TESLA COIL

Chapter 4

Tesla’s best-known invention takes the spark-gap oscillator and uses it to vibrate vigorously a coil consisting of few turns of heavy conductor. Inside of this primary coil sits another secondary coil with hundreds of turns of slender wire. In the Tesla coil there is no iron core as in the conventional step-up transformer, and this air-core transformer differs radically in other ways.
Recounting the birth of this invention, Tesla wrote, "Each time the condenser was discharged the current would quiver in the primary wire and induce corresponding oscillations in the secondary. Thus, a transformer or induction coil on new principles was evolved Electrical effects of any desired character and of intensifies undreamed of before are now easily producible by perfected apparatus of this kind." Elsewhere Tesla wrote, "There is practically no limit to the power of an oscillator."
The conventional step-up transformer (short primary winding, long secondary on an iron core) boosts voltage at the expense of amperage. This is not true of Tesla's transformer. There is a real gain in power.
Writing of the powerful coils he experimented with at his Colorado Springs lab, coils with outputs in excess of 12 million volts, Tesla wrote, "It was a revelation to myself to find out that ... a single powerful streamer breaking out from a well insulated terminal may easily convey a current of several hundred amperes! The general impression is that the current in such a streamer is small."

how it works

A tesla-coil secondary has its own particular electrical character determined in part by the length of that slender coiled wire. Like a guitar string of a particular length, it wants to vibrate at a particular frequency. The secondary is inductively plucked by the primary coil. The primary circuit consists of a pulsating high-voltage source (a generator or conventional step-up transformer), a capacitor, a spark gap, and the primary coil itself. This circuit must be designed so that it vibrates at a frequency compatible with the frequency at which the secondary wants to vibrate.
The primary circuit's frequency is determined by the frequency and voltage of the source, the capacity of the capacitor, the setting of the spark gap, and the character of the primary coil, determined in part by the length of its winding. Now when all these primary-circuit components are tuned to work in harmony with each other, and the circuits resulting frequency is right for plucking the secondary in a compatible rhythmic manner, the secondary becomes at its terminal end maximally excited and develops huge electrical potentials, which if not put to work, boil off as a corona of bluish light or as sparks and streamers that jump to nearby conductors with crackling reports.
Unlike the conventional iron-core step-up transformer, whose core has the effect of damping vibrations, the secondary of the Tesla transformer is relatively free to swing unchecked. The pulsings from the primary coil have the effect of pushing a child in a swing. If it's done in a rhythmic manner at just the right moment at the end of a cycle, the swing will oscillate up to great heights. Similarly, with the right timing, the electrical vibration of the secondary can be made to swing up to tremendous amplitudes, voltages in the millions. This is the power of resonance.

Also in this chapter:

a new power system

man-made earthquake

superconductive

no electrocution

electrotherapy.

THE LOST INVENTIONS OF NIKOLA TESLA
by George Trinkaus
republished with permission of the author and publisher
High Voltage Press
4326 S,E. Woodstock, #489
Portland, OR 97206 USA