RE: Hi Power Discharge "Disruptive"

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Steve Conner" <steve.conner-at-optosci-dot-com> 

 >I think a hundred years of subsequent physics actually does give us a
 >pretty good idea of how these things work.

I agree. I think many members of this list probably understand how Tesla
coils work a good deal better than Tesla himself ever did. Not necessarily
because they are smarter than Tesla was, but because we have all sorts of
cool 20th/21st century toys like signal generators, spectrum analysers,
digital oscilloscopes, and computer-aided EM modelling.

When Tesla was doing his Colorado Springs work in 1899, oscilloscopes more
or less did not exist. They would not become off-the-shelf items until radar
became widespread in the 1930s. He mentions in the notes that he would have
to get round to setting up a "rotating mirror" sometime to view the
oscillations, but it seems that he never did.

Plus, he was further hindered because he didn't believe in electromagnetic
waves or "Hertz waves" as he called them. From reading the CSN, I get the
impression that he thought all the energy from his transmitters propagated
through the conducting ground, and the elevated terminal played no part in
the process.

Of course, this was sort of true, in as much as the hypothesis was
consistent with whatever experimental data he had. Tesla's transmitters were
such a poor match to "free space" that a huge proportion of the energy was
trapped in the reactive "near" field, circulating between the terminal and
the patch of ground surrounding it, and practically none of it was radiated.
Paul Nicholson deals with this in much greater depth on his site.

Tesla never noticed this because at the long wavelengths he was using, the
reactive field extended several miles in all directions. If he had travelled
2000 miles away and tried to pick up his signals, he would probably have
been bitterly disappointed, and forced to alter his mental model of how the
signals were propagated into something more in keeping with the E-M theory
we get taught at college now.

But we only know this in hindsight from 105 years of development in radio
engineering.

Steve C.