This page contains Tesla experiments and detailed information and observations on the experiments.
About me
Tesla coil and HV experiments
I first heard about Tesla in school (hahaha just kidding). First time I read his name was on the traffic light “Nikola Tesla” so I think. Not long after that it was changed. Then I learned about him as much as possible.
In my high school I wanted to build my first Tesla coil but the teacher was against it, so I built it when I finished the high school.
About Nikola Tesla
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla received an advanced education in engineering and physics in the 1870s and gained practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. He emigrated in 1884 to the United States, where he would become a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla
set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company would eventually market.
Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.
After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla’s work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s.
After 1890, Tesla experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil. He attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling and conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from across a stage. He would spend most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors but none of the ventures succeeded in making a commercial product out of his findings.
In 1893 at St. Louis, Missouri, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told onlookers that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct “intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires” by conducting it through the Earth.
Tesla served as a vice-president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1892 to 1894, the forerunner of the modern-day IEEE (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers).
(Source Wikipedia)
High voltage circuit
First I made the frequency generator with the ne555n timer, then I put the transistor IRF840 to work and made the transformer for the output.
Than I put the HV (640V) capacitor on the leads of the transformer primary winding and that was it for the first step.
Then I made a second circuit with the capacitors and diodes for voltage multiplication.
The voltage multiplication is 11x so the output voltage should be around (1000 x 11) 11 000 V or 11kV
Lichtenberg figures with the HV circuit driver.
Making Tesla coil
First I wound the secondary on the PVC pipe with two-sided tape so the wire wouldn’t unwind. The whole winding is made by hand, I have a record for one in 3 days and for two in one week.
The number of windings is around 900 and thickness of the wire is 0.5 mm.
In the second picture there is the final product with the improvising primary winding and the second “receiver” coil.
Testing the coil with neon and 12V auto light bulb (last two pictures).
The effect of the Tesla coil on the plasma globe.
I was invited to demonstrate the experiments with my Tesla coils in Maribor.
Here are some pictures from that day:
A year later I was at the opening of the railroad from Murska sobota to Hoduš ( Hungary ) the event was in Murska sobota (Slovenia)
I custom made and soled one of the Tesla coils to center of experiments in Celovec (Austria).
The second Tesla coil is went to the center of experiments Maribor (Slovenia).
Now I’m working on new 3D printed primary coil stand.
New toys for the Tesla coil.
Tesla tower
Wardenclyffe Tower (1901–1917), also known as the Tesla Tower, was an early experimental wireless transmission station designed and built by Nikola Tesla in Shoreham, New York in 1901–1902. Tesla intended to transmit messages, telephony and even facsimile images across the Atlantic to England and to ships at sea based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. His decision to scale up the facility and add his ideas of wireless power transmission to better compete with Guglielmo Marconi’s radio based telegraph system was met with refusal to fund the changes by the project’s primary backer, financier J. P. Morgan. Additional investment could not be found, and the project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
In an attempt to satisfy Tesla’s debts, the tower was demolished for scrap in 1917 and the property taken in foreclosure in 1922. For 50 years, Wardenclyffe was a processing facility producing photography supplies. Many buildings were added to the site and the land it occupies has been trimmed down to 16 acres (6.5 ha) but the original, 94 by 94 ft (29 by 29 m), brick building designed by Stanford White remains standing to this day.
In the 1980s and 2000s, hazardous waste from the photographic era was cleaned up, and the site was sold and cleared for new development. A grassroots campaign to save the site succeeded in purchasing the property in 2013, with plans to build a future museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. In 2018 the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The idea is to send the electric energy to the upper atmosphere (ionosphere) where the electric current will flow much easier than in the lower atmosphere. There is an addition with the potential that is build because of the solar radiation and other sources that exponentially add power to the sent energy. The theory was tested with the use of a neon bulb and it was a success.
With the bulb the energy was transferred from the transmitter to the receiver almost fully and without the bulb the receiver didn’t receive enough energy to light up the starter bulb.
So now I’m waiting to start making some money so I can build the big Tesla tower so I can test and see if I can replicate the experiment made by Tesla that sent electrical energy 20 miles away to light up special bulbs with the 1MW of power.
In the meantime I’m making some gadgets and DIY experiments that I’ll sell on my web shop soon.