Re: Tesla Receiver Coil

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Steve Conner <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

> And as Nikola's distant German cousin said,
> "PferdscheiB !!"

LOL :-) I sometimes think what Tesla thought of as
"Proof" was maybe not so rigorous as the standard of
proof we think of nowadays. But this reminded me of
something I wanted to ask the list about.

The Colorado Springs Notes is one of the biggest
bodies of writing that Tesla left us. When reading it
I was often surprised by how he seemed to wander
around between disciplines. One minute he would be
doing routine electrical engineering calculations on
resonating coils and transformers. On the next page he
would be speculating about the "Dark rays of the sun"
or something that sounds totally crazy.

I used to think that this showed a kind of charming
eccentricity, or even a sort of impudence. I thought
since Tesla was "just" an electrical engineer, he had
a cheek trying to play with the great physicists like
Thompson and Maxwell. In fact, it often crossed my
mind that he could well have been full of PferdescheiB
:-o

But the other day I thought: What if the boundaries
between disciplines didn't exist back in 1899?
Electrical engineering probably didn't exist, since
Tesla, Edison and Charles Steinmetz were just in the
process of inventing it. You certainly couldn't go and
study it at university.

So maybe at the time he was doing them, ALL of Tesla's
experiments and theories would have been a far-out
branch of physics, like superstring theory and quantum
computing seem to us now, and he would have been
respected by the physics community. If certain parts
of his work look familiar now, or boring, or even
naive, it's just because these were the techniques
that caught on and were developed as the amount of
electrical apparatus in the world mushroomed, and
electrical and radio engineering became recognised as
disciplines, and ultimately day jobs for hundreds of
thousands of people.

So maybe it's only with the benefit of 100+ years'
hindsight that we can tell the good stuff from the
PferdescheiB. Does this sound right? It would have
been interesting to know what Tesla's contemporaries,
like Maxwell and Thompson, thought of his work. (I
guess the likes of Marconi, Fessenden and Lodge should
be included too, since by this argument they would
have been "Physicists" too.) Did they respect Tesla or
did they think he was nuts? I guess Marconi
"respected" Tesla so much, he stole all his ideas ;-)

Steve Conner
http://www.scopeboy.com/