Was Tesla a Quack?

They took it away. It's not in front of the Adams power plant arch. It's off in some small park now (it was in the way of some state park redesign project.)

Isn't Andrea Rossi still out there selling E-cats?

Rick C.

Exactly that. :)

The toy model often talked about, is a set of capacitive dividers. With capacitors made of metal and air, in a tabletop size, and driven at MF, the losses are very small, and the resonators can be made very good (with help from some Litz wire), making a coupled-resonator filter that can transmit power with reasonably low insertion loss. But the real world, it's just different enough that it's not simply a scaling-up. Or, practical considerations (like where you're going to get a thousand tons of Litz cable) manifest in a somewhat unexpected (nonlinear?) fashion.

Hadn't heard anyone did an analysis, that's neat. And yep, a system is only practical if the _system_ works, not just a few parts.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

Of course "free energy" means something completely different in thermodynamics. Google "Gibbs free energy" and "Helmholtz free energy".

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

The first modern Democrat!

He may have been more conceptual than quantitative. You see that a lot of that in early electrical machinery, as in big u-shaped pole pieces with long field windings. Efficiency improvements came later.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

This is known as the Schumann resonance in which VLF emitted by lightnings propagates several times around the earth in the waveguide formed by the earth and the ionosphere.

In principle, you could tap into this free lightning energy, but unfortunately, the field strength is only 300 uV/m so not much power is available even with big structures, but certainly, it might be possible to run some flea power applications :-).

Superconducting inductive rings would make an excellent long-term bulk-energy storage battery you just pump the energy in and the current goes round and round and round forever and you tap the energy out via cutting in a transfomer/coupled inductor into the field when you need it. All you need is a cheap high-temperature/non-cryogenic superconductor

In fact the development of a cheap non-cryogenic superconductor would make any of Tesla's power-transmission schemes pretty much irrelevant.

On Nov 10, 2018, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote (in article):

Actually, the Romans solved this problem 2000 years ago: Water meters were not practical in that day, but that didn?t prevent the creation of public waterworks. In Roman towns, theconnection from the town water system was by some number of ~ 3? diameter lead pipesin parallel. The connection fee was per 3? pipe per year.

If transmission over the air were practical, the Roman scheme would have been adopted in some form.

Joe Gwinn

The Youtube quacks that follow Tesla cannot spell thermodynamics.

I don't know if Tesla himself could spell thermodynamics but he was very cool nonetheless. I would love to have met him. The others I would stay far away from.

Not found; a different number perhaps?

I don't find it online. I think it was one of these, KL Corum:

Since Tesla kept much of his plans secret, all sorts of bogus skeptical theorizing blossomed during succeeding years. Much discussion ends up as pure straw-man, since the ideas being analyzed aren't Tesla's, but are ideas that his opponents insisted Tesla must must have been using. (But actually weren't! The actual proposals were kept secret, waiting for investors to fund the project, Tesla being unable to afford the hoards of patents required.)

But Tesla did reveal many things in a private interview, 1916 after his project was dead. The text was discovered in the Belgrade Tesla museum, and published in early 1980s as:

Leland Anderson, ed., "Nikola Tesla on his work with alternating currents and their..."

The key secret: Tesla was going to use EHT to break down the atmosphere over a scale of tens of KM, essentially running a "wire" up across vertical kilometers to make electrical contact to the ionosphere layer ...then driving the entire ionosphere using many megawatts of VLF high volts, as if the whole sky were a single capacitor plate, with the Earth's surface being the second plate or ground-return.

So, not radio, but direct capacitive coupling, with the planet's Earth-sky gap being the dielectric of a driven RF capacitor.

Then, no matter where on Earth you are, you're still within ten or twenty KM of a giant "conductor plate" with a few MV of rf on it. The KL Corum paper assumed that the e-field would be roughly the same as the natural global thunderstorms field: 100 to 300 volts per meter, vertical.

The physical patent-model was a 50ft glass pipe between two hv transformers, partially evacuated and used as a plasma-conductor to connect the two, as a power-transmission HV link, so he could run motors and lights on the output of the second, step-down transformer. The head of the US patent office approved the first patents after coming to NYC to see it. Tesla of course planned to use the ionosphere as his "glowing pipe."

I never see any of the above stuff discussed. Everyone insists that Tesla was going to "send power through the ground." He was keeping secret any plans to have some sort of giant purple beam extending upwards from the top of Wardenclyffe tower.

But how was he going to produce a twenty-KM vertical lightning bolt? Wouldn't it just arc to the ground, rather than pointing upwards? Guidance by ion-beam seemed to be one part of the whole thing, and remained secret, although Tesla hinted around that the Colorado Springs device was a successful pilot project to expose problems before building the large version. If you have some big toys that put out a few hundred megavolts, could you produce kilometers-long conductive pathways that go where you aim them? Produce a plasma-conductor to connect your rf supply to the entire ionosphere?

Nikola Tesla: extremely NOT famous for thinking small.

That's 300V/M. Low by 10^6

Actually it's a bit above 100V/M most of the time. It peaks at 300V/M during the day when all the African coastal thunderstorms start up.

It's large enough to run tiny DC kilovoltage-motors using a fairly small antenna-wire, see

Here's a guy running his motor by lifting an antenna with a quadcopter:

Calculate the total wattage for the whole planet, and you only get about 100 megawatts. If it could be harnessed 100%, you could run a single small city.

You seem to be talking about the electro_static_ field between the ionosphere and earth. That DC field strength close to ground is indeed

100-300 V/m.

I was talking about the ULF electromagnetic radiation emitted by lightning strikes that make a few times around the earth in the earth-ionosphere waveguide. Those wavelengths that are a submultiple of the earth circumference are amplified (Schumann resonance) those out of phase are canceled. Even those frequencies that are amplified by the resonance are soon attenuated by the losses.

Here is

an interesting article of making calibrated measurements of the Schumann resonance signals using coils. The magnetic field is really weak, about 1 pT/sqrt(Hz). Note that the stray magnetic fields from 50 Hz mains is at least 30 dB stronger.

Not much energy harvesting when a coil with 60000 turns produces only nanovolts :-).

For an extensive description of Tesla's work see the biography: Tesla, Inventor of the Electrical Age, by W.Bernard Carlson (Princeton University Press 2013. ISBN 978-0-691-05776-7)

Scott.

Heheh... it's funny, because it sounds like the primitive 20th century equivalent of some things we do semi-regularly nowadays, like lauching rockets into the sky to stimulate real lightning (trailing a fine wire which then gives an inordinately straight lightning bolt for the lower half or so), or shooting Frickin' Lazers(R) through the atmosphere at enough peak power to cause self-focusing and ionization.

And maybe it would work, too, if not at as much efficiency as the modern realization would give. Amateurs have quite reasonable success generating meters-long sparks from foot-tall apparatus, that somehow manage to travel in mostly straight lines despite there not being an obvious factor attracting them in that way. Like these kinds of thingys:

Man. Imagine the noise that thing would put out, not to mention the chaotic flashing. It would be the ultimate instant-hit NIMBY, almost a century before NIMBYism took hold!

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

NIMBYism took hold because America placed more emphasis on individual rights over the past 100 years. America in 1900 was run like China. If the railroad company wanted to build a railroad through your land then the government told you to get your ass out and if you didn't your house got mysteriously burnt down. If you worked for a company and went on strike the government sent out the troops and shot you.

Americans like to flip flop between "I demand my rights!" and "Gosh, nothing ever gets DONE around here!"

As if there are only two possibilities and they are mutually exclusive.

Rick C.

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