This is the correct spelling of Tesla`s name in cyrilic.
NIKOLA TESLA (1857-1943)
Tesla’s best-known
invention takes the spark-gap oscillator and uses it to vibrate vigorously a coil
consisting of few turns of heavy conductor. Inside of this primary coil sits another
secondary coil with hundreds of turns of slender wire. In the Tesla coil there is no iron
core as in the conventional step-up transformer, and this air-core transformer differs
radically in other ways.
Recounting the birth of this invention, Tesla wrote, "Each time the condenser was
discharged the current would quiver in the primary wire and induce corresponding
oscillations in the secondary. Thus, a transformer or induction coil on new principles was
evolved Electrical effects of any desired character and of intensifies undreamed of before
are now easily producible by perfected apparatus of this kind." Elsewhere Tesla
wrote, "There is practically no limit to the power of an oscillator."
The conventional step-up transformer (short primary winding, long secondary on an iron
core) boosts voltage at the expense of amperage. This is not true of Tesla's transformer.
There is a real gain in power.
Writing of the powerful coils he experimented with at his Colorado Springs lab, coils with
outputs in excess of 12 million volts, Tesla wrote, "It was a revelation to myself to
find out that ... a single powerful streamer breaking out from a well insulated terminal
may easily convey a current of several hundred amperes! The general impression is that the
current in such a streamer is small."
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Tesla's Biography
HOW A Tesla Coil WORKS 
A Tesla-coil secondary has its own particular electrical character
determined in part by the length of that slender coiled wire. Like a guitar string of a
particular length, it wants to vibrate at a particular frequency. The secondary is
inductively plucked by the primary coil. The primary circuit consists of a pulsating
high-voltage source (a generator or conventional step-up transformer), a capacitor, a
spark gap, and the primary coil itself. This circuit must be designed so that it vibrates
at a frequency compatible with the frequency at which the secondary wants to vibrate.
The primary circuit's frequency is determined by the frequency and voltage of the source,
the capacity of the capacitor, the setting of the spark gap, and the character of the
primary coil, determined in part by the length of its winding. Now when all these
primary-circuit components are tuned to work in harmony with each other, and the circuits
resulting frequency is right for plucking the secondary in a compatible rhythmic manner,
the secondary becomes at its terminal end maximally excited and develops huge electrical
potentials, which if not put to work, boil off as a corona of bluish light or as sparks
and streamers that jump to nearby conductors with crackling reports.
Unlike the conventional iron-core step-up transformer, whose core has the effect of
damping vibrations, the secondary of the Tesla transformer is relatively free to swing
unchecked. The pulsings from the primary coil have the effect of pushing a child in a
swing. If it's done in a rhythmic manner at just the right moment at the end of a cycle,
the swing will oscillate up to great heights. Similarly, with the right timing, the
electrical vibration of the secondary can be made to swing up to tremendous amplitudes,
voltages in the millions. This is the power of resonance.
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