Nikola Tesla - Free-Energy Devices

HIGH FREQUENCY AND HIGH POTENTIAL CURRENTS. 311clearly not the best medium through which a disruptive dischargeshould occur. Air or other gas under great pressure is ofcourse a much more suitable medium for the discharge gap. Ihave carried on long-continued experiments in this direction, unfortunatelyless practicable on account of the difficulties and expensein getting air under great pressure. But even if themedium in the discharge space is solid or liquid, still the samelosses take place, though they are generally smaller, for jusfr assoon as the arc is established, the solid or liquid is volatilized.Indeed, there is no body known which would not be disintegratedby the arc, and it is an open question among scientific men,whether an arc discharge could occur at all in the air itself withoutthe particles of the electrodes being torn off. When thecurrent through the gap is very small and the arc very long, Ibelieve that a relatively considerable amount of heat is taken upin the disintegration of the electrodes, which partially on this accountmay remain quite cold.The ideal medium for a discharge gap should only crack, andthe ideal electrode should be of some material which cannot bedisintegrated. With small currents through the it isgap best toemploy aluminum, but not when the currents are large.The disruptivebreak in the air, or more or less in any ordinary medium,is not of the nature of a crack, but it is rather comparable to thepiercing of innumerable bullets through a mass offering greatfrictional resistances to the motion of the bullets, this involvingconsiderable loss of energy. A medium which would merelycrack when strained electrostatically and this possibly might bethe case with a perfect vacuum, that is, pure ether would involvea very small loss in the gap, so small as to be entirely negligible,at least theoretically, because a crack may be produced by aninfinitely small displacement. In exhausting an oblong bulbprovided with two aluminum terminals, with the greatest care, Ihave succeeded in producing such a vacuum that the secondarydischarge of a disruptive discharge coil would break disruptivelythrough the bulb in the form of fine spark streams. Thecurious point was that the discharge would completely ignore theterminals and start far behind the two aluminum plates whichserved as electrodes. This extraordinary high vacuum could onlybe maintained for a very short while. To return to the idealmedium, think, for the sake of illustration, of a piece of glass orsimilar body clamped in a vice, and the latter tightened more and