Re: Tesla myths corrected - Best text? (fwd)

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:44:23 -0600
From: Gary Peterson <g.peterson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Tesla list <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Tesla myths corrected - Best text? (fwd)

     ". . . I gave to the world a wireless system of potentialities far 
beyond anything before conceived.  I made explicit and repeated statements 
that I contemplated transmission, absolutely unlimited as to terrestrial 
distance and amount of energy.  But, altho I have overcome all obstacles 
which seemed in the beginning unsurmountable and found elegant solutions of 
all the problems which confronted me, yet, even at this very day, the 
majority of experts are still blind to the possibilities which are within 
easy attainment." [Nikola Tesla, "The True Wireless," Electrical 
Experimenter, May 1919.]

     "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and 
they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a 
structure which has no relation to reality. . . ." [Nikola Tesla, "Radio 
Power Will Revolutionize the World," Modern Mechanics and Inventions, July 
1934.]

     ". . . the more we learn about high frequency phenomena, resonance and 
radiation today, the nearer we find ourselves approaching what we at one 
time were inclined, through a species of intellectual myopia, to regard as 
the fascinating but fantastical speculations of a man who we are now 
compelled . . . to admit was a prophet." [John Stone Stone]


> From: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Tesla myths corrected - Best text? (fwd)
>
>> Hi Ed,
>>
>>    So, we have this giant capacitor (upper troposphere  to earth) being 
>> pumped with a gazillion watts of power and arcing  internally hundreds of 
>> times a second from dielectric punctures  (lightning). Sounds terribly 
>> inefficient and dangerous to me.  When a big cap  goes bad and turns 
>> itself into a non-quenching spark gap, being inside the  dielectric is 
>> "not healthy for children and other living things."  However, such 
>> power-arcing on a global scale would convert significant amounts of N2 
>> and  O2 to nitrous oxide, so at least we'd all die laughing.
>>    YOMV, but I, for one, am glad that Tesla never got  such a system 
>> working.
>>
>> Matt D.
>
> Never fear, there wasn't any danger since mother nature wouldn't have 
> allowed him to do it.  All of that stuff was proposed before his "dreamy 
> years" and I would have thought he could realize the fallacy in his ideas 
> and his prediction that "Hertzian waves" would vanish from the scene by 
> 1920.  Certainly at Colorado Springs one of the things he worked on was 
> determining the capacitance of his upper terminal and if he'd extended 
> that work about ten million times he'd have come somewhere estimating what 
> the capacitance of his "conducting layer" was going to be.
>
> Too bad the gentleman isn't around to discuss some of this.  He was 
> brilliant, he understood a lot of the math and arithmetic involved and 
> could apply it to his designs, but somehow he developed a blind spot in 
> his thinking when it came to this particular subject.  I've known quite a 
> few people, including engineers who should know better, who've fallen into 
> the same trap.
>
> Ed