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Dial "T" For Tesla

Johnny Pneumatic

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J
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As anyone who has read about the last decades of Nicola Tesla's life he had some crazy habits. Was obsessed with the number 3 for example. The line between genius and insane is sometimes so thin. My purpose is not to soil his memory. Thanks to his genius we have fluorescent lights, radio, tesla coils, electric motors etc.
My point is to ask a question about something he was supposedly working on in the years just before his death. "Teleforce". It was supposedly a weapon that shot particles of iron at hyper fast speeds(something like Mach 50 if not greater) using electric charges to accelerate them. Quack or could this actually be done? If so I would expect it to be in use today.
 
I believe it is the same principal used in rail guns. I havn't seen any research lately, but a couple of years ago one of those Military Tech programs showed a prototype that looked quite promising.

Thing launched a sabot-type projectile similar to the depleted-uranium penetrator round used in the Abrahms tank. The projectile was sandwiched between two flat pieces of aluminum, which would fall away from the fin-stabilized projectile.
I can't recall figures, but they were getting some impressive velocities.
 
I remember reading once how Tesla wanted to use his infrared communications technology to develop devices for remote control for tanks along with an assortment of other weapons for the army in order to considerably reduce the risk of casualty. The army officials he met with to discuss this scoffed at the idea and practically laughed him out of their offices. It's a wonder how ahead of his time he was.
Originally posted by SkepticJ
Was obsessed with the number 3 for example.
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What's wrong with that, and why does that make him insane? Aren't such pastimes of the "lucid" masses as celebrity voyeurism, obsession with fashion trends, and the investing of emotional capital into reality shows much more bizarre? :D
 
Last info I got on rail guns was a system using a lightweight, non-metallic, ceramic compound penetrator either wrapped with a magnetic wire or encased in a magnetic sabot. IIRC the speeds were on the order of Mach 20 or so. All this is from meory however, and I think we can all agree how reliable that is. So, of course, if anyone references my comments as data I will disavow any knowledge of my existence, or something like that :)
 
SkepticJ said:
As anyone who has read about the last decades of Nicola Tesla's life he had some crazy habits. Was obsessed with the number 3 for example. The line between genius and insane is sometimes so thin. My purpose is not to soil his memory. Thanks to his genius we have fluorescent lights, radio, tesla coils, electric motors etc.
My point is to ask a question about something he was supposedly working on in the years just before his death. "Teleforce". It was supposedly a weapon that shot particles of iron at hyper fast speeds(something like Mach 50 if not greater) using electric charges to accelerate them. Quack or could this actually be done? If so I would expect it to be in use today.
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As others have pointed out, rail guns. Or coil guns. Coil guns have the problem that the chunks of iron tend to come out molten.

Tesla was really good at coming up with ideas that worked. He wasn't so good at scaling those ideas, however. So, while he suggested with his "ray gun" (actually just an electron beam) that the power would be unlimited, in practice, there's always a problem.
 
Tesla may have obtained a patent for something similar to the rail gun, but you must understand that it doesn't necessarily mean he did any work on it at all. Toward the end, Tesla became extremely paranoid (he insisted that his former friend Edison hd stolen some of his ideas), and he made a point of patenting everything he thought up. Many of the things he "patented" are wild in the extreme, and there are woos who claim that the patents are evidence that Tesla invented all these marvelous machines. But the fact is, his trip to the patent office was the only work he ever did on a lot of his "inventions", and the rail gun may have been one of them.
 
Joshua Korosi said:
Toward the end, Tesla became extremely paranoid (he insisted that his former friend Edison hd stolen some of his ideas)
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From what I've read on Edison, his claim was probably true.
 
Huntsman said:
Last info I got on rail guns was a system using a lightweight, non-metallic, ceramic compound penetrator either wrapped with a magnetic wire or encased in a magnetic sabot. IIRC the speeds were on the order of Mach 20 or so. All this is from meory however, and I think we can all agree how reliable that is. So, of course, if anyone references my comments as data I will disavow any knowledge of my existence, or something like that :)
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The last unclassified military tests I know of had them firing projectiles at 4 kilometers a second. Not too far shy of mach 20, at any rate, and this was a few years ago.

They are actually fairly simple to build, but making them powerful is rather difficult.
 
They had a guy on "Screensavers" who had directions for building a tabletop "rail gun" using fixed magnets. It was capable of knocking over tin cans.
 
I heard somewhere that the Navy experimented with using a 'linear motor' to launch aircraft off their carriers but had problems with the electromagnetic pulse frying all the computer systems when it was fired!
Thats probably why they still use the old steam-launched mechanism today.

Also, some of the newer rollercoasters use such a system in reverse to slow them down at the end of the run.
 
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