Serious electrick!.

[N. Thornton]

One reason geniuses are odd is that genius is the ability to form different thoughts about the things that the rest of us just take for granted. This ability to step outside of how most of us see things is what enables new things to be seen. And gives them a differing persective to the rest of the species.

There is no such technology. Tesla thought there was, but his radio transmission of power is of very limited use, thats why it its rarely used. It did not live up to his hopes for it.

Regards, NT

[Dave Liquorice]

All good stuff. B-) Like the way that the "worlds biggest jacobs" ladder was half intentional. Wonder what would have happened if it had been just a bit windier, not enough to blow the arc out but enough to make it go more horizontal. Did they pick a still day because of that risk?

Downloaded the clips but need to look at them on a window box.

500MW down that line is not to be sneezed at either. Always remember doing a corporate for SWALEC, they where putting in another connection to the supergrid up the heads of the valleys somewhere. Nice offcuts of cable lying about, as thick as my fore arm all the switching was enclosed still pretty big though. Also went to a grid switching substation just outside Cardiff. Watched the 125kV feed ammeters sat at around 100A waving about by 10A or so, the odd MegaWatt variation in load over just a few seconds.

[Grunff]

His ideas about global communications systems were a bit off track, but he did build the first radio transmitters with any real output, and he did lay the foundations of tuned radio circuits, which were then built upon by Marconi - no?

I'm not going to disagree there - there's certaily *a lot* of crap out there.

[Andy Dingley]

Hertz, Helmholtz and Maxwell, IMHO

[Grunff]

Totally agree as far as the theory goes - but applying it to build working transmitters?

My use of 'invented' was inaccurate, but my understanding is that Tesla was the first to (through an understanding of tuned circuits) build workable transmitters. This is based on my reading - I wasn't actually there!

[Steve]

Well Helmholtz might disagree there, and possibly Oliver Heaviside and Charles Steinmetz,who pioneered the use of laplace transforms to solve problems in AC circuits.. And transmitting it isn't anywhere near as clever as receiving it again....For that Marconi and his use of the Bramely coherer as a non-linear detector deserves the credit for that.

As for AC power systems - S.Z De Ferranti deserves an awful lot of credit. One assumes he is spinning (synchronously) in his grave at the destruction of his legacy by his grandsons.

What a complex thing history is !

Steve