On Sat, 4 Dec 2004 19:09:59 +0000 (UTC), "Reg Edwards"
wrote:


It's as simple as that. I hope this description will enable you to make
your own Tesla coils. But in this day and age they are mainly of educational
and entertainment value. Perhaps they always were. Tesla was a
flashing-light with bangs, circus showman without knowing exactly what he
was doing.

Tesla was a genius cruising through life, having fun, without caring
or worrying about the ramifications of his toys.

Ingenious nevertheless. But perhaps not quite in the same class as Edison.
Even Edison and people like Marconi did not know exactly what they were
about.

Not in Edison's class. A class an order of magnitude above Edison
perhaps. Edison and Marconi were more interested in profiting from
their inventions (or their refinements of the inventions of others).
They can be honored for their commercialization of inventions and
bringing the ideas out of the laboratory. Thomas Edison had a lot in
common with Bill Gates in that respect. Tesla probably understood his
inventions better - to his way of thinking the induction motor and
three phase power were so obvious they didn't warrant much discussion
or interest.


But we should be very grateful to the few workers, the willing slaves of
technology, between 1880 and 1905 who dragged the human race, often at great
personal disadvantage and expense to themselves, away from the feudal age
into the present age of electronics.

The $64,000 question : what is the human race, you stupid set of succeeding
genocidal suckers, to do with your rich inheritance?

Many of us fall into ruts and become worker bees. From birth we are
programmed to seek safe secure ruts . . . Some of us just cruise
through life. The "successful" apply the efforts of others. Little
is done with the "betterment of mankind" as its real justification.

Humans just continue to react/respond to the conditioning of millions
of years of evolution. We can see that something better should or
could be done with what we have. But we don't.

All of our flaws and gifts are what enabled us to survive. We still
play those cards - even though we changed the game substantially in
the last 4,000 years.

Too late to ask Tesla.

Now that would be interesting.

Reg, G4FGQ


Playing with Tesla coils has been very educational and has altered my
perspective a great deal. For instance, I groked the concept of SWR
with a detached cerebral understanding until I saw it in a Tesla coil.
Ditto harmonics. I understood that inductance is related to the
square of the turns, but it was so much book learning until I built an
induction coil.

Likewise I thought the 1600's to 1900's were the dark ages
scientifically - then I read some of the old masters and realized that
they were very smart cookies. They had to deal with concepts that
they didn't have the language to describe, yet they still understood
what was happening. They frequently resorted to mechanical models in
an attempt to make it physical and understandable. Imagine what they
could do with the oscilloscope I take for granted.

I rank Hertz, Gilbert, Maxwell, Kelvin and Tesla among the gods, and
Edison and Marconi among the mortals.

And . . . if you go back just a few more millennia, the inventors of
musical instruments were dealing with the same concepts that Tesla and
Marconi were playing with. Likewise the first engineers trying to
manage crop irrigation or heat a bath. Doubtless they were equally
brilliant; they just didn't have the base to build on.