A man out of time
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Christian Graus wrote:
Then my wife lost it.
This begs a question. How does a wife lose a husband's book? ...or when you wrote "lost it" did you mean lost control and went berserk?
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So, I read most of a book on the life of Nikola Tesla. Then my wife lost it. It was very interesting tho.
Christian Graus No longer a Microsoft MVP, but still happy to answer your questions.
There's a fascinating documentary about him - 'The missing secrets of Nicola Tesla', presented by Dean Stockwell (Al from Quantum Leap). Maybe you can find it online somewhere. I'll look for it when I get home.
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It's better than that. He used to pay kids to deliver cats and dogs, which he'd electrocute.
Christian Graus No longer a Microsoft MVP, but still happy to answer your questions.
Didn't he electrocute an elephant (which he'd previously injected with poison) to "prove" that AC was dangerous whereas DC is completely safe? Rich
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So, I read most of a book on the life of Nikola Tesla. Then my wife lost it. It was very interesting tho.
Christian Graus No longer a Microsoft MVP, but still happy to answer your questions.
Check his autobiography "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla". He is talking about Wireless in Wi-Fi sense and about sending images across the globe. Wireless talk in 1900 - amazing! FBI took everything from his hotel room, all the plans including death ray. Search on the web for his FBI file. He was followed by FBI because he mentioned death ray publicly 30 years before his death, and followed regardless that he was naturalized US citizen before 20th century. PredragN
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Tunguska ? They do talk about his plans being taken by the government, but they steer clear of conspiracy theories by and large. They note that his plans for a particle weapon were probably not completed, just like a lot of the things he spoke of late in life.
Christian Graus No longer a Microsoft MVP, but still happy to answer your questions.
Just got done reading a novel involving Tesla's wireless power transmissions. Remember how his experiments reportedly caused the ground to shake? What do you think would happen if you did that with a bunch more power? At one point in the book, in San Francisco on April 18, 1906 his assistant sets up a neon sign that reads something like "This power sent to you by Nikola Tesla in Colorado". Tesla then proceeds to light the sign using wireless power. The event is ignored by newspapers because of the other events that day.
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Check his autobiography "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla". He is talking about Wireless in Wi-Fi sense and about sending images across the globe. Wireless talk in 1900 - amazing! FBI took everything from his hotel room, all the plans including death ray. Search on the web for his FBI file. He was followed by FBI because he mentioned death ray publicly 30 years before his death, and followed regardless that he was naturalized US citizen before 20th century. PredragN
I believe a lot of stories get munged together with Tesla. The shaking business had to do with attaching a motor with an eccentric weight to a pole in his lab basement and setting the speed of the motor to "resonate" the frame of the building. Supposedly the building was shaking apart way up and he did not know it right away. His "wireless" was displayed in a little boat floating on a pond. The wireless units were granulated carbon devices, not unlike a carbon microphone, that would "flash over" and conduct when Tesla fired up a tesla coil-like sending coil on the shore. Each carbon toy responded at a different frequency so he had "remote control" frequency-based. Nearly everything that came out of Tesla's labs was about resonance applied to some device. Essentially all of Tesla's wireless inventions are absolutely not compatible with modern life. When he was transmitting wireless power he was filling the atmosphere with static racket. "I Love Lucy" would certainly stop appearing on local TVs when power was being transmitted from New York to Paris. Later in life Tesla got quite crazy, doubtlessly from sitting in and amongst millions of volts at hi-freq as some of the photos of the time clearly show. He was afraid of eggs and round things in general, talked about "death rays" wireless power transmission, and a host of other things that were taken from him by money people. I believe this guy was both brilliant and mad, and we owe him a ton. But I believe most of the stories that swirl around concerning him are right up there with Vril and Theosophy. Chris
Do we weigh less at high tide?
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So, I read most of a book on the life of Nikola Tesla. Then my wife lost it. It was very interesting tho.
Christian Graus No longer a Microsoft MVP, but still happy to answer your questions.
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I believe a lot of stories get munged together with Tesla. The shaking business had to do with attaching a motor with an eccentric weight to a pole in his lab basement and setting the speed of the motor to "resonate" the frame of the building. Supposedly the building was shaking apart way up and he did not know it right away. His "wireless" was displayed in a little boat floating on a pond. The wireless units were granulated carbon devices, not unlike a carbon microphone, that would "flash over" and conduct when Tesla fired up a tesla coil-like sending coil on the shore. Each carbon toy responded at a different frequency so he had "remote control" frequency-based. Nearly everything that came out of Tesla's labs was about resonance applied to some device. Essentially all of Tesla's wireless inventions are absolutely not compatible with modern life. When he was transmitting wireless power he was filling the atmosphere with static racket. "I Love Lucy" would certainly stop appearing on local TVs when power was being transmitted from New York to Paris. Later in life Tesla got quite crazy, doubtlessly from sitting in and amongst millions of volts at hi-freq as some of the photos of the time clearly show. He was afraid of eggs and round things in general, talked about "death rays" wireless power transmission, and a host of other things that were taken from him by money people. I believe this guy was both brilliant and mad, and we owe him a ton. But I believe most of the stories that swirl around concerning him are right up there with Vril and Theosophy. Chris
Do we weigh less at high tide?
Uh... The photos were double exposures for the WOW factor. As for the static racket, data is passed on electrical wires all the time, wireless power through the AIR would not be a huge issue. However, until the end Tesla said that the wireless power that he transmitted was through GROUND waves.
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Sounds like an interesting read. What's the name of it, "Life of Nikola Tesla"?
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on! A post a day, keeps the white coats away!
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Uh... The photos were double exposures for the WOW factor. As for the static racket, data is passed on electrical wires all the time, wireless power through the AIR would not be a huge issue. However, until the end Tesla said that the wireless power that he transmitted was through GROUND waves.
WolfManDragon wrote:
data is passed on electrical wires all the time, wireless power through the AIR would not be a huge issue.
How do you figure? The electrical field around a single wire through air is relatively weak (which is why motors & generators require multiple coils around ferrous materials). The field strength required just to send a communication signal is larger by an order of magnitude (otherwise - ignoring cable TV for the moment -, the field generated by a power cord would obliterate your TV signal). Multiply that again by several orders of magnitude to get a field strong enough to resonate a receiver strongly enough to be of practical use in power transmission. The wireless power transmission systems currently under development are only practical due to using a model of low power consumption devices (like portable music players) and continuous charging in a very confined field (requiring surface contact or very close to).
WolfManDragon wrote:
Tesla said that the wireless power that he transmitted was through GROUND waves.
I may be betraying a level of ignorance here, but doesn't the inherent lack of directionality in ground transmission incur high loss? I can accept the theoretical possibility of ground transmission but can't imagine a practical application for such a lossy transmission system.
T-Mac-Oz "When I'm ruler of the universe ... I'm working on it, I'm working on it. I'm just as frustrated as you are. It turns out to be a non-trivial problem." - Linus Torvalds
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WolfManDragon wrote:
data is passed on electrical wires all the time, wireless power through the AIR would not be a huge issue.
How do you figure? The electrical field around a single wire through air is relatively weak (which is why motors & generators require multiple coils around ferrous materials). The field strength required just to send a communication signal is larger by an order of magnitude (otherwise - ignoring cable TV for the moment -, the field generated by a power cord would obliterate your TV signal). Multiply that again by several orders of magnitude to get a field strong enough to resonate a receiver strongly enough to be of practical use in power transmission. The wireless power transmission systems currently under development are only practical due to using a model of low power consumption devices (like portable music players) and continuous charging in a very confined field (requiring surface contact or very close to).
WolfManDragon wrote:
Tesla said that the wireless power that he transmitted was through GROUND waves.
I may be betraying a level of ignorance here, but doesn't the inherent lack of directionality in ground transmission incur high loss? I can accept the theoretical possibility of ground transmission but can't imagine a practical application for such a lossy transmission system.
T-Mac-Oz "When I'm ruler of the universe ... I'm working on it, I'm working on it. I'm just as frustrated as you are. It turns out to be a non-trivial problem." - Linus Torvalds
Because of the random magnetic induction created by the power cord, not a phased (not the Star Trek "phased") power transmission. IP's in Europe actually send data over the power lines as well a wireless transmission of data from many meter bases back to the power provider. Yes there would be issues like static discharges, high loss and probably many things I havn't thought of. I did not make my statement clear, what I was trying to make clear was that interference would not be a huge issue. Tesla actually used wireless transmission in his lab, so it is practical at least on the small scale.
