Found this!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ff_AXVlo9U

Read the full info alongside the video.

Alan

Cool

I have just been reading up about our man Tesla

Duckon is a Science Fiction convention I used to attend in the western 'burbs of Chicago.

It's not what you think. The sparks were not "generating" the tones, they were just triggering a pre-programmed set of tones already put together phonically. That's why everything seems to fit nicely from a musical standpoint, just the rhythm is erratic.

It's the same idea as the juggler who appears to be "playing" music by bouncing balls on a keyboard on the ground in front of him. If you watch closely, the balls just hit the keyboard in random areas, not specific keys. So the only thing he need to control is the rhythm.

Punch in Nikola Tesla in a search engine and you will find some interesting links. There are societies out there that worship the ground he walked on. He was indeed an interesting person and even on the Yugoslavian 100 Dinar. His research has been instrumental in our lives yet many do not even know who he was. Many of his inventions were credited to other like radio waves. It was not Macroni, it was Tesla.

Agreed. Tesla is the unsung hero of the modern world if you ask me. The development of AC power, which we really owe to him, is the thing that made electricity an almost universal commodity. If Edison had been allowed to prevail, we would be using DC power which, because of the limited transmission distances, would have meant a lot of very expensive power generation stations all over the place. This would have made electricity so expensive so as to be only accessible to the wealthy or to industry.

Of course, maybe we would all be healthier now because in order to run our PCs at home, we would need to be pedaling a generator bike!

Jeff,

ABB does not agree.

In the past the ability to convert AC to DC and back as well as problems in increasing the voltage did cause problems with long distance DC transmission. These problems have been overcome and there are less line losses in DC transmission lines than in AC lines.
Don

Edison DC world. We would have electric lights and possibly the radio and I'd be tapping this out in morse code. Would we be at the same level of technology with a dc system?

Sometime in the late70s/early 80s we finally reached a point in our technology where a DC system might actually work. The first thing your TV, PC or most "transformerless" power supply electronics is convert the line voltage to 170vdc or so where it is chopped up into 20kz or so and dropped in little torroids to the voltage you need.
The flaw in Edison's system is they did not have the semiconductors to do that.

A few years ago I heard about HVDC transmission and it sounds promising. Howerever it came 100 years too late. Sorry Mr . Edison It could be benificial for developing countries and even in our country with replacing of old infrastructure. I could google it, but does any one have reliable info on HVDC transmission?

Good old Wikipedia scores again

Check Here

So if it weren't for Tesla's development of AC that could be trasmitted over long distances, we might all be watching gas-powered televisions by candlelight.

From Alan Belson:

The wikipedia entry above mentions mercury-arc rectifiers. This was the only successful commercially used method of converting ac to dc, [by non-mechanical means], before solid state devices became widely available in large power sizes. They are of course non-reversable. The larger rectifiers shown were mainly used for railroad and traction dc supply, dc being preferred for this purpose, but there were smaller all-glass rectifiers made for large-scale battery charging, as in telephony, small electric vehicles like milk floats, radio transmission, etc.

These devices use the "valve" phenomena of an arc struck in mercury vapor in a vacuum. Current flows predominantly in one direction and is curtailed in the other. It's not 100% rectified BTW, but good enough for traction and charging purposes. The units were usually supplied in pairs, for full wave rectification, and were usually 6-or-more phase designs. This not only smoothed the dc output somewhat, [ rippled dc, of course , ] but also kept the arcs alight as they swept round the chamber in sequence. Although the essential machine has no moving parts, it had to have pumps for the vacuum and for cooling. Plus the media itself, mercury, is highly toxic. Problems associated with harmonics also troubled the users of these machines, and complex resonant shunts were required. They tended toward higher voltages [ 1500v ] for traction as this increased efficiency, there being about a 25v loss across each arc.

Sealed Glass bulb units as low as 110v could be built, when efficiency might be 80% or so- the quoted efficiencies are over 95% at voltages above 550vdc, at full load. The efficiency drops off slightly at idle loads. Power factor was not significant, except as regards the actual transformers providing the supply voltage. The pics are from French Railway installations but these units were all built in the UK . I believe that 'Power Rectifiers Ltd' was a division of Westinghouse. The pics and diagram all date from the mid 1920's.

BTW, there was a weird machine, built and exhibited,in the 1920s, called a Transverter, which was shown at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1921. It was a "polyphase synchronous rectifier" with fixed windings and revolving brushgear, designed for long range dc transmission. This machine created 100,000 volts dc from an ac supply, but higher voltages would not have been a problem. At the other end of the dc line [ HVDC?] another Tranverter converted the dc back to ac, at whatever frequency was desired. It could thus link 50 and 60 hz generation plant, or indeed any frequency. I'll try and get some pics and data scanned, if anyone is interested.

Alan.