crystal radio: the first real free energy device

[Lakes]

An OC140!!, good lord, that takes me back a lot of years.

I wonder if these could be collectors items?

[gyulasun]

...
Gyula,  thank you for the radium info. I had run into that article before, but in the scientific american instead. I did try waving uranuim salts around a ferrite rod antenna inside a proper radio, but it had no effect. Now that I have a crystal set I will try it on a wire antenna instead. Unfortunately uranium is a million times weaker than radium. I think another way to reproduce the experiment is to use a negative ion generator instead of radium. I'm not sure how it works but perhaps the effective antenna area is increased by the conducting ionized air?

Profitis, my friend gave me a few small chunks of germanium 99.9999% pure. The picture shows my stock of germanium.  I can try replicating you experiment, tell me how how did it exactly.

Regarding  the uranium doped galena, I'm getting the feeling that the Moreland patent application is a fairy tale. Why are there so many people in this field spinning yarns, turning their ideas into supposedly factual events?  I get the feeling this Moreland chap may have given conferences on his device and needed this patent application to boost his status.

Well,  I am a lurker on this topic (or on nuclear chemics and physics) and I think that alpha particles coming from materials like radium does ionizes air in its vicinity, and this makes air more conductive locally than normally it is,  this turns out from Page 34 of this file here: http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/04/054/4054050.pdf    In Page 35, the radioactive lightning rods are mentioned too.

IT is very possible that your uranium salt is too weak to casue detectable effects. In the test described in The Electrician, the strength of the radium bromide used was defined as very weak, of 50000 units. Somehow it should be figured out how it compares to your uranium salt strength, how weak is the weak which is still good, lol

Re on the ion generator: perhaps Tesla's ozon patent could be taken as a start.  What you wrote that the effective antenna area increases due to the ionized air: well I am guessing a yes here but I could think of the followings too: the effective quality factor, Q, of an antenna (and possibly the LC circuits coupled to it)  is increased by the effect of the particles, reducing Ohmic losses both in the antenna and in the LC circuits coupled to it, as it were 'inducing' negative resistance in those wires pf the antenna and the coils, so the selectivity of the system increases hence the received signal is enhanced. 

Gyula

EDIT:  This video may also be of interest here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8GlzUjYazs

[DreamThinkBuild]

Hi Gyulasun,

That video is pretty cool, thanks.

Cloud chambers are really neat devices to see some of the energetic particles that swirl around us constantly.

Radium (clock)hands in cloud chamber
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAYDae9zhrs

Cosmic Rays @0:05 they have some interesting data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnKvtazt5So

How to build a cloud chamber
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xky3f1aSkB8

We truly live in a sea of energy. It's just how do we focus/tune this randomness into coherence. I haven't seen any videos of these cloud chambers where they put a coil in them with varying frequencies and see how they change the local space around them, would be interesting.

[pomodoro]

Good video Gyula!   

Well, I made the doped galena, knowing that it went against current science. Unlike magnetic and electronic devices, there have not been many replications of these experiments, so I though that there might be a very slight chance of some anomaly showing up, especially when similar devices were supposed to have worked in T. H. Moray's earlier work.  I assumed that Moray's early work (lighting a single light globe with what appears to be a crystal radio set and  in another device, being able to power a 2000 ohm horn speaker directly) was authentic (a big assumption to say the least ) and figured that he either received lots of power from the station, used feedback to the antenna to improve its performance ( description of inch long sparks from his antenna in later versions) or the radioactive sources produced the power.
I decided to focus on the last aspect for now.  Although the nuclear magnetic battery  experiments I did a while ago with uranium salts did not show any increase in the Q of the coil (Brown) , having read Moreland's good description of Morays work and Moreland's own patent application i decided to try these galena experiments. The quantity of Uranium trioxide used was 0.25g in 3g of galena. I only used a lump of about 1/3 of this total mass.  Now even if we assume that all of the energy from the uranium can be utilized, we still come up with a very small value. I'd need to work it out , but it is puny.  You mention increasing the conductivity of the coil to increase the Q. But would we also get this effect by irradiating the bare coil with a negative ion generator, like the ones popularized in the 1980's.  Pointy needles are made to have a high electrostatic voltage and millions of ions per second stream out of the points.  The ions would contact the coil and leave electrons on its surface, also giving it a high negative electrostatic charge, but would it really  increase its conductivity? I'm not so sure.

[pomodoro]

An OC140!!, good lord, that takes me back a lot of years.

I wonder if these could be collectors items?

Not sure, there must be thousands around still. I've got oc70 or 71s as well. I love the glass bulb and rudimentary structure.  Apparently they cost a lot compared to today's transistors, inflation adjusted.

Profitis I tried a quick test with germanium against al foil and no voltage or current at all occurred.