Nathan Stubblefield Earth battery/Self Generating Induction Coil Replications

[protonmom]

MW383....Welcome!  I am so glad to see another NS EB maker.  I hope you will continue to research Stubblefield's work and not get sidetracked, (which is very easy to do).  I have still not buried my latest EB as I have not wound a secondary on it yet.  As soon as I do I intend to experiment with it until I succeed. (I hope, I hope)  I agree with Jeanna that Nathan must have used some kind of spark inside a silver ball.  If you look at his pictures you will always see this "ball thing on a stick".  (for lack of better words) 

I wish someone, somewhere, would find one of his earth batteries that someone stuck up in a loft of a barn or somewhere like that, and would post pictures of it, inside and out.  That might be the only way we ever learn the truth, unless someone gets lucky and "discovers" what Nathan did.  After all, we all have brains (some more, some less) and just maybe someone will hit on the same idea that Nathan did so long ago. Perhaps that will be YOU.   
Anyway, Welcome to the group.

[MW383]

Thank you all for the very nice welcome here. I was up at 4am this morning and had some time to further contemplate this system. I have so many questions so the only way to start answering them and to gain experience with this baby was to construct one and start playing with it. So I made a simple desktop unit of single layer coil design; no secondary coil just yet. For the sake of humor, I'll call it the "mini-Nate"

1   1/2" OD iron pipe nipple. (has about 1/4" ID) x 5.5" long
2   16ga copper wire. 27 turns. coil length = 3.5"
3   16ga iron wire. 24 turns. coil length = 3.0"
4   single layer coil only
5   paper towel wrapped around iron core
6   copper wire applied 1st with very slight gap between winds.
7   paper towel added over copper winding
8   iron wire applied over outer paper towel such that its coils fit neatly side by side with
     copper coils. paper towel over copper trick worked great
9   being that this is a single layer coil, i just ran each end wire back up to be on same
     side as others. so i essentially have #5 copper, #6 iron, #10 copper, and #10 iron
     wires exiting the cell
10   checked continuity between coils = none , so nothing shorted out
11   placed in 16oz jar and filled with tap water

My approach is simple. I want to get experienced with the copper iron electrochemistry and with this particular primary coil / battery construction. By breaking entire design down into fundamental pieces, hopefully I can learn about how each works.

I will be testing this afternoon and posting whatever results / conclusions I come up with. For starters I will be measuring everything in a no current scenerio. All measurements to be taken with standard Fluke 77 multimeter. I will have to look in its manual to determine what impedance this will place on the battery. I will report whatever this is with my test results. I'll also post some pictures of this little squirt.

Time for some lunch and then time for some testing!

[protonmom]

I don't think the paper towel approach will work.  The EB needs to be in a moist environment, and we all know what happens to paper towels when they get wet.  You are going to have a major short.  You should use the cotton or silk as per instructions.  Hope you don't have a lot of re-winding to do, but if so, then join the club.  We have all torn apart our "babies" to start anew.  But I reallly must stress, I think you should re-think the paper towels.  Do you have an old cotton sheet, or some silk shirt that has seen better days?  Could you not try that instead?  Be sure to cut the material into strips for easy winding. 

[Pirate88179]

Or just do what I did (several others too) and get cotton string about the same diameter as your wire and wind that in between the copper and the iron wires.  You can actually wind it first, and then add the string by pulling it tight and it will force itself into the slots between the wires.  Saves a lot of time and does not short out.

Bill

[MW383]

OK built the little prototype described above. it did have paper towel. i had built before i read the new posts! oops. Anyway the unit went together quickly and without issues.

open current voltages various places on the cell. (all values = DC)

5 to 6        0.495V     1.75mA after 1 minute
10 to 10     0.495V     1.60mA after 1 minute
5 to core    0.195V     0.23mA after 1 minute
6 to core    0.297V     0.46ma after 1 minute

So not a real high performing device but everything nice and steady. I think that after some light discharge conditioning of the cell, it should possible perform a little bit better.

I connected 5 and 6 to check and see what kind of electromagnetic field i might have.... nothing discernable but my detection methods pretty bad. I'll try holding a compass near the unit and see if I can deflect its needle with the field. I have my doubts though, there just isn't enough current here to do much. So I'm thinking that the cell is too small and underpowered with just a single coil of these meager dimensions.

What voltages are you guys getting out of your similar iron-copper systems?

....here is something interesting. i went back to cell and measured 5-6 for the hell of it. cell now reads steady .526 VDC. Since cell had plenty of time to presoak the 1st time, it is looking like my little multimeter load did some conditioning for me. Either that or the shorting of 5 and 6...I'll condition for longer periods and see what happens to my readings.

So this is what I have been up to today. If I am still thinking clearly, a strong primary field is what we need here for good saturation of secondary coil during collapse of primary.

The patent clearly says useful voltage possible with primary coil... So I will probably rebuild this little Nate into a multi-coil system (1 coil added at a time to see effects). Volts will probably remain low in this electrode set but more amperage could certianly be had with larger coil.

This is a neat little battery. Somehow, someway I want to get up to snuff in order to create a useful magnetic field. step 2 = optimize secondary coil. step 3 = cycle the primary coil really fast and get steady output of secondary coil.

I'll keep experimenting and also posting.