bibliotecapleyades (Thanks, Vernie)
Tesla became familiar with the destructive characteristics of fireballs in his experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899. He produced them quite by accident and saw them, more than once, explode and shatter his tall mast and also destroy apparatus within his laboratory. The destructive action accompanying the disintegration of a fireball, he declared, takes place with inconceivable violence.
He studied the process by which they were produced, not because he wanted to produce them but in order to eliminate the conditions in which they were created. It is not pleasant, he related, to have fireballs explode in your vicinity for they will destroy anything they come in contact with.
At Colorado Springs….. I never saw fireballs, but as a compensation for my disappointment I succeeded later in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially.
Parasitic oscillations, or circuits, within the main circuit were a source of danger from this cause [of ball lightning]. Points of resistance in the main circuit could result in minor oscillating circuits between terminals or between two points of resistance and these minor circuits would have a very much higher period of oscillation than the main circuit and could be set into oscillation by the main current of lower frequency.
Even when the principle oscillating circuit was adjusted for the greatest efficiency of operation by the diminution of all sources of losses, the fireballs continued to occur, but these were due to stray high frequency charges from random earth currents.
From theses experiences it became apparent that the fire balls resulted from the interaction of two frequencies, a stray higher frequency wave imposed on the lower frequency free oscillation of the main circuit.
As the free oscillation of the circuit builds up from the zero point to the quarter wave length node it passes through various rates of change. In a current of shorter wavelength the rates of change will be steeper. When the two currents react on each other the resultant complex will contain a wave in which there is an extremely steep rate of change, and for the briefest instant currents may move at a tremendous rate, at the rate of millions of horsepower.
This condition acts as a trigger which may cause the total energy of the powerful longer wave to be discharged in an infinitesimally small interval of time and at a proportionately tremendously great rate of energy movement which cannot confine itself to the metal circuit and is released into surrounding space with inconceivable violence.
It is but a step, from learning how a high frequency current can explosively discharge a lower frequency current, to using the principle to design a system in which these explosions can be produced by intent.