On Wed, 24 Jun 2009, John Berry wrote: > Tesla in US patent 685,958 describes how an insulated copper plate can > absorb such energetic charges from the environment (seemingly from the sun)
Build one, and you'll find that he accidentally discovered the Photoelectric effect, where ultraviolet light knocks electrons off a metal surface, leaving it positively charged. His 685,958 device acts as a "vibrating-reed electrometer," a very sensitive detector for DC electrostatic voltages. It also translates DC e-fields into audio, thus harnessing the extreme sensitivity of the human ear as an electronic instrument. Quite a feat when accomplished before transistors, before vacuum tubes. Physicists only had the slow insensitive version: a vertical quartz fiber, a metal flag, and tiny mirror with light beam. Today we instead use these below. But it's conventional stuff. If someone was VERY VERY lucky, they'd discover some sort of weird signal that Tesla's device detects, but modern electrometers cannot. http://amasci.com/emotor/chargdet.html http://amasci.com/electrom/sas51p1.html#Electro http://www.precisionstrobe.com/jc/fieldmill/fieldmill.html http://www.imagineeringezine.com/PDF-FILES/efield1a.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20061231224121/http://www.wenzel.com/pdffiles/cloud.pdf > This can not be readily explained by the effects of microwaves due > to the insulation, the fact that the sun can cause this charge to accumulate > and the fact that this charge is unusually energetic at low voltages. Just > read the patent. Don't just read the patent: build one! It's an incredibly simple device: a metal plate connected to a vibrating contact to ground (a relay with AC-driven coil,) with an audio transformer in series with the ground conductor. Tesla used clockwork contacts, but we can just make a simple buzzer using a 5V reed relay and a sig gen. Expose the metal plate to various signals, and listen to the contact- chopped AC current in that ground wire (use headphones, or better yet, an audio amp which didn't exist in Tesla's time.) And with no signal, you hear silence. Additionally, it picks up RF. It's a "mechanical radio," and this device is Tesla's mechanical analog to the Branly Coherer, but it fires itself continously, and therefore detects incredibly tiny signals. The Coherer only fires when it receives fairly powerful RF signals. Also, Tesla's device directly steps CW RF down in frequency so it can be heard in the headphones, while Branly Coherer does not. And Tesla's device easily detects DC, including ions, glow-discharges, slowly-moving charged plastic, and perhaps x-rays. (But in modern times it's swamped out by 60Hz e-fields, so you'll need a somewhat shielded environment, or a 60Hz notch filter.) I've only recently played with these "Tesla Receivers," and havn't yet added it to Youtube, or my page. But I didn't see any anomalies in the brief time I was experimenting. > ATGroup found these cold electrons in the TMB or Thermal Magnetic Battery. > (I think I can dig up the web page of the TMB for any interested) Yeah, sounds like THAT's the one I was after. > While his theory seems probably entirely wrong it has been replicated by > several including JLN and others with success: > http://jlnlabs.online.fr/vsg/index.htm Ah, I knew about this one, but didn't know that JLN had tried it out. Valle' isn't the usual crop of self-deluders, and I think this is one of the rare claims that's actually worth testing. > Boyd Bushman in US patent 5,929,732 shows a magnetic device that projects a The trouble with most of these: they're crap. You build them and they don't work as advertised. Perhaps you made a mistake, but you'll probably never find the problem without help from the original inventor. Or perhaps something was intentinoally left out of the patent. Or much more likely, perhaps the inventor was dishonestly fooling himself or actually insane, and the patent is purely for vanity. If the rule for orthodox reality is "99% of everything is crap," then the rule for alt-science inventions is similar, but the percentage is far closer to 1. (You won't discover this fact unless you spend some time actually trying out a bunch of alt-science devices, and encountering continuous failures or just a string of mistakes and delusions. One becomes cynical after enough of these events.) I find that it's nearly worthless talking about such untested devices UNLESS YOU YOURSELF have got one of them to work, or you're in direct contact with such a person. Don't waste your own time pretending that they're real, since almost always they're not. To converse about them, it's a good idea to preface every statement with this: "It's pure speculation, and probably just one in an unending string of hoaxes or errors, but..." (Do that for awhile, and you'll develop the habit of remaining silent until you've had a chance to test the stuff personally. A genuine anomaly is rare, worth widely publicizing, while crying wolf must be avoided.) > Another example is seen in this video: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltnlviCqu70 (watch the next 2 from him A high electrolysis current, routed through grubby supermagnets touched lightly against alligator clips? That's a forumla for random noise and corroded contacts. Measurment results then are like seeing animal shapes in the clouds. He's making lots of "spot welder" type sparks, not HV sparks. He says "what was that?" Hasn't he ever seen the tiny "sparks" of molten metal spat out whenever you touch a corroded screwdriver across battery terminals? > So just to recap we have 7 accounts listed above of electrons flowing along I'd say zero accounts, since neither you nor I have yet verified any of them. Being one step removed from an experimenter is VERY NOT OK, since most amateurs aren't trying to learn the truth, but instead are looking for evidence to support their agendas, while rejecting counterevidence. The guy in the above video is making just that mistake. Unless we know differently, the same is probably true about all the other reports as well. Orthodox science does suppress threatening discoveries, but more often the "discoveries" simply aren't real. Of course the sorts of experiment reports you discuss are very useful if you have lots of time and looking for anomalies to verify. But until this is done, these reports are almost the same as rumors and urban legends. Don't say "I heard that someone tried it and it worked." Wait until you can say "I personally tried it, and here are all the gory details in great quantity." > Patrick Flanagan in US Patent 4,743,275 'Electron field generator' describes > a capacitor with a dielectric dopped with tiny metal particles, the entire It's quite clearly a negative ion generator, even with description of health benefits and precipitation of air pollution, just as all neg ion generators do. With AC, you have capacitance currents and don't need any conductive path, so ion-spitting coronas develops on sharp points of suspended metal particles. Normal ion wind DOES fill a space almost immediately, it self-repels and seeks out distant walls, that's how neg ion generators always behave. > Bill's web page(s) on ball lightening gains more and more weight as people > add their report, apparently about 5% of the population have seen ball > lightening about the same % that have seen lightening up close. BL Eyewitness reports are very different than amateur alt-science experimenter reports, since BL eyewitnesses aren't intentionally looking for weird events, and they aren't out to prove their own personal theories. If you strenuously apply yourself to search for weirdness, you'll see it everywhere, but it's all just orthodox phenomena filtered through mistakes in perception. So, don't suspect weirdness and certainly don't leap to accept its reality unless there really is no other possible explanation. If you do, you'll waste your life chasing the 99% crap, and never manage to see past the illusory weirdness to the rare genuine anomalies hidden behind it. > Also it would be worth noting that most fully "respectible" scientists would > not think about these possibilities, try the experiments or report on them > if they did so anyone who does report results is going to be more likely > either an amateur or a professional who not well respected. Try the experiments. Don't talk here. Go try them, then start a web page and post the results so they won't just vanish as usual. The last ones I did are here: Tesla's death ray on your lab bench: the 'air threads' effect, accelerated nanoparticles at one atmosphere pressure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLG8gKb-lyk X-rays where none should be? Ah, that's because we can have vacuum where none should be! AC high voltage will spontaneously create high-vacuum regions if the e-field is high enough to create corona discharge in bubbles within dielectric. Perhaps a bubble- filled insulator can become an "x-ray tube." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqDI0lFz9Gc (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
