BEDINI IMHOTEP BODKINS REPLICATION UPDATE6 RADIANT ENERGY TE

[Drevtoobe]

Hey Nat, I see that you are interested in metallic spheres for doing some of your experiments. There is a property of static electricity that makes spheres particularly interesting and useful.

The property is that when you have a metal object charged with static electricity, the electric field lines coming off the surface of the object are always at right angles to the surface. So you can see for a sphere everything is very even and symmetrical, there are no sharp edges on the sphere.

[Drevtoobe]

That is in contrast to something like a flat metallic plate charged with static electricity. You can imaging the lines of the electric field being at right angles to the top and bottom surfaces of the plate. But at the edges of the plate you can imagine the lines of the electric field 'bunching up' around the sharp edges, because every small part of the edge has to have a corresponding electric field like at right angles.

This creates a high electric field 'gradient' at the edges.

[Drevtoobe]

This high electric field gradient (which means you have a high rate of change of voltage over distance from the plate) can ionize the air and literally strip or add electrons to the air molecules. This creates the hissing that you sometimes hear on high voltage setups.

The nice smooth sphere avoids the high voltage gradients, and doesn't ionize the air. The sphere can be charged to a much higher static voltage potential than the plate without bleeding off charge due to air ionization.

[Drevtoobe]

The inside of the charged sphere (or any other hollow metallic object) will have no electric field. The charge on the surface of any hollow object will spread out so that inside the hollow object everything cancels itself out and there is no electric field.

As far as painting the spheres go, I think that the main reason that was done was to protect Tesla's hardware from the weather. I really doubt that you need to do it for your own experimentation.

[nat1971a]

Tesla advises in the colorado notes p226 that he shellaced the ball several times and finally covered it with weatherproof rubber paint. i.e providing insulation just as the insulated plate as mentioned in the radiant energy patent. Unfortunately he does not elaborate on what paint he uses at Wardencliff. But as long as one understands what he was doing and the process it doesn't matter.

[nat1971a]

Tesla mentions that the plates and spheres are insulated on several occasions (in patents and in article). So i would say it is important. He has already done all the experimentation in every possible way all we need to do is understand it.

[Drevtoobe]

"all we need to do is understand it."

Perhaps you could try to figure out what the differences are unpainted vs. painted, and run some tests unpainted first and then run them painted afterward.

What I am trying to suggest is that you question everything, even what Tesla was doing.