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

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:53:14 -0700
From: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Tesla list <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
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