While single turn primaries look good on paper:
V2 = Sqrt(L2 / L1)
It has been debunked in practice. The sames formula and thinking goes for
topload capacitance (paper vs practice). You need a lot of C2 for good
sparks.
The thing about Colorado Springs is, that primary was 49.5 feet in
diameter! Just adding a few more feet of inductor would drastically change
the tune. The primary was a special wire shipped from his New York lab and
the entire Colorado Springs lab was designed around it. Meaning, the wire
was only so long, so the diameter was what it was. Telsa was unable to add
length (or tap it) so he did not tune is oscillator like we do. Instead he
used a 'regulator coil', basically adding parasitic inductance to tune it.
Additionally, to combat the high surge in the gap, he used a rotary spark
gap, comprised of two counter rotating discs. I believe this was around
4,000 bps and since they were counter rotating this gave very fast quench
times.
~Dan
Kansas City area
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