Farra Day, Here is a photo that I have of his device. As you can see Stan more or less copied his work. I'm sure that if you find Stan system has no merit, Tesla's wan't have any merit either. Also I added another photo of my test cell which goes along with the movie above.
Hi GPS, while the image looks like one of Tesla's drawings, clearly the blue descriptive wording has been added by someone else. And without the descriptive wording we would just have normal Tesla capacitors - and why would we think otherwise? What patent is that tesla drawing from? As that will no doubt clear the matter up.
And just while I'm here, I've been looking into Tesla's hairpin device and I can fully understand how physically shorting the parallel copper/brass bars at the top will not cause an electrical short.
Clearly if a standing wave is set up on one bar, while the other bar is effectively at 0V, then depending on where the nodes are, shorting across from the live bar to the 0V bar will have no effect. With the bars shorted at the top, then we can assume that a node sits there. To test this simply connect the light bulb to the top - it should not light! This science is well understood by anyone that works with transmitters and aerials, including HAM radio enthusiasts.
A standard Tesla coil also exhibits the same properties, with its secondary coil at a 1/4 wavelength, the bottom of the coil will show little voltage, the voltage gradually rising as you move up the coil until you see maximum voltage at the top.
I'm happy to be wrong on this if what you are demonstrating is not the case, but I just think that perhaps we would be better eliminating well known science and well documented explanations before looking to the more exotic.