Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA current and convert it into very high-voltage and high-frequency current. The spark gap, G² in the Tesla coil can be made a fraction of an inch long or many feet across as the dimensions of the Tesla coil are altered. An engineer can build a Tesla coil to any dimension he wishes so that it can be used for anything from the production of artificial lighting to the testing of the vacuum in a small laboratory system. As I made notes on the coil I began to wonder how the same ideas of resonance had been worked into Tesla's theory of power transmission. That was something which I would have to puzzle over during the next weeks. After ordering from the library the Tesla biography I had noticed the previous day I decided that my next job would be to track down the facts behind those stories of radio interference. It did not take me many telephone calls to find a reliable source of scientific information. Beginning early in 1976, heavy interference had been recorded in Europe and North America. The disturbance occurred in the short waveband, between three and thirty megahertz - the range used by international broadcasting. In some cases, the effects were so intense that international communications on certain frequencies were 'blacked out' for several hours. It was not long before monitoring agencies had taken a 'fix' on the source and pinned it down to a location just outside Riga, in Latvia. Protests were made from London, Washington, Ottawa and other capitals and, towards the end of 1976, the Russian Government admitted that they were conducting experiments which could give rise to radio interference. The exact nature of these experiments was never revealed but the protests themselves seemed to have had some effect for the interference was cut down to a series of short bursts over limited time intervals. The considerable range of the interference suggested a generator of very high radio power - possibly operating at over five million watts. There seemed little doubt that the Russians had built a device which produced a great deal of electrical power. Could it be a Tesla transmitter? The high frequencies of the interference seemed odd. I checked back into the Tesla file and confirmed that the Tesla resonance was at low frequency, only a few cycles each second, instead of the millions of cycles per second observed by the monitoring stations. However, when the interfer33
