RE: [TCML] Tesla coil history - which came first?

[James Zimmerschied <zimtesla@xxxxxxx>]

Gary, I suggest as a source a book titled "The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla" by Thomas C Martin which was written in the 1890's which follows many of Tesla's inventions and includes sections from Tesla's lectures. My impression is that Tesla did experiments with generators with more and more poles and the resulting higher and higher frequecny currents and their behavior. He then did experiments with induction coils and tried to get high frequency from them. This led to experiments with single wire lamps and the ability to light cetain lamps with radiation from induction coils. It is hard for me to follow Tesla's discusions but it seems that he derived the rudimentary TC from these investigations. In his patent 568,178 Sept 1896 - it looks like the common two coil TC we are familiar with. In a later patent 649,621 Tesla describes electrical power transmission using a high frequency device. He states that rarified air at high altitudes offers little resistance to transmission from the high frequency coil to a receiver coil. I believe this got a patent when Tesla was able to demonstrate power transmission in a long tube of rarified gas at his NY lab site.
 
I don't claim to be a Tesla expert and I am sure others will have input that corrects or refines my comments. Tesla was a master at obviscation at times and I never was successful in following the invention trail on the power transmission without wires very well.
Jim Zimmerschied
 

> Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:30:59 -0400
> From: glau1024@xxxxxxxxx
> To: tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [TCML] Tesla coil history - which came first?
> 
> I've been asked to give a brief talk about Tesla coils. Of course no
> discussion of the topic is complete without credit to its inventor, Nikola
> Tesla. It dawned on me that I don't really understand how Tesla came upon
> that device. We all know he developed the TC to enable wireless
> transmission of power, but it's not obvious that he started out with that
> goal and then built a TC, or, more likely IMO, he somehow for some reason,
> cobbled together an early prototype TC, saw that power was transmitted, only
> then realizing what it could do, and endeavored to refine it for that
> purpose. Is there any known account of what inspired Tesla to first build a
> resonant transformer? Which came first - a high frequency resonant
> transformer, or the vision of wireless power transmission? Or is it all
> just speculation at this point?
> 
> Thanks, Gary Lau
> MA, USA
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