Unbelievable: Tesla coils were built long before Tesla?

[Shanti]

I just stumbled upon this page:

http://lateralscience.blogspot.ch/2012/07/victorian-tesla-coil-with-reference-to.html

And it is really baffling.
As it seems, already in the 1850s a Tesla coil was built, looking exactly like today's which had 5000 galvanic batteries as power source, and about a 1500 turns secondary.
It made about 3 yards sparks. Impressive.

And even more baffling is the attached medieval picture of something that clearly looks like a Tesla coil.
Was history so wrong???
Theoretically one sure could do that with the help of steam electricity to charge up the leyden-chars.

What is your thought about this story?

I have a bit a hard time believing this is real. Anyone knows, how credible this source is?
I think it is probably a joke of some kind?

Edit:
Ok, I had a look around. It seems it is really just a neat story, without any correspondance to truth.

Sorry to have bothered your time.

[Farmhand]

Yeah, somehow I don't think .577 nitro-express rounds were available at the local sports store in Victorian times. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.577_Nitro_Express

I have Hodges ensure that all livestock are removed from the vicinity, but on one occasion the buffoon allowed a bullock to blunder into our experimental area. Its last act was to smell one of the rods. The beast dropped as though hit with a .577 nitro-express round.

..

[TinselKoala]

Oudin coil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oudin_coil
1882

Tesla Coil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_coil
1891

[Artoj]

From Arsonval biography "The two key investigators of electrophysiology during the nineteenth century were Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval and Nikola Tesla. d'Arsonval independently reported similar observations on the physiological effects of high frequency currents before the society of biology in Paris.  In early 1892, Tesla met d'Arsonval on a lecture tour of France where Tesla was pleasantly surprised to find that d'Arsonval used his oscillators to investigate the physiological effects of high frequency currents."

[CANGAS]

The letter reads perfectly like a literary tale, not like a real letter from a friend to a friend. STRIKE ONE.

Smokeless powder cartridges did not come common availability until about 1892. Until then the explosive in any commercially available gun cartridge was composed of powdered charcoal, powdered sulphur, and, powdered potassium nitrate. No cartridge was called NITRO anything until 1892 when cartridges containing NITROcellulose began to be manufactured and sold. If I am guessing correctly about the time frame  here, Faraday had gone up to be spinning with the cosmic magnetic vortexes a handful of decades before then.  STRIKE TWO.

Tesla had invented the concept of alternating current and extensively sussed it out long before the claimed date of the tete a tete. I think it is unlikely that somebody else would have also discovered alternating current and recognized its quality to change voltages in a transformer prior to Tesla. His prof in Serbia decades before (or wherever) called him crazy to believe that ac would work. Somebody else beat Tesla to doing important research with an ac transformer Tesla coil? I don't believe it. STRIKE THREE! YOUR OUT!


CANGAS 52