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Author Topic: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?  (Read 11368 times)

Shanti

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Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« on: July 14, 2014, 03:05:26 PM »
I just stumbled upon this page:

http://lateralscience.blogspot.ch/2012/07/victorian-tesla-coil-with-reference-to.html

And it is really baffling.
As it seems, already in the 1850s a Tesla coil was built, looking exactly like today's which had 5000 galvanic batteries as power source, and about a 1500 turns secondary.
It made about 3 yards sparks. Impressive.

And even more baffling is the attached medieval picture of something that clearly looks like a Tesla coil.
Was history so wrong???
Theoretically one sure could do that with the help of steam electricity to charge up the leyden-chars.

What is your thought about this story?

I have a bit a hard time believing this is real. Anyone knows, how credible this source is?
I think it is probably a joke of some kind?

Edit:
Ok, I had a look around. It seems it is really just a neat story, without any correspondance to truth.

Sorry to have bothered your time.

Farmhand

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #1 on: July 14, 2014, 04:09:07 PM »
Yeah, somehow I don't think .577 nitro-express rounds were available at the local sports store in Victorian times.  :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.577_Nitro_Express

Quote
I have Hodges ensure that all livestock are removed from the vicinity, but on one occasion the buffoon allowed a bullock to blunder into our experimental area. Its last act was to smell one of the rods. The beast dropped as though hit with a .577 nitro-express round.

..

TinselKoala

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Artoj

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #3 on: July 15, 2014, 02:58:46 AM »
From Arsonval biography "The two key investigators of electrophysiology during the nineteenth century were Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval and Nikola Tesla. d'Arsonval independently reported similar observations on the physiological effects of high frequency currents before the society of biology in Paris.  In early 1892, Tesla met d'Arsonval on a lecture tour of France where Tesla was pleasantly surprised to find that d'Arsonval used his oscillators to investigate the physiological effects of high frequency currents."

CANGAS

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #4 on: July 15, 2014, 10:06:26 AM »
The letter reads perfectly like a literary tale, not like a real letter from a friend to a friend. STRIKE ONE.

Smokeless powder cartridges did not come common availability until about 1892. Until then the explosive in any commercially available gun cartridge was composed of powdered charcoal, powdered sulphur, and, powdered potassium nitrate. No cartridge was called NITRO anything until 1892 when cartridges containing NITROcellulose began to be manufactured and sold. If I am guessing correctly about the time frame  here, Faraday had gone up to be spinning with the cosmic magnetic vortexes a handful of decades before then.  STRIKE TWO.

Tesla had invented the concept of alternating current and extensively sussed it out long before the claimed date of the tete a tete. I think it is unlikely that somebody else would have also discovered alternating current and recognized its quality to change voltages in a transformer prior to Tesla. His prof in Serbia decades before (or wherever) called him crazy to believe that ac would work. Somebody else beat Tesla to doing important research with an ac transformer Tesla coil? I don't believe it. STRIKE THREE! YOUR OUT!


CANGAS 52

gauschor

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #5 on: July 15, 2014, 10:53:30 AM »
Edit:
Ok, I had a look around. It seems it is really just a neat story, without any correspondance to truth.

Sorry to have bothered your time.

I find it interesting, especially because there are technical descriptions in it worth to investigate. So I say thanks for informing us :)

Farmhand

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #6 on: July 15, 2014, 09:35:27 PM »
The letter is dated 1856 but Nitro express rounds for the .577 caliber were not produced until 1898, that's 42 years early, I stand
corrected that they were not available in Victorian times as they were in fact available right near the end of the Victorian era.
But it was 42 years after the date of the letter.

I find it difficult to believe anyone would refer to a person they were writing to by their last name only as well in those times,
especially when that person was Mr Faraday.

Regardless it brings nothing new technically to the table.

...

raburgeson

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #7 on: August 01, 2014, 03:43:48 PM »
This post has a merit of type. It brings up the question why aren't Tesla era components available today? Why not some with a modern twist of advancement of cutting edge materials we have today. IE, better brushes and other things like dumbbells and laden jars. Back in the early days a laden jar could store up to 600 Kilo volts. What could we do with modern materials. How about a dumbbell that can respond to a Giga hertz pulsating DC current? We have modern day transmission antennas that can do this. Why aren't dumbbells being made from these type of materials.

Little note about these transmission antennas. They have to be perfectly flat and square at the end of the cylinder. Used for transmitting credit card crap at stores. They send a focused transmission. Hey, every hacker already knows!

Nixim

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #8 on: October 09, 2015, 02:18:11 PM »

thx1138

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #9 on: October 15, 2015, 01:54:43 AM »
Tesla inspired by this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar
No, Tesla wasn't inspired by the Leyden jar. They were around long before Tesla was born.

Actually, I think AC electricity was around before Tesla used it. Tesla's breakthrough was the concept of the rotating magnetic field which enabled him to built generators and motors that had no brushes or commutators like previous devices. That was what made AC electricity more usable in industry since there were no brushes and commutators to wear out. The thing that made him famous though was his teaming up with Westinghouse to use AC electricity instead of the DC electricity systems of Edison. Edison had patents on a lot of the DC technology while Tesla had the patents on the AC motors and generators and later developments.

His high frequency and high voltage work came later.

It's good you saw that article, though. There is a lot of garbage out there about what people think Tesla did so beware. If you want to learn Tesla you have to go straight to the source - Tesla himself. And he was prolific. There's a lot of it. You also need to understand the times he lived in and what was know at the time, and just as importantly, what was not known at the time. To get a grip on that, study the first and second industrial revolutions.

Look at some photos of New York City during the mid to late 1800's and the first thing you notice is the horses and wagons in the streets. There was no subway, cars, or trucks. The second thing I noticed was that all of the buildings were only 4 or 5 stories tall. That's because masonry construction at the time could only be built that high and remain stable and the Bessemer process initially had problems and high capacity production of quality steel didn't occur until around 1875.

forest

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #10 on: October 15, 2015, 07:00:41 AM »
Inventors of this period were mostly working with mechanical simple devices, except probably a few - who were totally forgotten. I believe God is sending man after man, inventor after inventor to let us know energy is everywhere around, no need to dig coal or oil. We still don't grasp the idea...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ylYgUOfUzY

forest

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #11 on: October 15, 2015, 07:12:48 AM »
“I have found the principle that I have been hunting for so long. I can now start a dynamo to going and it will never stop, except by the wearing away of its own parts. Not only will it run itself by its own current, but also produce power enough, according to the size of the engine, to run any machine in the world.”


Daniel McFarland Cook 1886

forest

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Re: Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?
« Reply #12 on: October 15, 2015, 07:17:24 AM »
The above comment is the essence of all effords during last 100 years.


What a shame for humanity ! We are still in the dark cage causing wars and killing people while we could live in peace and wealth from 1831 when Faraday discovered magnetic induction or if not, then at least from 1886 when Daniel McFarland Cook has shown his generator !