On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, William Beaty wrote: > Then take a look at THIS one: > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tesblb1b.jpg > > It's from "Electrical Experimenter" from 1919. June issue, I think.
Note that lots of "Electrical Experimenter" 1910 era magazine issues are available for five bucks as PDF files. The guy at http://store.g-books.com is selling them. More weird stuff: on teslaflyingmachine group on yahoo.com, the author of "Occult Ether Physics" says that Tesla later built a bulb from a metal hemisphere but WITHOUT ANY VACUUM BULB. In thinking about this, I think it's possible. The bulb will self-pump its own vacuum during operation, just like Tesla observed in his lecture on the bulb shown at http://amasci.com/graphics/tesblb1b.jpg. Suppose we take a solid aluminum hemisphere with a flat polished face. Put a glass disk against the flat face and seal the edge and cover the whole thing in thick insulator. If this device is then operated with a CW tesla coil, a high-frequency AC plasma will appear in the thin air film between the glass plate and the aluminum. The air will vanish! There's an "ion pump" effect which drives the gas ions at high velocity into the metal surface where they're permanently trapped. Given enough time, a hard vacuum will form in that narrow gap. Now if we have a capacitor-like device with: a metal plate, a glass plate, and a vacuum layer between them, and if we drive the metal plate at extremely high voltage AC of high frequency, then something interesting should occur. The voltage drop should mostly appear across the vacuum layer!!!! This happens because glass is conductive at high frequencies (because it contains movable charges.) The higher the dielectric constant of the glass, the more AC voltage will be impressed across that vacuum layer. Second, a glow discharge will develop in the air surrounding the device, and this gives a second "conductive plate" as well as a long conductive "wire," so our vacuum capacitor develops two real terminals. The conductive plasma path connects capacitively to ground. This again should increase that voltage drop impressed across the thin vacuum layer. And finally, with that high a voltage on a hard vacuum next to a metal, the metal will send out electrons via high-field emission. And on alternate cycles, the electron cloud will smash into the metal at extreme high velocity, producing Bremssralung x-rays. The metal should be highly polished in order to create a parallel beam of x-rays, and supposedly this is a necessary feature of the device. The electron trajectories are short. But how high is the voltage drop over which the electrons travel? Heaven only knows. Could be astronomical, especially when compared to a conventional x-ray tube. The thing might even be producing extremely hard x-rays (gamma radiation.) The beam of ionizing radiation will launch a narrow corona discharge out of the face of the tube. There will be a high-capacitance connection between the metal Tesla Coil terminal and the plasma (remember that the vacuum is conductive, since it contains an electron cloud.) A purple beam should shoot out of this simple device. One more thing springs to mind: it might be better to use PZT or Barium Titanate instead of glass. This would force a larger potential drop across the vacuum layer. (But perhaps this change might screw things up. Maybe high-temperature ceramic would be a better choice.) The only trouble is that we'd need a high-wattage CW tesla coil to run this beast. Tesla said that the spark-gap type of coil doesn't work very well in this application. I sort of see why: the electron cloud inside the vacuum layer might need constant drive once it forms, and if it was driven in short bursts with long dead-time between, it might quench out between bursts. Or at least the onset might be delayed, so the total on-time would be very small when compared with a CW system. In any case it probably would behave very differently under pulse drive than under CW drive. Pretty cool, eh? A GAMMA-RAY EMITTING CAPACITOR! No vacuum pumps needed. > I always thought that these old Tesla bulb devices were the same as > "plasma globes" with fingers of glowing gas inside. But instead, the glow > penetrates the glass and extends into the room as a feet-long glowing > discharge! Most probably it is a tesla-coil lightning bolt, but one which > is following a beam of x-rays, so it becomes silent and constant, not > branched like normal lightning. The x-rays pre-ionize the path. And > because the x-ray flux would be different during the positive and negative > parts of the AC, it probably functions as a rectifier, so it would put out > some milliamps of DC into the room. (And therefore would become > sensitive to magnetic fields!) > > Apparently this answers questions about the material below. If Tesla > mounted such vacuum bulbs on the tips of his high-voltage antennas, they > would produce ion beams which visibly glowed, and which functioned as > antennas having not just long lenghts, but large surface areas (large > capacitive coupling to distant emitters!) > > > > > > billb wrote: > > I uploaded some crude screenshots taken from the film "The Secret of > > Nikola Tesla." I'm very curious as to the original source of these > > images. Who was the artist? On what were they based? From what I > > understand of Tesla technology, they seem very accurate (also quite > > revealing.) > > > > > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tstowr.jpg > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tsflyr.jpg > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tspjctl.jpg > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tsplane.jpg > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tscar.jpg > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tsfactry.jpg > > http://amasci.com/graphics/tstrain.jpg > > (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (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 425-222-5066 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
