller radius of curvature or
protruding more or less beyond the others so that, should the pressure rise
to a value, beyond which it is not desired to go, the powerful discharge may
dart out there and lose itself harmlessly in air."

When global surface-wave mode propagation studies are eventually done using
large-scale ELF/VLF Tesla magnifying transmitters, ball lightning should
become less of a mystery.

Gary