Searching for a Tesla Patent

[MarkE]

Well I'm an amateur and I really do not know what Tesla's actual intentions were. But in my opinion the power transmission would be at a low frequency being an odd multiple of the Earths frequency so that an odd number of 1/4 wave lengths would fit across the Earth.  Then the signals could simply be carried by that lower frequency, just like internet over power line tech.

In my opinion he intended to use lower frequencies for power transmission. Remember Wardencliff was to be the prototype, it was likely he had several different idea's for achieving each thing he wanted to do.

In the Colorado Springs notes Tesla says that for the transmission of power (where large quantities of energy are to be transferred) to get the high voltage required a high rate of transformation would be way better than using resonant rise. A system using resonant rise to attain high voltages would be ok for the transmission of signals, I think it is because for signals the rate of energy use is small and the rise could be maintained. Whereas when a large power draw is put on the transmitter resonant rise would be retarded so the voltages would drop to transformation tension, hence the high rate of transformation would be the logical choice.

I have quoted the text several times in different threads about that point Tesla made about the high rate of transformation but the PDF is on my desktop PC which has a failed motherboard, another job to do. grrrrr.

The text is towards the beginning, but I don't recall exactly where I need to find it in the book. And photograph it.

..

The passage that you posted shows that Tesla understood that for purposes of power transmission he was limited by series impedance.    Series impedance sets current dependent loss.  If you've got a situation with some impedance Z, then in order to scale power at some fixed percentage loss, then you have to scale voltage by at least the square root of the power.  Say you had a DC system sending 10V through transmission of 1 Ohm.  You could deliver 9V @ 1A to the loads, 9W, 90% of your input.  If you wanted to scale the delivered power up to 90W at 90% then you can afford to lose 10W in the 1 Ohm transmission system: 3.16A.  You can get there by scaling the source voltage up by 3.16 X (10^0.5) to 31.6V.

[Shanti]

IIRC Tesla mentioned in the CSN somewhere that introducing a capacitor in the ground connection actually improved the circuit. But he didn't explain why.
Could it be that it worked like a kind of impedance matching?
Actually although I work professionally with digital circuits, I don't have that much knowledge of the analog part. Only what has been left in my brain from university times...
To my shame I have to say, my diploma thesis was building a radar circuit. But there's not much left of this knowledge anymore...LOL...

[Shanti]

Doesn't seem to interest anyone... LOL 

But maybe later someone would like to give his opinion...

As it seems, Tesla really first planned to do the Wardenclyffe tower like the pic in the first post on the right, meaning with a separate free oscillator which has as coil just straight metal columns to the earth.

But wouldn't that be just an almost perfect monopole antenna for EM waves?

As in his usual design, with quite a coil, this is less of a problem as the tower is then much smaller than the wave itself, so the emission should be fairly small. But with a tower as high, it should IMHO be quite a good EM emitter.

Tesla himself stated, his tower should emit by EM waves as small as possible, as you want to resonate with the earth and not dissipate the power into the air.
This is why it seems very strange to me, that he obviously planned first to make the tower like that...
Sure the knowledge about antennas was almost nonexistent at that time. So maybe Tesla wasn't aware that this would be a bad approach?
As it seems from the CSN, he never tested this design before...

Would be interested in other opinions...

[Farmhand]

I'm sure Tesla was thinking along the lines of transmission efficiency when talking of minimizing the radiated "Hertz" waves as he
said. He does also mention that he discovered that he could in fact use a good percentage of that "radiated" energy as well, he
mentions that in his "Work on Alternating Currents".

Maybe his tower might have been a lot more efficient than the way they say they are doing it now, maybe not, maybe he
miscalculated or failed to consider something. But is that the only way they do it now ?

I see near the beginning of the Colorado Springs Notes that he shows some dual resonator setups, with the coils having different
frequencies he could get "beats", which of course is common knowledge now. I often wonder could a set of coils use a "beat"
frequency of say to tap into the lower frequency transmissions of these large transmitters,
sounds like a lot of Juice at Harold Holt Station, 

The frequency is 19.8 kHz. With a transmission power of 1 megawatt, it is the
most powerful transmission station in the Southern Hemisphere

Here's a couple of Wiki's to consider. See in the "See Also" sections of the Wiki below the articles. Interesting stuff.

Communication with submarines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines

Extremely low frequency[edit]

1982 aerial view of the Clam Lake, Wisconsin ELF facility.
Electromagnetic waves in the ELF frequency range (3–300 Hz) (see also SLF) can penetrate seawater to depths of hundreds of meters, allowing communication with submarines at their operating depths. Building an ELF transmitter is a formidable challenge, as they have to work at incredibly long wavelengths: The US Navy's system, Seafarer, which was a variant of a larger system proposed under the codename Project Sanguine,[1] operated at 76 hertz,[2] the Soviet/Russian system (called ZEVS) at 82 hertz.[3] The latter corresponds to a wavelength of 3,658.5 kilometers. That is more than a quarter of the Earth's diameter. Obviously, the usual half-wavelength dipole antenna cannot be constructed, as it would spread across a large country.

Instead, one has to find an area with very low ground conductivity (a requirement opposite to usual radio transmitter sites), bury two huge electrodes in the ground at different sites, and then feed lines to them from a station in the middle, in the form of wires on poles. Although other separations are possible, 60 kilometers is the distance used by the ZEVS transmitter located near Murmansk. As the ground conductivity is poor, the current between the electrodes will penetrate deep into the Earth, essentially using a large part of the globe as an antenna. The antenna length in Republic, Michigan was approximately 52 kilometers (32 mi). The antenna is very inefficient. To drive it, a dedicated power plant seems to be required, although the power emitted as radiation is only a few watts. Its transmission can be received virtually anywhere. A station in Antarctica at 78°S 167°W detected transmission when the Soviet Navy put their ZEVS antenna into operation.[3]

Due to the technical difficulty of building an ELF transmitter, the US and Russia are the only nations known to have constructed ELF communication facilities, with India being in the process of constructing one. Until it was dismantled in late September 2004, the American Seafarer, later called Project ELF system (76 Hz) consisted of two antennas, located at Clam Lake, Wisconsin (since 1977) and at Republic, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula (since 1980). The Russian antenna (ZEVS, 82 Hz) is installed at the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk. It was noticed in the West in the early 1990s. The British Royal Navy once considered building their own transmitter at Glengarry Forest, Scotland, but the project was canceled.The Indian Navy is in the process of constructing ELF communication facility to communicate with its Arihant class and Akula class submarines. This facility is expected to be operational by 2015.

.....

Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Harold_E._Holt

......

[thx1138]

 Let me first say I know next to nothing about transmitting either power or signals. I don't know at this point if that is good or bad. It might be good since I don't have to "unlearn" things.

[font=]I actually always wondered how Tesla would have wanted to modulate several different information streams onto his magnifying transmitter. I know his normal solutions, e.g. as an example with a direct conversion of speech into the modulation. [/font]

This might be related. It is from much earlier work than CS or Wardenclyffe but remember he used impulses rather than AC.



Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency and Their Applications to Methods of Artificial Illumination, Lecture at American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Columbia College, May 20, 1891

"When the terminals of a high tension induction coil are connected to a capacitor, and the capacitor is disruptively discharging into a circuit, we may look upon the arc playing between the spark gap as being a source of alternating, or generally speaking, undulating currents, and then we have to deal with the familiar system of a generator of such currents, a circuit connected to it, and a condenser bridging the circuit. The capacitor in such case is a veritable transformer, and since the frequency is excessive, almost any ratio in the strength of the currents in both branches may be obtained. In reality the analogy is not quite complete, for in the disruptive discharge we have most generally a fundamental instantaneous variation of comparatively low frequency, and a superimposed harmonic vibration, and the laws governing the flow of currents are not the same for both."

In these "rare notes" Tesla describes partly this strange top spark-gap system. As it seems he really intended to have a second "free" oscillator top driven by the first oscillator. And he wanted to make all in one big tower.

As it seems he miscalculated the needed height for this tower.

The reality would be, that the tower would then have had to be extremely high.

He originally planned a much higher tower but, not being able to raise the capital needed for its construction, he scaled it back. IMO, that re-scaling was much of the reason for the construction delays and ultimately the Wardenclyffe project failure. Had the delays not occurred due to resizing, Marconi may not have beat him to the intercontinental transmission and he would have had the full backing of J. P. Morgan.

It would have as few resistance as possible (wire thick and as short as possible). As it needs as much energy oscillating as possible, the top capacitor has to be big.

The inductance should have no distributed capacity and absolutely no inductive coupling to any other circuit.

So the best solution would just be make a straight wire upwards with a big capacitor on top.

Not knowing anything about transmission, this has always puzzled me. I think it fits into your discussion here but I don't know the implications. In the quote below coil B is the secondary and D1 is the drum inside coil B.

U.S. Patent 1,119,732 applied for January 18, 1902 (Wardenclyffe)
"The coil B is wound on a frame or drum D1 of insulating material, with its turns close together. I have discovered that when so wound the effect of the small radius of curvature of the wire itself is overcome and the coil behaves as a conductor of large radius of curvature, corresponding to that of the drum."
http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla-patents-1,119,732-transmitting-electrical-energy?pq=MSwxMTksNzMy

That seems to be your "( wire thick and as short as possible)". Look at  the drawing at that link and read the above paragraph again.


You should also look at Canadian patent 142,352 applied for April 17, 1906 - Art Of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through Natural Mediums and note the difference in dates. I think the U.S. patent was filed to protect the idea without revealing much information and the later patent was filed to protect the ideas when it was apparent the Wardenclyffe project would not be completed. There is quite a bit more information in the Canadian patent. I suppose it was filed in Canada to make it somewhat more obscure because in that day the documents would have to be examined in person and Tesla was so active in the U.S. I'm not sure people would go to Canada to look for it.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canadian_patent_142352

[font=]In those patents he also references patents for individualization of transmissions. Related patents.[/font]
[font=]http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla-patents-685,953-intensifying-transmitted-effects?pq=Njg1LDk1Mw==[/font]
[font=]and [/font]
[font=]http://www.teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla-patents-685,955-utilizing-transmitted-effects?pq=Njg1LDk1NQ==[/font]
[font=][/font]
[font=]It would probably be beneficial to go back and read those patents thoroughly with the understanding you now have. On review, a lot becomes clear. Also look at the CS notes on July 4, 1899. [/font]
[font=][/font]
[font=]I tried the "Remove Formatting" button but couldn't get rid of the font tags.[/font]