RE: early rotary gap

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

Original poster: "Daniel Kline" <daniel_kline-at-med.unc.edu> 



 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com]
 > Sent: Monday, March 22, 2004 10:05 AM
 > To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
 > Subject: Re: early rotary gap
 >
 >
 > Original poster: Mddeming-at-aol-dot-com
 >
 > In a message dated 3/21/04 7:27:35 PM Eastern Standard Time,
 > tesla-at-pupman-dot-com writes:
 >
 >  > Original poster: Mike <megavolts61-at-yahoo-dot-com>
 >  >
 >  > Isn't it akin to sacrilege to use anything invented my
 > Marconi in Tesla
 >  > coil construction...even if it's a good invention?   lol
 >  > Mike
 >  >
 >
 > Only among the anally fundamentalist and avid sports-fan mentalities.
 > Although they were intellectual adversaries, Leibnitz's
 > notation is used
 > everywhere today in "Newton's calculus". Marconi's wireless
 > application of
 > Hertzian waves was practical, and Tesla's atmospheric and terrestrial
 > transmission methods are still not.
 >
 > Matt D.

Not only that, but there's even some evidence that Tesla didn't invent
the air-cored, capacitive discharge, resonant transformer, i.e.
"Tesla-coil".
Tesla's early AC coils were basically iron-cored induction coils that he
drove with reletively low-frequency (10 kHz) alternators. I have an
article
somwhere, where the possible actual inventor of the coil, Elihu
Thompson,
claims that Tesla attended one of Thompson's lectures and saw a
disruptive
discharge coil for the first time. The problem is that even though I
have a
copy of the article, I don't remember and haven't been able to re-track
down
the source. One possibility is the Elihu Thompson biography, but I don't
think so.
This article is taped together like it was put together from the
really-old
newpaper-sized Scientific Americans of the late 1800s. I just don't
remember where
I copied it from. So, since I can't come up with a source, the point is
kind of moot.
It's an interesting thing to speculate about though :)
Dan K.