Is Nikola Tesla the only scientist to successfully create ball lightning?

Question

Related: Is there any scientific proof that ball lightning is real?

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Someone passed along this The Oatmeal comic about Tesla. It's quite interesting and entertaining. I was curious about a lot of the statements' complete veracity, but this one in particular struck me (emphasis mine):

Ever heard of ball lightning?

It's lightning that appears in the form of a sphere and travels slowly while traveling a few feet above the ground.

It's an extremely rare phenomenon and even today no scientists have ever successfully produced it in a laboratory.

Oh, except Tesla did it back in the 1890's

The related link above says that we currently have no explanation, which I would think makes it pretty difficult to replicate. Did Tesla, indeed, create the only "artificially-generated" ball lightning to date?

Or perhaps a better question is, "What is the source and reliability of the evidence supporting Tesla as having created ball lightning?"

Answer 1

While Tesla was reportably able to reproduce this in a laboratory setting well before any other scientists could, we have been able to produce it since then.

A press release from the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik which is repeated by PHYS ORG show it.

Answer 2

He is not the only one to reproduce ball lightning.

Mysterious 'Ball Lightning' Recreated In The Lab [GIFS]

From a NASA site (PDF):

At last the discovery of how to produce ball lightning on a command and controlled basis has been discovered by Robert K. Golka, Jr. It took 23 years and thousands of failures to develop the techniques. Similar plasma balls have appeared in dwellings on rare occasions and on commercial and military aircraft during flight.

The type Golka has created are similar to what has come into airplanes during flight and that have appeared in WW-2 submarines during maneuvers. They consist of a liquid metal core or kernel surrounded by a metal vapor boundary layer. It has characteristics very much like a drop of water bouncing and dancing for a few seconds on a hot cast-iron stove. With higher power input to the fireball it can be made to flow and travel higher from a surface or ground area.

Answer 3

He is not the only but beyond doubt was the first one. According to Ball lightnings in Tesla's lab:

The adjustments should be made with particular care when the transmitter is one of great power, not only on accout of economy, but also in order to avoid danger. I have shown that it is practicable to produce in a resonating circuit as E A B B’ D immense electrical activities, measured by tens and even hundreds of thousands of horse-power, and in such case, if the points of maximum pressure should be shifted below the terminal D, along coil B, a ball of fire might break out and destroy the support F or anything else in the way. For the better appreciation of the nature of this danger it should be stated, that the destructive action may take place with inconceivable violence. This will cease to be surprising when it is born in mind, that the entire energy accumulated in the excited circuit, instead of requiring, as under normal working conditions, one quarter of the period or more for its transformation from static to kinetic form, may spend itself in an incomparably smaller interval of time, at a rate on many millions of horse power. The accident is apt to occur when, the transmitting circuit being strongly excited, the impressed oscillations upon it are caused, in any manner more or less sudden, to be more rapid than the free oscillations. It is therefore advisable to begin the adjustments with feeble and somewhat slower impressed oscillations, strengthening and quickening them gradually, until the apparatus has been brought under perfect control. To increase the safety, I provide on a convenient place, preferably on terminal D, one or more elments or plates either of somewhat smaller radius of curvature or protruding more or less beyond the others (in wich case they may be of larger radius of curvature) so that, should the pressure rise to a value, beyond wich it is not desired to go, the powerful discharge may dart out there and lose itself harmlessly in the air. Such a plate, performing a function similar to that of a safety valve on a high pressure reservoir, is indicated at V.

Nikola Tesla: US1,119,732. Apparatus for transmitting electrical energy, Jan. 18, 1902.