Source of energy, Testatika

[TinselKoala]

You can take an ordinary air variable capacitor, a high-voltage one like is used in ham transmitters, and which can have its movable plates rotated 360 degrees. Drive this capacitor with a motor and you will see voltage generated at its terminals. Put a diode in there and you can actually charge up a battery or capacitor. The "Principle Experiment" is only lacking either a diode or a commutator/switch, to be able to charge up capacitors by the same means, I think.

[Shanti]

IMHO it surely is no problem to generate HV with such kind of device, but that doesn't give you anything in excess. The question is: Where does the extra energy come from, and how?
Someone just posted an article from an old book from Inge Schneider. In it there's an interview with Mr Bosshard. And an interesting part of this interview is the following:


Mr Schneider:
I do have a certain idea, how the Testatika could work. Energy doesn't come from
nothing, but from the atmosphere. It is known, that the atmosphere, the weather,
has an enormous energy in it. It is, for example eerie, the amount of energy
which is set free during a Tornado. On the Testatika, I guess, electricity is
drawn from the atmosphere by electrons and then utilized.

Mr Bosshard:
Yes, I can tell you, I'm not a technician, and only have had a physics
education, but for me it was a revelation, when I did understand the principle.
The machine works according to the ordering principle, just like also the
Tornado does. A law is activated, which aims for a order, pointing to the
center, and there the energies get unlimited at the end.
To stay on the machine topic: What does it do?
It orders the positive and negative parts in the atmosphere - exactly how they
exist in a thunderstorm. A polarization of opposed forces is developed, an
order, a voltage field in between, and this is efficiency. Ordering equals
efficiency. This is the basic law, which is true.
[...]


So it seems, like Mr Baumann explained to him the basic functional principle, but IMHO it doesn't seem that he new details on how this is then actually practically done in the machines.

[gauschor]

@TinselKoala: but there's the point: if I use a motor it's like that: let's say the motor drives at about 50 revolutions/second and does this for 10 seconds to charge the capacitor up, then it's a minimum of 500 rps already. Compared to that, Baumann only needed 10 rotations to charge up the cap. Something in Baumann's principle experiment setup must have been overly efficient.

[mikewatson]

It seems to me the only way it would be possible to get that much energy from such a small and simple device as Baumann demonstrated is by the use of radium bromide, which was then readily available as luminous paint for clock and watch dials. I have here a small ww2 era radioactive instrument pointer and it produces a respectable number of clicks on a geiger counter.

Here is an effect discovered by Maby and Franklin in ww2 but forgotten:-
Take geiger counter,  put on it a radioactive source, alpha or beta emitter such as a vintage camping gas mantle from ebay(not all modern ones are radioactive) as an alpha source or salt substitute (potassium chloride) which is naturally radioactive due to the presence of potassium 40 (see wikipedia:-potassium 40)  for a beta emitter.
Use a laptop and a data collection device to read the geiger clicks with respect to time and show them on a laptop. Wait until a vehicle passes and you will see (and hear) the geiger clicks/second  speed up and slow down in a wavelike way as the vehicle passes.
This effect was called the "mass wave" by Glasewski around 1950. Note the total decay rate remains unaltered because the increase in decay rate is followed by a decrease in decay rate in a wavelike manner.
Perhaps something similar was used by Baumann.

[Shanti]

Did you ever do the math how strong the radioactive decay actually would have had to be?
Let's assume if it is possible to somehow stimulate the decay. But this stimulation would not need to have a factor of 1000s, but of millions or billions.
And if we now would really be able to get this stimulated strong decay, then you surely would not be able to convert it 100% to electricity. That's just not possible.
E.g. if we look at conventional nucleid batteries, then their efficiency is terrible. Even if you would somehow find a possibility that you can make the conversion more efficient, then still a lot of waste heat would have been produced. But all visitors stated that they couldn't detect any heat raise on the machines (nor could they detect any cooling of the device).
Also in this interview from Bosshard, he again points out, that any increasing/stimulation of the natural decay to get energy is against nature.
I personally really do not believe they would ever have made anything in that direction, as it would have been strongly against their beliefs and way of living.