tuks.nl Steinmetz reference folder, 2026-10-08
Site: http://www.tuks.nl/pdf/Reference_Material/Steinmetz/ (directory listing; the site is kept by an independent free-energy/Tesla researcher and hosts Dollard-related material; found via the Wikipedia citation for the 1898 article). Fetched by script.
Listing
General Lectures on Electrical Engineering 1908 and 1918; Engineering Mathematics 1911; "Electrical Disturbances and the Nature of Electrical Energy" 1912; Elementary Lectures on Electric Discharges 1911; "The Natural Period of a Transmission Line and the Frequency of Lightning Discharge Therefrom", Electrical World 1898; Alternating Current Phenomena 1900; Transient Electric Phenomena 1909; "Reaction Machines" chapter.
Downloaded (research/files/), both image-only scans; OCR'd with tesseract to research/pages/ocr-1898.txt and ocr-1912.txt
- steinmetz-1898-natural-period-transmission-line-lightning.pdf (3 pages, Electrical World, 27 Aug 1898; scan title "electricalworld32newy"). Steinmetz, "The Natural Period of a Transmission Line and the Frequency of Lightning Discharges Therefrom". [web, OCR] Derives the oscillation of a line discharging to ground from its distributed constants and tabulates the fundamental frequency against line length: "Length of line 10 20 30 40 50 60 80 100 miles ... = 4680 2340 1560 1170 937.5 780 585 475 cycles" (OCR digits partly garbled). Conclusion (OCR): discharges produced by sudden changes "are complex waves of many harmonics, which in their relative magnitude depend upon the initial charge and its distribution - that is, in the case of the lightning discharge, upon the atmospheric electrostatic field of force", and the fundamental frequency of a line's oscillating discharge "is relatively low". Bears on claim 4: this is the earliest statement found of the f1 = 7.5 x 10^9 / l0 law and the same table (4700 at 10 miles to 470 at 100 miles) that the Transient book repeats in 1909/1920. It dates the idea to 1898. Equations need a page-image read (OCR garbled).
- steinmetz-1912-electrical-disturbances-nature-of-electrical-energy.pdf (8 pages, General Electric Review 1912). Footnote: "An address to the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies at their convention in Spring Lake Beach, N. J." [web, OCR] - Classes of disturbance: traveling waves (arcing grounds, lightning), standing waves, and "the most dangerous of all disturbances, cumulative oscillations, like the resonance of a tuning fork, namely, oscillations which gradually build up, increase in intensity until they finally limit themselves and become stationary, or die down again, or increase until something happens. Such for instance are the hunting of synchronous machines, certain internal transformer oscillations, etc." - Destruction by repetition: "Each individual electric impulse would not have sufficient energy to do damage, but when they follow each other successively, in thousands and millions, as coming from an arcing ground, then finally they cause destruction." - Power as quantity x intensity (current x voltage), compared with hydraulic energy (flow x head) and heat (entropy x temperature). - The editor's abstract says the address argues light, heat, Hertzian waves and AC fields are the same phenomenon differing in frequency; discusses the luminiferous ether as both an infinitely thin gas and a solid (contradiction), and the ionic theory, concluding that present theories "represent only crude conceptions". Bears on claims 1 and 4 (cumulative oscillation in transformers as a recognised class by 1912, two years before the Discharges chapter), and claim 7 (his view of the field and the ether in 1912; compare Four Lectures on Relativity and Space, 1923).
Result: positive.