All language subtitles for Tesla Coil - James Corum - Tesla Society 1990

Digital techniques in England, France, Germany, Netherlands and the US.

He was director of the commercial Television satellite engineering Division of Consumer Communications in Cleveland, Ohio,

is presently working as a consultant with Hewlett Packard.

He's developed experimental techniques and apparatus, which makes the recent fireball investigation possible.

Sounds intriguing.

Dr. "James Corum"

has a BSEE from the University of Lowell, 1965

MSEE in Ohio State, 1967,

a Ph.D. In electrical engineering from Ohio State in 1974.

He's been active in academia for 18 years, serving as an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University

and also as a professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering Technology at the Ohio Institute of Technology.

While a faculty member at West Virginia, he's received 9 universally outstanding faculty recognition awards, prizes and citations.

He's presently a senior research scientist with the Electromagnetics Department, patel in Columbus, Ohio.

Dr "Corum" was also a senior member of the IEEE, and also holds memberships in American Geophysical Union,

American Physical Society, Research Society of North America and the Society of Motion Picture and Television engineer.

he currently holds five papers and has an excess of 30 technical publications.

So please welcome our two speakers, a welcome present.

And then after 45 minutes, we'll take a short break and we'll get right back into it.

So please welcome Kenneth and

Dr James Corum.

They have to pass this back and forth for the taping.

Ok.

We'll be working over here.

Let's see.

You probably can only hear me if I hold this thing up.

All right.

If it ain't o'clock in the morning, my voice wander off.

And if for some reason or other, I get too quiet, you can't hear me anymore.

Wave at me or something and I'll try to speak up again.

Normally, I try to be a little more diplomatic in our introduction, and thank everybody for inviting us here.

And it's nice to see so many people back again over and over again over the years.

And I'll try to just cut that short and get really into some technical things.

I take it that most of you're here because this morning, because you want to hear something technical.

The two papers that we submitted, the first one is on.

I think we're able to do it without any equations.

We draw lots of of pictures, though, and it's on, let me say, Tesla Coil engineering.

The second paper is on the ball lightning experiments that...

I'm going to say we performed, but that were completely outlined in the diary and in the various publications of Tesla Head.

And when you look at it in retrospect, you'll say,

My, you know what a bunch of boobies we all were for, not just doing what he told us to do.

You know, it's been standing there in print for 85, 90 years or so,

not just in the diary, but in Collier's magazine and other places.

And it wasn't that he was trying to hide something.

He just we make the comment in the paper that was submitted that...

It's like... Poe's story on "The purloined letter", just so that right out in the open, you know, and that is where nobody would look.

Everybody would look for something hidden or mysterious underneath it all.

Also, there's some fascinating developments that have occurred fairly recently...

With the Soviets and published in their open literature and a number of books that have just come out.

We'd like to tell you a little bit about that.

Okay, let's see.

The first one then is on...

I think the official title of the paper

is something like 100 years of Kennedy Resonator Development

and Kennedy Resonators.

Microwave ovens and microwave electronics as we know it today really develops.

You can trace it right back to the work that Tesla did in the early 1890s.

It's amazing that... I taught microwave engineering both undergraduate and graduate courses for good many years

goes through all the boundary value problems and all the solutions for heavy resonators and waveguides and all that.

But what's amazing is that...

Hey, in all that, you never tell the story of where those equations came from and who those people were.

And the remarkable thing is...

The fingerprints of Tesla's work right on through up to the development of...

Distributed circuits and cavity resonatorsand microwave ovens and particle accelerators that we have today.

Okay.
Now, let's see.

Doesn't make any sense to talk about all this without somehow rather showing some of these pictures.

That's kind of low. Yeah.

somebody want to catch the lights there?
At least the ones here in the front.

okay.

Can we get the one that's right
over the middle there? Okay.

This is, of course, the famous picture and you've all seen it, what have you.

But there's something thrilling about this site.

And it certainly is a shrine for electrical engineering and electrical science.

And, you know, physical things come and go.

They pass away.
But ideas and concepts that are real.

All right.

A lot of people have wrong ideas, but I mean, people are on the right path, have ideas, and those things are eternal.

They don't change, and "Tesla" made comments about that several times.

and we should mention a little bit about some of the people that were here.

"Fritz Lowenstein" That was Tesla's technician.

Here was the first vice president of the IRE.

When it was first formed, and "Loewenstein" was also the inventor of the class amplifier,

which is something they don't normally don't tell you junior level, you're learning your transistor circuits are back.

When I was an undergraduate, that was a mixture of transistor and vacuum tube circuits and

they never told us that, it was "Lowestein" who got the original patents

and working for "John Hays Hammond"
in "Gloucester Hammond" labs.

He was also the inventor of the shaped capacitor

so that you could tune and get something that would be a linear in frequency.

Tesla, by the way, I don't know why it's not commonly advertised, but...

in 1891, "Alexander Graham Bell" was president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers,

and during that year, "Tesla" was elected as vice president of the IEEE

and served two year term along with "A. E. Kennelly", was famous with "Heaviside" as the discoverer of the "Kennelly-Heaviside" layer.

And as I say, Tesla was the vice president of the of what's now the I believe, for two years.

And a lot of people in the I believe in the history committees don't seem to realize that the amazing thing

that they forget the past even though they're supposed to be authorities on it...

picture of course with a lot of these were taken by moonlight by "Dickenson V. Alley",

who's the photographer...

Now a lot of you've come to this symposium and I think was in the 84 symposium where somebody did a marvelous piece of work and located the original site at the corner of Foote (avenue) and Kiowa Streets.

And all of you should make a trek over there

and stand on the side and look and see the mountains in the distance.

And if you take the diary, you can look in the other direction, see the printer's home and so forth.

But also in the background...

You can see where there was a lake and if you got a rental car or a map,

of Colorado Springs, you can see

Prospect Lake, which shows up in some of these pictures In the background

and you see where the based on the lake.

Well, we did we did our off start.

Some of you will recognize some of these from previous years but that's okay

And I have to start at the beginning and come forward to the circuitry that we'll be dealing with

RLC circuits.

The second order we want to at the time start with "Lord Kelvin".

He's the first guy to introduce the discharge of a "Leyden" jar into an inductor.

It's a lump circuit.

e^−αt

it's a viscous damping for mechanical engineers.

Actually, I think a little quote on it from our comment to "John Stone Stone" a points out that

the analysis by "Lord Kelvin" was not accurate for spark discharged capacitors.

And this is where we sophomore in electrical engineers starts you need to the underdamped and overdamped critically damped case

but I mentioned that because when "Hertz" was doing his experiments,

what he did was he took the capacitor plates and just opened them up

and use the inductance of the structure.

And he used... Can we focus on just a little bit?

He used an induction coil here in this marvelous book that was put out by...

the history committee for the MTT the Microwave

Theory Techniques group of the IEEE a couple of years ago

where someone went back and really did quality analysis of this.

It's kind of like a photographic review... Anyway.

Typically he had around 15 KV at low frequencies, let me say one kilohertz buzzer

that would charge up the capacitor plates

and reach a point where we would get an arc here and discharge, of course, when it does we have an RF short circuit

this with... the charge on the... structure

would discharge oscillate back and forth and ring down

and it radiated of course, at a frequency that's proportional to the characteristic length of the structure.

The problem here is this and this is the reason why I repeat this

How much power could you radiate with a structure like this? You know...

Tesla went to Bonn and talked to Hertz.

I think it was in 1892 about this.

How much power can you radiate?

Well, the amount of energy that you can store up on that capacitor is E =(0.5)C(V^2) and C is typically picoFarads (pF).

He had a really big tower, maybe, you know, a thousand picofarads or something

and a (0.5)C(V^2) Is the amount of energy you've got and the number of times per second you do that DWDT is the amount of power that you can produce.

And for Hertz's experiments.

The average power rate, it works out to be around 25 to 35 milliwatts.

And it's right there in that reference.

It's also an electric weighs on page 40

people will quote and say that well Hertz was using about 16 Kw and turns out that that's the peak power that he had at 50MHz

but that's not the average power that's radiating from an engineering point of view

30 milliwatts isn't too exciting.

Tesla found a way to improve this,

in overnight the amount of power radiated jumps by five orders of magnitude.

Imagine somebody could come along with the transmitter today and do that right now.

I don't know what Imac top transmitting tubes run, but let me let me be generous and say ten megawatts or so.

It seems like they have a megawatt tetra orders.

But suppose somebody could just go five orders of magnitude from that and all of a sudden we're talking about average power is now not at peak power.

That would be up on the range of terawatts or so.

All right. That would be a significant...

But Tesla did that, a five order magnitude jump

and we've also shown this one before, but...

It does also set the scene, it's in a critical piece of history...

Early on people were using induction coils and a lot of people try to build Tesla coils very similar to this.

And this is what Tesla had, what, 1891 or so in his publications,

and engineers call this couple coil transformer and depending upon the coupling E² equals, any one where it turns ratio and people try to build Tesla coils that way

and we'll show you where even some of the big boys tried to build Tesla coils that way

and it's about the craziest thing you could do because they don't operate that way and all you get for your troubles as losses.

All right, I'll show you how *brighton tov and *hatstat build one that way.

and it's no wonder they went to the graph machines because what they had was nonsense.

It's probably one of the poorest design machines that you or I could ever see.

All right. Documented very well so you see the mistakes that they made.

The Tesla's marvelous discovery

was to move the energy storage device from the antenna side, he use a couple of coils

and move the energy storage device over on to the primary side.

And that's got to be one of the major advances in the development of civilization.

All right. Very simple idea. I shouldn't say it's simple, it's deceptively simple.

Looks real simple when you do some of the analysis, you find a little more complicated.

It's no wonder Tesla didn't try to attempt a lot of the mathematical analysis.

A lot of the mathematical analysis wasn't available, in fact, until the late 40's and early 50's.

And he also discovered the importance of spark, the duration of the spark control.

Many people build machines on giant machines and they get little sparks,

you know, and the whole problem is that you're not controlling this spark duration.

And if you examine the hit the sequence of patents that Tesla has in the 1890s,

he stops and spent several years developing ratory brakes for the purpose of spark control.

This is an important improvement, also very important to Tesla.

This version down here is the version that most people see today when they talk about,

Tesla coils or Tesla coil circuits that they're going to build.

Well, it's turned around, but this is from a drawing that Tesla had in a report that he gave 1898.

What's going on here? Of course...

you've heard this several times already in the past few meetings

is we've got a low frequency power mains here that basically a low frequency, say 60 Hz

this primary is has you know, it's only a few microhenry (µH) so it has zero reactance.

And basically what happens is just we just charge these capacitor plates up until

we reach the breakdown of this gap. That's really a simple way to describe it.

but when this breaks down, we have a plasma conducting across.

It's like something close to switch.
And this is an oscillator, right?

just like we had with with "Lord Kelvin" stuff.

And when it oscillates, if this is tuned, a tuned circuit

will get magnetic coupling between the two and there's an exchange of energy oscillating back and forth between the two and energy

will go over into the secondary,

things will happen and you'll build up to a fairly high voltage on the secondary. All right?.

We'll have a whole lot more to say about that as the hour goes by.

This version is shown in the diary.
It's of interest for several reasons.

First Tesla takes this resonator and puts it over here a little bit further.

and this part here is a lump circuit sinusoidal....

It's a damp, damp sinusoidal master oscillator.

This is not a Tesla coil, per se.
The voltage rise here

is not by standing waves, it's a lump circuit or based lump circuit analysis,

you can verify that in the lab yourself.

And today we could take all that and remove it and bring in a 250 Kw

continental AM power transmitter, and plug it into this thing and get the same results that Tesla.

All right, that's that's all I want to say about that.

It taking longer than I wanted to set the stage.

I guess I do have one more little thing.

I think this appeared in both reports back into Tesla coils and also the one...

The computer program we wrote.

Well, let me mention something about that.

We wrote that program several years ago, I think it was in 85

when the traveling wave aspect of Tesla files occurred to us.

But wait, it had occurred to others before we didn't know about it.

You have to start of things out yourself, and I think it was in the 86 symposium.

We came all excited and told everybody about it

I think maybe there were one or two people who understood what we were talking about.

What we need to do is take all that mathematics, all the "Smith" charts and all that stuff.

And grad student in electrical engineering would understand what we're doing.

Let's see if we can't put it in the hands of, you know, people that are trying to do this thing

because they want to build a Tesla, because they want to understand all the engineering.

So we wrote those computer programs, the T.C. Tutor (ISBN-10: 0-924758-01-5)

and tried to provide as all the documentation, all the equations.

So you can check everything that we've done, see where we've made...

Assumptions and go through and get those results.

And that was the purpose of the proposal.

Proposal, yeah.

You know what business I work at 8:00 in the morning is still too early to think clearly.

Uh, let's see, "Lord Kelvin" again.

This is sort of the history of cavity resonator as cavity resonator here down here doesn't show,

but this is how they develop historically.

And I...

I've been wanting to write a paper on this because I've got all the references and

I can show you places where people like "Sloan" quote from "Tesla"... Moved on me.

"Sloan" quotes on Tesla and and *Hanson quotes from "Sloan" and you can...

There is a document about a pathway from the microwave technology we've got today.

Right on back to Tesla's work.

Let's see the last one on the previous one was this double tool circuit.

Oh, I didn't tell you why "Tesla" was using this.

And by the way, this isn't really drawn correctly and this is counterset but that's okay.

But we've got one circuit that oscillates and rings down.

Well, the other one's charging up and then this one oscillates and rings down.

Well, this one's charging and we could have used more when I start with two.

And in fact "Marconi" went to more I think he patented a version in the 1907.

Where he had, I think, seven of these guys to try to get two things sinusoidal wave.

And the second thing is a more power is it was kind of a primitive idea.

No, it's not so primitive.

If you look at some of the recent transactions on nuclear science, you see that

virtually the same technique is being used by people at Los Alamos and in a number of other places.

Okay.

So this is what's kind of fascinating, again, this is a resonator.

and "David Sloan" picked this up, put the resonator in a box, okay.

And developed what is commonly called today the helical resonator in a can.

*Hanson expanded on this as long as work was done at around 40 meters around the 47 MHz, 40m ham band.

and *Hanson, pull this out straight.

Still get the resonator in the boxes is still electrically a quarter wavelength longest of a voltage rise by standing waves

and then *Hanson kept shortening the...

As he's going up the microwave region he kept shortening this and all of a sudden he ends up with an empty box

with a little ink couple on the side coupling a magnetic field.

But the resonator still works basically the same way.

It's still a distributed circuit the voltage rise inside there is the same.

this is in fact, this is a "Tesla" coil, right?

The physics that describes this is exactly the same physics that describes this guy.

All right? We do the same Maxwell's equations.

we have the same kind of modal analysis.

The field structure is a little bit different,

but the the physics, the physical principles are exactly the same.

There's one more I like to talk about down here, and that's when we do the whole Earth ionosphere cavity

that was postulated by "W. O. Schumann" in 1954.

And that's probably the grandest cavity resonator that I can think of that we can get our hands on.

I did read in the, oh, about 20 or 30 years after Schumann's work, somebody postulated

a cosmological model in which the whole universe was a county resonator,

which is very fascinating theory was even mentioned, written up in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

All right, now, that's a little bit of history.

Let's get down to something useful here.

Let me take this off.

Okay.

This is a standard "Tesla" Coil.
You've all seen these.

you couldn't have walked in the door if you hadn't seen something like this.

And let me mention the following.

Well, what's going to happen here before we go into the actual...

Drawings that describe the currents and so forth.

Again, we're going to charge up this primary is only a few turns and 60 hertz.

It's low reactance so long so that the whole voltage will basically very small is drop here.

The whole 60 hertz will appear here and we'll get a conducting short here at RF.

And we've got an oscillator that will drive this guy over here.

Now, that circuit on the right cannot be treated in this version

by long circuit analysis during the whole operation of this structure,

during the period of time in which this oscillator is, this one is discharging

the magnetic field from the primary, bathes the whole secondary,

and the whole second is just being bathed in the magnetic field.

The primary energy oscillates back and forth between the two.

There's a marvelous little homework problem in the back of *Raymond Whineray,

the traditional book going back to the forties that we used to use for the

one of the undergraduate microwave courses,

and it tells you that the helices behave in two different ways.

If they're bathed in an external field,

the disturbance that you get at the terminals of the helix obeys one set of equations.

And if you drive it another way,

you get a slow wave effect and the velocity of propagation along a structure is a whole lot different from the previous way.

And what's going to happen is this

we'll end up with a lot of energy over here bathing this resonator, and then the spark will break.

And when it breaks, the impedance in the primary is very, very high.

And so that energy can't come back to the primary,

but it's distributed over the whole structure

and over a period of time, which we call the coherence time for the resonator, it's different from the fill time for a cavity resonator

that corresponds to sinusoidally driven resonator.

But over a period of time call the coherence time is very similar to optical coherence,

and it has to do with a fundamental reciprocity relation and Fourier's analysis

being a period of time, standing waves will build up to a peak

and then the whole thing will ring down.

You can actually see this if you have an osciloscope will show you some waveforms.

In a little while. Now it's that building up to a peak time that is important.

By the way, it's during that latter period of time

that this coil behaves exactly the same way as an extra coil.

And this is an extra coil during that period of time.

It's a secondary during the period of time when we get the two mutually bathed.

All right.

Since that thing is a resonator, the voltage distribution builds up on any resonance,

you all see resonators in the bathtub you can sit there and splash water back and forth and build up

let me call them Vmax and Vmin in there and get standing waves

when you first start splashing your traveling waves.

And as the waves travel back and forth, you begin to interfere.

And just like an optics cause a diffraction pattern

and the interference pattern does not have Vmax and Vmin in the position

of the nodes will stay in the same places in the...the voltages will slosh up and down

the Vmin is where... where the are RMS value is the minimum and the Vmax is where the value is, the maximum,

the positive and negative of that sloshing.

Yeah.

Here's a curl from a recently published Russian book...

I don't know if you can read Russian

the thing on the left you recognize is just a...

This is a book called "Industrial accelerators" (ISBN-10 3642516904) by "E. A. Abramyan"

he's now at the Institute for High temperatures in Moscow.

This thing on the left is just a standard market generator.

And by the way, "Tesla" patented the Marx generator in 1897.

All right. The language is described.

I think "Marxs" get his patent on... I believe 1924 or so.

And apparently the Germans don't read or weren't reading English American patents at that time.

But this very structure is described in 1897, patent the language.

I think there's only like two or three claims in their patent, they describe this thing exactly.

I'm not talking about that on today.

Here's the the resonator that "Abramyan" has, and noticed this is the voltage distribution.

I don't read Russian but I got a number of friends that do.

And the language down here basically says the thing on the right shows the voltage standing wave.

Here's the resonator the Vmin at the base the Vmax up at the top.

It's a capacitively loaded transmission line.

Here's the primary that goes in here in and this would go off to the capacitor and rotary breaker

or whatever other pulsing circuit we're using...

And the showing here, the rise voltage waveform on the resonator.

It's interesting that, by the way, this book has been translated into English.

I think it's available through hemispheric publishing.

It was translated within the last year or so.

The caption on the bottom says scheme of sources of pulsed high voltage and shape of generated voltages

and the reference is "Industrial Accelerates" by "E. A. Abramyan" 1986.

On page 73 if you want, you can probably find that at your standard engineering libraries.

This wave forms an important point

and this is the standard lump circuit analysis

the best presentation we've ever seen on this was in...

"Static Electric Electricity and Magnetism" (ISBN-10 0891169172) by...

I can't think this name... "William R. Smythe".

yeah.

"Smythe" has an outstanding presentation of this in the transit case, including losses.

That's why I say it's outstanding.

("Hugh Hildreth") Skilling's famous book on "Transient Analysis".

Does the one same situation without losses

during... when the capacitor charges up and that break first.

Breaks down and conducts

the primary current is what we've drawn above primary and secondary current below here,

both circuits are behaving as lumped a couple circuits

and nodes as a phase shift here, and you've probably seen this kind of thing with coupled

springs and pendulum is a famous mosque in Iran.

There's two mosques that are side by side...

With a walkway between the two, and they actually behave as a couple of oscillators,

and their displacement of the oscillators actually behaves like this.

I guess for a good many years it was started as being sacred

and a bunch of civil engineers from England were down there, I think, in the late 1800s

to examine what was going on and came back completely baffled.

Depending upon the coupling you have between the primary and secondary,

you have this oscillation of energy back and forth.

Notice that the envelope goes to zero at a certain time, which means

what we're trapping all of the energy over here in the secondary.

When the secondary has maximum amplitude current

in the low rise case, you can go through and computer this.

in the computer program that we give you.

We do the completely lossy casing in a very accurate.

The calculation of this.

The time between beats here is 1/ΔF and that's what the big T sub B (T_B) is.

If you had a spectrum analyzer

or if you know a little bit of arithmetic and compute the for a transform of this

to get the spectrum, this is what you'd measure with a wave meter.

Back in the old days.

But what you'd see on the spectrum was that today you get this double hump thing

and with a lower frequency and upper frequency

that are both displaced from the frequency, I assume that the two

coils have the same resonant frequency when they're infinitely removed and then we brought them together

and you get this as this double humped circuit, and depending upon the coupling, those humps will move together and move apart.

Rated critical coupling there.

I guess it's just little bit after critical coupling where they begin to diverge.

And again, this is predicted on the basis of what lumped coupled circuits.

Okay.

And this is classical analysis that you find in many places.

It describes totally what "Tesla" had for his Tesla coils in 1891

and fails miserably for what he had 1898 and before you even before he came out here.

I want up at the top, we've worked a very special case, this is the optimum

early Tesla coil where we broke the primary spark of that particular instant in time.

And then the secondary operates along.

All the energy is trapped over there it just rings down and you can do this.

you don't need Tesla to do this.

And just like IF Cans and at 455 KHz and a regular receiver do this kind of thing,

with this is a transient response and just couple tuned circuits to this,

notice it built up and then rings down over many cycles

the interesting thing here is during this build up time, we have that double humped spectrum

and then after brakes when it rings down, if you took the fourier transform of this part or look at it on a spectrum analyzer,

you see a very sharp line.

It is a "Lorentzian" for those of you that are atomic physicists

for this kind of structure with this visca stamping.

All right.

But all that works for lumped circuits.

When we were over in Belgrade the first time, we didn't know about this,

It went too long ago anyone of us... Other than, you know, without built circuits.

I think I've been licensed as a ham radio operator since 1956.

I think it was '54 when *Carson and the other fellow came up with that

article on vacuum tube Tesla coils that appeared in radio TV.

Whatever it was called back then.

Radio...

It's now Radio-Electronics (Magazine).

And we built one of those and burned out some tubes and grids

and stuff like that, but i really didn't understand from an engineering point of view.

An engineer is different from a scientist,

scientist just wants to know how things work.

Engineer wants to find out how they work,

but he wants to squeeze that last bit of performance out.

The real mechanical engineer is the guy who goes down and spends $20,000

on a car and takes it home, pulls the engine out.

To me, that's an engineer, because he wants something more than what he could buy.

The first time we went over to the Belgrade, *Dr. Marincich pointed out to us, a reference

that we hadn't been overlooked and it was one that was in... Its listed, by the way, in the diary,

and it's that paper by "Fleming" and "Dyke".

And they have a very fascinating discussion in there that describes this very phenomenon

that we have here.

Everything I'm telling you today is in the paper,

and we gave it to... "Steven R. Elswick" When we came in here on the first day, so that this is all documented.

And I suspect that eventually you can all get copies of it

and see everything that we're saying right... What?... No, in two years from now.

Right?

Okay.

Look, here's what's of interest in the "Fleming" and "Dyke" paper.

When they took a wave meter,

wave meter is a tuned circuit level indicator,

if you change the frequency, you get relative amplitude of response.

So it's equivalent to what we've used is a spectrum analyzer, except for the fact that

can't show you stuuf in real time.
Does a long time average.

They measure this solid curve, which has the three humps.

All right?

And there's an interesting discussion that goes on in there

concerning the duration of the spark.

And "Dyke" discusses it also with Dr. "Fleming"

But critical... The upshot of their long discussion is this... the dart curve

that "Fleming" and "Dyke" Measure is actually made up of these two separate curves.

And during the period of time when the primary spark is conducting

in both circuits, they are interplaying and we're getting that...

For those of you that are ham radio operators, you recognize that the spectrum

that we had down below there and that was a double sideband signal

the "Fourier" transform of that oscillating exchange signal is a double sideband signal

During that period of time when the primary spark is conducting and the entire resonator is being bathed,

the structure is behaving as a double sideband oscillator.

We've got the two humps at two separate frequencies,

and then when the primary spark breaks, all the energy is trapped in the secondary

and the secondary rings down as a resonator.

All we get is this little curve.

And.

And that's all there is.

All right.

By the way, the bandwidth of that curve is characteristic

of the losses that are in a distributed resonator.

In a lump circuit we'd say that the proportion of the Q of the resonator

Q is a little bit different, meaning when we talk about distributed resonators and cavity resonators,

it's not just Omega elevator it's something a little bit different, but for a lump circuit reduces to that.

The width of that curve is proportional to the losses, and if I make the losses go down,

I'll get the same energy, the width will get very thin and the peak will get very high.

And that's what Tesla was doing, it right in the diary you can go through, calculate

and do the calculations where he's running this stuff

and I've got to talk faster Kenny's saying, okay.

Now, here's something that is very exciting.

All right.

That "Fleming" and "Dyke" missed.

I'm trying VC2 here.

All right.

That's the voltage on the top of the ball, or the toroidal, or whatever you have.

We've got two separate instances of time.

Up until at this particular incident time, the primary spark is conducting.

And we've got the interplay of currents back and forth between the primary and secondary and...

And right at this instant in time is when the primary spark breaks.

Now, when that occurs, if you've done it right, all the energy is trapped in the resonator.

And with that Tesla coil,

we're now going to make the transition from lump circuits to distributed circuits.

With all that energy trapped over there

and it's distributed almost uniformly over the whole coil,

I should mention, for those of you that are EEs (Electrical Engineers),

the best analysis of couple transmission lines

was given by our "Ronold W. P. King" It's the same "King" that did...

The thing Linear antenna up at Harvard grad students and now doing

the electromagnetic missiles and all that stuff.

But "King" has an outstanding treatment of that.

In the late 40's, in the proceedings of the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers),

there's three papers in there where he discusses that distributed resonance.

But when that energy is trapped over there.

What happens is you go through a period of time

where that energy starts to build up standing waves.

Now, well, it's building up.

It's also being dissipated.

And so you reach a point in time where the standing waves are reached up to a maximum,

and then all of a sudden... I don't want to say all sudden.

And then from then on, the dissipate...

The dissipative processes in the resonator take over and it dies down again.

The primary spark is broken here.

And this is really dramatic rise.

in the envelope of the voltage in the resonator.

It's during this period of time from here out to here

when the voltage of building up to a maximum.

Now, there's an assumption built into all of us,

and that is that there is no discharges taking place.

We're looking at straight right at a linear system here.

This charge is a curve, there is another way we can handle that.

And all I'm doing is making sure that the ball on the top

is big enough to be able to handle the potentials that we're going to hit when we get up here at the particular point.

So the standing wave built up during this period of time,

and then the whole resonator decays exponentially after this.

And here's what's fascinating, back here again, we've got the double hump...

lump circuits with a double humped spectrum.

At this point in time, we've got the single...

let me call it Monochromatic Spectrum, and it's got a certain finite bandwidth.

It's a band pass signal.

And this little portion was what "Fleming" and "Dyke" missed.

And as I say, you can see it with an oscilloscope.

Now we run an appendix to...

We prepared for the T.C. Tutor it's not in the version here that's for sale.

And we're still typesetting it.

But in it we go through and derive all the equations on the spectral coherence

of cavity resonators

and helical resonators included and derive the analysis for this portion of it.

Those of you that have backgrounds in optics will recognize it immediately.

The analysis is very similar to what you do with the amplitude splitting "Michelson" interferometer

when you can measure that self coherence of radiation.

Radiation field.

now we thought that's marvelous theory, theory is great.

yeah.

And "Kenny" and I have this situation

where we've had all kinds of theories and then gone in the lab, and it was, you know,

had nothing to do with what the theory that we what we thought we had, had nothing to do with

what was measured in the lab.

Now, it wasn't because the mathematics was wrong. Because that's what's puzzling.

the perfect mathematics still had nothing to do with reality.

It's the assumptions that go into the model that's built in your mathematics

that make all the difference. Okay.

Now, let's see. Here's what we actually measured.

when we went in the lab to see if this was so... I can talk about this a little bit.

Let me mention this.

There's something important occurring here.

This is the point in time where the switch, the primary break, is going to occur.

We're doing this with a Ford buzzer.

"Kenny" is going to tell you about how that's done with the big coils we run.

You know, with a typical rotary break, 800 breaks per second,

the spark duration in the primary will be around 100 microseconds or so.

You'd like to get it a whole lot shorter than that.

In the literature that we published, which are where

the optimum for Tesla's machine was around 10.4 microseconds.

And of course, there's no way you could get a break down there, but

a break at those speeds in break down,

you get a tremendous break down here.

This scale on the left is in volts.

You know, it just brought everything down low in voltages and just our shock exciting this guy.

and this is actually it's kind of rough to see here,

but it's actually the interplay between the primary in the secondary till you reach this point.

Now, at this point of voltage is began to rise so fast we couldn't...

We had to change scales.

Otherwise we couldn't show it.

By the way, the first 150 microseconds arc shown it go back to here.

And that's where the interplay between the primary in the secondary is occurring.

And this is the point where the break occurs.

At this point.

Change the scale on the left by factor ten

So this point, instead of being 100V is a 1.000V right?

So thousand volts we're up on the roof someplace here and it doesn't really build up like a step function here.

Actually, this is real data

so that you can see that we've got some above and some below and it's a little wobbling here,

but you can see the general trend of this.

"Kenny" you wanna tell a more about this since you took the data here?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

I just want to interject a couple of footnotes for you guys that like blisters.

Let's talk about the real world for a moment.

This data here was taken.

Painstakingly over a period of about a month of working 16 hours a day just to get this graph.

Now, what we did to set up the experiment, to get this data

and take the experiment over and over and over and over again until we could

tend to see a trend and coordinate things so we could predict what was going to happen.

What we did is we had a very large coil similar

to the one that "William C. Wysock" has out here on display.

And that thing would generate 20's 30's lightning bolts

easily when we had it in full power, full operation.

But what we couldn't do is we couldn't plug in a oscilloscope on that huge lightning bolt.

You just couldn't do it.

The electric fields are so high that the oscilloscope would go nuts.

Even a quarter mile away, you get spikes all over the place.

You couldn't measure it.

So we did take a... I had a 1924 Model-T Ford that I owned just recently sold it.

We pulled one of the buzzwords out of it, one of the spark coils,

and we connected it up to the primary and used the buzzer as a gap and so forth.

And what we began to see was, sure enough, using a real nice Philips oscilloscope

where you can expand the waveform and reduce it down and look at narrow segments

and trigger on different parts of the waveform.

We began to see this, the interplay while the spark was conducting.

We could trigger at any point when the spark first ignited to the point anywhere

in between to where the spark just went out, we can look at that.

And as we began to zoom in, we could see the phenomenon that everybody

saw with lump couple circuits quite easily.

You get the beats and everything would go on.

But what we saw

was all of a sudden right here on the secondary side, this rise,

and we said, wait a minute, what is that? Where's that coming from?

And we began to look closer and closer at it, and it didn't make much sense.

Well, maybe the oscilloscopes going nuts, even running just a couple of Kv out of the top of this big coil that we had.

So we began to do the experiments over and over and over again.

And this graph is what resulted for you Macintosh lovers.

This was drawn on a macintosh.

We used one of their graph programs,

but this time where it's rising up was very interesting to us

we started looking at other coils that we had. We had small coils, tabletop coils.

we had big coils, we had coils arranged all the way up to 100 MHz or so.

And we began to look at this time and they were different on every coil of what's going on.

What is that?

What's taking place on the secondary in here as it builds up

right after the spark extinguishes.

And we found that we could modify that time

in there by essentially changing the "Q" of the coil.

If we had a very low "Q", we would see that time change.

We had a very high "Q" We'd see it switch the other way.

And what we did is we began to play around with that.

We begin to see certain phenomena take place and that leads into the ball lightning stuff

or the fireball stuff.

We got to be careful because

we don't want to call it ball lightning just yet it's got characteristics of natural ball lightning.

What we want to do is call it when Tesla did fireballs

and this duration in here, this time, this buildup

had a lot to do with the formation of the fireballs, which we'll see later on.

And then it would continue to to ring down.

At this point, I'll turn it back over to "Jim"

I'm going to jump ahead here and skip the step...

Because I didn't want to get to the "Milton S. Livingston" Chart.

For those of you that...

This is from "David Bohm" and "Fred Alan Wolf"

And it has to do with the interference of partially coherent waves.

And what I want to mention is if i've got fully coherent waves ...

Is monochromatic and completely coherent.

I can get pretty good interference patterns if it's only partially coherent,

if it's completely incoherent.

Even though it's monochromatic, I have no interference.

All right.

The same thing occurs during that build up time on a Tesla coil and

we discuss other things, other place.

Here's a famous "Tesla" coil that was built in Germany by "Werner Heise" back in 1964.

My German is not good, but "vorlage"

I think probably means presentation or something, I don't know...

Spending the voltage against the earth.

So he's plotting the voltage to ground for his "Tesla" coil is marvelous pictures of this thing

along the secondary coil of a Tesla transformer for the case where

the secondary is a quarter wavelength long,

where "L" is the length of the wire secondary coil.

It turns out, he's got the right idea, but it's not...

What you want is a quarter wavelength from here to here,

which is pretty close to what you have along the wire, simply because the velocity factor for

along the wires isn't too far different from what you get.

If you actually calculate it rigorously and formally

I include this one because it was published in "ETZ" back in 1964,

but you can see he has the very standing wave that we're talking about here. Okay.

And there's some pictures of his coil in action and it.

looks a little like the "Wysock" coils

Skip all this stuff...
This is worth taking a look at real quick...

Again, simply because this is a helical resonator against ground.

All right?

Has a certain velocity factor.

"Sloan" put it in a can.

We can operate it openly against ground like you would.

Those of you that are ham radio operators know how quarter wave tower works.

If you can measure the current distribution on your tower, so the current goes to zero

at the top unless you have a top loading,

and then you have a maximum current down on the bottom.

You can actually measure the current and it'll be a maximum and the V

does the opposite because the tower behaves as a resonator,

behaves as a velocity resonator and losses of radiation resistance hopefully nothing more

maybe some ground resistance as well.

But the same thing is occurring here and this is sort of a base loaded vertical tower,

and then you can make it shorter by capacitively loading the thing on the top.

And all the analysis of this is very well treated in other places.

Do I nee to show that circuit?

I'm going to run out of time here.

We go through in several places and show you how you can treat this on "Smith" charts.

I want to stop and talk about that. Let me talk about some coil that people have built, this one...

" L. V. Mysovskii" And Soviet Union is a marvelous paper that was published in 1976,

I believe, by "Grinberg" in Soviet physics, "Uspekhi"

and those of you that can read Russian,

"Kenny" and I have an article on Ball Lightning that was published in the April issue in Russian

in Soviet physics, "Uspekhi"

Last summer I had a gallbladder attack and was flat on my back for a while.

"Kenny" had a broken back and.

Well, while we were in this tortured condition,

one of my colleagues at work sent me this note that there was a conference on

Ball Lightning to be held in in Moscow at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

and we at this request, would we be interested in submitting a paper.

So my wife put me in the car and

basically hauled me in the horizontal position after to Windsor, Ohio.

And "Kenny", his wife, was wheeling him around in the yard in a wheelbarrow.

So the two of us got together on the living room rug and flat on our backs

and put together this paper that we sent off to the Soviet Union.

I should mention this,

that what's so interest to the Soviets is they have a remarkable theory based on fractals.

This guy, "B.M. Smirnov"

who has got to have been divinely inspired to have written some of the things that he's done.

I mean, he's a very very qualified person technically

but has a tremendous amount of insight.

and somehow you could use "Mandelbrot-Fractal" theory

to describe some of the things that going on Ball Lightning we'll talk about that next hour.

But "Grynberg"...

This guy "Mysovskii" back in the 20's

was interested in doing relativistic electron beam accelerators.

Now this is ten years before "Ernest Lawrence" and so over forth here.

And really what we've got here here is a primary going around this guy.

He's got it encased in a can that's grounded it.

Here's the secondary resonator in there, and he's got it in a vacuum and so forth.

But this was first presented as a paper, I think, in "Petrograd" in 1922.

And we recognize that, again, he's where Tesla was in 1896.

That's a very famous Tesla coil in Soviet Union here's one

that is in "M.S. Livingston" And " "J.P. Blewett" book. (Particle Accelerators 1962)

And this was the one built by "David Sloan".

I'm not sure if he's still alive.

I came across somebody who was at Los Alamos at an ultra wide band radar symposium

back in March, who worked with "David Sloan" for a number of years.

These are real people.

"Sloan" built a 7 MHz oscillator up there, and...

where did I put that little antenna? There it is... give me the APS symposium.

This is a primary, we've got a monochromatic signal generator here,

so I could take that away and put any oscillator I want here.

Well, he's running a class C.

I forget how much power he was running let me think...

this was reported in that 1935 issue article by "Sloan" and Physical Review.

But again, this is the extra coil standing there as a resonator

and he built it up to about 800 Kv or so his purpose was for making X-rays.

in the book we mentioned...

On the paper for that goes with this we mentioned that Sloan's advisor,

his mother, was very sick and had cancer.

And so "Sloan" built this thing to make X-rays and used it on his advisor's mother.

Boy that would have been a marvelous thing to do.

I don't have to use it on my advisor occasionally.

And she was the first one of these successfully treated with X-rays for stopping a cancerous growth.

His advisor, by the way, was Nobel laureate "Ernest Lawrence".

This is of interest because this is a famous Tesla coil.

It's the one that was built by "L.R. Hafstad" And "M.A. Tuve" those guys in 1928.

They used 7000 turns of number 40 copper wire, which has...

If you get TCBA news, which if you have any interest in Tesla coils, you must

get a whole "Harry Goldman" by everyone that he's ever published all the way back,

because those are certainly collector's items.

And somebody sent in something that was very similar to this

a guy I think he built out like a 10 foot coil

and and wound it with a number of 40 gauge copper wire and had 10 million turns on there

and was wondering why it didn't work and and I think Harry's comment was

tongue in cheek was something to the fact that I've never been stumped before,

but you've totally baffled me on this one.

What's happening here again is that for the frequency these guys were, I forget which it is,

It's mentioned in the physical review article it's a lead up article, I think in 1930.

And this is going to be a halfway dipole, sort of a quarter wave.

So these guys are running it not as a vertical monopole, but as a halfway dipole up in the air.

End loaded capacitor fully loaded you can go through and run this thing on,

take the numbers right on the physical review and put them in

T.C. Tutor and run true calculate gap operation of this thing what you find is that

the losses are horrendous because...

What you want to do is you want to build out as low loss resonator as possible.

By the way, this is his primary that he's got around here center field this is just a link couple

ham radio operators do the same thing quite a lot put a loading coil in the middle of an antenna

and link couplets are... If you don't have 50 ohm coaxial you can use an open wire line or something but...

they then took it and they put it in an oil bath to raise the voltage on the thing.

By the way, the capacitor bank in this article is a photograph of it.

They built this out of glass windows and

tin foil or whatever, the same way a lot of you guys probably have done things in the past.

The photograph is identical to a photograph was published in...

It's something like "wireless electricity for

boys and girls" or something like that was published in 1916.

They replicated the same capacitor I mean, to the very joints.

They must have handed it to someone to build one of these things.

Again, this has got to be one of the poorest designs that we have ever seen

for Tesla coils.

Well, what would you do to made it better?

got rid of that 40 gauge copper wire and made it a half inch diameter copper tubing

or something, I mean, you want to keep the losses down.

Use Litz wire, Litz wire it again was invented by Tesla.

I think there was a question on that yesterday and the Germans picked up on it.

They'll keep your RF losses low as long as your frequency is below 500 KHz or so.

Above that Litz wire doesn't work so much and a very poor design.

These guys, by the way, wrote the article that that eventually they said, well,

we just couldn't use Tesla coils and they went to "Van Der Graaff" generator.

It is no wonder they went to "Van Der Graaff" generator.

I mean, they built this thing so poorly they needed several megawatts to do some of the

experiments that they were doing and...

Like I say, it's now one where they went to "Van Der Graaff" the machines

It couldn't do one of these things. Now, we shouldn't be too hard on them because

"Chadwick" the guy that... I'm going to stop just a minute.

The guy that discovered the neutrons made the comment

that he tried to build a Tesla coil when he was for an accelerator

in the early 1930 so he's working, I think with "Rutherford" maybe.

I may have him mixed up with something else else.

I just didn't have the training and I wasn't capable of doing such things.

He recognized that there was something going on that he didn't understand

and just set that all aside and went another way to do it.

What's the connection between all this and fireballs?

This is another form of a Tesla coil, this is a helical resonator in a can.

This is one "Kenny" built.

I forget what frequency it was working this 2 Mhz "Ken"?

Yeah, 2 Mhz.

and...

"Q" Here is about 450.

This guy was three feet in diameter and stood about so I had a barrel, you know,

and we began to notice strange discharges from this thing.

it was right at the time when we came out here in 1988.

At that point in time, we were also reading this thing that it was in July, I think, of 88

that "Harry Goldman" had published this statement

in an article called "Tesla Tries to Prevent WW II" But he's describing how he made fireballs.

And he says it became apparent that fireballs resulted from the

interaction of two frequencies, a stray higher frequency wave imposed on the lower frequency oscillations of the main circuit.

And what's he talking about?

This condition acts as a trigger

which may cause the total energy of the powerful longer wave, that is the low frequency

to be discharged in a infinitesimally small interval of time

and the proportionately tremendously... Why you don't like his language?

and the proportionately tremendously great rate of energy movement

which cannot confine itself to the metal circuit and is released into surrounding space

with inconceivable violence.

Now this last phrase is released into space with inconceivable violence.

Is very important with some work that...

Is very analogous to some work that "Forrest" and "Witten" were doing on fractals

in the early 80's And I'll tell you about that in the next hour.

Then he goes on and he says, Well, It is but a step, from the learning how

a high frequency current can explosively discharge a lower frequency current

to using the principle to design a system in which these explosions can be produced by intent.

And "Kenny" and "Leland Anderson" and I

and "Danny Edwards", were walking around Prospect Lake...

And "Leland" made the comment, he says, you know, this is amazing

for all the Tesla coils that have been built that,

you know, we're not more people haven't been seeing fireballs.

This is the way Tesla described they almost come off like bubbles off the machine.

Why aren't we seeing them? It was a puzzle, you know, we just stood there.

by the way most of the stuff that is really exciting that goes on

in this symposium it doesn't occur here at the podium.

It occurs in the parking lots and the restaurants and the parks and the in the airport.

And it's almost a Roman orgy of explosive intellectual activity that occurs at a symposium.

And there we were banging our heads on the wall and we flew back to Cleveland

looking at the diary, reading this stuff.

as you look at the pictures, it becomes obvious what's going on, where Tesla has

one primary exciting several secondaries

and he could use easily one coil to discharge another.

So we arranged... well get back, we arrange the circuit in that form.

Sounds real... That's an easy thing to say, I think it took about ten days to do this.

you recognize those two coils in the center?

That's a drawing very similar to what Tesla has in the diary, I forget the page number.

It's showed up many places, but I think early in September

those of you that have a diary you start reading through September, You see where things actually got

that same kind of circuit.

The actual form of that is not what's critical, but the general circuit ideas there,

by the way we publish all the the numbers

that are measured that completely characterize those coils.

So if you don't believe us, you can build your own and see that it's really so.

Now, that's the end of what I wanted to say this morning.

There was a third paper that we were going to give,

but Dr. *Pulgeli from Battelle had to be in the Caribbean this week.

I understand there's a hurricane down there, he is going right where the eye of the thing is.

so he's probably had a good time, but

he's a high energy physicist, originally from Brookhaven and it was also, I guess,

in Annapolis and a few other places. And as he began to read some of Tesla's work.

he said, some other strange things are going on here with respect to the X-ray apparatus.

we were looking at this "Livingston" chart, fairly famous.

It is a plot of accelerator beam energy versus year.

And "Levingston" is the guy that started plotting this stuff starts around 1930 or so,

around 100 Kv

And over the years, certain things that happened, you can see way up there

is where the superconducting supercollider is supposed to be.

Let me call your attention to the "Van Der Graaff" machines,

which are these electrostatic generators.

They build up real fast till about the early 40's and somehow or rather

there is a great deal of improvement after those.

I think this is the newest one that was just built at the tandem version that was built at Yale.

Now, what struck me as I looked at this was...

Hey if I plotted on here, Tesla's published

the energies measured here in electron volts and this is actually volts for "Van Der Graaff".

So if I did the same thing as he do for "Van Der Graaff". These aren't real volts, by the way.

This is probably about the limit where real volts stop

these other things are are kinetic equivalent volts or anything.

I don't have time to talk about that.

But if I apply just like we do for "Van Der Graaff", where would Tesla's

published data fall on this thing?

And the thing that struck me was this...

Now get the idea...

his Tesla's data start out early 1890s.

And lo and behold, he has his own one man "Livingston" chart.

That is the same as this displaced 40 years over.

and the point that i make and i regret about this

is that hey we should have had superconducting super gliders 40 years ago.

Another way to put it is this...

Where will high energy physics be 40 years from now in the year 2030?

Let's see... We found when we were doing this, that it wasn't necessarily used 2 coils.

You could do whit one.

And in the paper that we sent over to the Soviet Union,

we just show the same thing with only one instead using two resonators,

one to discharge the other.
When we built this.

We didn't start seeing fireballs, of course, the first time, but where we were in the diary

was on page 330 and there's a paragraph in there that says... We're Tesla's writing

and describing this stuff, he describes it in several draft for five different places in there.

But he says it's already met as already noted,

a streamer will show sometimes one or more points of great luminosity.

And what we found out was an arc between these two guys,

there'd be places where there'd be a hotspot in the middle great luminosity. That is fairly common.

A lot of you guys have probably seen this also with your own machines.

But what occurred to us was... He says in this instance here describe

the streamers were very powerful and the spots when they appeared were about an inch

or possibly more in diameter actual fireballs.

So in one sentence, he's talking about these hotspots.

In the next sentence, he's got fireballs.

So we knew we were within a sentence of where he was at

one can barely note a small luminous patch on the streamers.

And you'll see some of these slides we're about to show where you see the bright patch,

at least I think you can see them...

on the streamer and the impression of the central portion of the ball.

So he goes right from one to the other.

By the way, when we were doing this experiment, it was in mid-August of 1988,

just after the symposium and by October or so

we felt like, well, what else can we do with this stuff?

And that's why we said, well, can we can we make them go through windows?

People talk about them going through windows, you know,

and so "Kenny" got a piece of glass and set it up there.

And this is just to orient you so when you see the slide, you see what we're talking about,

and then here's the fireball that's coming and a discharge

coming in from the left and the arc...

And the discharge hits the plate of glass.

And the glass was so big by so big, a pretty good size, something we took out of a barn

up in Ohio that's been there for a good many years.

And the arc comes through and the ball's formed on the other side, and this ball goes out

and you can see it pretty clear on the video.

And if you're watching it in real time, you get the appearance of the ball incident on the left

and the ball exiting emanating on the right it looks in real time, looks like the ball's actually

passed through the glass.

And the explanation for this was actually, I think, anticipated by "D. Finkelstein"

And the other fellow back in the late 60's when they give an explanation for this

and also in their American Scientist article and 1970,

we've got a number of slides to show you

and "Kenny" is going to show them to you right now.

Well, let's see. What can it get set up?