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{{Infobox scientist
| name = John H. Couture
| alt = John H. Couture
| residence = San Diego, California, United States
| fields = [[Tesla Coil|Tesla coil]] engineering, high-voltage design
| workplaces = JHC Engineering Co.
| known_for = The JHCTES Tesla coil design program; ''Tesla Coil Design Manual''; "A New Tesla Coil Design Approach"
}}

'''John H. Couture''' is an American engineer and high-voltage experimenter who spent many years reducing [[Tesla Coil|Tesla coil]] design to an explicit, calculable engineering discipline. Writing as J. H. Couture and trading as JHC Engineering Co. of San Diego, California, he produced a sequence of design manuals, construction guides and a computer design program that became standard working references among independent coil builders. His work belongs to the independent-inventor side of [[Tesla Technology|Tesla technology]] research rather than to any university programme.

==Biography==
Little is published about Couture's personal life. He is identified in the 1992 International Tesla Symposium programme as "John Couture PE", indicating a licensed professional engineer, and his publications were issued from his own imprint, JHC Engineering Co., at a San Diego, California address. His books and articles appeared through the late 1980s and the 1990s and circulated through Tesla-community booksellers and the International Tesla Society.

==Scientific contributions==
Couture's central contribution was to treat the Tesla coil as an engineering artefact with a defined parameter set rather than as a matter of builder's intuition. Coil performance had traditionally been reported in the crudest possible terms &mdash; the length of the spark it would throw &mdash; and Couture's writing repeatedly returns to the question of what that measurement actually means. His 1989 article "Tesla Voltage vs. Sphere and Streamer Sparks", published in the International Tesla Society journal ''Extraordinary Science'', addresses precisely the practice of using spark length as the sole description of a coil's output, and distinguishes the different discharge regimes that produce it.

The design work culminated in JHCTES, a computer-aided Tesla coil design program. Couture identified an explicit list of coil input and output parameters &mdash; 36 in the earlier documentation, 46 in the later ''JHCTES Tesla Coil Notebook'' &mdash; and organised the design task as the problem of choosing a consistent set of them. The accompanying ''Tesla Coil Design Manual'' presents the same material graphically, with 26 design graphs covering coils producing sparks from one inch to 400 inches, so that a builder without the software could still work from published curves rather than from trial and error. The ''Tesla Coil Construction Guide'' (1994) covers the practical side, describing the building of coils in the one-inch to eight-foot spark range.

Taken together the three books and the program address the recurring complaint of the amateur high-voltage community: that Tesla's own writings and the surviving literature give a builder no systematic way to predict what a given geometry will do. Couture's answer was a closed parameter model that could be solved in either direction, from desired output back to component values or from components forward to expected performance. On this wiki his paper "[[A New Tesla Coil Design Approach]]" (1992) sits alongside the work of [[James F Corum]], [[Gary L Peterson]] and [[Gary L Johnson]] as part of the practical, measurement-oriented core of the Tesla tradition.

==Conference appearances==
Couture presented at the International Tesla Society symposia in Colorado Springs, the annual gathering whose proceedings were edited by [[Steven R Elswick]] and whose successor event is the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference run by [[Tesla Tech]]:
* "A New Tesla Coil Design Approach" &mdash; 1992 International Tesla Symposium, Colorado Springs

==Works==
* "[[A New Tesla Coil Design Approach]]", 1992 International Tesla Symposium
* "Tesla Voltage vs. Sphere and Streamer Sparks", ''Extraordinary Science'', April 1989
* ''Tesla Handbook'', 1988
* ''Tesla Coil Design Manual'', JHC Engineering Co., 1992
* ''JHCTES Tesla Coil Notebook'', JHC Engineering Co., 1993 (versions 3.1 and 3.3, CAD software manual)
* ''Tesla Coil Construction Guide'', JHC Engineering Co., 1994

==External links==
* [https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/people/j-h-couture J. H. Couture at Tesla Universe]
* [https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/books/publishers/jhc-engineering JHC Engineering titles at Tesla Universe]
* [https://teslatech.info/ttstore/conftapes/ITS/TS9200.html 1992 International Tesla Symposium programme (TeslaTech)]

[[Category:Scientist|Couture John H]]