Jow Forums is always been curious about nikola teslas work so lets have a discussion about it and hopefully other experimenters can joint, mods please dont delete this thread, this is related to politics, everyone knows the US miliitary was involved with teslas papers and I go into this issue too.
my training is in electronics, a couple of months ago I got interested in looking closely at this subject , I've been looking at the "tesla comunity" and I think they are totally mislead to the point that I'm starting to think this is intentional, for example this lecture, the presenter clearly knows about electronics but at the same time ignores what tesla said in those same patents he is evaluating!!! this whole lecture is pure desinformation! ( I'm posting it just for reference and not as a recomended view) ...
first of all theres no real "tesla secrets" because he left a lot of technical info avalible and this info IS NOT esoteric or "a radical new view of electromagnetism" although there are some very interesting "ways of calculation" he published that are unorthodox, this are related to the speed of light and to the way he explained/calculated the propagation of electromagnetic waves.
be warned !!! I'll try to explain it simply but it is long and if you know nothing about electronics theres A LOT to digest . I know some people here do know and I guess I'm counting on them to also move this thread foward.
I'm not so sure if i'm presenting all this info in the best way or the right order but I think if you read to the end all will be clear (I hope).
>" It is well known that certain radiations—such as those of ultra-violet light, cathodic, Roentgen rays, or the like—possess the property of charging and discharging conductors of electricity"
"roentgen rays" are X-rays, back them that was the name they used because they were first observed by Wilhelm Röntgen.
tesla worked extensively with X-rays to the point that it becomes scary, he did a lot of experiments trying to perfect Xray photography trying different materials and metals to best produce them that he even reported feeling sleepy after long exposure to Xrays...
>" ...For instance, at a distance of 45 feet from the end of the bulb my assistants and myself could observe clearly the fingers of the hand through a screen of tungstate of calcium..."
this is the context where the concept of "radiant energy" came to be, "radiant" doesnt mean anything obscure it only means literally "something that produces rays" like an Xray tube will produce "rays of energy" or "radiant energy", this is where he notice that a metal plate subject to X rays will dislodge electrons that could be accumulated on a capacitor and then produce some "work", the explanation for this is the photoelectric effect (pic)
in that same patent you can even see the tube that will produce this "radiant rays" (ultra violet or Xrays) and the metal plate "sensor" that will collect them , and here is where you can see the infamous diagram that everyone thinks is collecting "free energy" "from all around" ... but no, he explicitly explains in that same patent that this is radiation from the sun specifically uV radiation.
>The rays or radiations which are to be utilized for the operation of the apparatus above described in general terms may be derived from a natural source, as the sun (fig 1 and fig 2), or may be artificially produced by such means, for example, as an arc-lamp (fig 3), a Roentgen tube , and the like (fig 4), and they may be employed for a great variety of useful purposes.
the patent is basically for a solar panel ... in those days there was no semiconductors or solar cells so he was relying on the high energy of uV radiation and Xrays to "dislodge electrons" , this has to do with the photoelectric effect he even states that:
>it will be found that when the radiations of the sun or of any other source capable of producing the effects before described fall upon the plate P an accumulation of electrical energy in the condenser C will result.
>Many useful applications of this method of utilizing the radiations emanating from the sun or other source and many ways of carrying out the same will at once suggest themselves from the above description. By way of illustration a modified arrangement is shown in Fig. 2, in which the source S of radiant energy is a special form of Roentgen tube devised by me having but one terminal k
the patent US685957 and US685958 are basically the same but he added secundary aparatus to his basic "solar panel", he doesn't give much info about exactly what metal he used but its possible to deduce from his puclications about Xrays that this was aluminium and also because aluminium has a comparativelly very low electronVolt (eV) "barrier" meaning that uV and Xrays can dislogde electrons more "easily" that other metals (unless you use some more "exotic" metal like lithium or other with even lower eV "rating" that can even work with visible light)
please don't be mislead by this apparatus, they are not that important , they are there just to make something useful from the energy of the "solar panel", this apparatus sound very mysterious and intricate but you got to put yourself back in those days where you didn't have transistors not even "vacuum valves"! (this mismatch is intentional because he uses the term "vacuum tube" but this does not mean the device that came latter ) so he had to resort to various "wierd" (to our eyes) ways to detect energy for example the use of iron filings or the use of mechanical "switchers" because he didnt have diodes!!! (ERIC DOLLARD has talked about this fact in his lectures BUT unforntunately he is MISLEADING the public. more latter).... for example this patent is basically describing a mechanical tuner and rectifier:
"TRANSMISSION OF ENERGY AND SIGNALS". this patent/idea is the one that I'm most fascinated with and the whole "secret" to this invention is to just READ he's own words and to also understand his time period (this is important to always keep in mind), this means for example that he uses different units of meassures to what we are used to now, for example he uses "cm" indistinctively for nanoHenry "nH" (inductance) and picoFarad "pF" (capacitance) he also uses "cycles" to note hertz
the "secret" with this invention is to use VERY LOW FREQUENCIES (VLF) AND SUPER HIGH VOLTAGES , voltages as high as 2MV (mega volts, 2 million volts!!!) and frequencies as low as 25.000 hertz ( 25Khz) this means a little above the maximum upper range of human hearing but he also sugested even lower frequencies (around 900 hertz and apparetly he even experimented down to 6hz!!!) , the whole idea with this is to use a transformer (so called "pancake coil" pic is one of the original transformer coils that tesla used, the spiral one in the back on the wall! not the one he is holding.) to create the highest voltage possible so the current (amps) involved in this method becomes almost negeglible and the transmission throu the air becomes practicable.
from his own words:
>"With waves 300 meters in length ( 1Mhz ) economic transmission of energy is out of the question, the loss being too great. When using wave-lengths of 6,000 meters ( 50KHz ) it is still noticeable though not a serious drawback. With wave-lengths of 12,000 meters (25KHz) it becomes quite insignificant and on this fortunate fact rests the future of wireless transmission of energy."
btw "wave lenght" in meters and "cycles" (now we use the term "hertz") are inversely proportional so don't get confused by this (if meters goes up the hertz go down, if meters goes down the hertz go up)
now we know that this is because the sun has an effect on the ionosphere (back then it was called the "heaviside layer") and is not related to evaporation from the ground.
but in this case he is talking about regular radio transmmissions in the much higher frequency range (back them this were called "hertzian waves", remember this term), hes not talking about Very Low Frequencies, in fact he considered very low frequency ( the VLF band) as a completely different phenomena and this is were the whole controversy starts,
a "different radio wave" "longitudinal wave" "GROUND WAVE" "tesla waves" "tesla system" ... all of this refers to the properties of the Very Low Frequency band and not to a undiscovered new type of electromagnetic wave or the "longitudinal wave" and just by reading his own publications this becomes VERY CLEAR.
sometimes the VLF band can also be called Ultra Low Frequency band ULF, this terms are not strictly regulated they are just for general denomination.
the penetration property of VLF is what he termed as "ground wave" but its all the same electromagnetic (EM) wave phenomena. to really understand and appreciate tesla you have to put yourself back in that time period where a lot of things started to be discovered and a lot of things changed , you have to understand they used different terms and even expressions that we don't even use today, the whole EM phenomena was not fully understood nor fully agreed upon , this also means that he made mistakes and this is understandable!
you have to be careful with the term "high frequency" in those days alternators worked at less that 100 hertz so back them an alternator working at 10.000 hertz was considered "high frequency" , this could create confusion.
>The high frequency alternator employed in my first demonstrations ...furnishing sinusoidal currents of from 10,000 to 20,000 cycles per second.
another erroneus conclusion, (the "heaviside layer" is now called the ionosphere and is divided in layers D, E, F, they are directly related to sun activity):
>Terrestrial phenomena which I have noted conclusively show that there is no Heaviside layer, or if it exists, it is of no effect.
like I said before the heaviside layer is the main reason the shortwave band can propagate long distances.
pic is related but somewhat not complete in the sense that not all AM radio waves bounce back, depending on the frequency some in the high frequency range (over 30Mhz more or less) just go through the ionosphere into outer space, but other frequencies can bounce back (around the 10Mhz range), and not all radio stations change their power output (only in the "golden days" this was more common) I'm being redundant about shorwave propagation because this has to be clear, the electromagnetic spectrum has different properties but they are all the same "wave" or phenomena!!!
tesla was very bright man BUT he also made mistakes and the way he explained/calculated the propagation of Very Low radio Frequencies is just...not right.... he claimed (patent US787412A):
> "...a wave over the earth's surface with a mean velocity of about four hundred and seventy-one thousand two hundred and forty kilometers per second." 471.240 km/s (page 3 paragraph 35 and 60) 292.000 miles
speed of light is a little less than 300.000Km/s and if you use miles per second it doesn't add up either... so I'm inclined to think that this is a mistake or a typo but he claimed that the speed of light was not the natural limit in other publications so...
pic related is how he demosntrated his "calculation" for the speed of propagation for his VLF trasnmiter , but don't get too hang up about this, this are erroneus calculations (he made other mistakes), just keep reading because the really interesting part is the technology not hes conclusion about how it worked (althought this is usesul for a historical viewpoint) . I think that the error comes when looking at this as a standing wave because he wrongly tought that the speed of propagation was infinte at the origin and progressively lowering speed as it gets to te middle point of the earth where he says the wave will propagate at "normal speed" right at the midle point to then gain speed again and it would be also infinte at the other pole (right at the other side of the earth) in this explanation he dismisses the atmospheric propagation.
he observed that the ground conection was very important for efficient radio comunications (this is true) and this is why he tought that this waves propagated via the ground this is incorrect is just that the VLF band has very high penetration into ground and even water.
for source go to the part title " III. The Singular Misconception of the Wireless."
the concept of "longitudinal waves" comes from the properties of the VLF band like I said before this band has very interesting properties just like the Shortwave band also has very interesting properties that make them travel very far using the ionosphere (whithout the ionosphere the SW band will be basically useless) the Very low frequency band has the property to penetrate and travel long distances with very good efficiency and this is where the concept of "longitudinal wave" comes from , tesla though of the VLF band as a special band because it offered excelent transmission properties, tesla even bashed the "HERTZIAN WAVES" because they are much more inefficient and by hertzian waves tesla meant the higher frequency bands (basically anything over 100Khz, the AM radio band starts at about 400khz or 500khz) I repeat what TESLA said:
>"With waves 300 meters in length ( 1Mhz ) economic transmission of energy is out of the question, the loss being too great. When using wave-lengths of 6,000 meters ( 50KHz ) it is still noticeable though not a serious drawback. With wave-lengths of 12,000 meters (25KHz) it becomes quite insignificant and on this fortunate fact rests the future of wireless transmission of energy."
at 20:00 Eric Dollard "tries" to explain the supposedly "tesla longitudinal wave" VS the "hertzian wave" this is not correct!!! by reading teslas publications he specifically is talking about the properties of the Very low requency band!!!
Tesla invented a Generator called a Homopolar Dynamo Electric Machine.
It uses the rotation of magnets and a conductor to draw power from 1 pole of the magnet.
Bruce Depalma built one and it was confiscated by the feds. And Adam Trombly helped the government build a superconducting version of it.
Watch the movie Thrive.
Ryder Adams
remember that I said to always keep in mind the time period, one of the biggest issue with all this is that tesla did all his major experiments during the 1890s, there was no certainty about a lot of things and the electromagnetic phenomena was not completely understood to a point that made tesla create erroneous conclutions and even calculations for example he was wrong about nuclear energy, he thought that it was impossible , from his observations working with super high voltages he never saw any atomic "rupture" and erroneusly concluded that the feat was impossible, another example is his views on radioactivity
> Now, according to my theory, a radioactive body is simply a target which is continuously bombarded by infinitesimal bullets projected from all parts of the universe, and if this, then unknown, cosmic radiation could be wholly intercepted, radioactivity would cease.
now heres where I'm goin into the conspiracy territory because is VERY WELL known that Very low radio Frequencies have the property to penetrate and to reach very long distances, tesla was very correct about this, this property is so well understood that the military uses this band with submarines (the VLF band centered at around 20 khz) many people in the conspiracy world put a lot of attention to the HARRP antenna arrey, well it turns out tesla proposed many uses for the military when employing super high voltages (like I said before over 1 million volts range) and the HAARP array is said to use the VLF band (although I'm not 100% sure what is the exact frecuency, and maybe they even use different frecuencies depending on what they are working)
tesla did offered his services to the military when he was alive and he openly talked about it in the press this is where "the death ray" comes from...remember some time ago when the CIA published a report about tesla? well it doesn't say anything of interest, theres a huge more info in the press than that report! and it is just desinfo because it goes into the whole "longitudinal wave" thing and they even put "calculations" to leave people thinking "we are on the right track..." just read what tesla said in his own patents!
people are correct that the military and tesla had connections, the man openly talked about offering his services to the US military!
anyways all this makes me belive that the huge majority of people involved with tesla giving lectures and organising events are basically desinfo (the CIA report even state that they went to one of this events/lecture) Eric Dollard is not giving the right info and neither peter lindemann, just look at that lindemann video I put in my first post, how the hell can you go through the patents and miss the very obvious info that tesla put there?!!!
Eric Dollard has a video where he uses a "pancake coil" at one point he says "tesla was using millions of volts" then why the hell don't you use that coil like tesla said?!!! hes using this very bad scheme where hes using a 2.9 Mhz carrier (this is "shortwave" band) hes basically just using the "pancake coil" as a regular antenna (a bad one) this is not how tesla describes his method!!! you just need to listen to what tesla said and use the Very low frequency band with super high voltages! ... thats the whole secret of his technology by his own patents!
and supposedly this is the man that knows more about tesla ?! what the hell is going on here?!! ALL this is pure misleading information...
pic related is once again the tesla spiral tranformer coil, in this close up you can easily count the turns of the secundary (about 100 ) and it is about 2.5 meters high(!) , in the patents he describes a 50 turn coil 2.4 m high, all this can be made with regular coper wire
>mods please dont delete this thread, this is related to politics I will help after all Tesla was a Croat
Owen Lewis
during teslas time there was controversy about the whole deal with "tesla waves" (VLF band) VS "heartzian waves" (high frequencies) that he even published an article with his view on the matter:
that is a very nice technical publication about how he understood the properties of "his system" that in reality is the VLF band , the thing is this two supposedly different "waves" are just simply different bands of the same electromagnetic spectrum!!!
now even the "hertzian wave" concept is obsolete (but we just retain the "hertz" designation instead of the older "cycle"), the "different" bands of the electromagnetic spectrum have different properties for example shorwave band can travel long distances but only because they happen to bounce form the ionosphere this doesn't happen with the rest of the spectrum but the whole spectrum is composed of the same type of wave!
pic related: notice that it says "tesla tested 100 foot discharges at millions of volts demonstrating that the hertz wave are of infinitesimal effect and unrecoverable"
this means that he used for this comparison a frequency of about 9Mhz (use calculator below) this is at the very center of the shortwave band, this is compared to his results using the VLF band.
he used impulses and not pure sine waves , DO NOT GET CONFUSE BY THIS a lot of people think this impulses are the "secret" and that somehow tesla produced a special type...but no, back in those days it was difficult to produce AND control high voltages so impulses were more effective, this are technically called "inductive impulses" or inductive spikes basically all coils have this property it has to do with the nature of induction and the sudden change of a magnetic field.
I've seen many people doing tesla coils but not using them as tesla intended, they have to be used at low frequencies and at very high voltages (BOTH AT THE SAME TIME) thats the whole key for this tech to work, the idea is to transmit energy or messages so you'll need two coils or at least you should use some other detecting/observation device (meter, oscilloscope etc)
a tesla coil is much more than just to make sparks!!!
for example I like what this guy is doing but he is totally mislead :
he is even using low voltages!!! so hes gonna be chasing nothing like a lot of other experimenters and this is just sad because the info from tesla is very clear and people like Eric Dollard and Lindemman have only contributed to desinform.
like I said before my educated guess is that the military uses this technology and they don't what people messing with it I could bet that they started the trend of publications about "the incredible tesla and his free energy" but with intentional desinfo, I mean the patents are quite clear! how we ended up in these mess with people claiming he was flying UFOs ?!
why this level of complot? because the Low frequency spectrum is very narrow as it is and to get more people involved doesn't look good. to the military is good that the experimenters are "stuck" in nowhere land doing tesla coils just to see a spark... tesla claimed that with this tech it was posible to produce atmospheric "effects" and the so called "death ray" all this is withing the same technology but using different frequencies and using high watts of power in the kilowatts range but for the home experimenter and the original idea of tesla is to transmit energy and messages so working with low watts, around or even less than 100 watts, should be enough .
he left info about all this in the press but nothing about the exact specs, he talked very grandiosely about his tech in the magazines so the military would be interested but """nothing happened"""... supposedly the military took his papers after he died but he gladly and openly offered his services to the US military anyways...
please notice the info about the voltage he proposes to use... 50.000.000 volst !!! >Mr. Tesla makes one important stipulation. Should the government decide to take up his offer he would go to work at once, but they would have to trust him. He would suffer “no interference from experts.”
but theres some difficulties presented by this transmission method: the VERY long antennas requiered to obtain the maximum efficiency and also theres difficulty because of the high voltages needed, arcs will occur betwen the spirals of the coils if the coil is not correctly made, in that video I posted Eric Dollar "explains" how to make a bad coil, even keeping the secundary terminal enclosed within the coil as oppose to how tesla insist that you should extend this terminal above the ground to form an antenna, the secundary terminal should be at potentials of megavolts and it should be raised as high as possible into the air using a metal plate or a metal sphere as the terminal but Dollard was correct about grounding the other terminal of the secundary coil .
that video is just more desinfo and is not the way tesla explains it in his patent US645576 and actually is much more easy how tesla did it!!! because this are low frequencies you dont really need fancy weaving for the coil (like in high frequencies) or silver coax wire and the skin effect and the .... nah...the only thing that is good about it is the flat primary but you can use a regular copper strip for the primary and the secundary can be made with regular round copper wire (even telephone wire) here you could use some fancy insulation (high voltage type) and the advise to use the same weight of copper (in other words to use a very short but heavy primary and a very long but thin primary resulting in both having equal weight) is good advice but I think not really critical for this (this tip could be handy for regular push-pull transformers when you want max symmetry but will depend on how you plan to make the bobbin formers)
pic T is the tranmitter R receiver it really is that simple, just read his patents.
that image is somewhat of a misinformation. we adjust due to cloud cover height. I own 9 300 to 400 foot towers in a couple of counties here. I know these things.
another problem that this has is that this band is very narrow you cant transmit voice because it will occupy almost the whole VLF band! the "sound range" goes from 0 to 20 Khz and remember we are using this same range for our carrier! so to modulate (amplitude modulation) even using a very narrow 5khz passband (from 0 to 5khz this basically means to transmit decent quality voice but not descent quality music) and lets suppose we use the frequency of 25khz as our carrier... it just becomes a mess, the frequencies are just too close to each other, and you have take into account that we want more people participating in this band and we already are using almost the whole spectrum with only one transmission!
now we can see why teslas system was outpaced by the higher frequencies (or the wrongly named "hertzian waves") but teslas system can be useful with morse code, morse code is basically just pulses using just one frequency (on, off) without swamping the whole band, this is how tesla proposed to be used AND also to transmit power and again this requieres just the carrier (one frequency)
"on and off" means we could use it for digital signals? yes but the maximum would be 25000 bauds if we use a 25khz carrier this would mean 25000 bits per second absolute maximum (I might be wrong about this so please correct me!!!)
and again this would be the reasons why the military would not want this band to be used. pic is the palmer station located in antartica
yes, you are correct thats why I explained at the end that the image is not 100%"complete" but the image itself was good to visualize the phenomena.
but theres more...
Benjamin Martin
>some difficulties presented by this transmission method I'd say, like widespread epidemic of leukemia and bone cancers. Caused by EM radiation polarizing and magnetizing naturally occurring metals in your systems and bones. I'm actually wondering if those Tesla cars have the passenger compartments shielded from the EM fields of the electric drive train... also the earth is round and signals tend to not be affected by gravity.
because this band IS used! this is a VERY GOOD video, its worth the 10 minutes watch to better understand teslas system and the limitations that I talked about:
this is directly from wikipedia because this all this characterics are the reason tesla though this waves as something different from the rest of the spectrum but they are at a fundamental level just the same as any other "radio" wave:
>Because of their large wavelengths, VLF radio waves can diffract around large obstacles and so are not blocked by mountain ranges or the horizon, and can propagate as ground waves following the curvature of the Earth.... The conductive ionosphere and the conductive Earth form a horizontal "duct" a few VLF wavelengths high, which acts as a waveguide confining the waves so they don't escape into space. The waves travel in a zigzag path around the Earth, reflected alternately by the Earth and the ionosphere, in TM (transverse magnetic) mode.
VLF waves have very low path attenuation, 2-3 dB per 1000 km,[2] with little of the "fading" experienced at higher frequencies... VLF transmissions are very stable and reliable, and are used for long distance communication. Propagation distances of 5000 to 20000 km have been realized.[2] However, atmospheric noise (sferics) is high in the band,[3] including such phenomena as "whistlers", caused by lightning.
VLF waves can penetrate seawater to a depth of at least 10 to 40 meters (30 to 130 feet), depending on the frequency employed and the salinity of the water, so they are used to communicate with submarines.
VLF waves at certain frequencies have been found to cause electron precipitation.
VLF waves used to communicate with submarines have created an artificial bubble around the Earth that can protect it from solar flares and coronal mass ejections; this occurred through interaction with high-energy radiation particles.[4]
Wireless energy transmission seems dangerous and inefficient as fuck (except when using condensed light as laser beams, but you still fry whatever the fuck crosses its path).
Luke Lee
Could you manage to reproduce his shit or not? Thanks for the thread anyway
Jose Morales
you mean superconductors not semiconductors, but yes, continue
Parker Gutierrez
bump
Landon Harris
well, the whole idea is to use very high voltages so the current is basically negligible. this basic principle does work in fact this is why the transmision lines use it, they start with a step up transformer to operate in the 500 kiloVolt range (and even close to 1 MV range) this is to reduce amperages and reduce losses then at the final stage you step down this volatge to gain the advantage in amps. and btw this is the "wired" systen that tesla propose
