Linda Brown wrote:
If you don't mind, I need to wade in here on some of the conclusions that you are reaching for. Maybe between the two of us we can get to a more defined viewpoint.
Please do, it's an honour. I admit I may be misunderstanding a lot of things about the technology. I'm trying to evaluate it by what little I understand of comparable technologies to see what parts seem out of place or innovative.
I don't know if you realized it or not but the " loudspeaker" did not have to have an appreciable air flow. At all. Maybe that might tweak some of your thinking. We even put speaker cloth over the front and airflow was never an issue. Technically don't ask me how that was accomplished. <g>
That does sound better than the systems my friend knew.
What do you mean " by conventional thinking it looks like he was exploring a technological dead end" I'm lost there can we discuss that more?
Again, I'm comparing his speaker to what my friend has told me of his work with electrostatics, which was that they could be run without a membrane but there was a distinct reduction of sound quality. You could boost the airflow to compensate but that had side-effects. That's what gave him the "yes I know about that and explored it and it was a nice party trick but I couldn't get it to compare with the other technologies" response. I would like to grab him again and sit him down and seriously have him ask you some questions, if that's possible.
" I suppose I'm not 100% convinced that there was anything gravitic about his speaker technology."........ Nate. Has anyone made that direct claim?
On this forum, yes, people have made that assumption and made comments building on it.
If there were gravitic components to the fan or loudspeaker (or anything like that) should we think that it would be lying on the top of things?
Er, yes. If gravity was being modified in a device sitting right in front of a qualified electrical engineer, I should very much expect that to be obvious. You'd be able to, eg, put it on a scale. Put sensitive weight probes on it and watch them change. Take voltage readings and see if they match theory or not. It would be something physical that could be played with and tested. I don't think any device would be able to keep something startlingly "impossible" like gravity control a secret that long unless the actual hardware and all associated basic science was totally hidden.
You may have misjudged my Dads motives here. The " big loudspeaker" was built for a purpose. It worked. It was heavily tested. Then suddenly the entire situation ( following a phone call) was disbanded. Dad never mentioned that loudspeaker again to me. After all of that work... I have no idea what happened to it. What I can figure is .... whatever information Dad wanted from that loudspeaker he got. Otherwise he would mentally never have been able to leave it behind like that. He had no interest at all at being a commercial developer of loudspeakers for the public. It was not where his interest lay. And as beautiful as the fans and the loudspeakers were .... in his own words ... he called them " ashtray products." What we need to find is what was actually on fire somewhere.
That does sound like how I understand your Dad to have operated. From the few photos and videos I've seen of him, he reminds me extremely much of a man I know (in fact a whole family). The kind of people who are natural born leaders and would pioneer things and then hand them on to others.
You see this is where your perspective and mine differ. You are assuming here that Dads work was meant to develop a " better quality audio" which resulted somehow in something that something that the military became interested in and then buried. I submit for your consideration that what he was working on was never meant for the public to start with ( no matter what Deckers might have said here and there) and that it was already well couched with the military. The fact that the Cutlass spent her summer in Philadelphia and that fact was intentionally mentioned by both Morgan and Mr. Twigsnapper is no small consideration. That big loudspeaker in my opinion was never meant to bubble to the surface to help out the high fidelity crowd.
Yes, I agree, and I am assuming that the military requirements came first, but there would still have had to be a reason even for a military or intelligence customer why this very experimental way of doing a loudspeaker was better than just taking what the Navy already had in Janszen's proven technology, which seems to have dropped off the official projects list about five or six years earlier.
I mean yes, I am assuming that the Caroline Group core crossed over with Navy people, and that the reason one would build a loudspeaker and invent new technology to do so rather than using off-the-shelf technologies would be to get quality audio reproduction. Seriously good quality. (Not necessarily of a movie soundtrack, but if that's what he used to tune it then it must have been optimised for human hearing range and not, eg, ultrasonics.) And that it would be pointless for any scientist to invest time in a project that had already been solved by someone else, and the best way to do that would be to find out what that other person had achieved.
(Other reasons for doing so would be 'just for fun, to see if it could be done', which would ring true for lots of technical people, or to push a personal technological obsession at the expense of using the best tool for the job, or to work around intellectual property rights by using an inferior but 'in-house' technology -- but that doesn't seem to have been the case here.)
I suppose a part of me is also trying to hedge my bets and entertain the possibility that since this work was done at least partly in the open (he didn't hide it at least from you), then it was potentially commercialisable (as the fan was), but that the situation with Decker degraded and it wasn't considered safe to do so. Trying to hold the two ideas of your Dad being both a super-spy and just an ordinary guy together.
My Dad in that case would have just gone out and bought the best set that he could with the technology that had been developed already. He had a really good system ( conventional one) that he loved to listen to .... some people who knew him will remember the music ... Andrew or Steve, I believe you guys still have bits and pieces of that ..... but he had no intention of taking his unit and trying to compete with those other guys.
Mmm. I don't suppose you have any idea what make it was? I mean if it was a KLH then there's a connection right there. If it wasn't, then maybe this whole theory is a wash.
Watch out for this kind of thinking. I am sure that your recognize the either/or here. either worked with him or a rivalry? What other situations might have been possible? I'll leave you with that question. <g> Linda
Yes, quite. There could have been all sorts of dynamics at play. I guess I'm just saying that the name Janszen jumps out at me - a lot more so than, say, Peter Walker of Quad, over in England, who was making high-performance electrostatics in 1957 but doesn't seem to have had any military connections at all. And that what happened to William Wright later in the 1970s suggests that the US military was keeping an eye on any high-end audio developments originating in the civilian world and actively vacuuming them up.