Nathan Stubblefield Earth battery/Self Generating Induction Coil Replications

[hansvonlieven]

G'day all,

I have just finished my latest essay in the Stubblefield series, this one looks at Helmholtz and the Meyer device in detail. All I have to do now is format my graphics, upload them to my website and post. Sometime tomorrow perhaps, as it is getting very late.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and all the best for the new year

Hans von Lieven.

[Thaelin]

   Hey now, you wouldn't want to be talkin about my great grand ma that way. She has a really ugly 12 gauge right next to the sofa. Still meaner than a badger too.



thaelin

[Freezer]

I was just thinking, perhaps the ground is acting as a capacitor, so if we take the energy too fast, we drain that capacitor.  Maybe if we take the energy in pulses, from each module producing current, then pair all those pulses together into one line.  Perhaps the energy will replenish itself fully before the next pulse of energy is taken.  Just an idea, I could be way off.

[Localjoe]

@freezer
The mini tpu would draw from the cap bank at the rate we designed it to .... so thats what it does in a very efficent way. but mind you if our cap bank was even only .22 f worth of capactiance the mini tpu would not drain the cap even close to half from its first needed input so i see this as a logical way to go. 

@jenna
           Good thinking 99 with that multivibrator circuit, bentzer from that thread had wanted to try that but not for our scenario.  So yes try it ! And they are not using an ic 555 or anything like that there are transistors and mofsets tho not real bad stuff to deal with ...   Bill is still using one cell but i guess my point was regardless of our starting tension/voltage the current we can store is as big as the resivor we give it to go into , and a device like that mini tpu or a regenerative boost transformer would probably be ideal to get some usable power... ON a small scale we can build this so its back yard worthy and a portable device to bring wherever device.. PLUG AND PLAY

But on a large scale i do not want to pay niagra mohawk for the rest of my life thats why im saying if this initial prototype goes well over what im guessing will take the better part of the next month or so , i will seriously consider an array of cells and multiple boost transformers connected to a battery bank then inverter.  The caps needed to make that work may have to be home made ones for that kinda storage so im waiting till a bit down the road to get that ambitious. But thats the game plan.

                                                                                                                                            Joe

[hansvonlieven]

Stubblefield continued:

G?day all,

Here is my next essay in the Stubblefield series. As you might remember, what started out as a simple project looking into Earth Batteries turned up Stubblefield. It became evident that the Stubblefield device was more than a simple galvanic battery using the earth as an electrolyte.

The main proof of this was that Stubblefield took his energy from a secondary coil, which indicates the presence of an alternating, or pulsed current, which galvanic action cannot generate. He was not the only one that did this. (see earlier posts)

Following that line of research and trying to track down the origin of these oscillations turned up a number of devices where inventors allegedly made use of this phenomenon in different ways, unconnected with earth batteries. There appeared to be a principle at work that so far is unacknowledged by conventional science.

Starting with the assumption that all these people could not have been ?pissing in the wind? as it were, as many of them had demonstrated working devices which science was at a loss to explain, I felt it necessary to re-examine the laws of conservation of energy.

The concept of conservation of energy was first expressed in detail by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) in his seminal book ?Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft? (On the Conservation of Force) published in 1847.

Helmholtz? paper rests squarely on the philosophical considerations of Parmenides (ca. 510 ? 450 BC). Parmenides is best known for his famous statement, here in Latin, which is the famous version, ?ex nihilo nihil fit? (out of nothing comes nothing).

Parmenides reasoned further: Since nothing can come from nothing and since there are evidently things in existence, a nothing as such (a perfect vacuum if you wish), cannot exist in nature. Modern quantum mechanics says the same.

The corollary to this is, that if a something cannot come from a nothing, and since a nothing cannot exist, a something cannot turn into a nothing and therefore must be eternally present.

This applies to everything, matter, energy, thought and whatever else. These things must have an eternal existence though they can change form.

This is the philosophical foundation of the conservation of energy laws. Incidentally, this is also the foundation for Socrates? (ca. 470 ? 399 BC) famous dissertation on the immortality of the soul.

But back to Helmholtz.

Helmholtz, by way of a number of examples of real devices, shows that all of the energy in a system can be accounted for.

This is all well known, so why am I bringing this up here?

Because this is not all that Helmholtz said. In seeming contradiction to his entire dissertation he makes, in the same volume, the following statement:

If the natural bodies also exhibit forces (Kraefte) which depend on time and speed or react in directions other than the straight lines joining each pair of acting material points - eg rotary ones ? then systems of such bodies would be possible in which energy (Kraft) is either lost or gained ad infinitum.  (page 19f)

This has been termed by many ?Helmholtz? exception to the rule of the conservation of energy?.

Needless to say that, whilst accepting the body of Helmholtz? work, science refutes this. It is also said that Helmholtz later retracted this statement. This is not true. He merely qualified it in 1881, by saying that this holds only true if Newton?s Third Law of Motion is generally valid.

So what was Helmholtz really saying here?

I do not believe for a minute that Helmholtz meant that there is an exception to the rule of the conservation of energy. His entire dissertation would be pointless otherwise. You do not put out a paper of that magnitude and then invalidate the whole thing with one sentence in the same breath.

Helmholtz was no ordinary academic. He was an experimenter and inventor. He invented amongst other things the Helmholtz resonators, Helmholtz coils and the ophthalmoscope, a device that can look at the retina, which is still used today by doctors worldwide in almost unchanged form. In other words a practical man as well as an intellectual giant.

Because of his outstanding contribution to the sciences the German Kaiser bestowed upon him the inheritable aristocratic title of  ?von?, an honour rarely bestowed for reasons other than political or commercial.

Helmholtz never gave any reasons for this statement; if he did, nothing has been recorded, but he would not have said something like this lightly.

Somewhere in his experiments he must have found evidence of this, though probably he could not gather sufficient proof to demonstrate the principle to his peers.

What he meant, in my view, is, that under certain circumstances when forces meet on specific vectors a gate opens which allows energy of enormous magnitude to escape from, or to, an underlying energy field (the ether if you wish) that has the potential of being exploited. Thus, the conservation of energy laws are still operational, though seemingly violated.

This is the mechanism I am trying to track down. There is evidence that this phenomenon is real. Since we do not understand the precise conditions that must be set up for this to occur, many of the discoveries that have been made in this area are not reproducible and have come about by chance.

I have just come across a device which, if real, might give us an opportunity to investigate this very thing and nail down, at least in part, some of the requirements for successful exploitation.

The device is remarkable for its utter simplicity. It was invented by Roy J. Meyers and patented in 1913. He called it an ?Absorber?. It has an interesting history.

Robert A Nelson writes:

Almost 100 years ago, Meyers served a 3-1/2 year sentence in the Arizona state prison at Florence. Before his incarceration, he had already invented an improved trolley wheel head that prevented it from jumping off the wire. While he was imprisoned, he was inspired to invent a device that would draw electricity from the atmosphere. He conferred with Superintendent Sims and Parole Clerk Sanders, and convinced them to give him the opportunity to develop his idea in a wooden shed on the grounds of the penitentiary. Within a few weeks, using easily available materials (chrome steel magnets and iron wire), he constructed the first crude working model, and used it to spark the gas engines of the prison's pump house. His second model developed 8 volts.

Miss Kate Barnard, who was State Commissioner of Charities and Corrections of Oklahoma, was a guest of Superintendent Sims at the time, and she saw the machine in operation. Miss Barnard was so impressed by it and by Meyers' essential integrity (despite the lapse that had gotten him imprisoned) that she told the story of Roy Meyers when later she appeared before the Arizona legislature to address them concerning prison reform. The legislature and Governor Hunt were convinced to grant Meyers an unsupervised leave of absence for 30 days to travel to Washington DC in order to apply for a patent.

Meyers gave this account of his trip:

"When I arrived in Washington and laid my plans before the patent office experts, they merely smiled and told me that I would have to build a model and demonstrate my claims --- that it seemed strange that I, unknown as I am in the electrical world, should have accomplished the things for which Edison, Tesla and other experts have been striving for years.
"They could not grasp the meaning of my drawings nor the explanation I tried to make to them. There was little time to spare, as I had only 20 days left of my leave, but I set to work in a few days was able to take a crude model around to the patent office to make a demonstration.
"Arriving at the patent office I telephoned to a friend who had been so kind as to introduce me and aid me in reaching the proper officials. The absorber was hoisted on two short poles and made to work. While they were as yet unable to understand the principles involved and hardly willing to believe their eyes, they were forced to admit that I had something new and different, and they told me that there would be no further objection; that I might file my application without further delay.
                                                                                                                                                  (Technology World Magazine, 1912)


I have tracked down the patent and already published it here in the forum in an earlier post. This is my analysis:
Meyers shows two embodiments in his patent. A basic version that is said to work and a more sophisticated version, somewhat different in design. The drawings in the patent are rather crude and untidy and because of this difficult to understand. I have created new graphics that show more clearly what is involved.
This is the bare bones version:



The diagram is self explanatory. Meyers says nothing about the length of iron wire between the magnets though they do not seem to be critical and can be quite short, say 3 or 4 feet. Alignment with the earth?s magnetic field is essential within a few degrees. It does not have to be perfect. The device is said to work better if somewhat elevated but it is a difference in performance, not workability.
The second drawing is far more intriguing and revealing. Here it is:



In this device we see a departure from the original layout. The left hand side shows the ?antenna? in diagrammatic form, the left is the rectifier circuit as schematic.

The ?antenna? can be used on its own or as part of an array. The units (as drawn) can be arranged horizontally, vertically or both. The zinc plates should be folded as shown and arranged with ?their mouths open? towards North and South. It does not matter which way the magnets face, South to magnetic North or South to magnetic South, the effect is the same. The zinc plate circuit must be electrically insulated from the magnet circuit.

The rectifier circuit is a standard bridge rectifier with a difference. In the patent Meyer uses mercury vapour valves but states that other elements can be used. What makes the circuit different are his ?intensifiers?  which consist of bifilar wound coils wound on an insulating coil former or a steel tube. I am not an electronics engineer but I would venture to suggest that the coils, wired as shown, would act as a condenser rather than a coil. If substituting the coils with condensers would give the same effect I cannot say at this stage.

Comments:

The first thing that comes to mind is Meyer?s unorthodox use of magnetism. He insists that his wires are magnetic conductors such as iron wire and then connects them to a point on his magnets where there is no magnetism.
Let us have a closer look at his ?antenna?



It is well known that if you join two magnets they become one. Similarly if you cut a magnet in half you will not get one south magnet and one north magnet but two magnets with south and north each. By joining the two magnets with an iron bridge they become one as in the diagram above.

Now let us have a look at the magnetic fields of his two designs:



This is where my analysis of Meyer?s device becomes speculative. Meyer is evidently connecting the neutral zones between the poles of his magnets with a magnetic conductor. It is as if he is creating some sort of  ?neutral channel?. He is clearly expecting the flow he is channelling to have at least partly a magnetic nature. This flow would have to be perpendicular to the magnetic flux of the magnets because this is where the channel is.

If Helmholtz is right with his assertion this is exactly the kind of place where the phenomenon he talks about is likely to occur.
We know Helmholtz invented the Helmholtz coil. It looks like this:



There is some odd behaviour associated with this coil arrangement when the coils are moved to a specific distance from each other. Perhaps he discovered something strange there. From a magnetism point of view there is no difference between the coils and Meyer?s magnet. The arrangement is the same.

In the Helmholtz device as in the Meyer device something strange occurs at the midpoint.

There is another well known device where something strange happens at the midpoint between poles.

The Faraday disk.




The Faraday disk presents a paradox that has never been satisfactorily explained.
The paradox is this:

If you turn the disk as shown at the midpoint of a magnetic field an electric current is generated between the axle and the rim of the disk.

If the disk is stationary and the magnet is revolved around the disk there is no electricity, though the relative movement is the same.

And now it gets really weird. If you revolve the disk with the magnet there is electricity again, even though there is no relative movement between the two components.

The question is, where is the electricity coming from?

When you really look at it Meyer?s device looks very much like a Faraday disk except it is stationary.

Maybe in Meyer?s device the earth does the spinning for you.

You see, when you align the device north ? south, as you must, the earth?s spin is perpendicular to the magnetic flux and in line with the ?channel?, just like a Faraday disk spinning with the magnet!

Perhaps, just perhaps, Helmholtz is right and we are on the right track.

Hans von Lieven