 Colorado Springs laboratoryTesla sitting while generating millions of volts of electricity
A Magnifying Transmitter is an advanced version of Tesla's tesla coil, a high power radio transmitter. Often cited as Tesla's greatest invention, the Magnifying Transmitter consisted of three coils: an air-core transformer plus a third coil operated as a grounded-base quarter-wave waveguide. In Colorado Springs, Nikola Tesla constructed the first "Magnifying Transmitter" and performed several experiments with it. The Colorado Springs laboratory of Tesla possessed the largest Tesla Coil ever built. The Magnifying Transmitter is not identical to the classic Tesla Coil, but is based in principle on that device.
The Magnifying Transmitter, at fifty-two feet in diameter, generated an electrical output at millions of volts and produced lightning bolts one hundred thirty feet long (forty-one metres). According to accounts, Tesla managed to transmit about tens of thousands of watts of wireless power using the magnifier. In normal operation the device is relatively silent, generating a high frequency electric field, but if the output voltage exceeds the design of the upper toroid electrode, high-voltage sparks may strike out in all directions from the toroid into the air. This coil reportedly is the final basis for the Wardenclyffe Tower project.
Reports and Discoveries
The Magnifying Transmitter produced thunder which was heard from his lab as far away as Cripple Creek. He became the first man to create electrical effects on the scale of lightning. People near the lab would observe sparks emitting from the ground to their feet and through their shoes. Some people observed electrical sparks from the fire hydrants (Tesla for a time grounded out to the plumbing of the city). The area around the laboratory would glow with a plasmic blue corona (similar to the phenonomena of St. Elmo's Fire). One of Tesla's experiment with the Magnifying Transmitter destroyed Colorado Springs Electric Company's generator by backfeeding high frequency RF into the city's power generators, and blacked out the city.
Tesla states that he discovered with the device that Earth's resonance can be excited (cf. Schumann resonance). Tesla set up standing electomagnetic waves with the Magnifying Transmitter in the telluric potential energy. It has been proposed that Tesla was ultilizing extremely low frequencies in a global transceiver of power and information. Some posit that this variation of the Tesla coil was mainly intended for wireless transmissions of information.
Construction and Modeling
The exact construction layout of the Magnifying Transmitter is unknown, though there are photographs of certian implementations of the concept. It is known that the Magnifying Transmitter is not identical to the classic Tesla coil. The Magnifying Transmitter had short thick primary and a long "extra coil" inductors characteristic of the classic Tesla coil. Though, in addition to these coils, Nikola Tesla added a third inductor coil to act as a transformer secondary which coupled a large current directly into the ground circuit of the "extra coil." Since the "extra coil" was connected to ground at one end while the other end remained floating, the Magnifying Transmitter resonated at a natural quarter wavelength frequency and behaved as a source of extreme high voltage. Tesla worked with the magnifying transmitter in a continuous wave mode and in a damped-wave resonant mode. Successful analyses focus on the distributed "transmission line" description of the "extra coil" (rather than the usual lumped-constant analysis).
In current construction implementations of the Magnifying Transmitter, a helical resonator is physically separated (forming an independent open circuit) from the two close-coupled central coils which comprise the master oscillator section. The power from the two-coil master oscillator section is fed to the lower end of the extra coil resonator through a heavy electrical conductor. This is established in order to achive easily-varied inductive coupling between the two systems. The magnifying transmitter's base-driven extra coil behaves as slow-wave helical resonators, the axial disturbance propagating at a velocity of less than 1% up to around 10% the speed of light in free space. The Magnifying Transmitter's axial velocity electromagnetic field is determined from the coil pitch and electrical charge propagation speed through the circuit.
See also
- US593138 "Electrical Transformer" - November 2, 1897
- US685958 "Method Of Utilizing Radiant Energy" - November 5, 1901
- US787412 "Art Of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through The Natural Mediums" - April 18, 1905
External links, resources, and references
|
