2.4 Magnifier

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"The magnifier coil"

The magnifier coil is the true Tesla coil. This is what Tesla experimented with in Colorado Spings. It consists of three coils, a primary, a secondary, and an extra coil or "magnifier". The extra coil is not in any way coupled to the primary's field flux. The primary and secondary make up a driver stage. The secondary is not like that of a 1/4 wave Tesla coil. It is normally very large and is wound with heavy wire ofnot many turns. The primary and secondary are coupled very closely. The magnifier is placed at a distance to prevent the primary's field from destructively interfering with the extra coil. The extra coil is base fed with a large conductor of decent surface area. This conductor is connected to the top of the secondary and to the bottom of the extra coil. What this does is allow the extra coil to develop very high voltages since it is allowed to oscillate freely. Magnifiers do not make a good first coil project.