Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 156

. I THE LEGACY →→→→ 288 worthy of Tesla: "If Tesla's resonance effects, as shown by the Stanford team, can control enormous energies by miniscule triggering signal, then by an extension of this principle we should be able to affect the field environment of the very stars in the sky...With godlike a rogance, we someday may yet direct the stars in their courses." ng No biography of Tesla would be complete without mention of his bright following of amateur physicists who build Tesla coils for their personal research, endeavoring to replicate his electrical magic; and the young Inventors who pore over his basic patents and still find Inspiration from them. Durlin C. Cox, a Wisconsin physicist who has pondered Teslah published writings, has built two Tesla colls, the second of 10 million volts. The reasons: "My own personal interest in high voltage engineer ing, especially in the field of high frequency rf transformers; to further my studies on the laboratory production of ball lightning; and because the University of Wisconsin at Madison asked me to submit a Tesla coll in their bl-annual Engineering Exposition in the spring of 1981." He and friends built one Tesla coil for a Hollywood studio for lightning affects, which has been a common use of them. Electrical engineer Leland Anderson has summarized the major points in design that a coll builder might gain from reading Tesla's Colorado Springs Notes: 1. The Q's of the primary and secondary must be as high as practicable. 2. The Q's of the primary and secondary should be equal 3. The length of the secondary winding should be one-quarter of the effective operating wavelength. 4. The technique of using an "extra coll" tank circult (or a variation of it) in the secondary to magnify the voltage should be used. "With these criteria in mind," he says, "the builder will find that hundreds of turns are not necessary for the secondary winding to achieve high voltages." Last but not least, what about Tesla's death/disintegrator rays? Were his concepts sound? If they were found useful by the U.S. Army Air Force research team, whose top-secret project was rumored to have had the code name "Project Nick," it may be safely assumed that Instead of being "destroyed," as reported, his papers are still highly classified. Dr. Trump's evaluation and Swezey's assessment of Tesla's "secret weapons" have, however, raceived updated concurrence by THE LEGACY →→ 289 Lambert Dolphin, assistant director of the Radio Physics Laboratory at SRI International, who has studied the inventor's work and his balllightning research for two decades. He points out that the fields of knowledge of both physics and electrical engineering have grown exponentially since about 1930. "Whole libraries are now required just to keep track of all the theory and experience that have unfolded since Tesla's time," he says. "Our mathematical and practical understanding of electricity, magnetism, electromagnetic theory, and radio communications has coninued to grow explosively ever since 1950, or should I say 1970!" Tesla, Dolphin believes, "may have had intuitive Insight into Insers and high-energy particle beams as well as ultra-high voltage phenomena, but now that we understand all the physics much more, we can easily evaluate many of his extravagant later-life claims."* In fact, there is no good evidence to suggest that Tesla anticipated lasers. His "teleforce rays" seem to have been concerned exclusively with high-energy particle beams. We still do not know precisely how he intended them to work, although, says Dolphin, the available evidence suggests that Tesla may not have paid sufficient attention to how greatly such beams may be absorbed or dispersed by molecules and atoms in the air. In any case, even if we did understand Teslas intentions more clearly, we should be hard put to compare them to the current state of the art, much of which is hidden under high security classifications. Nevertheless, Tesla's work with high voltages to accelerate charged particles does seem to have been decidedly in what is now the mainstream of physical research. "In this field,” says Dolphin, “he anticipated modem linear and circular nuclear accelerators. Such machines today have energy levels of tens of billions of electron volts or at least 1,000 times greater energy levels than Tesla ever attained. "I am sure his magnifying transmitters were spectacular... He probably generated some interesting arcs and sparks that were what we now study as plasmas. The containment of plasmas is a huge area of modern physics. For example... to see if small amounts of matter can be turned into immense amounts of electrical power in carefully contained plasmas." But Tesla's early discoveries and inventions, he concludes, were indeed ingenious and ahead of their time." As this book goes to press, the Pentagon is studying the creation of a new branch of the armed services, to be known as the U.S. Space Command, whose primary arsenal will consist of laser and particle-beam weapons fired from space battleships." In prose not 156