vibrating at different velocities b

vibrating at different velocities by different objects. These vibrations bombard the minute rods of the
retina... It is responsible also for all the immensely varied phenomena of electricity, probably, too of
cohesion and gravitation...
The dynamo and the other electrical mechanisms, which we have invented do not make or create
electricity. They merely let it come through, showing itself now as light, now as heat, now again as
motive power. But always it was there before, unnoted, merely potential, and yet a vast surrounding
ocean of energy there behind, ready to break into active operation when the medium was at hand for it.
Jones, who was not a scientist but a religious thinker and communicator, was making a point about the
nearness of God's power and could do so by invoking the physics of his time. This would be difficult
using the Einsteinian physics in fashion today, which W. Gordon Allen has called atheistic science.
Although the ether is intangible, it is assumed to have elastic properties, so that Tesla can say a circuit
with a large capacity behaves as a slack spring, whereas one with a small capacity acts as a stiff
spring vibrating more vigorously. This elastic character of the ether, which you experience palpably
when you play with a pair of magnets, is due to the medium's lust for equilibrium. Distorted by electrical
charge (or by magnetism or by the gravity of a material body), the ether seeks to restore a perfect
balance between the polarities of positive-negative, plus/minus, yang/yin.
Voltage is the measure of ether strain or imbalance, called potential difference, or just potential.
Balance is not restored from this strained condition in one swing-back. As we have seen with the
capacitor, the disturbed electric medium, like a plucked guitar string, over-swings the centerline of
equilibrium to one side, then to the other, again and again, and this we know as vibration. In this way of
looking at nature, vibration is energy; energy is vibration. So you could say that the commotion in the
medium caused by the capacitors discharge is energy itself.
Thus, you can speak of the capacitor as an energy magnifier. Even though a feeble potential may
charge it, the sudden blast of the capacitor's release plucks the medium mightily. The capacitor is
common in modern circuitry, but Tesla used it with much greater emphasis on its capability as an
energy magnifier and on a scale almost unheard of today. It's difficult to find commercial capacitors
that meet Tesla specifications. Builders of tesla coils and other high-voltage devices usually must
construct their own capacitors. Fortunately, this can be done using readily available materials.
How it works
The spark gap: A simple way to discharge a capacitor is through a spark gap. The spark-gap oscillator
is just a capacitor firing into a circuit load (lamps or whatever) through the spark gap. The opening
between the spark-gap electrodes determines when the capacitor will fire. This setting is one
determinant of the frequency of the circuit.
The others are capacity and the reactance, or bounce characteristics, of the load. The potential
needed to bridge the gap is in the tens of thousands of volts. It takes a potential of about 20,000 volts
to break down the resistance of just a quarter of an inch of air. The gap doesn't necessarily have to be
air. Tesla has referred to a gap consisting of a film of insulation. A spark gap is a switching device, a
semiconductor in fact. But the spark gap is problematic, particularly the common two-electrode air-gap
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the lost inventions of Nikola Tesla
version. Heating and ionizing of the air cause irregularities in conduction and premature firing.
This arcing must be quenched. It can be to a great degree by using a series of small gaps instead of
one larger one, or by using a rotary gap. Tesla also immersed the gap in flowing oil, used an air
blowout, and even found that a magnetic field helps to quench. For the gap Tesla substituted highspeed
rotary switches, which he called circuit controllers. One has a rotor that dips into a pool of
mercury, and another uses mercury jets to make contact. You can operate a spark gap without a
capacitor by connecting it directly to a source of sufficient voltage.
This is, of course, how our automotive spark plugs work, directly off the coil. (The capacitor in that
circuit is used to juice the ignition coil primary.) The auto distributor, incidentally, is a rotary gap, pure
Tesla. Early radio amateurs used spark-gap oscillators as transmitters. The capacitor was, more often
than not, left out of the circuit, but with it the transmitter could create a greater commotion in the
medium.
3. Tesla Coil
Tesla's best-known invention takes the spark-gap oscillator and uses it to vibrate vigorously a coil
consisting of few turns of heavy conductor. Inside of this primary coil sits another secondary coil with
hundreds of turns of slender wire. In the Tesla coil there is no iron core as in the conventional step-up
transformer, and this air-core transformer differs radically in other ways. Recounting the birth of this
invention, Tesla wrote, Each time the condenser was discharged the current would quiver in the
primary wire and induce corresponding oscillations in the secondary. Thus, a transformer or induction
coil on new principles was evolved Electrical effects of any desired character and of intensities
undreamed of before are now easily producible by perfected apparatus of this kind. Elsewhere Tesla
wrote, There is practically no limit to the power of an oscillator.
The conventional step-up transformer (short primary winding, long secondary on an iron core) boosts
voltage at the expense of amperage. This is not true of Tesla's transformer. There is a real gain in
power. Writing of the powerful coils he experimented with at his Colorado Springs lab, coils with
outputs in excess of 12 million volts, Tesla wrote, It was a revelation to myself to find out that ... a
single powerful streamer breaking out from a well insulated terminal may easily convey a current of
several hundred amperes! The general impression is that the current in such a streamer is small.
How it works
A Tesla coil secondary has its own particular electrical character determined in part by the length of
that slender coiled wire. Like a guitar string of a particular length, it wants to vibrate at a particular
frequency. The secondary is inductively plucked by the primary coil. The primary circuit consists of a
pulsating high-voltage source (a generator or conventional step-up transformer), a capacitor, a spark
gap, and the primary coil itself. This circuit must be designed so that it vibrates at a frequency
compatible with the frequency at which the secondary wants to vibrate.
The primary circuit's frequency is determined by the frequency and voltage of the source, the capacity
of the capacitor, the setting of the spark gap, and the character of the primary coil, determined in part