This ties in with the thread on aerial taps that was posted under 'How
about some discussion?'
Nathan Stubblefield back in the 1800's used 'earth batteries', large
dissimilar metal plates separated by a 1/2 mile or more distance...these
plates were buried in the ground facing each other and had an insuluated
cable connecting each of the plates to one side of a load.
The claim was that Stubblefield lit his entire farm at night, so that it
was bright as day, using carbon arc lamps....these things took 1000s of
watts to power...yet he got all his energy from the earth...
An excellent book, written by Gerry Vassilatos and published by
Borderlands ( http://www.borderlands.org ) called 'Lost Science' has a
superb chapter on this and other 'lost inventors'....amazing book..
One of the neat things that Stubblefield found when talking to people who
run lines for telegraph stations....the earth has pools of high energy
and pools of low energy....in some telegraph stations, the same battery
used to power the line had not been changed in 40 years or so....the
reason being, that the earth currents were doing all the work.
So they showed Stubblefield how to find these high and low energy areas.
You put one plate in a high energy area, the other plate is buried in a
low energy and the earth always tries to balance these two through the
connecting wire (and load)...high energy areas tend to be at the base of
hills and where ridges and valleys occur...the analogy was that
electrical energy is much like water, it washes up against these path
blockages and rolls back over onto itself, to create high energy
zones....the Prentice patent says much the same....
Don Smith, down in Houston uses topographic maps where low
altitude regions are shown as red, moving up the color scale to violet at
the highest altitudes. So basically using such topo maps, you could find
the best location to bury your plates...so for free power, buy land that
has a high hill on it...<g>....
-- Jerry W. Decker / jdecker@keelynet.com http://keelynet.com / "From an Art to a Science" Voice : (214) 324-8741 / FAX : (214) 324-8741 KeelyNet - PO BOX 870716 - Mesquite - Republic of Texas - 75187