"FREE ENERGY" AS SEEN ON BRITISH T.V.
by Harold Aspden
From: NEN, Vol. 3, No. 9, February 1996, pp. 10-12.
On Sunday, 17 December 1995, viewers in U.K. saw an hour-long T V. program which, at long last, puts across the clear message that "free energy" is on the way. In our New Energy News forum we already know much of the substance of what was covered, but it may be of interest to have this report.
The program was featured in the EQUINOX series which appears periodically on our T.V. Channel 4, its title being "It Runs On Water."
In the opening stages Arthur C. Clarke explained how there were four stages in the way scientists react to the development of anything of a revolutionary nature. "Free energy" was now working its way through these four stages of reaction, which were:
a) "It's nonsense,"
b) "It is not important,"
c) "I always said it was a good idea," and
d) "I thought of it first."
The scene moved to Rome, Georgia where Jim Griggs of Hydrodynamics, Inc. demonstrated the assembly and operation of a "hydrosonic water pump" which operated over-unity by producing hot water or steam with energy in excess of the electrical energy input to the pump motor. "Over-unity" was confirmed by satisfied customers, including the Albany Fire Station, where engineers from the "local university" and the "local power company" had been called in to verify the over-100% efficiency.
The presentation was impressive. A drum-type rotor close-fitting within a cylindrical housing had numerous holes In its surface, which presumably produced vortices and turbulence and acted as a pump driving water through the apparatus.
The "problem" it seemed was that Jim Griggs was not a scientist cast from the academic mold, so the technology had to be somewhat suspect - even though it worked!
I was impressed, as were many of my friends who saw this T.V. program, but I later, on reflection, found myself asking why we were not assured that the pump housing was not, in fact, cooling down.
To operate over-unity, a pump producing hot water must either capture "aether" energy or so-called zero-point" energy to cool the aether or it must cool the pump housing to keep the energy balance. The latter might seem illogical if hot water is being produced just inside the housing, but "logic" cannot be relied upon where "free energy" is concerned. However, the operation of the conventional heat pump needs to be kept in mind, just in case there is a low temperature heat sink (the outer casing of the pump)
Commentary by Frank Close, who is in charge of theoretical physics at the Rutherford Laboratory, in U.K., then assured us that if excess energy production could be demonstrated it would overturn 300 years of experience by breaching the Principle of Conservation of Energy. That was enough reason for him to remain at the first stage of Arthur Clarke's introduction.
To counter that, Paul Czysz, Professor of Aeronautics at St. Louis University, then took up the theme in a positive way. He was well past the second stage in Clarke's list, but not quite at the third. The reaction "It's important; we should be taking it seriously" would best describe his stance.
Next came reference to Tesla and from there we were introduced to the Chernetskii theme, 5:1 over-unity power generation in Moscow using plasma arc discharges. This we knew about from the Novosti Press release 03NTO-890717CMO4 in 1989. The facade of an academic institution in Moscow appeared on the T.V. screen. Then there were shots of an apparatus working and illuminating a set of lamps. Hal Puthoff had visited Chernetskii in 1991 to witness the device working, but sadly Professor Chernetskii had died shortly after that, in 1992, and that free energy pursuit had not been taken up.
Upon hearing this my thoughts switched to the Correa research findings in Canada and the U.S. patented discovery of how to generate electrical power with similar "free energy" gain using plasma arc discharge techniques. Of particular importance here is that the U.S. Patent Office has actually granted the Correa patents [NEN Dec. 1995, p 5] even though they are very clearly biased on performance efficiency data well over unity. This is in sharp contrast with their posture on cold fusion, where the patent examiner takes the law into his own hands, as it were, meaning the laws of physics rather than patent law.
I note something I heard from a later discussion with a U.K. colleague, who had first told me about this T.V. documentary while it was being put together, on the point on how this plasma tube demonstration was obtained. Based on the data in the Novosti Press Release a mock up demonstration had been set up in London at the Royal Institution where Michael Faraday made his discoveries.
We were therefore taking strength from what Hal Puthoff had to say about his Moscow visit: "It was a dramatic demonstration." "I was impressed ... didn't sleep that night ... was it a trick?" On his return to Austin, Texas, Hal Puthoff arranged for Chernetskii to be invited to USA to further the research, but Chernetskii's decease precluded that. The commentator then said "No one has taken up his research."
Well, I thought, although no one had taken up Chernetskii's research, the Correa technology under development in Canada would mean that over-unity energy generation using plasma remains with us and 1996 should see progress on that front. [The work by Kucherov, Karabut, & Savvitimova has also shown excess heat generation from a "glow discharge." --Ed.]
After Hal Puthoff's review of the Chernetskii story there was a very substantial treatment of the Stan Meyer activity in generating hydrogen from water. This included a fascinating demonstration of an apparatus comprising a column of water in which there were several pairs of concentric alloy metal tubes functioning as electrodes.
Upon switching on the electrical power there was instantaneous emission of gas, the combustible properties of which were said to be three times the electrical input, in energy terms. This was supported by Dr. Keith Hindley, a U.K. research consultant, who had visited Meyer several times.
By this time viewers had seen three demonstrable "free energy" technologies, but then the scene switched to Florida and James Patterson. He showed us a test cell and explained how he had discovered that 1300 beads having a metallic coating formed by layers of Ni-Pd-Ni when compacted in the cell and immersed in water could be used to generate excess heat by pulsing electrical current through the cell. Dr. Dennis Cravens then explained how his tests on a Patterson cell indicated heat energy output some tens of times greater than electrical energy input. Pulsing was the key and, in this respect, there were similarities with Stan Meyer's apparatus.
We saw Hal Puthoff several times during this program, at his Institute base in Austin, Texas, as someone of academic standing interested in knowing the full truths of the "free energy" prospect and equipped and willing to engage in definitive tests and evaluation of the performance of over-unity devices. We saw Paul Czysz throwing his academic weight fully into the "free energy" and stressing its commercial and political significance. We saw Keith Hindley as a U.K. proponent urging interest in "free energy," but explaining how much of the difficulty arises because the experimental results on test apparatus are often different every time it runs. This, he said, means that there is "no control" and scientists "could not do work" (meaning evaluation and testing) on that basis.
Yet, to me, the task of the scientist is all the more exciting if a device has its own independent character and presents a challenge. If it were just a matter of testing to verify operation then that is work for a technician, not a scientist.
Before Arthur C. Clarke ended the program on a positive note, the "voice of doom," that of Frank Close, explained how it was not feasible to risk one's career by seeking institutional research funding for such a project. He said he would "gamble his mortgage" in betting that there was nothing worth pursuing in this "free energy" hope. (I wonder what odds are on that offer?)
[Begin boxed text:]
I have very good reason for believing that a radial electric field set up between a cathode and a concentric cylindrical anode will develop "vacuum spin" which draws in energy from the aether.
[End boxed text.]
I cannot resist adding here my own observation: if the free energy source comes from an electrical coupling with something in motion in the aether, then that something could be a spin about a fixed direction in space. In that case, bearing in mind that the laboratory test bench on body Earth reorientates its direction in space as a function of time of day, I would expect the performance of such a "free energy" apparatus to be "different every time the device runs." After all, a clock ought to give a different reading every time one looks at it!
Nor can I resist noting that I have very good reason for believing that a radial electric field set up between a cathode and a concentric cylindrical anode will develop "vacuum spin" which draws in energy from the aether. This energy (as in the homopolar magnet N-machine) is shed as electrical charge displacement and enhances ionization in the water if between those electrodes. In the Patterson apparatus the metallized beads facilitate recombination of ions to produce heat, whereas in the Meyer apparatus the ions are segregated on the separate electrodes and form gas molecules of hydrogen and oxygen at the respective electrodes. Even in the Griggs hydrosonic pump I wonder if the drum rotor, being a metal conductor rotating in the Earth's magnetic field but separated from the casing by a thin layer of water which has a high dielectric constant, might allow vacuum spin build-up owing to the Faraday disc induction of a radial electric held. (These comments will be better understood when I publish what I have to say on the "virtual inertia" theme.)
Meanwhile, there were two messages that came across loud and clear from this T.V. program. These were:
(1) "We know how to gain access to free energy but cannot explain why our inventions really work," and
(2) "If only we had a theory explaining all this we could interest scientists so that they could support, rather than oppose, what we are doing."
As to the theory, though perhaps not the experiments, I see no reason to dispute the wisdom of Arthur C. Clarke's words, and so, to show we are nearly there, I claim to be one of the first to say "I thought of it first!"