Hi all.
Seems that back in the 1900s Tesla was indeed experimenting with lasers.
More specifically, single shot ruby lasers powered by a capacitor discharge.
It appears that they worked by igniting a carbon button in the proximity of a ruby rod, generating very short bursts of red laser light.
At the time, Tesla may have abandoned the experiment because he couldn't get a stable beam, due to the requirement for a repetitive pulsed flash such as a xenon short arc tube.
However, if he had considered using a Blumlein circuit (aka nitrogen laser) things get very interesting indeed.
It could have been not only stable but powerful enough to reach several miles.
He could have come up with it after seeing a straight lightning strike on a nearby field and having one of his famous flashes of inspiration.
Now imagine one of these "tesla beam" generators mounted on the front of the RMS Titanic as a "Method of detecting and avoiding icebergs using directed light discharges" patented circa 1905.
.. !
The technology to build an N2 laser existed at the time, however in a rare case of theory needing to catch up with the physics the ruby laser was invented first.
The N2 laser was a later invention, after Blumlein came up with the theory.
Early examples could indeed make objects fluoresce which is possibly how they were fine tuned.
The N2 laser can run at atmospheric pressure, although at the time even a relatively poor vacuum with N2 as the main working gas would have worked.
All that would have been needed was a source of clean dry nitrogen, the laser itself and a source of high voltage.
The beam would probably have lit up the area in front of the ship like a Christmas tree due to atmospheric scatter, and any iceberg would have been very obvious indeed.
Discuss.
-A
Seems that back in the 1900s Tesla was indeed experimenting with lasers.
More specifically, single shot ruby lasers powered by a capacitor discharge.
It appears that they worked by igniting a carbon button in the proximity of a ruby rod, generating very short bursts of red laser light.
At the time, Tesla may have abandoned the experiment because he couldn't get a stable beam, due to the requirement for a repetitive pulsed flash such as a xenon short arc tube.
However, if he had considered using a Blumlein circuit (aka nitrogen laser) things get very interesting indeed.
It could have been not only stable but powerful enough to reach several miles.
He could have come up with it after seeing a straight lightning strike on a nearby field and having one of his famous flashes of inspiration.
Now imagine one of these "tesla beam" generators mounted on the front of the RMS Titanic as a "Method of detecting and avoiding icebergs using directed light discharges" patented circa 1905.
.. !
The technology to build an N2 laser existed at the time, however in a rare case of theory needing to catch up with the physics the ruby laser was invented first.
The N2 laser was a later invention, after Blumlein came up with the theory.
Early examples could indeed make objects fluoresce which is possibly how they were fine tuned.
The N2 laser can run at atmospheric pressure, although at the time even a relatively poor vacuum with N2 as the main working gas would have worked.
All that would have been needed was a source of clean dry nitrogen, the laser itself and a source of high voltage.
The beam would probably have lit up the area in front of the ship like a Christmas tree due to atmospheric scatter, and any iceberg would have been very obvious indeed.
Discuss.
-A