This thread has made me discover "The Electrician"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electrician... and lose countless hours reading the .pdfs of the few numbers that are floating in the internet. And I'm addicted now, I need to know and see how it all developed back in the 1800s in "The Electrician" pages. Does anybody know where can I get them all?
A pearl from back then:
"In his experiments Lodge had simulated lightning by discharging Leyden jars. Preece and others questioned whether this was a valid analogy, and it was indeed the weakest part of Lodge's argument. The more substantial issue, however, was the alleged effect of self-induction in radically increasing the impedance of a conductor to a rapidly alternating current such as resulted from a Leyden jar discharge or, according to Lodge, a lightning bolt. According to Maxwellian theory, as elaborated by Heaviside, Poynting, and Lord Rayleigh (J. W. Strutt), this was essentially a field effect, and it involved nothing less than the nature of an electric current.
To most "practical men" like Preece, a current in a wire was much like the flow of water in a pipe. There might be some modifications picturing the pipe as elastic, to simulate capacitance, for instance, or filled with baffles to simulate resistance but it was basically a simple and intuitive picture, and a remarkably useful one. The essential insight of Maxwell's theory, however, was to focus on the field, not the wire; as FitzGerald put it, "According to Maxwell's view, there is a great deal more going on outside the conductor than inside it." The most striking implication of this view was one Poynting (and independently Heaviside) had derived from Maxwell's theory in 1884.
14 Preece in Electrician, 1888, 21:646, 662; Heaviside in ibid., p. 772 (rpt. in Heaviside, Electrical Papers, Vol. II, p. 448).
15 G. J. Symons (ed.), Lightning Rod Conference Report (London: Spon, 1882). 16 Electrician, 1888, 21:676, 679-680; cf. Lodge, Advancing Science, pp. 96-97. 17 See, e.g., S. A. Varley, Electrical Review, 1888, 23:224."
BRUCE J. HUNT, "Practice vs. Theory" The British Electrical Debate, 1888-1891.
https://google.com/search?q="Practice+vs.+Theory,+The+British+Electrical+Debate,+1888-1891"What still isn't clear to me is whether the radiation losses are in addition to the 50% or included in the 50%, nor the % in which energy is lost as heat in resistances vs the losses due to EM radiation, nor if a 50% loss is inevitable. Some have suggested in this thread that slow charging trough an inductor can reduce the losses below that 50%, is it true?