Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency: A Lecture Delivered before the Institution of Electrical Engineers, LondonTesla, Nikola
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Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency: A Lecture Delivered before the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London
Tesla, Nikola
Electric currents, Alternating; Electric discharges; Incandescent lamps; Telegraph, Wireless
It is a striking fact that the discharge through a gas is established
with ever increasing freedom as the frequency of the impulses is
augmented. It behaves in this respect quite contrarily to a metallic
conductor. In the latter the impedance enters prominently into play as
the frequency is increased, but the gas acts much as a series of
condensers would: the facility with which the discharge passes through
seems to depend on the rate of change of potential. If it act so, then
in a vacuum tube even of great length, and no matter how strong the
current, self-induction could not assert itself to any appreciable
degree. We have, then, as far as we can now see, in the gas a
conductor which is capable of transmitting electric impulses of any
frequency which we may be able to produce. Could the frequency be
brought high enough, then a queer system of electric distribution,
which would be likely to interest gas companies, might be realized:
metal pipes filled with gas--the metal being the insulator, the gas
the conductor--supplying phosphorescent bulbs, or perhaps devices as
yet uninvented. It is certainly possible to take a hollow core of
copper, rarefy the gas in the same, and by passing impulses of
sufficiently high frequency through a circuit around it, bring the gas
inside to a high degree of incandescence; but as to the nature of the
forces there would be considerable uncertainty, for it would be
doubtful whether with such impulses the copper core would act as a
static screen. Such paradoxes and apparent impossibilities we
encounter at every step in this line of work, and therein lies, to a
great extent, the claim of the study.
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