Stan Meyer's bifilar coils, and the 1894 Tesla patent that says what they do

Search "bifilar coil" and you'll find it sold as Tesla's free-energy secret. It isn't a secret: it's US Patent 512,340, "Coil for Electro-Magnets", granted to Nikola Tesla on 9 January 1894, and he says plainly what it's for. Wind two wires side by side and join the end of one to the start of the other, and neighbouring turns sit at very different voltages, so the coil stores far more energy in the capacitance between its own turns. In Tesla's example the energy stored "in the coil as a whole will now be two hundred and fifty thousand times as great", and capacity made this way "is evenly distributed". His aim was to build into the coil the capacity he would otherwise need a condenser for. Stan Meyer bifilar-wound his resonant coils "to give it an enhancement of amp restriction to allow the voltage to perform the work" (Denver lecture, 1997), and on the slide he showed, the labels at both coils read, as far as the tape allows, "distributed capacitance". Tesla's patent is three pages long and anyone can read it. The tape and our redraw of Stan's slide are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer lecture · Denver, 1997
• N. Tesla, US Patent 512,340 · 1894
• Stan's Legacy redraw of Stan Meyer's slide · Denver, 1997
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Denver, 1997, at 19:13 (the bifilar resonant coils slide) — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• N. Tesla, US Patent 512,340, Coil for Electro-Magnets, filed 7 July 1893, granted 9 January 1894 (USPTO)
• Stan's Legacy redraw of the Denver 1997 slide (s12); label readings from the tape with Chris Bake