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TESLA - HV fence protecting his property? His lab burned down?

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ragnar

Tue Mar 27 2007, 07:00AM

Registered Member #63 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425

I'm still waiting for clarification on what the hell the 'natural sky voltage is' -- phrases like that turn people completely off a thread.

Please would someone 'in the know' elaborate?

Coronafix

Tue Mar 27 2007, 08:52AM

Registered Member #160 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 02:07AM
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 938

I'd say he means the potential difference between the earth and the ionosphere, or anywhere "up higher".

Tue Mar 27 2007, 01:31PM

Banned on April 7, 2007
Registered Member #277 Joined: Fri Mar 03 2006, 10:15AM
Location: Florida
Posts: 157

Goldsphere, exacty correct. Natural Sky Voltage is a well established and documented effect. Put a suitable large conductor up in the air about 100 feet or more and it will be measureably effected by several forms of energy, 1) ions continuously produced by a number of natural sources, 2) triboelectric effect, 3) distant lightning pulses, 4) solar flares (a bit more complex to explain) and other forms of energy. Estimates vary from document to document, but general rule of thumb is 100-300 volts per meter above ground level, but the conductor must be high up in the air. As we speak, I continue a several year experiment with 3500 feet of custom-alloy conductor in the air at 130 feet altitude, believe me, you don't want to touch the antenna output even during fair weather days or nights, the hv discharge will knock you on you arss. In my early research, I seem to remember reading that Tesla patented or mentioned collecting electrical potential via raising a simple conductor in the air. Tesla history buffs may be able to comment on that better than I. CM

bill beaty

Wed Mar 28 2007, 05:57AM

Banned on April 8th, 2007.
Registered Member #597 Joined: Thu Mar 22 2007, 03:33AM
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 16

Sorry, I hadn't before encountered the ban on "double posting." If ten people ask questions and then go silent, is a gigantic single message the accepted response? And what problem is this rule supposed to cure?

"Natural Sky Voltage" is the Earth's vertical e-field, the Earth/Ionosphere cavity voltage, also called the "clear weather voltage." It's been recognized since the time of Franklin. If it was possible to make a solid electrical connection to the ionosphere, the estimated output is at least hundreds of megawatts. Not infinite, more like a nuke plant's worth or two. The ionospheric capacitor is kept charged by thunderstorms worldwide, with a time constant of a few seconds. Here is a physicist who managed to extract about a twentith of a horsepower by using a thin wire antenna lifted by a small weather balloon, then using it to power corona-motors: staff.washington.edu/wbeaty/emotpopsci.pdf

(Grab it quick, I can't keep it on my staff page that long.)

Simple vertical high-volt antennas in theory can collect far more than a few watts DC, especially if they employ "plasma contactors" at the top (such as radioactive sources, wads of sharp needles, etc.) That way the entire antenna charges up to the same potential present in air at the antenna tip. Of course the behavior of an xray-ionized vertical path acting as a DC HV antenna is unknown.

Other stuff:

"Tesla had been using big x-ray tubes..."
See page 29 of Colorado Springs Notes. Other hobbyists involved with Tesla history think that these were prelim designs, and his final 1-electrode tube design employed a massive aluminum hemisphere-electrode with a flat polished front (see fig 4 in Tesla's "radiant energy" patent.) This does make sense, since a massive electrode spreads surface heat uniformly if run at high power. Modern 2-electrode x-ray tubes use that same trick, but with a copper block.

"If aimed at a distant tesla coil of the same frequency, it acts like a power line..."
We don't discuss it much, but one of Tesla's main inventions was the stepup/stepdown pair. Put some transformers on either end of a power line, and you can make the wire thinner. If you employ a really high step-up, the wire can be like a filament. Even higher stepup and you can use an air hose at low pressure (which appears in a Tesla patents.) Tesla's original wireless concepts are quite obviously based on the next step: with astronomically high step-up, the power line can be replaced by a low-value capacitor; a pair of widely separated electrode spheres for example. Tesla's patent 645576 is exactly this, and not a radio transmitter/receiver.

In other words... the original purpose of a Tesla Coil is not to make lightning bolts. Instead it's supposed to be one of a pair tuned to the same frequency, with some sort of power transmission line between them (including thin wire, glowing air columns, or just empty space filled with displacement current.) Dump kilowatts into one TC primary, then connect kilowatts worth of motors and light bulbs to the other TC primary. Each watt flowing between the two coils is a megavolt at a microamp.

Another bit: look up "electron runaway" effect. With power supplies at or above 1MV, electrons are relativistic, and if a fast electron strikes an atom, it releases more fast electrons. Additionally, fast electrons have much smaller collision cross-section with air molecules, so the air acts far more transparent than it does with under-1MeV electrons (giving meters-long electron trajectories at one atmosphere, rather than cm-long trajectories.) With strong e-fields in air, these fast electrons can accelerate to much higher energies than any "normal" electrons which keep hitting air molecules and having to start over. Once an avalanche discharge contains fast electrons, it can grow disproportionally long. It's even longer because new fast-electrons are being created at the far end. This suggests that if we smoothly raise the operating voltage of a huge TC, then at some point the discharge will suddenly change character as the "electron runaway" physics becomes significant, with electrons suddenly penetrating far longer through air. It might affect the plasma streamers, but it certainly would affect the corona glow. Anyone building some equipment which produces air discharges up above 10MV might stumble upon this stuff, and I spectulate that Tesla may have done so. It *might* explain the multi-layer glow discharge seen in Tesla's illustrations of large HV electrodes in air. And if Tesla was already workind on long columnar glow discharges using x-rays, then when his equipment was run significantly above 1MV, the length of such glow-discharges would expand far more than the rise in voltage should produce. How much longer? It's scary to speculate. Imagine a military project where a modern linear accelerator is powered with a huge Tesla coil. How far could a beta-particle beam extend through air? Miles? But Tesla was apparently doing just this task at Colorado Springs, but seeing it as glow discharge, rather than as "linear particle accelerator" which of course wasn't invented yet.

But if he actually worked with such things, he didn't write it down.

When looking at the Colorado Springs Notes, I see something resembling my own inventor notebook: it's a strange legal object intended to hold up in court. It's for documenting invention priority. It's very definitely not just a private diary or a notebook of inventions, and the owner makes careful decisions about what goes in. It's sort of like grandstanding; writing for the benefit of some future jury in a possible patent battle. And like patents themselves, it's expected *not* to be secret. If Tesla wanted to keep trade secrets, even conceal little trivial things, then he would do the normal thing and very carefully AVOID recording it in the inventor's notebook. Secrecy of course has consequences, and if another inventor independantly was working on anything that Tesla was excluding those notebooks, then in any future court case the other guy would probably win. (Which may have been what happened with the discovery of x-rays: if Tesla intentionally kept no records, then he had no legally-acceptable documentation to show that he had priority over Roentgen.)

Actually, I sometimes wondered why Tesla wrote anything down ever, since he had a photographic memory. But in the case of the inventor's notebook, the purpose of writing is obvious: protecting his backside. If he lacked records of the invention development process to present to the court, he'd almost certainly lose any patent priority battle. So... there's probably no "secret CS notes," and the CS notes wouldn't exist in the first place if Tesla wasn't carefully declaring priority for those inventions. As Tesla said after a break-in at his NY city apartment, he has nothing the idea-theives can take, since his most valuable inventions are stored only in his head.

About accidentally powering a Tesla coil secondary using the sky-voltage and glow discharge... I made a crude model using a 470K resistor and a chain of NE-2s to model the x-ray ionized air column, and a grounded parallel-resonant LC circuit to model the TC secondary: 25mH toroid, 0.02uF, 7KHz. It needs a 0.002 capacitor to ground as air-column capacitance connected to the link between 470K and neon. Sure enough you can get it to oscillate by applying 130V DC. But it pulses at weird frequencies. And sometimes it won't self-start, but needs a voltage spike to start the oscillation. Very unpredictable behavior, almost biological. It tends to fire the NE-2s, then ring for four or more cycles while the capacitve part discharges and the voltage across the NE-2s rises again. When oscillation starts, the neons go almost dark. I managed to get pure 7Vpp sine waves out of it. Sort of like a neon relaxion oscillator, but acting as a sine wave source.

Hazmatt_(The Underdog)

Wed Mar 28 2007, 07:13AM

Registered Member #135 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:06AM
Location: Anywhere is fine
Posts: 1735

One of the major reasons we don't see any X-ray related inferences in the CSN is because the majority of the text (maybe 95% of it) is not from Tesla, but from his assistant.

I checked out the CSN today to go over what you're talking about to make sure that I could find no inferences to directed energy, because I had remembered seeing nothing of that in the CSN the first 4 times I poured through it, and I still have yet to see any hint of directed energy experiments.

As far as I can tell, page 29 has the one occurence of the discharge tubes that produce "powerful rays". Other citations refer to tuning and identification of a tuned system via discharge tube or Giessler tube, or lamp, but nothing out of the ordinary.

I respectfully have a huge 'bug up my A**' about your claims, as thoughtful and credible they may be, I remain a skeptic. I would side with you unambigously, but I think the inferences and conclusions you're reacing are based on too much information for the given time. I just haven't seen enough to support the claim.

I wouldn't mind reading Tesla's lectures though, if you're able to post them or direct a link somewhere.

Matt

Steve Conner

Wed Mar 28 2007, 09:40AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

OK, here goes.

The rule against double posting is to prevent bumping, because we don't like bumping.

My main objection to this whole line of discussion is that particles that cause ionisation, even when launched with very high energy, tend not to go far in air: see this picture.

Sure, these are probably protons or deuterons, not electrons, but would electrons really go that much further? X-ray photons might travel far, but would they ionize enough to direct a discharge? I don't believe so (did you ever smell ozone or NOx when getting a medical or dental X-ray?) but that is just a personal opinion which would be testable by experiment, so I encourage further discussion of it.

By the same token, Bill's "crude model" of Tesla's alleged experiment is all well and good, except there is no evidence that the X-rays could ionize enough air to make a column of it conduct. I personally think they couldn't, so a better model of the "ionized" air column would be a piece of dry string.

Tesla's wireless power system was debunked to my satisfaction by Paul Nicholson:

He argues very convincingly that Tesla was wrong and it could never work with useful efficiency over a useful distance. It would be kilowatts in, picowatts out, the same efficiency as we observe with ordinary radio transmitters and receivers.

If the CSN was a legal document, or written by Tesla's assistant, how come it contains pages of lyrical waxings about the quality of the moonlight in Colorado?

Dr. Shark

Wed Mar 28 2007, 05:23PM

Registered Member #75 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 09:30AM
Location: Montana, USA
Posts: 711

Wow, of all the free-energy types and other whackos that have joined the board recently Bill is the only one that I am genuinely happy to have around. Welcome to the board, Bill!

I can very well imagine x-rays ionizing the air, since it is pretty well know that UV does it. Ever smelled a powerfull laser flashtube after going off? Oh, and what about the easily verified claim that Marx-Generators syncronize their firing by ionizing the gaps with UV?

also backs this up, but it might not be considered a reliable source here, in this nest of skeptics...

Anyway, the real question is, how would Tesla have collimated the output of an x-ray tube? AFAIK this is totally impossible. And why the f*** would anyone in his right mind use a spark as an energy transmission line, I can hardly imagine anything lossier...

ragnar

Wed Mar 28 2007, 09:44PM

Registered Member #63 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425

My apologies, Bill -- I shall kindly remove my slipper from your arse. Thanks for your explanation

Bjørn

Thu Mar 29 2007, 12:03AM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

I think we have gotten as far as we can on the topic, if anyone can dig up photographs of a HV fence or the burning lab we can reopen the thread.

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