Greetings Friends,
After my puzzling adventure with the Lenz Free Pickup coil I was somewhat exasperated by all of the anomalous behavior I witnessed. I did attempt to describe some of it, but I am no Tesla. I have a very dim grasp of what I am dealing with and while I enjoy hearing the tales of people who talk about mysterious phenomena when I go to do an experiment or replication I put on my scientist-wanna-be hat and attempt to approach things as objectively as my human nature allows. I came to the conclusion that conventional circuit theory simply doesn't do a good job of explaining how electricity can propagate through a single wire. Even if I pretend I have a virtual capacitance which converts my single wire to a closed circuit I am at a loss to explain why this phenomena occurs only at a resonance frequency. Does my selected frequency cause a capacitor to appear in my circuit where I have none? While it may be a great tale to tell your children, any reasonable person should challenge ideas like that. There must be something else going on here. So I decided I'd jump in the deep end and research longitudinal waves. I must admit with some surprise not only do these things appear to exist they are in fact the phenomena which allows for "single wire transmission." The primary challenge has been to de-tangle these things from Transverse EM Waves (Hertz Wave theory). Tesla was convinced that his system was not based on Hertz waves and while I somewhat dismissed his ideas many years ago, I realize now I was wrong to have done so.
You'll have to forgive me here if you are a Tesla fan (i.e. personality cult member), I'm half-skeptic half-true believer, oscillating between the two as a manic bi-polar. Finding balance has always been hard, giving people the benefit of the doubt while at the same time not really going all in on their claims until I could prove them. I'd like to think this is actually the very best way to be, but observations of my fellow man convinces me that this is a rare philosophy. I have to credit Jesus here for his wonderful teachings on how to treat our fellow man without which I'd be an utter pain in all of your backsides. Even more so than you might find me to be at times.
While I would love to go on for some time of all the wonderful things I've learned over the past few weeks I'll wrap up this post with only a few bits for now (more to come). Here Tesla writes in The True Wireless:
It will be of interest to compare my system as first described in a Belgian patent of 1897 with the Hertz-wave system of that period. The significant differences between them will be observed at a glance. The first enables us to transmit economically energy to any distance and is of inestimable value; the latter is capable of a radius of only a few miles and is worthless. In the first there are no spark-gaps and the actions are enormously magnified by resonance. In both transmitter and receiver the currents are transformed and rendered more effective and suitable for the operation of any desired device. Properly constructed, my system is safe against static and other interference and the amount of energy which may be transmitted is billions of times greater than with the Hertzian which has none of these virtues, has never been used successfully and of which no trace can be found at present.
A couple interesting points, Tesla dispensed of spark gaps finding them inefficient. Not something we should dwell on too much, but to keep in mind in the future. Spark gaps may be useful but following Tesla's path we may find eliminating them to be beneficial. Tesla describes Hertz waves as useless, which shows that while he may be a genius he's also got his own unique perspective which many people would rightly point out is incorrect in some respects. The last 20 years has seen great leaps in wireless technology based on Hertz waves. At the same time we see, he is a big thinker, because he views power transfer as the most important benefit but also indicates that his wireless system is superior in every way while at the same time reinforcing what modern science confirms that transverse EM waves have extremely limited range for a power transfer application.
Of course theory without experiment is pointless theory-crafting, but before we experiment we should know what the goal is. Here is what we know about Tesla's Wireless Transfer system:
- Can propagate faster than the speed of light (under some circumstances?)
- Can transmit power to any distance connected via earth ground (his wireless system actually requires an earth connection, no getting around it, in this respect his system could be claimed to be not "true wireless" which I think is a fair but for our purposes single-wire/ longitudinal, Tesla Wireless, power from planet earth, etc. is all the same stuff.)
- Can transmit using a method which allows for the construction of "multi-frequency resonance" circuits.
So can the first claim be proven - I was skeptical but Patrick Kelly's book made reference to a video by Ming Cao:
If you are an expert I invite you to share real knowledge and practical experiments to verify various concepts regarding longitudinal waves. Keep in mind a bunch of theory without any practical testable claims is not really useful to the average researcher (certainly not useful to me). If you are not an expert feel free to share and ask questions but keep in mind that I am not an expert and I am simply sharing my research. There will be concrete claims, that can be testable in this thread at least from my posts...
Recommended reading:
Tesla's article The True Wireless
JL Naudin's Research: Longitudinal Waves and Transverse Waves Tests
Jack's Thread: LMD Experiments
Roberto Handwerker: LONGITUDINAL DIELECTRIC WAVES IN A TESLA COIL
Monstein and Wesley: Observation of scalar longitudinal electrodynamic waves
I found the above to contain helpful information. Perhaps you will too.