Re: 7.1Hz, how the heck did Tesla succeed?

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Tesla list wrote:

> Original poster: "Malcolm Watts" <m.j.watts@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>  > building up, you'd have to hit the frequency exactly.  Also,
>  > Sutton/Spaniol note that the resonance frequency changes from moment
>  > to moment, causing a misperception that the Q is low when in fact it's
>  > high (but the peak moves around randomly which screws up the
>  > measurements.)
>
> I'd interpret what is effectively a wide bandwidth as low Q or am I
> missing something?

This issue is also mentioned at:

  Earth Resonance
  http://www.pupman.com/listarchives/1995/january/msg00002.html


>  > But this brings up a big issue.  If Tesla accomplished it, HOW DID HE
>  > DO IT?  The Earth's resonant overtones supposedly die away above
>  > 10KHz, so high-freq Tesla coils won't work.  Maybe Tesla built a huge
>  > 2KHz coil? Driven by a multipole generator?  I don't recall the
>  > Colorado Springs frequencies offhand.
>
> To me the real question is "did he?". There is scant evidence that he
> did other than anecdote.

Yes, but think about it:  his claims were originally dismissed because
radio waves don't go around the earth, so resonance is impossible, Tesla's
objections to the contrary.  Then science advanced, soon finding that
radio waves do go over the horizon.  Then fifty years later Schumann
rediscovered the resonances Tesla was always talking about.  Is Tesla
vindicated?  No, his claims were STILL dismissed.  After all, if you're
sending out high power VLF (at hundreds of HZ?), you can't receive it,
since you'd need a quarter-wave antenna 100 kilometers long in order to
intercept significant energy from the fields.  But this objection turns
out to be wrong too.  An ideal short antenna can absorb the same energy
flux as a full size quarter-wave antenna.  That's assuming ideal zero-ohm
inductors with infinite Q tank circuits.  Real inductors make short
antennas behave much larger than their physical length, but not 1000KM
large.  But received power depends on receiver Q, and isn't fixed by
antenna length.

So now what's the objection to Tesla's "world system?"  Tesla failed to
make it work, but that was because wall street turned against him before
it was up and running.  Contemporary experimenters have failed to power
any distant devices via Earth resonance transmission, but this may just
mean that Tesla didn't reveal the necessary details (or it may just mean
that it's difficult to accomplish, and nobody has put major funding into
an attempt.)


>  > Or could he even have made a 60Hz extra coil?  With such low
>  > frequencies a non-resonant air-core transformer could easily be driven
>  > by mechanical AC generators, and only the "extra coil" would need to
>  > be resonant.  But the wandering Earth-resonance frequency would still
>  > be a problem.
>
> Why should it wander?

Why should it remain fixed?  The real question is *how much* does it
wander (a tiny percentage, or a significant amount?)  I've seen papers
that mention significant frequency changes over spans of months, so these
changes are possible.  If there were significant random changes over a
span of seconds, then this would appear on spectrum measurements as an
artifact: a falsely wide resonance band, and a falsely low Q.  See
http://www.pupman.com/listarchives/1995/january/msg00002.html


> A big problem I see with transmission schemes proposed by Tesla and
> others is that you would really want to supress lightning to avoid
> periodic shorting and loss of power in the system and the global
> frequency of lightning is a lot higher than 7-odd Hz (more like 100Hz
> IIR).

But we already know that lightning doesn't short the system.  We have
simple evidence that no shorting occurs: the Earth's vertical E-field
changes only slowly over 24 hours, with no enormous sudden shorts (or
sudden upward jumps.) Since the resonant cavity is 50 odd miles thick,
lightning doesn't come even close to reaching up to the conductive layer
and causing shorts.  Now "sprites and jets", they might have a chance of
causing a short.  But e-field meters would immediately tell us if this was
happening.  I think the main loss is because of air conductivity; because
at altitudes higher than a few hundred feet the air is ionized by cosmic
background radiation.  But as the Corum/Spaniol paper points out, this
loss appears across the transmitter.  It doesn't appear in series between
transmitter and receiver.  All continent-wide power grids have similar
losses because of corona and surface leakage across insulators.



>        I thought the Corums were supposed to have had some kind of
> scheme happening several years ago. Personally I am not as optimistic
> as some. Somebody please prove me wrong.

I've seen Corum papers about this, but hadn't heard that they'd actually
tried sending out VLF power.  (How do you make a tesla coil transmit
100Hz?)  If they had sufficient funding, and they tried and failed, then
that's more evidence that the task is impossible (or perhaps only
difficult.)   On the other hand, did they figure out how to send out 100Hz
radiation?    If they didn't use my "pulsed UV beams" idea, how did they
do it?


(((((((((((((((((( ( (  (   (    (O)    )   )  ) ) )))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty                            SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com                         http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-789-0775    unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci