Re: TESLA'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO RADIO/WIRELESS? (fwd)

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:55:43 +0000
From: Jeff Behary <jeff_behary@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: TESLA'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO RADIO/WIRELESS? (fwd)

Bart,

Your right about "only the people of the time know".  Many important 
discoveries of this topic were made by people who started off making Tesla 
Coils [for medical and X-Ray use].  These same individuals were requested to 
do things for the war effort, and much of this was wireless- related, 
top-secret, military and government work.  (Thomas Stanley Curtis, Earle 
Ovington, and Thomas Burton Kinraide were all examples to name just a few).  
This area of these inventors lives was completely in shadows, not even their 
families knew exactly what they were doing - there are a lot of undocumented 
mysteries in many chapters of the early inventors lives that make 
documenting certain aspects of history difficult.

There are a lot of interesting things to learn from Tesla-rivals and friends 
as well as Tesla.  Few people know that Edison was making Phosphorescent 
lamps, Thomson made an "electric egg", and  that a young employee of Edison 
demonstrated high frequency coils in Madison Square Gardens with his friend 
Nikola smiling in the audience.

Elihu Thomson, Nikola Tesla, and William James Morton all claimed priority 
for high frequency coils.  Elihu Thomson would appear to be the first to 
make a published announcement (in 1890).  Yet if you read some of his 
letters to fellow "Tesla Coilers" of the time period (one specificially to 
Frederick Finch Strong) he admits that the fact that he published the 
information first doesn't mean that Tesla or anyone else wasn't 
experimenting earlier and could have had superior developments regardless.  
He also stated that his work wasn't original, and was based on the study of 
condenser discharges made a decade earlier by several other people - so that 
all he, Tesla, Morton, or anyone else did was to make the discoveries a bit 
more practical or accessible for use, indepenent, but often overlapping or 
simultaneous to some extent.

So, while Tesla was using platinum for his early spark gaps, Thomson was 
using brass with a compressed air blast across the gap.  Tesla moved to 
meteorite, and then tungsten, Kinraide developed the telefunken style gap, 
and and Fredrick Strong was using heat sinks that were heavily silver 
plated...Ovington decided to make rotary spark gaps, and in the end all of 
the coils worked to varying degrees and were all made within a few years of 
each other - some were made in small numbers, and others into the hundreds.  
Some were getting rich, and others were content to develop ideas for the 
sake of invention, even if it meant that the ideas were lost within a year 
of getting their patents!

Some of the letters written casually between the inventors of the time 
period give some of the most insight into these issues.  So much has been 
written about "bitter rivalries", but the same rivals actually had a great 
respect for each other behind closed doors, and sometimes were quite frank 
about some of the real developments and how they came about.

To unravel this type of history takes a lifetime.   To find some of these 
personal letters is difficult, and publishing the information contained 
within them is also difficult.  Sometimes they are in the hands of private 
collectors who are quite content not to share such interesting history with 
the rest of us.  I can see what I can do as far as puitting some of these 
gems on the site.  They are a fascinating read in general, esp. the Thomson 
papers, and while his high frequency work was much cruder than Tesla's it is 
also much more accessible to build for people like us that want to 
experiment ...

Jeff Behary, c/o
The Turn Of The Century Electrotherapy Museum
http://www.electrotherapymuseum.com

>A compilation were certainly help with this old worn-out thread.
>Everyone has an opinion (Marconi bad, Marconi good, Tesla did nothing,
>Tesla did everything, etc..). The only real evidence I think we have on
>the subject is the US Supreme Court Case 369. It's been 10 years since I
>read it, but if I remember, Tesla, Lodge, and others had a dispute with
>the technology used for Marconi's patent claims. I believe it didn't
>work out too well for Marconi.
>
>Only the inventors of the time "really" know. We can analyze their
>circuits and come to our opinions, but they are the ones who truly know.
>There are many such disputes. TCBOR gap or RQ gap, who invented the
>first MMC for Tesla coils (Terry? Reinhard? others?). I find it silly on
>both ends of who did what and who used who's technology. A better
>question is "who doesn't use technology that works, regardless of who
>contributed more to it's invention"? We all do. Tesla and Marconi are no
>different than anyone else.
>
>I do agree that it would be good to have a list compiled for at least
>future reference to the questions that seem to reinvent themselves every
>year.
>
>Take care,
>Bart

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