put one of these inside a faraday cage and tell me you wont hear it chirping outside it's cage.

MOD   Tesla's patent artist did not draw things to scale.  That little block E consisted of an extensive network of tunnels with insulated pipes.  He wants his charges to accumulate in the capacitor plates not be pissed away into the air or the ground.  Also the diameter of the inductor solenoid is much larger than the diameter of the torroid.  If not the current radiates from this surface instead of the nice smooth glow zone created around the top capacitor .  The top capacitor 1/2 is also a spark gap electrode of sorts.  As well as the Earth which he considered to be a smooth polished cold cathode.

@ Loner

I am not familiar with details of Tesla experiments, but I do believe he was transmitting with megawatts of power. To send a signal 200 miles with a megawatt transmitter does not seem like it would be hard to do to me. There are many AM stations transmitting for over 200 miles with far less power. Ham radio operators use to see how far they could transmit using small battery powered transmitters and they were able to send signals hundreds of miles. As far as I know, Tesla was never able to show that he could transmit larger amounts of power all over the world with only two transmitters. But, as I said, I do not know much about his experiments.

In the 1950's a common way of measuring wavelength of microwave signals was to use a "slotted line" which was a waveguide with a slot in it. A signal would be sent into the waveguide and reflected back to set up standing waves and then a small probe would be moved along the slot inside the waveguide to determine the distance between the voltage peaks (which was the wavelength of the signal in the waveguide).

@ Loner

Indeed, coupling that much power at that distance seems out of the ordinary. But, a big factor in the coupling efficiency between two resonators is the Q of the resonators. If he was able to get extremely high Qs it may come into the realm of feasibility. I would need to do some calculating before I could say anything about that. Tesla was certainly a genius and I suspect knew all about Q of resonators (although he may have called it something else).

Like you have said, radio waves do not have a compression component. But it is possible to make a longitudinal electric "wave". I put wave in quotation marks because it is not technically a wave. You can do this by putting a charged object on something that will vibrate it horizontally and then suspending another charged object a short distance away. The vibrating charged object will push and pull on the suspended charge object and the suspended charge object will eventually be vibrating at the same frequency as the first vibrating charged object. The thing that comes closest to a longitudinal electric wave (at least that I can think of) is probably the field between the two plates of a capacitor as AC is being sent through the capacitor. In this case, the electric charge in one plate pushes and pulls on the charges in the other plate by means of the electric field connecting the plates.

"Tesla's view was that "Hertzian" waves (Transverse Waves) did not exist, and, of course, Hertz had the opposite view." - They were probably both correct. Each is probably an oversimplification of what is happening.

"An analogy given to me was, current RF is looked at like waves on the surface of water. Easy to see, and detect. Longitudinal waves would be pressure waves IN the water," - I think that is a good way of looking at it.

"When current starts flowing through a long wire, it starts at BOTH ends, proven by experiment. The middle is the last place that conduction starts." - This is not true. I have done many, many, measurements of this type. Someone has misled you.

"We all know that electrons "Flow" from - to +. but then what flows from + to -?" - Nothing. The electrons are replaced where they came from by new electrons flowing in.

A "hole" is just a location where the electron is missing. Think of it as the depression made by a ping pong ball floating on water. As the ball moves, the hole moves with it. But the hole is just the spot where some water is missing.

@ Loner

Wow. You cover so much in one post.

As you know, light travels about 1 foot in a nanosecond. Take a wire that is 20 feet long and feed it with a 200 MHz square wave from a signal generator at one end and terminate the other end with 50 ohms.  Use a dual trace scope with one probe at the start of the wire and move the other probe along the wire. You should see the rise of the pulses in the two channels separating at about one nanosecond for each foot the probes are separated. At least that is the kind of results I got when I tried this. I spent many years making delay lines and this is exactly what they would do. The longer the wire is, the longer the signal is delayed getting from one end to the other. I also used taps along the lines for different time delays. All worked according to theory. So, what is happening with the spark gaps. I am going to have to take a guess here. The 3 gaps are like 3 capacitors in series. When a voltage is applied across the 3 capacitors in series, electrons accumulate on the plate of the capacitor at the negative terminal and electrons are removed from the plate at the positive terminal. When the electrons build up at the negative plate they push electrons on the other plate of that capacitor onto one of the plates of the center capacitor. And likewise, the removal of electrons from the positive terminal capacitor plate will pull electrons onto the other plate of that capacitor from the center capacitor. So electrons "effective;y" move from the plate of the capacitor at the negative terminal connected to the center capacitor to the plate of the capacitor at the positive terminal that is connected to the center capacitor. I hope you can follow all of that. It is just a case of electrons will always move as far apart from each other as they can. So, now where are the electrons? They are on the plates of the end capacitors (gaps). As the voltage builds up it will jump where there is the greatest difference in electrons on the plates (gaps) which is the end capacitors (gaps).

Holes are tricky. I got A's in two semesters of graduate level semiconductor classes. And I still can not give you a better explanation than that they are just places where the electrons are missing. When the crystals are made it is done in a way that does not produce as many electrons as are needed to balance the charge in all of the molecules. The crystal is a semiconductor which means that the electrons can move about. The result is that the molecules compete with each other for the electrons and some of them do not get any (there is a game where there is not enough chairs for everybody and someone ends up without a chair - it is sort of like that).

Yep. Electrons only move at a few cm per second in a wire. But the SIGNAL moves at the speed of light. Use your balls in tube. Paint one ball red and put it in at the start of the tube. Now push another ball into the tube. Bingo. A ball comes out the other end as soon as you push a new ball in (assuming the tube is full). But the red ball has only move the length of one ball.

I do not know anything about scalar waves. That is what I am hoping you can teach me about. Or at least share what you do know.

What you now have is three spark gaps, and what I always thought and assumed  was the gaps would fire 1,2,3 in that order.  Seems like that's the only way it could work, right?  Unfortunately for me, and it still bothers me to this day, is that the end gaps fire first, at the same time, and the center gap fires a little later.

Since there are already so may theories on why this happens....

If you step out of the box for a moment try this perspective...

1. Charge, and all the results of charge and its movement are properties of space.
2. This experiment provides examples of two things:
     a) how easy it is for results to be misinterpreted
     b) a prime example of LEM motion (yes, 'wave' is not a good word here)
3.  TEM cannot exist without LEM but LEM can exist without TEM.
4.  LEM current and voltage are always in-phase.
5.  Current does not flow at the ends first. No more than magnetic field lines exist without adding some iron filings.
6.  'c' is a constant and matter cannot exceed 'c' but changes in the properties of space can.

Back to your box now 

@ BEP

I like experiments. Theories are often not correct. But, it is hard to argue with the results of an experiment. Put 3 capacitor is series and then put a DC voltage (any voltage) across the end leads of the series. Now measure the voltage across the center cap. It is zero volts (my meter reads a few millivolts because the leads are picking up stray fields, I do not live in a Faraday cage  ).

Do you know what frequency the spectrum analyzer was set at to pick up your birdie signal?

@ BEP

The spectrum analyzer hunted for signatures from D.C. to 1.2 gHz. It was looking for A carried by the LEM signal. The LEM signal from the birdie covered the entire spectrum and was below the noise floor on there and any standard radio A circuit.

This sounds a bit like a spread spectrum signal. This was a classified technology in the 1960's but is now what is used for wi-fi and cell phones. But then again, maybe it was a scalar wave signal. Do you know what "LEM" stands for? Is this short for "longitudinal electromagnetic"?

Spread spectrum uses phase modulation and can modulate any frequency.

@ BEP

Original SS was below noise floor and UWB. That was the idea, it could not be detected because it was hidden in the noise. But, if not that then this is very interesting problem. I will have to think about it for a while. Thanks for the many details.