Nikola Tesla Books
[Sec. 4.b.(2), cont.] A facilitating agent for their formation is found to be the presence of soot, or other forms of blackening. Eighteenth-century accounts of natural ball lighting frequently mentioned their occurrence near chimneys and fireplaces, and an observation was made that these structures provided some sort of "channel" for ball lightning. It is interesting to note that the presence of soot, or blackening, was not then considered a factor in the occurrences of ball lightning, and this writer will make an observation that perhaps some factor(s), not as yet clear to us, will provide the answers to Tesla's production of high intensity ground currents and, possibly, claims of wireless transmission of significant levels of power.
(3) O'Neill's description from Tesla O'Neill also described in Prodigal Genius as published, probably from Tesla's description to him, the following interesting characteristic of the Magnifying Transmitter operation (p. 186): "(At the switch closing) a short hairlike spark dart[ed] from the ball (on top of the mast). It was only about ten feet long, and thin. Before he had time to be pleased, there was a second and a third and a fourth spark, each longer, brighter and bluer than its predecessor. "More sparks! Longer and longer! Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty feet. Brighter and bluer! Not threadlike sparks now but fingers of fire. Wriggling rods of flame that lashed viciously into the heavens. The sparks were now as thick as his arm as they left the ball. "Tesla's eyes almost popped out of his head as he saw full-fledged bolts of lightning darting into the air, accompanied by a barrage of tremendous crashes of thunder. Those lightning bolts were now half again the length of the building, more than 135 feet long, and the thunder was being heard in Cripple Creek fifteen miles away."
COMMENT: This writer does not know how much reliability, if any, to attached to the description. Most difficult to understand is the sparks occurring at appreciable intervals, possibly a few seconds. Let's assume these sparks resulted from his experiments with the relaxation oscillator (See Sec. 5.b.). The effect of the sparks gradually growing in strength over a period of several seconds implies a Q of the system (including a local topographical dish cavity or the Schumann resonance cavity) of several hundreds: Q = (omega) x build-up time constant = (2 pi x few Hz) x build-up time of several seconds = several hundreds.
