On Wed, 16 Jul 2025, MSF wrote:
I'll bet William Beaty could figure it out.
If Tesla's stuff really worked, then the solution is trivial. First he suppressed all fractal streamers from a huge Tesla coil. Then, running at high wattage (and perhaps several megavolts,) he turned up the power until he got a discharge. He said these were like rifle-shots. (It's basically a megavolt spark-gap, which has very different physics than kilovolt spark gaps. Relativistic electrons happen at above 500KV.)
The radiative output of this instant bang-discharge would wrap around the planet, and focus back on his big coil. (Basically it was a vertical VLF antenna made of plasma.) During that short delay, the coil oscillations were ramping up to max. The next discharge would be triggered by the significan ambient fields, coming back from the earlier pulse. So the next pulse would be triggered by the previous one, after a delay-line time.
That way the lightning-bolts would only happen at a multiple of 8Hz or whatever. (11.8Hz?)
Then, turn the power up, and any 16Hz overtones from the pulses (Fourier transform of spikes has LOTS of overtones,) ...would make the coil go bang-bang at twice the lowest Shumann frequency. And so on. With sufficient input power, it could run at higher and higher harmonics, many hundreds Hz, where the spikes stayed in synch with the Earth waveguide, because the Earth waveguide is acting as the tank circuit of the overall "oscillator." The huge sparks are the analogy for the transistor in a Hartley oscillator. The Earth-waveguide delay becomes the RLC tank circuit of an oscillator. But since it's a waveguide, not a coil-capacitor, it can run at any one of higher modes ...multiples of the fundamental 8Hz. There should be about a thousand different frequencies available (8Hz to 8KHz.)
Weird trivia: at colorado springs, the telescoping metal tower was sealed, and hollow. One guy suspects that the airtight seal was used because Tesla pumped it down to a vacuum, by heating it up with water inside, then corking it off when the steam had driven out all the air. (That's a paleolithic vacuum pump. Ancients with glassblowing could have made vacuum tubes.) That gives maybe 2% of one atmosphere, the vapor pressure of water at room temp. But the guy didn't know why Tesla did this. Put megavolt/nanosecond spikes on an iron pipe, after pumping a vacuum inside? Maybe there's some weird physics which nobody knows about, unless they've worked with hundred-megavolt RF in the gigahertz regime. Which I expect is basically nobody since 1899.
I just thought that while I was at it, I could "steal" some 60hz grid juice. Using an open solenoid, you can fine tune the frequency by moving an iron rod in and out. It worked pretty well.
Old brainstorm: a big neodyminum magnet, if wiggling in a vacuum chamber, is essentially a lossless resonator, like a superconductor. Give it a whack, and what's the decay-rate of the wiggle? Or if not lossless, then incredibly high Q, thousands of times higher than an oscillating copper coil.
So, if we spin a neodymium magnet in a vacuum, drive it up to 3600RPM ...will it keep going by itself? Any microwatts of ambient 60Hz field should drive it as an AC synchronous motor. Shine 60Hz strobe-light on it, so you can see it not slowing down.
But instead we want a 60Hz dipole antenna. So make two of these, placed five meters apart, to emulate an iron rod 5M long. No, ten. No, even more! They'd act like a lossless ferrite rod many many meters long ...wound with a 60Hz superconducting tank coil.
The power company thinks we cannot do any harm with "power theft" as long as we stay 100 ft away from a transmission line. Now give them a one-tesla magnet, a few hundred feet long, with the fields synchronized so as to be like a resonant transformer-secondary. (Pickup coils don't do any harm unless they're RESONANT pickup coils. And even then, they're harmless as long as the Q is only hundreds. What if effective Q is a million times higher? What counter-voltage does it induce into the nearby power line? That gives a hint to the wattage which can be stolen.)
No, I'm not gonna try this. Let someone else get all the fame, and maybe the jail time.
Write an SF short story where the 60Hz grid was brought down by REALLY EFFECTIVE resonant power theft, thousands of remote farms using superconductor emulation based on fast-rotating neodymium slabs suspended in little bitty vacuum chambers. O the humanity.
Regards, MSF
(((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
