WIRED on "The AntiGravity Underground"

For a discussion of the science of Townsend Brown, his experiments and his ideas.
adminman

WIRED on "The AntiGravity Underground"

Post by adminman »

The August issue of WIRED Magazine features an article by Clive Thompson about the "Lifters" and cites Townsend Browns work as the source of current basement-and-garages experiments with "anti-gravity" devices." The article appears online here:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.0 ... avity.html

The article discusses in some detail experiments that were conducted with "lifter" devices in a vacuum, which is one way to disassciate the Biefeld-Brown effect from any kind of "ion wind" or similar phenomenon. The experiments described in the article seemed to disavow any actual "electr-gravitic" effect.

However, more recent experiments conducted by Hector Serrano, who experiments with both electro-gravitics and fusion energy processes, was reported to the underground fusion energy forum at http://fusor.net. Hector says:

- - - - - - - - - - -

On July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd I was at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) testing the Thomas Townsend Brown Effect in one of its large diameter vacuum chambers. While we did have some serious complications, on day three, test device number 2 did show a visible force.

However, while NASA scientist seem to agree that the rotary motion observed could not have been ion wind, they disagree with our conclusion that it is a new effect, in their opinion this is some common EMF effect.

Note: We asked which EMF effect could account for the observed rotary motion and the answer was that they did not know.

It is frustrating to see scientist shoot down empirical evidence with verbal speculation.
This has become the norm not the exception.

The force was observed at 1.86 * 10^-6 Torr and decreasing towards 10^-7 Torr.

I just wanted to inform you guys, because I know you are interested. I have to complete a full analysis, however I don’t know if I will be able to publish the results. There are some complications as you can tell.

While I did the work, it was done under my company Gravitec Inc.

- - - - - - - -

That would certainly seem to put an entirely different light on the subject. You KNOW something is happening here, but you don't know what it is... do you, Mr. Jones?

--PS
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After the Vacuum

Post by Hector »

When I talked to R.L. Talley last week after the experiments at NSSTC/NASA, he made a very good point, “If its ion wind when it’s in air, then it can’t be EMF in the vacuumâ€
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I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by Chris Knight »

I've heard similar comments as long as I've been a scientist. Something along the lines of, "Well, it's a very common effect, but we don't know what it is."

I originally really got into physics as an undergraduate when a distinguished physics professor of many years at Ohio University, said to me, "You're wasting your time. We know everything there is to know about capacitors." It is a pity when we begin to believe that we know everything there is to know about something.

As far as the Wired article is concerned, they misquoted me and got several aspect's of Brown's work confused. The lifter technology is the same as the ion speakers, air cleaners, etc. They were designed specifically to maximize ion wind generation - they move air up or down or through, etc. using asymmetric electrodes placed in 'V' formations.

You'll notice several differences in the tri-arcuate discs used in the vacuum tests - they were specifically designed to maximize the charge density and field imbalance (asymmetry) between the electrodes in a three dimensional aspect - i.e. the creation of a vertical toroidal vortex beneath the disc as well as a forward thrust. The electrodes are set on the same plane, and actually consist of three separate electrodes, although the main electrode is somewhat thicker than the leading and internal electrodes. Brown designed the discs specifically to fly in a vacuum, and they suffer significant corona losses in higher atmospheric pressures
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Post by quasar_2000 »

I would agree with you. These lifters, which are "supposedly" to be based loosely on T.T.Brown's electrokinetic apparatus patent, seem to be lacking to a few things common to his work:

1) The design: Throughout Brown's work, he found that the saucer was the best shape for maximum performance. If these lifters were really based on his technology, why haven't they chosen to use disc shaped designs?

2) The use of the Biefeld Brown effect: If we recall, the original effect was based on two oppositely charged electrodes separated via a dielectric. This isn't clearly seen.

3) The voltage used: These lifters use less voltage than Brown's discs. He achieved his movement with voltages around 50,000 volts. Other experimenters such as Talley and Dr Hal Puthoff tried to replicate the effect with voltages as low as 20,000 volts but to no avail. One experimenter replicated his electrokenetic apparatus patent using voltages from 50,000 volts onwards.

4) The dielectric used: Whilst the Electrokinetic patent mentions the use of a "surrounding medium" such as air as its insulator, T T Brown found that he was able to achieve better results with other (High K strength insulators) materials. He was able to achieve levitation and movement in a vacuum. In these tests he used barium titanate. With uranium based dielectrics this would be able to be increased exponetionally.

5) On the tests in the vacuum: It is no surprise that these lifters do not work in a vacuum. The lack of a fixed dielectric, the design and the voltage all add up to compound failure.
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Post by PyroPete »

I personally use 500,000V and I usually use the saucer shape, although I have been experimenting with the placement of electrodes.

I believe that Thomas Townsend Brown placed his electrodes on the sides of the saucer. I have tried placing the electrodes on the top and bottom of the saucer as well, with some interesting results I might add. When operated like this the size of the electrodes had a large influence on the performance which led me to my current design.

Recently I have been using a teardrop shaped dielectric, placing a high voltage electrode at the blunt end and a grounded one at the other. The results of my experiments have shown this to be the most efficient shape that I have found so far.

Right now I am experimenting with frequency; I am trying to get the electric field surrounding the teardrop structure into resonance.
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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by natecull »

I know this is probably the oldest post on this site. I went reading the archives (vain hope of catching up). But this went 'ping' at me. Possibly it's my imagination, but I figured I'll mark it here just in case.
Chris Knight wrote: You'll notice several differences in the tri-arcuate discs used in the vacuum tests - they were specifically designed to maximize the charge density and field imbalance (asymmetry) between the electrodes in a three dimensional aspect - i.e. the creation of a vertical toroidal vortex beneath the disc as well as a forward thrust. The electrodes are set on the same plane, and actually consist of three separate electrodes, although the main electrode is somewhat thicker than the leading and internal electrodes. Brown designed the discs specifically to fly in a vacuum, and they suffer significant corona losses in higher atmospheric pressures
I assume you guys playing with literal Brown saucers understand what that means, because I really don't. The fundamental working parameters of magnetic or electrostatic vortices lie completely outside my mainstream knowledge of physics, and since I've yet to see a demonstrated device (or even a contemporary video) that uses this principle I can't say I have any way of validating the claim. If it takes millions of volts and a vacuum chamber and NDA secrecy to demonstrate the effect, it may be a while yet.

But something about the word 'vortex' in the context of those 1958 saucers really resonates with me. 'Haunts' would be a good word to describe the feeling. I'm serious.

The diagram at the very top of Page 10 in http://www.rexresearch.com/brown2/brown2.htm, which I take to be a cross-section of a saucer in flight generating such a vortex, gives me the weirdest goosebumpy feeling when I look at it. Almost like it's looking back. Like it's an 'alive' thing. My heart races, my pulse pounds. It literally invades my dreams (I had this weird one about a turbine, filled with water, sloshing around, exuding the same sort of menace.)

I look at it, and something draws me in. I can see it somehow in my mind's eye, animating in 3D: it's like a miniature tornado, a doughnut of fluid rotating in two dimensions. And there's this sense of being watched, somehow. I don't know if it's a good feeling or a bad feeling. It's a sense of exposure and power and significance more than anything else. Great power unleashed, a new world opening, but for what end, or going where?

I hide the browser tab, flick back to it and it hits me with almost a physical impact. The closest feeling I can describe it to is vertigo: standing at the top of a tall building, feeling this immense space sucking at me. Hypnotic. I tell myself 'it's just a badly-drawn diagram of a saucer', but it's still there.

(It should hum. A low 'whoooouuuuuummmmmmm' that spins up like a fan. No crackling. Eerily silent. It should look silvery, like made of mercury, or transparent. A self-enclosing bubble. Not really there. If you see it, it moves like hot mercury. Dances and weaves about. Utterly beautiful. Elegant. Deceptive. Not where or what you think it is.)

Very few of the other diagrams in the notebooks have this effect on me. A couple of the other tri-arcuate saucer diagrams, but only partially: Page 11, but the shape is wrong (too spread out somehow), Page 12, but that long 'pillar' underneath is just laughably funny, not scary, it feels 'shorted out' somehow, Page 19, but it's 'too flat' somehow and 'the circuit doesn't close'. That's just my emotional reaction, whatever that means. No idea what it implies for physics. Every other picture in the notebooks are just diagrams to me and I have no emotional feeling except curiosity.

Is it just that they're pictures of saucers, so they imply all the UFO lore? But why does a rough sketch of toroidal one somehow feel 'complete, active and dangerous' and come alive in my head?

I wish I knew what it meant. It's possibly just imagination. But in the context of Chris Knight's statement about 'a vertical toroidal vortex', yes, that's exactly what I'm seeing. I don't know *how* that's significant or why. I mean, I can see how an ordinary ion-wind vortex could help maximise lift, but there's something more than just *lift* or *wind* going on there. Some kind of self-sustaining reaction, or feedback loop, even a 'reality hole' of some kind is what my emotional read of a sense of 'scariness', otherworldliness, suggests.

Singularity. Black hole. Whirlpool, quicksand, fire. Owl's eyes. Hawk in flight. Caution. You could fall through the hole in the floor and get lost.

What do other people feel? Is there something like a natural wired-in human aesthetic response to pictures of vortex-like shapes that I'm picking up? Or is this somehow a key to how the vacuum/ether effect works and perhaps *what* it does?
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Re: WIRED on "The AntiGravity Underground"

Post by twigsnapper »

Nate,

You said

"The diagram at the very top of Page 10 in http://www.rexresearch.com/brown2/brown2.htm, which I take to be a cross-section of a saucer in flight generating such a vortex, gives me the weirdest goosebumpy feeling when I look at it. Almost like it's looking back. Like it's an 'alive' thing. My heart races, my pulse pounds. It literally invades my dreams (I had this weird one about a turbine, filled with water, sloshing around, exuding the same sort of menace.)

I look at it, and something draws me in. I can see it somehow in my mind's eye, animating in 3D: it's like a miniature tornado, a doughnut of fluid rotating in two dimensions. And there's this sense of being watched, somehow. I don't know if it's a good feeling or a bad feeling. It's a sense of exposure and power and significance more than anything else. Great power unleashed, a new world opening, but for what end, or going where?"

Me too Nate, me too. twigsnapper
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Re: WIRED on "The AntiGravity Underground"

Post by twigsnapper »

Same notebook.... a short distance away

Page 21

During the period from October 1958 to October 1967 (9 years) no notes were made.

If you believe that.... I have a choice of things I can sell you. NO NOTES WERE MADE IN THIS NOTEBOOK, OBVIOUSLY. HE TOLD THE TRUTH.

and I see Paul that you are watching the forum. Regarding " She belongs to me" ... perhaps the title? The ring phrase meant alot but there were others that applied too. Feeling always that he would eventually be in a situation where he would be on the outside , looking in. Alas, twigsnapper
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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by htmagic »

natecull wrote:I know this is probably the oldest post on this site. I went reading the archives (vain hope of catching up). But this went 'ping' at me. Possibly it's my imagination, but I figured I'll mark it here just in case.

<SNIP>

The diagram at the very top of Page 10 in http://www.rexresearch.com/brown2/brown2.htm, which I take to be a cross-section of a saucer in flight generating such a vortex, gives me the weirdest goosebumpy feeling when I look at it. Almost like it's looking back. Like it's an 'alive' thing. My heart races, my pulse pounds. It literally invades my dreams (I had this weird one about a turbine, filled with water, sloshing around, exuding the same sort of menace.)

I look at it, and something draws me in. I can see it somehow in my mind's eye, animating in 3D: it's like a miniature tornado, a doughnut of fluid rotating in two dimensions. And there's this sense of being watched, somehow. I don't know if it's a good feeling or a bad feeling. It's a sense of exposure and power and significance more than anything else. Great power unleashed, a new world opening, but for what end, or going where?

<SNIP>

(It should hum. A low 'whoooouuuuuummmmmmm' that spins up like a fan. No crackling. Eerily silent. It should look silvery, like made of mercury, or transparent. A self-enclosing bubble. Not really there. If you see it, it moves like hot mercury. Dances and weaves about. Utterly beautiful. Elegant. Deceptive. Not where or what you think it is.)

Very few of the other diagrams in the notebooks have this effect on me. A couple of the other tri-arcuate saucer diagrams, but only partially: Page 11, but the shape is wrong (too spread out somehow), Page 12, but that long 'pillar' underneath is just laughably funny, not scary, it feels 'shorted out' somehow, Page 19, but it's 'too flat' somehow and 'the circuit doesn't close'. That's just my emotional reaction, whatever that means. No idea what it implies for physics. Every other picture in the notebooks are just diagrams to me and I have no emotional feeling except curiosity.

Is it just that they're pictures of saucers, so they imply all the UFO lore? But why does a rough sketch of toroidal one somehow feel 'complete, active and dangerous' and come alive in my head?
Nate,

I believe you are referring to this figure:
Image

Now if you look at this sketch, it is a side view of a saucer showing the flow lines of the ion streams (it's all about ions). Now the picture gives us the impression that there are two vortexes under the craft. But really it is like a side view of a smoke ring underneath and the side view shows the flows going into the center of the ring and then around and around and around, entraining more ions from the surroundings. And at these high voltages, this flow of ions into this plasma will keep the plasma energized with a ready supply of ions. And this plasma "bubble" under the craft will keep it aloft. As long as there are ions present, you don't need air for it to work. That's why the barium titanate and/or cesium was used.

Now the other drawings on the other pages, 11, 12, 19 show different configurations of disks and the corresponding lines of flow or lines of force. It is not a pillar on Page 12, but lines of flow/lines of force that extend to and from an infinite distance ().

Now the remark of the mercury reminded me of the Nazi Bell and the torroidal flow of mercury in a ring inside the craft. And this mercury is flowing at pretty high speed. Although I've never seen one, I've heard stories of UFOs being in trouble during flight and dumping a "silvery liquid" overboard, like ballast. Could it be mercury? I don't know, I only heard reports and don't know if anyone ever grabbed samples and had it analyzed. I would if I saw one. Unless they dumped it in a lake and it couldn't be recovered...

Viktor Schauberger used the Repulsine saucers and produced vortex flows in his craft. http://www.frank.germano.com/viktorschauberger_3.htm
These rapidly spinning vortices are reported to have hot and cold areas and operate like miniature tornadoes seen in nature, along with electrical effects and reportedly X-rays from the high voltage it generated. The vortex seems to be the common golden thread here, although Dr. Brown's craft used a plasma generated by the high voltage. But a plasma may have been involved for the Nazi Bell and Repulsine models as well but this is speculation on my part. If Dr. Brown was using extremely high voltage, he would have generated a larger plasma field than the Nazi Bell or Repulsine and would have had more effect (speed, etc.).

Musings of a magician looking for a rabbit in the vortex way down inside this rabbit hole....

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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by Mikado14 »

htmagic wrote: As long as there are ions present, you don't need air for it to work. That's why the barium titanate and/or cesium was used.
I would like to know how barium titanate, a ceramic, will create ions. I can see cesium in a vapor but I just can't visualize the ceramic. Just curious.

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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by htmagic »

Mikado14 wrote:
htmagic wrote: As long as there are ions present, you don't need air for it to work. That's why the barium titanate and/or cesium was used.
I would like to know how barium titanate, a ceramic, will create ions. I can see cesium in a vapor but I just can't visualize the ceramic. Just curious.

Mikado
Mikado,

Good question. Why don't you build a communicator and talk to Dr. Brown directly? And when you get him on the line, could you please do a three-way with me listening in? :wink:

Seriously, barium titanate was mentioned previously. It is a dielectric and could easily form one plate in a capacitor. It is also reportedly a high K material and that was what Dr. Brown was looking for. Barium titanate was reported to be in chemtrails and if you do a search for it on this forum, you can see where it was discussed before...

Mikado, I know this really doesn't directly answer your question and my short answer is I don't know. But barium titanate has pyroelectric and ferroelectric properties and thin films of barium titanate display electrooptic modulation to frequencies over 40 GHz.

Dr. Brown could have been experimenting with any one of these properties or all of them....

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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by Mikado14 »

htmagic wrote:
Mikado14 wrote:
htmagic wrote: As long as there are ions present, you don't need air for it to work. That's why the barium titanate and/or cesium was used.
I would like to know how barium titanate, a ceramic, will create ions. I can see cesium in a vapor but I just can't visualize the ceramic. Just curious.

Mikado
Mikado,

Good question. Why don't you build a communicator and talk to Dr. Brown directly? And when you get him on the line, could you please do a three-way with me listening in? :wink:

Truth can be stranger than fiction

Seriously, barium titanate was mentioned previously. It is a dielectric and could easily form one plate in a capacitor.

Barium titanate is a ceramic baked in a kiln thus it is non-conductive. You say it could easily form a plate. With what I know, it would be sandwiched between two plates made of a conductive material for example, aluminum.

It is also reportedly a high K material and that was what Dr. Brown was looking for. Barium titanate was reported to be in chemtrails and if you do a search for it on this forum, you can see where it was discussed before...

I don't need to, I know where it is at.

Mikado, I know this really doesn't directly answer your question and my short answer is I don't know. But barium titanate has pyroelectric and ferroelectric properties and thin films of barium titanate display electrooptic modulation to frequencies over 40 GHz.

You are the one who in the original quote above who implied a claim that barium titanate would emit ions. Either it does or it doesn't and your short answer is all that was or is necessary.

Mikado
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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by natecull »

htmagic wrote:[
I believe you are referring to this figure:
Yep, that's the one.
Now if you look at this sketch, it is a side view of a saucer showing the flow lines of the ion streams (it's all about ions). Now the picture gives us the impression that there are two vortexes under the craft. But really it is like a side view of a smoke ring underneath and the side view shows the flows going into the center of the ring and then around and around and around, entraining more ions from the surroundings. And at these high voltages, this flow of ions into this plasma will keep the plasma energized with a ready supply of ions. And this plasma "bubble" under the craft will keep it aloft. As long as there are ions present, you don't need air for it to work. That's why the barium titanate and/or cesium was used.
Yes, I can get that it's a rotating smoke-ring like vortex. 'Fluid' is flowing and spiralling as it spins. What I don't get, from my high-school understanding of physics, is how such a self-contained vortex of ions could, in a vacuum, generate lift. Conventionally speaking ,there's no 'working fluid' or medium to push against, no outside source of ions. Since the ions are being recirculated, they're not being shoved out the back as in a conventional ion drive (or even a lifter with its MHD effect), so there should be no net force at least from their movement.

Unless it's something to do with the motion of the ions generating an electrical field that pushes against an external magnetic field? In which case it could fly in a vacuum, but not outside Earth's magnetosphere? If so, it would be a sucky interplanetary craft, but it could be a great high-altitude flier, if the maths pans out - and conventional understanding of magnetism reckons we'd need a field of hundreds of teslas, I think, to generate something like 1G, and I'm pretty sure inverse square law would drain most of the force away as you rose. But even then, I'm not sure I understand how rotational motion gets converted into linear.

So something non-conventional is happening, I'm sure. But I can't pinpoint what.

Deyo describes something very much like MHD, but using the ether as a working fluid. He also talks about atomic nuclei being little gyroscopes, and effectively the principle being the same at the subatomic level as the macroscopic level, just faster / more powerful. I can see a toroidal vortex with its two axes of rotation being possibly something like Laithwaite's forced precession (but don't have enough grasp of mechanics to tell if they're at all physically comparable). One would think that if there *were* weird gyroscopic effects with vortices, they'd have been well-studied by now, right? Easy to create and play with. Just open a kitchen sink plughole and watch the water spin. And yet the rumours about Schauberger's Repulsine and tornados and friends persist - but are not well-studied. Why?

What happened with Argus (and certainly Starfish Prime in Operation Fishbowl) with the artificial radiation belts, electrons getting trapped in the Earth's magnetosphere 'like a cyclotron', seems similar, at least superficially, to a layman with no conception of the fine details. Magnetically confined toroidal ion flux, adapted for different results.

Cyclotron -> Calutron
Cyclotron -> Tokamak
Cyclotron -> toroidal configuration Brown tri-arcuate saucer
Cyclotron -> Argus/Fishbowl radiation belts

They all seem to inherit from that early cyclotron research, but in different directions. I suppose that's normal for a lot of research. Everything dates back to common ancestors, it doesn't prove much. But one of these things is not like the others, because we all know flying saucers do not exist. They've been erased from the record. Why?

The Magnetron in our good old microwave ovens also looks similar: electron vortices. And it's a component with its origins (or development) in WW2 radar. Which came first, the cyclotron or the magnetron? Which influenced the other?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator. Cyclotrons accelerate charged particles using a high-frequency, alternating voltage (potential difference). A perpendicular magnetic field causes the particles to spiral almost in a circle so that they re-encounter the accelerating voltage many times.

Ernest Lawrence, of the University of California,Berkeley, is credited with the invention of the cyclotron in 1929. He used it in experiments that required particles with energy of up to 1 MeV.
All cavity magnetrons consist of a hot filament (cathode) kept at, or pulsed to, a high negative potential by a high-voltage, direct-current power supply. The cathode is built into the center of an evacuated, lobed, circular chamber. A magnetic field parallel to the filament is imposed by a permanent magnet. The magnetic field causes the electrons, attracted to the (relatively) positive outer part of the chamber, to spiral outward in a circular path rather than moving directly to this anode. Spaced around the rim of the chamber are cylindrical cavities. The cavities are open along their length and connect the common cavity space. As electrons sweep past these openings, they induce a resonant, high-frequency radio field in the cavity, which in turn causes the electrons to bunch into groups. A portion of this field is extracted with a short antenna that is connected to a waveguide (a metal tube usually of rectangular cross section). The waveguide directs the extracted RF energy to the load, which may be a cooking chamber in a microwave oven or a high-gain antenna in the case of radar.
The oscillation of magnetrons was first observed and noted by Augustin Žáček, professor at the Charles University, Prague in the Czech Republic, although the first simple, two-pole magnetrons were developed in the 1920s by Albert Hull at General Electric's Research Laboratories (Schenectady, New York), as an outgrowth of his work on the magnetic control of vacuum tubes in an attempt to work around the patents held by Lee De Forest on electrostatic control. The two-pole magnetron, also known as a split-anode magnetron, had relatively low efficiency. The cavity version (properly referred to as a resonant-cavity magnetron) proved to be far more useful.

There was an urgent need during radar development in World War II for a high-power microwave generator that worked in shorter wavelengths—around 10 cm (3 GHz) rather than 150 cm—(200 MHz) available from tube-based generators of the time. It was known that a multi-cavity resonant magnetron had been developed in 1935 by Hans Hollmann in Berlin. However, the German military considered its frequency drift to be undesirable and based their radar systems on the klystron instead. It was primarily for this reason that German night fighter radars were not a match for their British counterparts.

In 1940, at the University of Birmingham in the UK, John Randall and Dr. Harry Boot produced a working prototype similar to Hollman's cavity magnetron, but added liquid cooling and a stronger cavity. Randall and Boot soon managed to increase its power output 100 fold. Instead of giving up on the magnetron due to its frequency inaccuracy, they sampled the output signal and synced their receiver to whatever frequency was actually being generated.

Because France had just fallen to the Nazis and Britain had no money to develop the magnetron on a massive scale, Churchill agreed that Sir Henry Tizard should offer the magnetron to the Americans in exchange for their financial and industrial help. By September, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had set up a secret laboratory to develop the cavity magnetron into a viable radar. Two months later, it was in mass production, and by early 1941, portable airborne radar were being installed into American and British planes.[1]

An early 6 kW version, built in England by the GEC Research Laboratories, Wembley, London, was given to the US government in September 1940. It was later described as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores" (see Tizard Mission). At the time the most powerful equivalent microwave producer available in the US (a klystron) had a power of only ten watts. The cavity magnetron was widely used during World War II in microwave radar equipment and is often credited with giving Allied radar a considerable performance advantage over German and Japanese radars, thus directly influencing the outcome of the war.

Common threads. Spirals. Vortices. Radar. Atomic research. WW2. US and UK cooperation. Anything more precise than that that we can get a handle on?

The cyclotron uses AC and the cavity magnetron uses DC. BUT, those cavities in the magnetron INTERRUPT the flow and cause a resonant frequency. An alternative way of accomplishing a similar effect? In both cases we have a pulsed, resonant toroidal flow of electrically charged particles in a magnetic field.
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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by htmagic »

Mikado14 wrote:You are the one who in the original quote above who implied a claim that barium titanate would emit ions. Either it does or it doesn't and your short answer is all that was or is necessary.

Mikado
We know barium titanate (BaTiO3) is a dielectric. A subset of dielectrics are electrets which carry a charge. I suspect barium titanate is an electret. And if that is true, electrons are emitted. If an electron moves one way, it can ionize an atom and turn it into an ion (in air) that moves as well. So it doesn't really eject ions but electrons and the ions move secondarily.

Also, I know titanium dioxide is photo-catalytic and I suspect so would be BaTiO3. If a photon hits the surface and releases an electron, it could energize the surface. Typically this would happen in the ultraviolet (UV) range but I'm not sure if it is long or short wave UV. The more energetic the UV, I would suspect more electrons and activity. Add the high voltage from an electrokinetic generator and I suspect this would really enhance the effect.

By the way, using barium titanate in a vacuum would still move the craft as there would be a stream of electrons moving from the charged surface. And if these BaTiO3 materials were shaped like a teardrop or pointed electrodes were used and the barium titanate material vaporized at the point of the high voltage corona, it would eject an ion stream that could propel the craft. So that is a second theory that I proposed for ions from a ceramic material. Do you have any theories or speculations, Mikado?

That was the long answer, Mikado. The short answer is that we know TTB used it as it probably worked. Did he try every element as Edison would have (with 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration)? I don't know but he was into some exotic materials like cesium, osmium, and some other rare elements.

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natecull
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Re: I don't know, but any expert could tell you...

Post by natecull »

htmagic wrote: We know barium titanate (BaTiO3) is a dielectric. A subset of dielectrics are electrets which carry a charge. I suspect barium titanate is an electret.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barium_titanate
Barium titanate is an oxide of barium and titanium with the chemical formula BaTiO3. It is a ferroelectric ceramic material, with a photorefractive effect and piezoelectric properties. It has five phases as a solid, listing from high temperature to low temperature: hexagonal, cubic, tetragonal, orthorhombic, and rhombohedral crystal structure. All of the structures exhibit the ferroelectric effect except cubic.
Doesn't say anything about being an electret. Is ferroelectric anything similar?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_effect
Ferroelectricity is a physical property of a material whereby it exhibits a spontaneous electric polarization, the direction of which can be switched between equivalent states by the application of an external electric field [1]. The term is used in analogy to ferromagnetism, in which a material exhibits a permanent magnetic moment. Ferromagnetism was already known when ferroelectricity was discovered in 1920 in Rochelle salt by Valasek[2]. Thus, the prefix "ferro", meaning iron, was used to describe the property despite the fact that most ferroelectric materials do not have iron in their lattice.

Ferroelectrics are key materials in microelectronics. Their excellent dielectric properties make them suitable for electronic components such as tunable capacitors and memory cells.
Ferroelectric phase transitons are often characterized as either displacive (such as BaTiO3) and order-disorder (such as NaNO2), though often phase transitions will have behaviour that contains elements of both behaviours. In barium titanate, a typical ferroelectric of the displacive type, the transition can be understood in terms of a polarization catastrophe, in which, if an ion is displaced from equilibrium slightly, the force from the local electric fields due to the ions in the crystal increases faster than the elastic-restoring forces. This leads to an asymmetrical shift in the equilibrium ion positions and hence to a permanent dipole moment. The ionic displacement in barium titanate concerns the relative position of the titanium ion within the oxygen octahedral cage. In lead titanate, another key ferroelectric material, although the structure is rather similar to barium titanate the driving force for ferroelectricity is more complex with interactions between the lead and oxygen ions also playing an important role. In an order-disorder ferroelectric, there is a dipole moment in each unit cell, but at high temperatures they are pointing in random directions. Upon lowering the temperature and going through the phase transition, the dipoles order, all pointing in the same direction within a domain.
Not that I can tell, unless I'm missing something... but is the polarisation important?
Electret (formed of elektr- from "electricity" and -et from "magnet") is a dielectric material that has a quasi-permanent electric charge or dipole polarisation. An electret generates internal and external electric fields, and is the electrostatic equivalent of a permanent magnet. Oliver Heaviside coined this term in 1885. Materials with electret properties were, however, already studied since the early 18th century. One particular example is the electrophorus, a device consisting of a slab with electret properties and a separate metal plate. The electrophorus was originally invented by Johan Carl Wilcke in Sweden and again by Alessandro Volta in Italy.
There is a similarity between electrets and the dielectric layer used in capacitors; the difference is that dielectrics in capacitors possess an induced polarization that is only transient, dependent on the potential applied on the dielectric, while dielectrics with electret properties exhibit quasi-permanent charge storage or dipole polarization in addition. Some materials also display ferroelectricity; i.e. they react to the external fields with a hysteresis of the polarization; ferroelectrics can retain the polarization permanently because they are in thermodynamic equilibrium, and are used in ferroelectric capacitors. Although electrets are only in a metastable state, those fashioned from very low leakage materials can retain excess charge or polarization for many years.
There are two types of electrets:

* Real-charge electrets which contain excess charge of one or both polarities, either
o on the dielectric's surfaces (a surface charge)
o within the dielectric's volume (a space charge)
* Oriented-dipole electrets contain oriented (aligned) dipoles. Ferroelectric materials are one variant of these.
Okay, you're right. Ferroelectrics are electrets, barium titanate is ferroelectric, therefore it is an electret.

Edit: But if all it's doing is changing internal polarisation, I don't see how that equates to emitting ions. And in any case, I would suspect the amount of ions emitted and the conventional thrust generated from them - unless they were accelerated to some insanely high fraction of C, and possibly not even then - would be low. I mean, shoving ions out the back and not taking any in means you've got to cannibalise your own structural atoms unless you've got a magic way of generating them, or a source of reaction mass. Doesn't it?

I can see how a teardrop-shaped dielectric *might* vaporise and form ions (though I'd naively expect that more from a conductor and one with a low melting point), but the tri-arcuate saucers are distinctly NOT shaped to maximise that effect. In fact the reverse.

Since barium titanate is pegged as a common dielectric for ceramic capacitors, and ceramic capacitors were a very common early type, my naive reading of Brown's notes is that he's simply doing the easiest thing, NOT experimenting with 'exotic materials' at all, and using the most common industry-standard materials for a simple dielectric. Whether the ferroelectric properties are relevant, I have no idea.

Re cesium, though, I'd love to know if he was the first to investigate its use as a heavy ion source for brute-force ion propulsion. Doesn't seem quite like his style, but it might have been a logical intermediate step.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesium
Caesium was used as a propellant in early ion engines. It used a method of ionization to strip the outer electron from the propellant by simple contact with tungsten. Caesium use as a propellant was discontinued when Hughes Research Laboratory conducted a study finding xenon gas as a suitable replacement.
Both of which I was aware of (being a bit of an amateur space / hard-SF geek). Both of which are very low-impulse, not enough to achieve hovering in a 1G field. (Lifters being different, using ambient air).
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