Original poster: "Gary Peterson" <g.peterson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Original poster: Mddeming@xxxxxxx . . . It would not have been out of character for Tesla to visualize something in such great detail that he was comfortable to report it as fact, sight unseen. Matt D.
It is true that Tesla tended to round up. For example, he described the Wardenclyffe building as being, "about one hundred by one hundred feet wide" (NTAC, p. 190) when actual measurements by Chris Bach show it to be 94 feet x 94 feet in dimension. We see a similar behavior when he spoke about the production of continuous waves by his TC RF transmitters. When it was certain a wave train was undamped, as it is when an ischronous circuit controller makes-and-breaks at the same rate as the output waveform, then he reported it as such. For example, "I had 60,000 per second absolutely undamped waves; they could not be damped." When the output of a certain apparatus was not truly undamped in the narrowest sense of the term, then he would eventually get around to the introduction into his description of an adverb such as "practically."
". . . before we talk of these continuous or undamped waves, we must realize what conditions there existed to keep up waves of this character. It makes a vast difference. In one apparatus the waves will die out quickly; in another one, they will not. Even when I operated as in some instances with a few of these hammer blows, even then, owing to the design of my circuit, the waves were practically continuous; but I have had several ways of obtaining absolutely undamped waves, irrespective of the manner in which the energy was taken out from them. . . ." [NTAC, p. 174]