Original poster: "Gary Peterson" <g.peterson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>Original poster: "Lau, Gary" <Gary.Lau@xxxxxx>
. . . I don't believe that the technology existed in Tesla's era to time spark gap firings with thephase of a ringdown. Gary Lau. . . Marconi did just that by around 1907 with his "timed spark discharger", an ingenius rotary spark gap which actually had one break per cycle of the RF, which was of the order of 20 kHz.Ed
"If these men knew what I do, they would not touch my arrangements; they would leave my apparatus as it is. Marconi puts in here two wheels. I showed only one wheel; he shows two. And he says, "See what happens when the wheels are rotated; a wonderful thing happens!" What is the wonderful thing? Why, when the teeth of the wheels pass one another, the currents are broken and interrupted. That is the wonderful thing that happens? The Lord himself could not make anything else happen unless he broke his own laws. So, in this way, invention has been degraded, debased, prostituted, more in connection with my apparatus than in anything else. Not a vestige of invention as a creative effort is in the thousands of arrangements that you see under the name of other people -- not a vestige of invention. It is exactly like in car couplings on which 6,000 patents have been taken out; but all the couplings are constructed and operated exactly the same way. The inventive effort involved is about the same as that of which a 30-year-old mule is capable. This is a fact." [p. 48]
"Here I come to another device. That was another solution of the problem of producing currents of very high frequency. . . . I could get a couple of kilowatts output very easily. That was especially built for telegraphy, telephony. . . . I had a number of studs with cups which were insulated, 24 if I recollect rightly. In the interior was a mechanism that lifted the mercury, threw it into these cups, and from these studs there were thus 24 little streamlets of mercury going out. In the meantime, the same motor drove a system with 25 contact points, so that for each revolution I got a product of 24 times 25 impulses, and when I passed these impulses through a primary, and excited with it a secondary, I got in the latter complete waves. . . . I would get 600 times 100, or 60,000 primary impulses, and in the secondary a frequency of 60,000 complete cycles. The primary impulses were unidirectional. They came from the direct current source, but in the secondary they were alternating -- full waves. . . . They were entirely persistent. I had 60,000 per second absolutely undamped waves; they could not be damped." [pp. 77-80]
[Source: NIKOLA TESLA ON HIS WORK WITH ALTERNATING CURRENTS AND THEIR APPLICATION TO WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY, TELEPHONY, AND TRANSMISSION OF POWER : AN EXTENDED INTERVIEW, Leland I. Anderson, editor, Twenty First Century Books, 2002, ;see also U.S. Patent No. 609,245, Aug. 16, 1898, Electric Circuit Controller, for an hermetically enclosed mercury break.]