Re: [TCML] How about some Tesla Coiling?

[Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff, Derek, All,

       You probably have seen the  TV ads that say "Our product may PROMOTE 
ABC health, or one in three people  may develop XYZ ISSUES". Just vague enough 
terminology that they can't be  accused of false statements. (I think the 
advertising industry may worship Tesla  as much as the pseudoscience folks do.) 
   It has long been obvious that Tesla had a knack for  "creative 
advertising" with a flair for sensationalism. As you have shown in the  correspondence 
below, there are many different, but equally valid ways of  defining average 
power. This is a term which I suspect, but can never prove  or disprove, Tesla 
deliberately did not define in his lectures, expressly  for dramatic effect.  
Since we can never know for sure whether he  measured joules per bang, or 
joules per hour, or something in between, we  can never know for sure if we have 
duplicated his claimed performance. Of  course, WE can agree on what WE mean by 
average power, and build and  evaluate coils of varying efficiencies using OUR 
standard definition, but  it cannot be related with any certainty to what 
Tesla actually did. We can  debate the terms until we end up in a morass of  
"scripture-interpretation" because of the deliberate vagueness of the  terminology 
as he chose to use the language in the late 1800's.

Matt D."

	All of the above must be true.  Another thing to think about is that standard names for units like power and voltage and current really were adopted during the 1890's [Tesla quoted horsepower on occasion, quite possibly because that made the power numbers bigger] so it's not surprising that his language can be both confusing and ambiguous.  The fundamental concepts were firmly understood by most workers in the field by then [there were some notable exceptions of guys who didn't understand Ohm's law and tended to try to design things empirically] and they could design and analyze stuff pretty well but there was a problem in expressing the results in a common language.

	Also remember that Tesla deliberately confused peak power with average power when it came to expressing the power in the secondary circuit of a TC and left the unwary reader with the impression that he believed the coils magnified energy [hence free energy].  We can be absolutely sure he understood the difference but should keep in mind that he always loved the extravagently large numbers he got that way.

Ed

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