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Borderland Visionary: The Life of Sir William Crookes (Part 2)

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:00:45 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Journal of Borderland Research (Volume LIV, No. 1, First Quarter 1998)

ELEMENTS

[Crookes's] astute enterprising aims had as their first order of priority a self sufficiency without aristocratic rule or restriction. He would be independent and self-employed. “Owe no man anything” was the lesson. As his father was successful in the art of tailor craft, so he would reach independent success in the scientific profession. Von Hoffmann had been a good and thorough master. He taught him well by example, and had highly favored and encouraged William. I am sure he insisted on calling him “Wilhelm.” In the isolation and efficient production of new chemical substances, there were new fortunes to be made.

William Crookes saw that this theme and atmosphere so contributed to the German industrial power base that to deny it was foolhardy. Worse, it might someday prove deadly. Competitive Germany had thoroughly recognized these scientific potentials, and were quick to implement every fruit of technical achievement. His strong opinion was contained in the notion that scientific labor should be justly and amply rewarded. Valuable scientific knowledge was not a free tithe, no mere resource. His nation needed to implement the free enterprise theme as rapidly as possible.

Exploitation was no longer to be tolerated. The German approach did not prohibit the exchange of information between and among persons of different class. Not so in England, where scientists and their technologies were viewed by royalty as exploitable resource for the personal extension of profit and power. By the end of the same decade, Germany would outstrip the English industrial facility on several key grounds. By the time the aristocrats were roused from their self deceiving slumber of peace, the whole of Great Britain had been shaken to its patristic roots.

Throughout the early history of this laboratory, Dr. William Crookes devoted himself to the discovery of industrial applications. The industrial production of new products was his aim, but this goal did not prevent him from exploring the natural world of chemistry. He was forever investigating new families of chemical substances which might prove in the future to be of strategic industrial importance. This native curiosity permitted him to be first in the discovery of new elements, compounds, and their possible use in some burgeoning industrial complex. In 1859 he initiated and directed the publication of The Chemical News, a scholarly journal whose aim it was to stimulate both the professional and amateur chemists into a new industrial revolution. He remained its principle editor for several years.

Serious theoretical and industrial information thus flowed from him and to him. The flow of such material was timely. In this theme and approach, Dr. Crookes explored the strange properties of selenium, a new “light sensing” element. The year was 1861, and selenium was the focus of several intriguing discoveries. Photoelectric effects were observed, and the extreme sensitivity of selenium to various spectra promised new industrial frontiers. It would therefore be imperative to be the principle provider of information on the topic area. In the eventuality of new applications, industrialists would want ready information on the manufacture of selenium components. William was always in the lead, especially when the more mystifying aspects of Nature made themselves apparent.

His intuitions were well rewarded when, in the next decade, selenium became the principle means by which certain highly desirable electrical analyzing instruments were made possible. In the process of studying selenium, William succeeded in discovering a new element. The element thallium was discovered in 1861, the result of a spectroscopic study. He recognized its unique strong green spectral line. Here was the word which Faraday himself had spoken. Here was the rarest of privileges, an honor granted to a very few individuals. How curious and fortunate that he had been chosen to assume such an exalted scientific poise in science history!

The discovery had its industrial merits. Lucrative merits. Poisonous metallic thallium, a bluish-white element, was utilized as a catalyst in the industrial manufacture of benzene and antiknock fuels. In its other chemical uses, thallium found prime application in the manufacture of flint, glass, artificial gems, scientific thermometers, mineralogical washing solutions, and pyrotechnics. In the following years Dr. Crookes developed sodium amalgamation methods for the commercial extraction of gold and silver from crushed ores, devised laboratory-worthy spectrum microscopes and polarization photometers, compiled planetary and stellar spectra, perfected astronomical photography, and hunted for new planets and asteroids.

So it was, in 1863, Dr. Crookes was elected to the Royal Society as a Fellow.

WHITE LIGHT

It was while investigating certain properties of thallium in vacuum (1873) that he chanced to observe a unique motional effect in a delicate torsion balance. The mere presence of light, whether from the sun or an artificial source, made impossible the routine task of weighing the element in vacuum. Dr. Crookes saw that, as soon as light was admitted into his balancing apparatus, the delicate device moved quite violently. In some cases, the torsion balance struck its containment walls. The mere presence of light so destabilized the delicate quartz fiber of his torsion balance, that he paused from this chemical study.

With external sources of illumination, he found that vacua of 40 millionths atmosphere allowed the most powerful rotation in the vanes. With internal sources of radiant heat, he found it possible to obtain much stronger rotations. These were observed (over 30 rotations per second) in hydrogen gas at 0.1 millionth atmospheres…a remarkable figure! The observation of movements with vanes coated on both sides in lampblack. . .a complete conundrum.. .could find few good explanations. Nor could the mechanistic theory attempt adequate explanation of the other numerous anomalies found in his study.

Deeper inquiry into the “mechanical action of light” led to a minor upheaval in the world of physics. The philosophical debate which discussed the “light pressure” remained a focal point for years, since a reversal of theoretical expectations was obtained. The fundamental anomaly which Dr. Crookes and others observed was that “light pressure” caused the repulsion of dark bodies, and the attraction of reflective bodies. This basic riddle occupied the thoughts of many physicists for several years. Dr. Crookes published his findings in a long series of articles and scientific essays; where the variables of vacuum, substance, vane shape, even or uneven surface heating, and applied spectral energy were each studied with the utmost care. (The complete record of his meticulous research may be obtained in collated form a. DeMeo).

As regard to the anomalies which he observed, Dr. Crookes was bold and decisive. “In some of the observations, the results accorded with theory; and although I could explain most of the anomalies, there were irregularities which seemed to point to another influence…” Another influence? To what influence did he possibly refer? He had eliminated all of the mechanistic variables with elaborate shields and baffles. In fact, these inconsistencies were never solved and, with attempts to give answer according to the mechanistic theory, were entirely unsatisfactory.

The prevailing view among physicists was that the opposite vane rotations and other behaviors were all the result of molecular bombardments within the glass bulb. Varieties of mechanical dynamics (gaseous flow, viscosity, “creep,” recoil) along vane surfaces were cited in explanation of each anomalies. But each such puzzle required new and (sometimes self-contradicting) applications of the mechanical principles. The glaring inability to provide satisfactory explanations for key phenomena lent an increasing number of scholars to assail the mechanistic view itself. Accusations of the obvious deficiency in this view, especially in explaining the newly discovered phenomena of the day, represented the first in a series of major failures.

The mechanistic view was shown to be inadequate in such cases as regards various phenomena of light and other radiant forms. The trend to save “mechanism” continued through the Twentieth Century. Renewed interest in this episode of scientific inadequacy has evoked response from several researchers such as Dr. James DeMeo. This esteemed researcher and author considers the strong likelihood that such anomalies are entirely due to more vitalistic influences. The possibility that the anomalous results of Crookes were entirely derived from external influence of his own presence (i.e. of biological energy) has provided the most potent reevaluation of the phenomenon to date.

TOYS

In all of these important considerations we see that the mechanistic view and its explanations usually results from highly valued topical effects of least importance, caused by more dominant fundamental energies of Nature. Yet it is well known that Sir William inclined more toward these vitalistic possibilities, having observed motions on his own approach to the device. And, while never publishing his deeper inclinations on these issues, it is known that his study of paranormal forces were commendable in his employ of numerous sensitive apparatus.. .not the least of which was his Radiometer.

The debate on these “light pressure” anomalies prompted Dr. Crookes to bring the effect out of the academic halls and into the public forum. His development of the Radiometer for serious scientific use was a matter of scientific record. But this serious application did not limit his wonderful imagination from teaching children of its marvels. So delightful was the Radiometer, or “light mill” as he often called it, that an inexpensive version was developed for toy shoppes. The small scientific “toy” has remained both a curiosity and amusement since its first appearance. Of it Nikola Tesla gave fond homage, referring to the delicate design as “the jewel of motors.”

This first of many such “toys” became a distinct Crookes trademark, an ultimate “soft” vengeance. “In this realm of marvels, this wonderland toward which scientific enquiry is sending out its pioneers, can anything be more astonishing than the delicacy of the instrumental aids which the workers bring with them?” Dr. Crookes was relentless in his provocation of the scientific aristocracy. His deliberate conception and deployment of a great many such “toys” was directed at their fancies. He would haunt both them and their children.. with scientific “amusements” and “toys.” Crookes was the great scientific toy maker, but delighted in presenting them to those who would acquire them as curiosities.

Simultaneously cunning and humorous, the designs produced for his laboratory a steady source of capital. They also accomplished their primary task of preserving the various vitalistic conundrums everywhere. Crookes was especially delighted that the aristocrats perceived these as amusing devices to purchase. With his guidance, and the “skillful manipulations of my friend, pupil, and associate, Mr. Charles H. Gimingham,” the manufacture of a vast laboratory demonstration assortment was offered to the scientific community at large. Both in England and abroad, in America, sales of these marvelous and glittering Victorian designs brought in an important steady revenue. These designs were distributed in North America by James Queen and Company, a scientific supply house based in Philadelphia.

BLACK SPACE

Sir William’s scientific approach differed from the growing convention. His approach appealed to the philosophical aesthetic, rather than to the engineering theme. His demonstrations were never intended to represent miniatures for technological exploitation. In the Victorian tradition, experimental models and demonstrations represented philosophical statements. Each was made to consolidate some principle, to embody an idea. Experimental models were statements in solid form. Such devices were therefore always referred to, not as industrial appliances, but rather as “philosophical toys”; his elegant and final answer to each challenging polemic.

Sir William delighted in contriving such designs in order to provide wordless proof of each thesis. In 1877, he began his most world-renown series of researches into the discharge of high voltage electricity through spaces of very high vacuum. The automatic mercury pumps of Herman Sprengel were much improved on behalf of Dr. Crookes, again by Charles H. Gimingham (1877). It was this improvement which stimulated the new and thrilling research, since prior to this time, the reasonably attained vacua were insufficient to produce the effects which were historically first obtained by Dr. Crookes.

His first major discovery was one typical of the style and flair by which he would be best remembered. Bringing the vacuum to its ultimate degree, he observed a mysterious “dark space”. This was the metaphor which most captivated his scientific attentions, a symbol and representative of space itself. But what was in that dark space? He called again for the lights to be withdrawn. They had seen his preliminary demonstration of phosphorescence, but had they comprehended the meaning of those phenomena? Had they pierced through to his exact intimations concerning that phenomena?

Were they able to realize that no phosphorescence, no light is ever emitted unless substances are completely wrapped and permeated in a blanket of absolute darkness? Did they appreciate that every condition of earthly light was first predicated in every instance by a permeation of radiant black space? His voice again rang into the dark space of the Hall. “I will endeavor to render the ‘dark space’ visible to all present. Here is a tube having a pole in the centre in the form of a metal disk, and the other poles at each end.” The large barreled tube which he stood near on the table was fitted with a disc-shaped central cathode, facing two opposed anodes; one at each end. Current was applied.

“When the exhaustion is good and the electrical pressure is high… the dark space is seen to extend for about an inch on both sides of the cathode.” The luminous gas residue withdrew to the anodes, being tightly squeezed upon their metal surfaces. But the dark space remained. Clearly, all matter had been forced away from this space, otherwise it would be glowing with light. In the dark space were rays whose power “…radiating from the pole with enormous velocity, assume properties so novel and so characteristic as to entirely justify the application of the term borrowed from Faraday… that of Radiant Matter.”

There were those who had always mistakenly believed that his Radiant Matter was simply composed of electrons, even as J. J. Thomson had sought to prove. But Sir William could never have disagreed more. To him, the dark space was filled with “dark light,” the precursor to every form of light known to the world of physics. It was the energetic presence of this dark light which provoked the phosphorescence of any substance placed within that dark space. As he was about to prove again, the dark space was completely devoid of inert, or massive particles. He would now separate the negative charges from the neutral dark light particles. The next few demonstrations were therefore designed to highlight his original statements concerning cathodic rays and precursory light.

The younger and more acrid members of the Society, the posh appointees of fashion and advantage, remained completely unimpressed with his outpourings. Their affections forever fawned among the acceptable conventions, since this poise always seemed to preserve and a greater social favor.. .an assured measure of decorum. For them, learning was unimportant. Face and keeping face was all.

Nevertheless, he remained courtly, noble, and somehow impossible not to watch. There was an unmistakable luminosity about the man which was also difficult to deny. It seemed to brighten whenever he spoke. “It is not unlikely that in the experiments here recorded maybe found the key of some as yet unsolved problems in celestial mechanics.. .we may argue from small things to great.” The audience saw his vague outline moving to the far side of the proscenium. They turned to see. Sir William now stood among a select series of vacuum tubes, also now decades old. With these large demonstration vessels, he would provoke his detractors into a renewed revelation of Radiant Matter.

EMERALD

He opened this section of the lecture with a simple statement. “To those, therefore, who admit the Radiant form of matter, no difficulty exists in the simplicity of the properties it possesses, but rather an argument in their favor.” He stood behind a second apparatus, a large V-shaped vacuum tube, and applied the voltage. “You see that the whole of the cathode arm is flooded with green light, but at the bottom stops sharply, and will not turn the comer to get to the anode…. Radiant Matter absolutely refuses to turn a corner.” By this it was understood that cathodic rays did not behave like ordinary electric charge, which would have eagerly sought the positive terminal. Many imagined that the high terminal velocity, imparted to these rays on ejection from the cathode, actually constrained the rays from seeking the electropositive terminal. They remained unconvinced that the rays were “rays of dark light.”

A third large bulb stood near this V-shaped tube. This bulb had a cathode which had been sealed in the side. Two anodes had been sealed at opposing angles and at differing distances from this cathode. The current was applied. “Notice,” he said, “the rays fall on the opposing side of the bulb, and produce a circular patch of green phosphorescent light. As I turn the bulb round you will all be able to see the green patch on the glass. Whether I now electrify the top or bottom anode, the rays remain unmoved from their path…. Radiant Matter darts in straight lines from the negative.”

The positive proximity to the ray path did not alter the beam in the least. Were these the light mass particles claimed by Thomson and his adherents, this ray path would have bent to the closer anode. But it did not. He beamed nearly as bright as one of his tubes. Now he turned to a very large diameter tube. His fourth proof for the existence of cathode light rays. It was long, fitted at one end with a split cathode. At the other end was a single anode. Through the center of this tube, a phosphor coated card was placed for the visual inspection of cathode rays in their progress across the space. “If the streams of Radiant Matter are simply built up of negatively electrified particles, then they will repel one another. But if the streams are neutral, then they will proceed independently of one another.”

Now switching the current on, two straight and brilliant green rays traced their thin paths across the card. The surprised reaction in his audience was delightful! Both rays moved independently of the other. Each touched the anode separately. Though ejected from the cathode, such emission did not conclude negative charge. Here was the proof. Sir William showed again that Radiant Matter was a neutral, light like form of energy.

A fifth globe used a large concave cathode with an opposed planar anode. Between this cathode and its small anode, a strip of silver-white metal was poised on a sealed support wire. The globe was very large in size. “The bright margin of the Dark Space becomes concentrated at the concave side of the cup to a luminous focus, and widens out at the convex side. When the dark space is very much larger than the cup, its outline forms an irregular ellipsoid, drawn in toward the focal point… the whole appearance being strikingly similar to the rays of the sun reflected from a concave mirror.”

“You will notice that the rays which project from the cup, and which cross in the centre, have a bright green appearance… the intensity of the color varying with the perfection of the vacuum.” That strange green light, what equally bizarre properties it displayed! “The cup is made of polished aluminum, and projects the rays to a focus. In this tube, the rays focus on a piece of iridio-platinum, supported in the centre of the bulb.” The globe was ingenious, an embodiment of genuine insight. Those who long believed the inadequacy of the Victorians regained a lost admiration.

“With only a slight application of the current, the interposed metal strip suddenly became white hot. I increase the intensity of the spark, the iridio-platinum glows with almost insupportable brilliancy, and at last melts.” This demonstration showed a remarkable and uncommon property of Radiant Matter. In its apparent ability to defy the Faraday electrostatic laws, it could not be composed of negative particles. Leaving internal surfaces in converging lines, electrons could never be brought to such a tight focus without producing noticeable repulsions.

This radiant behavior more exhibited the characteristics of light than particles of matter. The radiant extension of the material shape into the vacuum was visual. It took the form of straight and continuous lines. On closer examination, and in taking consideration of electrostatic principles, here was a very different kind of ray than that which J. J. Thomson quantified.

RADIANT MATTER

Sir William again called for the lights. His coup-de-grace was a large and bulbous “electric” Radiometer. This demonstration Radiometer gave a most remarkable demonstration of the mechanical energy exerted by the dark space itself, a singular anomaly. “The best pressure for this Electrical Radiometer is a little beyond that at which the Dark Space extends to the sides of the glass bulb.” He attached the leads with ginger delight. Here was a “toy” which he especially enjoyed sharing with others. “On continuing the exhaustion, the Dark Space further widens out and appears to flatten itself against the glass, whence the rotation becomes very rapid.” Current was applied, and the vanes spun themselves into a blur.

“You perceive the dark space behind each vane, and moving round with it?” When the power was increased, the blackness covered the vanes completely, and the vanes began to rotate into an amazing blur. Here was true light pressure. Light pressure in the apparent absence of any material agency. In this device, motion required the mere presence of the dark space. But what was in this special space? Was it the literal extension of the cathode into the ultravacuum? Was this a revelation of the continuity of matter in space? How did vacuum and electrostatic charge now combine to expand the material volume of the cathode, revealing it as force? This was nothing less than the Reichenbach thesis, where matter and its diverse qualities extends throughout space.

“Here we have actually touched the borderland.. .where Matter and Force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between Known and Unknown, which for me has always had peculiar temptations. I venture to think that the greatest scientific problems of the future will find their solution in this Border Land, and even beyond; here, it seems to me, lie Ultimate Realities, subtle, far-reaching, wonderful.” What an epithet! One might well draw the title for a scientific journal from his words.

The vacuum tubes thus provided a most potent visual means for elucidating each of these concepts. This visible proof, which the mind grasped, offered the noisy intellect perhaps more analytic substance to disannul. But the combined effect of the performance would force the intellectual process to relax, while the holistic sensibilities once more brought in true and whole vision. The analytic process simply disintegrated the world into nothingness. This qualitative grasp represented a larger consciousness. As often as he shared this demonstration model, his audiences remained completely enthralled. He knew the all too human need for colors, sounds, and motions … for sensation. Sensation, whole experience, was the proper use of the mind.

His experiments had revealed to him that matter and material aggregates were supported in their very existence by non-inertial form. This what the fourth state of matter represented, and this is precisely why it was so vehemently rejected. Here was the heart of Vitalism yet again revealed! In this revolutionary view, molecules and atoms vibrated about a lattice of “continuous matter.” The mobile particles of inertia were simply associated with these continuous solids, and were not themselves the real forms we knew as matter at all. Platonic solids contaminated by inertia! Collectively, the demonstration was a marvel, a true philosophical argument in the best Victorian tradition. His last display caused quite a commotion.

The younger aristocratic members, those who most sought to maintain their composure, were now shifting ever so slightly in their seats. He noticed this with glee. How tragic! They refused to so much as grant him any facial expression whatsoever, a too common conceit. Noticing the ill-cloaked irritation of his young aristocrats, Sir William chuckled. He did not care so much that they were vexed, as much as he was delighted that his point pierced their defense. For them, his beaming joy was detestable. To this animosity they were entitled. Nevertheless, amor vincit omnia!

Were they aware of their German counterparts, whose industrial complex was about to march across Europe to the very borders of England? Alas, theirs was a sleep of ages, from which they would soon awaken in frightful need. But there would now be no prating command for protection and service. Science and other working class “servants” would now exact their wage, their price. Among the burgeoning scientific class, those who had suffered so much indignity, there was no urgent obligation to the dwindling Empire. The free option to emigrate to North America was now forever their chief tool of threat. And if it was not possible to maintain the common human right in England, there was dignity, honor, and profit to be made over that westward sea horizon. Command would remain among those scientifics, those laboring minds whose experience in life had not known idle advantage.

RARE EARTH

Sir William had undertaken a thorough research on rare earth elements in 1883, a field of study which would have enormous strategic and industrial importance in the mid-Twentieth Century. His original research in this capacity brought him to a consideration of radioactive phenomena and the possibility of elemental transmutation, yet another term which the proud desperately wished to eradicate from the scientific register.

But Dr. Crookes was the first to observe that elements contain isotopes, noting that pure elements were composed of differing atomic weights (1886). His conception of transmuting the elements was therefore founded on sound reasoning, and clarified observation. Each of these notions were in part realized with the discoveries of Ernest Rutherford.

Sir William began to consider the possibility that all matter, all elements, were “built up” by a primordial aether. Where would such a primordial aether be found? Sir William held out his hand toward his tubes, emphasizing the effects which had just illustrated the heart of his dissertation by wordless example. His glassy globes and bulbs, with their twirling little mica vanes, now sparkled in the eyes of those who watched them almost as much as did his rimmed glasses!

The prevailing “old school” view was indeed here, embodied before them. Sir William was a sprite, a truly “aethereal” character! Cheerful, merry, beaming, brilliant, lighter than air, he appeared to be aglow with the same white light seen in his mineral tubes. Equipped with his collection of unearthly globes and radiant crystals, he glittered a starry message of dreams… without words. Most realized that they had, quite unawares, fallen into one of the delightful little games of the grand old gentleman. Each slowly saw where he was guiding their vision. A few resisted, could not follow. They tuned their hearts away, and were instantly recognized. He was aglow, spying them out as if by magic. Most enjoyed the prospect of allowing him to guide their mind’s eye, and were drawn into his hopeful sphere of influence for a few more moments.

Those who best remembered the melody of his voice and life remembered a sense and mood from another time, from childhood’s forgotten world. The old gentleman spoke, a dark line from Royal Society history. “Faraday pointed out that matter existed in four states.. solid, liquid, gas, and radiant. He stated that as matter ascends in the scale of forms …it does not cease at the gaseous state. But the greater exertions Nature makes at each step of the change becomes greatest in the passage from gaseous to the radiant form…” He was not now averse to making formal statements concerning the luminiferous aether. Besides the fact that they had spent the evening observing effects-in-miniature of this aethereal gas, it was also an air in which he seemed to live and move quite comfortably.

Indeed, “the phenomena in these exhausted tubes reveal to physical science a new world …a world where matter exists in a fourth state, and where the corpuscular theory of light holds good.” He called attention to the strange green light, that which was observed with each manifestation of cathode rays. The green light had peculiar and persistent qualities. “This green phosphorescence is a subject which has occupied my thoughts, and I have striven to ascertain some of the laws governing its appearance.” This statement sent some of their minds reeling with implications.

“The spectrum of the green light is a continuous one …no difference can be detected by spectrum examination in the green light, whether the residual gas be nitrogen, hydrogen, or carbonic acid.” Most physicists had concluded the green light to be a property of the bombarded glassy matter. Its spectral lines were taken as proof of the “excitation” theory. But now Dr. Crookes was highlighting his spectral study, finding the curious constancy of that light regardless of gas or glass. Was this not some indication of the existence of a new “ultragaseous” element?

For some, the very admission of an ultragas was instantly recognized. But the lecture had perfectly led to this realization, and was whole in every aspect. From these elevated vantage points, one could hardly argue the existence of the luminiferous aether!

He continued, emboldened by the sense that the audience had entered that absorptive stage, where deep and permanent impressions could be made. “Between the gaseous and the ultragaseous state there can be traced no sharp boundary; the one merges imperceptibly into the other …nor can human or any other kind of organic life conceivable to us penetrate into regions where such ultragaseous matter may be supposed to exist.” Most mortals at least could not endure the ethereal air as he so effortlessly did.

“The position of the positive pole in the tube scarcely makes any difference in the direction or intensity of those lines of force which produce the green light.., and this green light is distinguished from ordinary light…it cannot be wrong to here apply the term emissive light.” The glowing globes had each spoken the thesis for him. He merely repeated those statements which he had published so many years ago. But no matter now, all minds asked the same question. All knew the identity of that pure light which issued forth from his highly electrified cathodes. There could be no question now. Those whose minds now grasped the whole message of the one who stood before them, fell silent. Why had no one ever considered these facts? One saw around his words, and conceded without a single protest. The unmistakable ring of truth.

Sir William suddenly appeared to have now satisfied himself that his message was well received. A teacher could not hope for more than this. For a few brief moments, the Hall felt silent.

“Time has not allowed me to undertake the whole of the task so vast and so manifold. I have felt compelled to follow out, as far as lay in my power, my original ideas. To these collateral questions, I must now invite the attention of my fellow-workers in Science. There is ample room for many inquirers.” It was not until a few began to clap and shout sharp words of approval that Sir William looked down once more. He smiled again and looked among them all. Standing among his glittering and delightful toys, he nodded his thanks at their approval. The green light, the melodious voice, the twinkling eyes, the silvery air, all remain suspended in memory.

Sir William Crookes left the spinning, glowing, scintillating magic of his wonderful little toys in the springtime. Nikola Tesla never forgot the date when his dear mentor and friend departed the material world. Shedding aside the crusader’s lantern to those in the scientific world, he took to the stars – the date was April 4, 1919. Those who grew to cherish his memory lifted his lantern before it fell into the relativistic dust. In so doing, one felt a twinkling joy where there should have been sadness. The great man’s passing left a sparkling tracework, and yes, like the joy which suddenly quickens and stimulates in the midst of night, it twinkles still!

All quotes were taken liberally from the following excellent sources:

Selected Reprints of Articles Related To The Mechanical Action Of Light And The Radiometer, Sir William Crookes, (compilation reprint) by James DeMeo, Natural Energy Works, 1994.
The Phenomenon of Spiritualism, Sir William Crookes, London, 1874, The Quarterly Journal of Science, (reprint Health Research, 1972).
Radiant Matter, Sir William Crookes, Nature, 1879 (reprint Electric Spacecraft journal, 1995). Available from BSRF.

Borderland Visionary: The Life of Sir William Crookes (Part 1)

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:00:22 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Journal of Borderland Research (Volume LIV, No. 1, First Quarter 1998)

IN the pantheon of our qualitative science there stand a grand assembly of highly venerated persons, the mere mention of whose names is sufficient to evoke inexpressible sentiments. Some of these have been justly venerated to a station which is not inordinate, being of such grand stature in their achievements that to deny them due homage would be unjust. We note that a few of these distinguished ones so deeply touched each their generation, that whole epochs became intimately associated with their names alone. How beautiful and fitting that we find it often quite impossible to mention certain scientific periods without first recalling them, name by name. These are the doorkeepers of an epoch, who names must first be acknowledged, evoked so to speak, before being permitted entry into their realms of knowledge. No greater earthly glory can be acquired by mortals.

ROYAL

The Royal Society had gathered to hear a lecture by one of the most eminent members who had ever blessed their halls. After having been announced by the president of the Society, the principle speaker walked to the large proscenium area, took his place behind the wide demonstration table and began to speak in a fervent, ringing voice. He was elderly, formally dressed in a black waistcoat of a former time. The loose black evening cravat wrapped the high white collar, and neatly, framed the now radiant face.

Bright and cherubic, in glittering spectacles, the guest looked down for a brief moment. It was as if he lingered in some wonderful clear peace, awaiting an inner impulse to speak. His trimmed silvery moustache and the pointed silvery beard lent an otherworldly air, and as he looked up again all eyes came to rest upon the curious elfin figure. This was not the first time that the assembled members of the Royal Society had seen the wonderful Sir William Crookes. No one present in that assembly could have long remained ignorant of the man standing before them. Sir William and his mysterious investigations into Radiant Matter had captivated the greatest minds of his time. And while most believed that the aetheric implications of his work had been explained away, there remained a lingering suspicion among a dwindling membership that he had eluded them all with a far deeper secret.

“When I was asked a month or two ago to illustrate in this theatre some of my recent researches on high vacua, I exclaimed how is it possible to bring such a subject worthily before a Royal Institution audience when none of the experiments can be seen more than a few feet off?” Two former decades had passed since his first demonstrations on Radiant Matter were given. It might as well now have been a former age. So rapidly had the scientific movement taken the industrial world, that the famed Crookes Tube seemed to be an antiquated and elementary device. But perhaps then, few had actually comprehended the full meaning of that simple “antique.”

He once believed that he had been careful about elucidating these matters. He also believed that his original dissertation, presented in 1879, had been clear and forthright to the illustrious Society. There was no reason for him to doubt his proficiency in the lecture hall. How far can facts be twisted, taken from fact and distorted into rumors? But over the long decades, he sadly observed a peculiar reaction which repeatedly worked to dispel any new advancements in thought. There were those Society members who, after both having seen his classic demonstrations, somehow failed to sustain the precise message which had been delivered to them. This strange principle maintained an arrested consciousness in the scientific ranks of the Society, rendering them incapable of philosophical progress. And without first appreciation for philosophical principles, there would never be true scientific progress.

“Like a traveler exploring some distant country, the wonders of which have hitherto been known through reports and rumors of a vague and distorted character, so for years I have been occupied in pushing an enquiry into a territory of natural knowledge which offers almost virgin soil to the scientific man”. The majority were now unable to hear the simplest ofhis statements without somehow automatically “reinterpreting” his ideas. This automatic process consistently obscured topics which opened to the more vitalistic aspects of natural lore. This degenerative process obscured the real impost of his work, that which literally claimed to point a way toward a vision of deeper dimensions. But in them, he perceived a growing ignorance, which was not so much a darkness of intellectual resource, but a darkness of intellectual use.

The amount of factual information had increased beyond the ability of science to remember all that had been observed. But the manner in which these facts were reorganized and reinterpreted which deeply distressed Sir William. “Are we to investigate nothing till we know it to be possible?” In his estimation, science was on the verge of an important divergence, one which limited scope by a stringent doctrine. It would thus become polarized, on the one hand opening up to new awareness, yet on the other resisting change.

“It is not reason which convinces a man, unless a fact is repeated so frequently that the impression becomes like a habit of mind.” What he now recognized was far worse than scientific agnosticism. Having miscarried the vision which had been faithfully delivered to them, the younger generation of “scientifics” had chosen a selective number of facts, and certainly not the philosophy. It was rather like being given a lovely rose bush.. cutting off a few roses, and then killing the shrub! The eradication ofall things pre-modem seemed more important to the young scientific revolutionaries than the reverence of learning, of knowledge, and of a deeper vision.

But this revulsion of all things pre-modem manifested an unmistakable tendency to repulse and repudiate themes which were Vitalistic. And the lifelong theme of Sir William Crookes was a Vitalistic theme.

“With all my senses alert and ready to convey information, believing as I do that we have by no means exhausted all knowledge or fathomed the depths of all physical forces.” So here stood the very personification of that antique worldview, and the Hall was never more divided in their opinion of his presence near the proscenium. Having well comprehended the present dilemma, Sir William fully intended to baffle the minds of his younger antagonists. “The consciousness of my senses, both of touch and sight.. .and these having corroborated by the senses of all present… are not lying witness when they testify against my preconceptions.”

Many had already critiqued his past works in the scholarly journals, mocking his “simplistic” views. But he was not concerned that his work was being critiqued, so much as that the Victorian approach to science was being critiqued. There was already an established background of biased thought, a progressive epidemic of erroneous doctrine. “If a new fact seems to oppose what is called a’law of Nature,’ it does not prove the asserted fact to be false, but only that we have not yet ascertained the laws of Nature. or not learned them correctly. And if you find a fact, then avow it fearlessly, as by the everlasting law of honor you are bound to do so.”

He fully intended on thwarting the proliferation of this doctrine by throwing a few simple facts into the group mind. Any convincing polemic in the Victorian tradition would stand to confront the new and alienating quantitative science. The well-organized machinery might be disrupted by an experiential form of sabotage. He would attack their dead view of the world by giving them such an irrefutable experience of his realm so as to haunt the Hall and its annals for a century if necessary.

GEMS

When his work with electrostatic discharges in vacuum was first brought forth, it was immediately wrangled into a theory of particles and quanta. For Sir William, his experiments with ultravacuum began as an extension of experiments performed by Baron von Reichenbach. His intention was to test those early experiments by which the Baron discovered a luminous emanation exuded by magnets in vacuum. Sir William’s thought was to extend this principle to an exploration of the electrostatic field in vacuum. Would the electrostatic field reveal a new world of Light when the vacuum was very high? But that noble name of Reichenbach was forgotten by his colleagues, buried along with Mesmer and Galvani. The work of each of these legends, in their study of vital force, had somehow managed to offend the intellectuals. Their scientific approach had no place for vital energies.

“New forces must be found, or mankind must remain sadly ignorant of the mysteries of Nature. We are unacquainted with a sufficient number of forces to do the work of Universe.” The only recognized forces consisted of gravitation, magnetism, electrostatics, and the new nuclear force. Theories which might as much as intimate the existence of soul, spirit, or vital force were very much despised. Sir William had long championed the notion that the qualities of matter were not sourced in their “atomic focal points.”

In these experiments with ultravacuum tubes, Sir William had consistently observed that matter was possessed of a whole and continuous nature, bearing qualities which emerged into our world from a “fourth state.” The process of allowing matter to expand in an ultravacuum seemed to reveal these qualities in the complete absence of inertia. Had he found an experimental means for proving the existence of Platonic Solids? His classic work with vacuum discharges was concerned with the deep mysteries of space, of a peculiar black radiance, of radiant matter, a fourth state, of force, and of light. In their ultimate implications, Sir William intended to instruct on certain aspects of the human aura, the world of ectoplasm… the world of matter in the fourth state, of intimations concerning the luminiferous aether, and of consciousness.

Tonight he hoped to again clarify and disentangle the singular distinctions of his original thesis from all the confusion which had transpired in the intervening decades. Those younger and more discourteous appointees had already been taught to reject Vitalism without so much as a breath. The rejection was becoming automatic, easy. It was unbefitting for scientifics to refuse skeptical examination before repudiation. For them, the gentlemanly figure was merely an silvery antiquated curiosity who was satisfied to delve in dubious and unscientific realms of research. Worse. For some, the legendary name of Sir William Crookes had already been “tainted” because of his willingness to explore psychokinesis and other paranormal forces, as did Baron von Reichenbach before him. Many did not therefore wish to hear Sir William speak at all. ”

But he had longtime experience of the audacious accusations levelled against him for this research on the paranormal. Sir William had already prepared himself against this prejudicial atmosphere, and fully intended on dispelling the many intolerant presumptions in the audience. And yet he managed an unearthly jolliness! He was not vindictive, but was rather soft in approach. He would summon all the magic in his delightful devices, his arsenal of marvels, to reach these darkened minds.

In addressing the Royal Society he hoped to haunt the whole world of Science with a deeper view of natural reality. A vitalistic view. Toward this end, he would use one weapon: sensation. Direct, tactile, and irrefutable. Sensation would work with him, achieving some new reawakening.

“The kindness of your late secretary, Mr. Spottiswoode, placed at my disposal his magnificent induction coil, not only for this lecture, but for some weeks past in my own laboratory; thus enabling me to prepare apparatus and vacuum tubes on a scale so large as to relieve me of all anxiety so far as the experimental illustrations are concerned.” His face shone, a childlike willingness to share what he had learned. This brotherly nature and merry mood was a birthright which he inherited from living in a large extended family. He was fun to watch! As he began, a mercurial levity filled the hall, and the mere mention of each supportive discovery in his theme filled the many diverse listeners with an enthralled sense of mystery. While he spoke, the august assembly was silent.

“Anomalies may be regarded as the fingerposts along the high road of research, pointing to the byways which lead to further discoveries. Now these residual phenomena, these very anomalies, may become the guides to new and important revelations.” He was always sensitive to atmospheres and vibrations. In surveying the Hall, he was now also sure that his audience had lost all awareness of his principle reasons for conducting those first experiments in high vacuum electrical discharges. But he was energized by the prospect and, having brought forth his now classic tubes from their dusty old glass cases, was fully ready to command the scene. Surrounded by his now-famous collection of large vacuum globes and specially designed Ruhmkorff Coils, his eyes twinkled with delight.

His was a voice which had the power to convince and thrill. “In the course of my research, anomalies have sprung up in every direction. I have felt like a traveler, navigating some mighty river in an unexplored continent.. .and promising rich rewards of discovery for the explorer who shall trace them to their source”. He was a model of the romantic and heroic Epoch, enabled by some wonderful inner force to formulate concepts which had previously occurred to no one. It was the manner in which his mind managed to “ask the right questions,” “see the right effects,” and “make the right connections” that set him apart frommost others.

“In Science, every law, every generalization, however well established, must constantly be submitted to the ordeal of a comparison with newly discovered phenomena.. .and a theory may be pronounced triumphant when it is found to harmonize with, and to account for facts which, when it was propounded, were still unrecognized or unexplained.”

Though his manner was cordial and cheerful, he did not lack in the disciplines required by his profession. Of the scientific professional he said, “[H]aving once satisfied himself that he is on the track of a new truth, that single object should animate him to pursue it…without regarding whether the facts which occur before his eyes are naturally possible or impossible.” Indeed, in this theme, he penetrated avenues of contemplation which were positively astounding. His was a vibrant and inspiring mind which was exceptionally creative on a great many issues of natural science.

“The little bye-lanes often lead to the most valuable results. After a while the facts group themselves together and best tell their own tale.” This rare and innate forte permitted his subtle but decisive ability to shock and surprise his students. But he laughed and chuckled as he spoke. Was this a scientist.. .or a magician? For those who loved Sir William Crookes, this was quite an event. Here was a reasonable lesson on a field of inquiry having potentially unreasonable directions.

But the audience was not filled with his admirers, of this he was well aware. Some had already committed the most unforgivable and ungentlemanly acts of cowardice. Having attacked his investigations in the scholarly journals, there were those who attended in order to obtain more evidence against his methods and themes. Those persons sat in his audience. But he had no animosity toward them. None was left amid the joy of love, the joy of illuminated wonder.

“Dr. De La Rue, who occupied the chair, good-naturedly challenged me to substantiate my statement that there is such a thing as a fourth, or ultragaseous state of matter. I had no time then to enter fully into the subject, but as I find that many other scientific men are in doubt, I will now endeavor to substantiate my position.” The lecturer surveyed the hall. Sir William was an exceptional master of the dramatic, exercising a distinct and unique flair by which had also become renown. Besides presenting a strictly scientific thesis, he thoroughly exploited the more theatrical aspects of the lecture hall.

Each aspect was part of his method, a method designed to stimulate an epiphany in each hearer. Metaphorwas often more valuable to his method than mathematics. He knew how to move the inflexible pride. Drama and other emotionally provocative movements were always successful in stimulating the prelude to learning, to true change. Without drama, there could be no impression in the icy world of the Royal Society. Radiance and color, darkness and Light. The prelude to Light was darkness. But before light could penetrate the mind, before it became a beauteous contrast to isolating emptiness, there had to be an immersion in darkness. The room was therefore necessarily darkened for several moments. When all eyes were now accustomed to the dark, his voice rang out quite suddenly. “One of the most noteworthy properties of Radiant Matter is its power of exciting phosphorescence.” In an instant, out of the deep darkness, a green light flickered momentarily in midst of a large glass globe.

His beaming face was semitransparent as the pure green rays flooded the Hall. “My earlier experiments were carried on by the aid of a strange natural phosphorescence which glass takes up when it is under the influence of the radiant discharge; but many other substances possess this phosphorescent power in a still higher degree than glass.” The current was applied to another globe, one which housed a large mineral crystal. As it sprang into a blue brilliance, the room grew hushed once more. The color filled the entire room. “When this sulphide of calcium is exposed to the discharge in a good vacuum, it will phosphoresce for hours.” Withdrawing the electrical current, the stone continued glowing as brilliantly as if continually stimulated by an unknown radiant source.

“Without exception, the diamond is the most sensitive substance I have yet met for ready and brilliant phosphorescence. ” The diamond, mounted on a post within the large globe, was now glowing in a vivid green light. The sight moved the entire room. Everyone leaned forward to see, to gain some sense and feel of the phenomenon. Sir William smiled with glee! There! The vibrancy of that wonderful diamond light was fast melting away all academic resistance, all the critical effrontery, all the callous aristocratic pretense. That diamond light dissolved every personal wall, releasing the child in each member once again. The most acrid of academes remained positively entranced by the glow of his lamps.

Their vitality returned as fresh as springtime. It was as if many of them were awakened from a deep sleep of the mind. And here was his brilliant, wordless theme at once unfolding! His commentary was just as resplendent, deeper in fact than the light which now issued from the vacuum tube. His joyous voice continued. “Next to the diamond, the ruby is one of the most remarkable stones for phosphorescing.” Assistants quietly switched off electrical power from the large Ruhmkorff Coil in the center of the demonstration table. Electrical connection was established with a second large globe, an elongated ovoid.

“Nothing can be more beautiful than the effect presented by a mass of rough rubies when glowing in a vacuum.” As the current was silently applied, the entire large ovoid globe became a dazzling red light. “They shine as if they were red-hot.” The color permeated the room. “In this tube of rubies, there are stones of all colors… the deeper red and the pale pink… but under the impact of Radiant Matter they all phosphoresce with the same color.”

VERMILION

Rubies. Collections of rubies. He looked out into the crowd from his place behind the table. All faces were clearly seen in that red radiance. Each reflected back varying degrees of that pure and deep vermilion light. As he observed this remarkable effect on the face of his audience, he thought aloud. “It scarcely matters what color the ruby is to begin with …under the impact of Radiant Matter, they all phosphoresce.” Some managed to derive from that phrase deep meaning. There were those who long lingered on that phrase, for it taught a multitude of lessons quite all at once. This was the remarkable manner and style of Sir William. He always managed to speak on several simultaneous levels. On one level, there were the scientific revelations. On another, the social implications. On yet another, the personal revelations. What was it about his personality or subject matter which permitted this astounding juncture of consciousness?

The deep light of his rubies flared into a deeper and more brilliant light. The wonder of his life was not unlike these wonderful glowing tubes. He had come out of the darkness, out of a peculiar class vacuum, was touched by some thrilling and inscrutable energy, and became suddenly radiant! And here he was, as so many previous appointments had invited, standing and lecturing to the Royal Society. How had it happened, that he of all people was granted such favor as to be elevated to his present station?

Between the thoughts which were now flooding the hall, between the lines of his lecture, between the strokes of a second hand, he quietly turned his gaze to the radiant rubies for another look. Just then, just as he paused to gaze into the deep red light of his ruby tube before opening the switch, Sir William looked into another world. A window suddenly opened to him, and he looked in. The innocence of his childhood was always close to the surface. He recalled how his mother would called to him from the lower floors of childhood’s home. He had been wondering at the morning sunlight far too long, gazing out at an upper windowpane. The other younger children had already surrounded the kitchen table and were awaiting his presence.

Seated and ready for morning prayers, breakfast, kindly admonitions, and school, the family waited for the eldest son to take his place. As William quickly arrived, it seemed to him that the entire household was full of light. Light was everywhere, or was it just an afterimage? Seated near his father, and casting his gaze all around him, he saw the light glowing in his little brothers and sisters. No, he was sure. This was no disappointing afterimage. This was the light of life, and it merged with the sunshine in a most remarkable way.

William loved to hear his father’s many accounts. His father was something of a wonder, a life filled with a hundred episodes. Those were the days when families sat at table together, respectfully hearing the tales and admonitions of their elders. Each of his father’s stories had their distinctly miraculous tone. The chapters in his life read less than that of a poor tailor from the country, and more like the chronicle of a minor prophet. His father was born of poor parents, a misfortune at any time in English history. In England, being born in poverty, meant that one died in poverty. There were no informal means for achieving some kind of social mobility in the rigid caste system. No mobility whatsoever, except for the occasional “accidents.” And the elder Joseph Crookes certainly attested to these, although he never believed in the “accident” of a divine blessing.

Out of poverty, in some inexplicable manner, his father was fortunately apprenticed to a master tailor who lived in his township. In time, Mr. Crookes also successfully acquired the title of master tailor. Yet Rubies. Collections of rubies. He looked out into the crowd from his place behind the table. All faces were clearly seen in that red radiance. Each reflected back varying degrees of that pure and deep vermilion light. As he observed this remarkable effect on the face of his audience, he thought aloud. “It scarcely matters what color the ruby is to begin with …under the impact of Radiant Matter, they all phosphoresce.” Some managed to derive from that phrase deep meaning.

There were those who long lingered on that phrase, for it taught a multitude of lessons quite all at once. This was the remarkable manner and style of Sir William. He always managed to speak on several simultaneous levels. On one level, there were the scientific revelations. On another, the social implications. On yet another, the personal revelations. What was it about his personality or subject matter which permitted this astounding juncture of consciousness?

Out of poverty, in some inexplicable manner, his father was fortunately apprenticed to a master tailor who lived in his township. In time, Mr. Crookes also successfully acquired the title of master tailor. Yet unemployed, the hope of rising out of his impoverished station seemed dim. It was shortly after this sad realization that the smallest light of an opportunity twinkled for him in the distance. The children always liked this part of the story. Father repeatedly told how he had come to London, poor and humble, in hopes of earning the smallest living. Used to poverty, any work would have satisfied him. “Crookes” was an unlikely name for anyone to trust. They all laughed. But this master tailor was no twisted branch, no prodigal son. Hard work, perseverance, and prayerful diligence prevailed. Employed in a small tailor shoppe, Mr. Crookes began his routine with great thanks. He was fortunate to have secured such a position.

Soon, he was married to his second wife, Mary Scott. William, their eldest son, was born on June 17,183 2. Then the magic in their lives grew, for the elder Mr. Crookes suddenly found himself the focus of a monetary whirlwind. It was one which did not cease its spinning magic until a veritable trail of silver flooded the Crookes family purse. The small twinkling light which had brought him to London became quite a brilliant stream. From town to city. From poverty to riches. William never tired of this wonderful story, this family history. Over and over again, he turned the episodes in his heart. Once their message reached his mind, he saw them as something of a sure hope. If his father could have escaped poverty against those impossible odds, then he might also further the fortune of his life. If only the same blessings were on him, who knew where the paths would lead?

Without that inscrutable blessing, so obviously at work in his father’s life, William knew that he might never have had opportunity to study natural science. And natural science was what his heart loved best. He was thankful, grateful for all those about him. But the clock struck the hour, and the family parted until dinner once again. William was off to a day of lectures and laboratory exercises at the Royal College of Chemistry. His father’s kind eyes spoke in silent approval. William was not going to be a tailor. Just as well, he was exercising a new kind of apprenticeship. This was a new world, was it not? Was anything impossible?

William would try to do as his father had done. This sweet and golden image of sunny early days never faded in his mind. Its treasure merely withdrew at times, slipping beneath a red setting sun. The sea softly rippled with other luminous thoughts. Red luminous thoughts. The red radiance of his tubes reached their crescendo, flared more brilliantly, and Sir William felt the Lecture Hall around him. He withdrew the power, and watched the rubies sustain their individual colorations. Their afterglow was a special effect which few ever appreciated. He noted that only a few continued to radiate light. Looking out into his audience, he saw the same effect. Some faces shone more brilliantly than others. Some would not glow as brightly. Yet others would show themselves incapable of reflecting any light at all.

This reverie, known to him alone, was far too touching. He felt much humbled. How ordinary he was in comparison with most of these persons who were seated before him! He was not the son of upperclass breeding. He bore no aristocratic emblem. He had no ancient lineage to claim extraordinary right. But not one of them had the fire of light within. Not one seemed to draw radiance from the light. Yet here he stood, the son of a once-poverty stricken tailor. Here… among the rubies!

SPECTRUM

“The spectrum of red light emitted by these varieties is the same as described by Becquerel twenty years ago. There is one intense red line. ..having a wavelength of about 6895…and a few fainter lines beyond it, but they are so faint in comparison with this red line that they maybe neglected.” Indeed, only the brightest colors are noticed and prized. He recalled the day he was entered into The Royal College of Chemistry in London. It marked the episode which proved to him that blessings do not fade.

His was a biography which seemed in every aspect identical to the good fortune of another young man. Years before, the young Michael Faraday was elevated to eminence. Though a bookbinder’s apprentice, it was the exuberant love of all things scientific which first attracted Faraday to audit lectures at the Royal College. Through a similar series of encounters, Faraday met the great Humphrey Davy, and became his personal assistant.

When William Crookes was asked to be August Wilhelm von Hoffmann’s own personal assistant, a definite turning point was reached. It was one which forever sealed his fortune. William so impressed the master chemist with his innate and intuitive laboratory skills, that he was soon invited to attend lectures at the Royal Institution. There, young William heard presentations by the most eminent scientific explorers of his day, a profusion of diverse topics. The meetings introduced him to an innermost circle of the scientific world. The prodigious honor was excelled only by an unforgettable meeting. How wonderful it was that William Crookes met the great Michael Faraday himself!

Faraday sought William out from the crowd, a rare and humbling experience. Faraday had kind eyes, but spoke with a clear and forthright voice. He had heard much of the young man, and saw much of his own life in William. He strictly encouraged the young man to take up the pioneering study of chemical spectroscopy, promising him that the greatest new chemical discoveries would there be made. William took that advice as from a master. Years later his prophecy would be fulfilled. Time had passed indeed.

Having thus recalled the great Michael Faraday, a bookbinder who virtually established the world fame of the Royal Society, Sir William added a few words in the way of tribute. “The great philosopher’s lecture on Radiant Matter was given in 1816, when Faraday was twenty four years old.” Remarkable! Faraday preceded every major scientific revolution by sixty years. He called for the lights. Were there, he wondered, any young hearts out in the audience of similar affections and intuitive skills? Were there any fervent and curious minds out there? But his eyes scanned about the room, spying out only those whose dispassionate expressions betrayed only a singular disinterest.

There was a time in which he had become angry with the exceptional lack of vitality among certain Society appointees, but gradually grew to understand this as characteristic of the aristocracy. The bored deportment of most who sat in the audience may have been the direct result of patronage and breeding, but was certainly not the result of artistic fervor and scientific temperament. These were the sons of patrons and traditional families, who merely occupied their elected posts. It was they who, through effete vanity usually obstructed the discussion portion of the Society Proceedings with antagonistic interruptions; although such questions were designed merely to reemphasize jurisdiction over the Society.

Of the illustrious Society and its message to the world at large, they seemed utterly incapable of offering anything in the way of adornment or enrichment. Sleek and self-composed, there was nothing in the way of scholarship in all their thoughts. There was no spark of curiosity, no scientific life in them. No love, no necessity to learn, to excel and advance. One heard the dour temperament in the affected congestions of their speech. Smug, arrogant, implacable, and reprehensible, he knew who they were very well. And while he would do his best to dissolve away that critical and elitist air with his animated bravado, he did recall his first hurtful encounters with the gentry.

GLITTER

The path of his life had produced a glory, but it had not been an easy journey. The long night hours, the dusty volumes, the long thought trails. These were internal struggles which evoked the deepest personal transformations. The enrichments of knowledge required a demanding discipline which could never be ill-spoken. The exhaustion of his effort and much labor was not without its wonderful reward, its divine response. One became radiant only after having endured “the process.” The dreams, hopes, failures, achievements. ..all those trials and errors formed a unique tapestry, whose current and flood required a unique willingness to press forward. Few of his elite schoolmates were willing to abide the discomforts of such intense desire for even a moment.

Class distinctions were very much alive and active in that day. It still is. Their repugnant and smug misuse of all others had a dubious distinction. It was world-famous! William recalled well the manner in which the aristocrats had never accepted his father. The status which they proscribed to him was that of a mere servant, whose talents and abilities were viewed as a resource for their personal service. Despite his wealth and dignified stature, the aged Mr. Crookes was never allowed into the inner confidences of that upperclass.

This mistreatment extended to young William. He had sensed it all around him in the College. There were those whose presence in the lecture halls had nothing to do with scientific passion, nothing at all to do with the need to learn. But there they were. In addition to this effrontery, he was often excluded from their social clusters. Since his father was a tailor, this was considered a mark of fundamental division, a blot on their potential social registration.

But William was indignant of these self indulgent traditions. He bore his father’s station as the greatest mark of honor. He espoused his father’s teaching, and taught his own children that only in prayerful effort and impassioned endeavor true greatness was won. Great men were made, not born. He would rise above his detractors in avenues, perhaps not in elitist isolation, but in achievement. When he was scarcely twenty two years of age, he was appointed as Superintendent of the Meteorological Observatory in Radcliffe. His life had been a walk in wonders. The new appointment, a straightforward confirmation of prayer.

Within two years df this installment as Superintendent, tragedy struck. His father passed away in the night. William was crushed, the family in disarray. William, being the eldest son, was now to rear and guide his younger brothers and sisters. They would forever look to him for morale, guidance, and comfort. He would look to them for solace. It was a position for which he was admirably suited, but the loss of his father deeply affected him forever after. The fortune, to which he was heir, was wisely invested.

He had learned a great deal from the German chemist, Dr. August Wilhelm von Hoffmann. It was with Dr. Hoffmann that William saw the value of every new scientific find. Von Hoffmann viewed each stray scientific fact and phenomenon as of paramount importance.

Every natural effect was observed and valued. Each was aggressively scrutinized as if it alone held some new secret to an entire world of industrial potentials. Crookes saw the validation of ideals which Faraday had quietly cherished. It was in the employ of von Hoffmann that William Crookes learned the German ethic of free enterprise firsthand.

He understood that German attitudes were not at all like the British ones in terms of class and stature, a surprising and strangely comforting discovery. The traditional system of dialogue between all classes, professions, and occupations, became the essential secret of Nineteenth Century German Technology. Lines of communications were opened to all for the good of all. This became too evident before 1870. In the meteoric development of chemical process and metallurgical applications, Germany had no equal in all of Europe. This was dangerous, and Crookes did not lightly esteem the imbalance of power in Europe. But his subsequent accomplishments had several trenchant motives, not the least of which was an importation of the German scientific ideal. One was the expansion of the working class ethic, and the extension of their rights in the realm. Another was the simple undoing of the aristocratic element in the scientific circles. Their obstructive influences had diminished every scientific revolution which defied their aesthetic. And what was their aesthetic? The methodical elimination of working class aspirations.

Restricting, limiting, and diminishing this dream potential among the lower classes was first achieved by restricting attendance in higher learning institutions. This rule also diminished the chance that working class persons would rise, if in mind only. This aristocratic rulership of knowledge was also the principle reason why Vitalism was so deeply despised among the British scientific aristocracy. But such knowledge as William was amassing through his potent expertise was neither going to be restricted or exploited by the rigid British structure on any level. Here he drew the line. The secret was contained in a simple notion: seek out the most obscure and strategic facts. Consolidate every bit of knowledge in that field of study. Prioritize the knowledge.

“In the practical world, fortunes have been realized from the careful examination of what has been ignorantly thrown aside as refuse; no less, in the Sphere of Science, are reputations to be made in the patient investigation of anomalies.”

Concluded in Part 2

The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (Part 3)

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:09:59 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. LII, Number 2, Second Quarter 1996)

Continued from Part 2

COMPLETING a tour of the major scientific institutes in America, Tesla expected to retire for a season of rest in New York once again. News of his advancements however, flooded every technical trade journal. The name Tesla was everywhere once again. First polyphase and now radiant electricity. He was the “darling” of the press. Tesla captured the public eye once again. People everywhere were thrilled with the projected future visions which Tesla freely provided. He was a model European immigrant, suave and debonair. These are probably the qualities which first attracted Anne Morgan. Irresistible, wealthy, unattached, and warm. Tesla was her obsession.

Despite his great personal charm and magnetic personality, he maintained his serious tone and poise wherever he went. The vision of the future was far more important than the attentions of a young and flirtatious lady. In anticipation of these forthcoming events, Tesla often invited other socially esteemed guests to his laboratory for special demonstrations. In this manner, it was noised abroad that what he claimed was in fact real. Anne often attended these gatherings, breathing silently in the shadows of his large loft laboratory.

There were others who, although not attending these demonstrations, were equally watchful of Tesla’s newest radiant energy developments. Several of these persons, shall we say, were interested in his new discovery and its implications.. .because their fortunes were threatened. Tesla had swept the world once with polyphase. He wiped out Edison’s Direct Current System overnight. J.P. Morgan, Edison’s recent “patron”, had lost a considerable sum during that fiasco. It was certain that Tesla would soon sweep the world again with broadcast electricity. This destabilizing influence would not be tolerated. Anne complicated the affair considerably. She was in love with Tesla. Obsessed in fact. Too obsessed and desperate to let go.

ROYAL SOCIETY LECTURES

In the very midst of all these national attentions, Tesla received an invitation from Lord Kelvin. He was formally requested to address the Royal Society, his latest findings were earnestly desired. The English, usually extremely conservative, were sure that Tesla would change the course of world history.

Tesla, adjourning from his daily researches now prepared himself for the lectures which would start the world-change. He packed nearly every piece of delicate equipment one can imagine. Vacuum tubes, Transformers, strange motors, and equally strange wireless apparatus. All were carefully crated and personally brought to Europe by Tesla himself. His beloved elder and personal mentor, Sir William Crookes, greeted him.

In the opening portions of his Royal Society lectures Tesla first described his preliminary work with high voltage high frequency alternating currents in some length. He explained that these devices embodied the very last investigations and improvements of his Polyphase System. He demonstrated several of the first small high frequency alternators and iron-core induction coils in order to prepare his audience for a final announcement.

In this very last dramatic demonstration Tesla revealed to British Academia the disruptive electric discharge and the properties of electric rays. Tesla made a rare and complete “full disclosure” of the electric ray effect at the very end of his lecture. It was the very last time he would ever do so again in academic circles.

Tesla showed that the new radiant electricity was distinctive, having been openly proclaimed during the London Royal Society lectures. Tesla deliberately compared and contrasted the potent impulse radiance to his previous weak effects produced by alternating currents (February 1892). Fluorescent lamps and other luminous wonders held his audience spellbound. All the while his voice, tenor-like by excitement, rang throughout the silent awestruck hall.

He demonstrated wireless lamps, lit to full brilliance by radiant electricity. He ran small motors at sizable distances for his audiences to see. This last lecture represents the only recorded instance in which Tesla openly announced his discovery of the electro-radiant impulse. He tells the personally revolutionizing aspect of his discovery and how it virtually eradicates his previous work. He went to great detail verbally describing and disclosing the exact means for eliciting the phenomenon.

In his closing time Tesla quickly demonstrates special “electrostatic” motors and lamps made to utilize the radiant effect. Examination of these first lamp and vane-motor devices reveals their primitive and initial state. Tesla modeled the motor after the Crookes radiometer, stating this fact publicly for the benefit of his revered mentor. Tesla finally stated the vast implications of the discovery. He pointed their minds toward the establishment of true power transmission. He prophetically announced the new civilization which would emerge from these first devices and systems. The world would be completely revolutionized by this new principle. Tesla described beam-transmission of electrical energy, and the possibility of harnessing the radiant energies of space itself.

Those who had witnessed Tesla’s entire demonstration were completely enthralled at his results, but misunderstood his new announcement completely. This became apparent to Tesla a short while after he, highly decorated and honored, departed for his Parisian tour. British Science was yet delving into Teslian high frequency alternations. Tesla had already disposed of these discoveries as mere preparatory introductions to impulses.

Tesla showed by way of comparison that disruptive field impulse transcendently exceed all other electro-inductive effects by several orders. He expressed difficulty in discerning whether the effects were electrostatic or electrodynamic in nature, preferring to associate them more with electrostatic effects. We deduce that he had only recently begun developing the electric impulse effect because of his hesitance in identifying the phenomena properly.

Tesla was stringently exact in all his statements. This seems uncharacteristic of his scientific nature. But he did this in true scientific openness. Tesla did not know exactly what was occurring in the electric impulse at that time, desiring only to share the discovery openly and candidly. Academic disapproval of his personal semantics came swiftly in journal after journal.

It is clear that Sir William Crookes completely grasped the significance of Tesla’s entire demonstration and realized the closing formal announcement of the new electric force. Crookes could not contain the thrilling implications. He was also sure that the new force would completely revolutionize the scientific world.

Crookes upheld Tesla thereafter as the true discoverer of an unrecognized electrical force. Tesla continued correspondence with his mentor after his departure from England. He had hoped that his dramatic announcement and demonstration would produce a new regime of electrical engineering, and that others would now reproduce the radiant electric effects as described. His hopes would be strangely dashed to pieces in the coming years when the derisive academic attacks began.

To European academes, the lecture series was astounding. It was a glimpse of the future, so clear that few could find time to argue with Tesla at all. Tesla concluded his tour of England and France, everywhere heralded in typical Victorian heroic style. One night, while in Paris, a telegram informed him that his mother was on point of death. Rushing to her bedside, he managed a few hours of final conversation.

He always referred to her as the one who completely understood his strange abilities. Was she not the woman who had encouraged him when he first remarked about his childhood visions? When siblings and friends derided him, she was his support. Early the next morning, in an adjacent house, he was abruptly awaken by a vision. What he beheld changed his life. A seraphic host surrounded his mother. She was ascending into bright clouds. Several minutes after that, the announcement came. His mother had quietly passed away. He spent a torturous week in his native land for her funeral, and fled back again to New York.

REVERSALS

When English engineers wrote, asking the means for generating his impulse effects, Tesla gave them very strict descriptive parameters. He never failed to openly disclose the secret by which his spectacular effects were obtained. He had learned to freely share what he knew with all. He was surprised to discover that the academic societies who so warmly addressed him in Europe, were gradually losing interest in his discovery. Being utterly incapable of duplicating his specified parameters, most believed the effects to be “dubious”.

The impulse effect had very stringent requirements before its manifestation. Care in constructing impulse generators was the basic requirement. Engineers wanted equations. Tesla gave them descriptions. A few experimenters succeeded in later duplicating Tesla’s broadcast electricity effects. But these systems were direct descendants of Tesla’s earliest and less efficient designs.
It is often in the nature of academes to forgo empirically evident facts and argue personal differences, especially when foreign personalities are given excessive adulation. Fixated on issues having to do with words and personal poise, Tesla’s audiences found several acrid voices whose equally vile publications dared tamper with Tesla’s character.

New critics were everywhere, even at home. Dolbear, Thomson, and even Pupin found time to criticize and deride Tesla. Because most younger academes relied entirely on schooling and less on empirical method, they were easily swayed by academic opinion. Tesla underestimated the power of media and of opinions in underrating his abilities. He quickly found that public opinion could actually sway scientific opinion. He failed to see who was behind the media campaign.

Tesla disregarded his antagonistic colleagues. Crookes always deferred to Tesla, whom he admired and loved as a younger protégé. Tesla revered the aged Crookes, upon whose confidence he came to rely during more difficult years. Crookes had been given a true Tesla Transformer when Tesla had given his lectures. The small device was potent, giving the uncharacteristic effects which Tesla had always claimed. This single piece of evidence was left in England for all to see. Remarkably, this evidence did not silence the critics.

Tesla could see no reason in all of this. Something did not quite “add up”. Even Tesla could see that there was a missing part of the “equation”. Discovering this part would explain his own reversals. As if these personally devastating events were not enough for him, the insolent young Anne continued haunting him at his every turn. He continued being “polite” to her, but never more than this.

Crookes wrote many times to the Royal Society and to Tesla concerning this fact. Sure that Tesla was a modern Faraday, Crookes continued espousing the belief that Tesla had discovered the next historically important electrical advancement. He was encouraged to continue research despite his protagonists. Few academes trusted Tesla’s methods now. Fewer yet listened any longer to his statements.

Losing credibility as quickly as he had found it, financiers were slow to trust investing in his new systems. His inventions continued their steady march into electrical history. Each new device chronicles a new step in the technology which should have changed the world. He plunged himself headlong into work. Only work would vindicate him. Opinion would fade when others gradually saw the astounding developments which he would produce. In these actions, Tesla revealed his noble and naive nature. The world had changed, but changed toward a more brutish rule.

BROADCAST POWER

He set to work developing more powerful embodiments of his initial Transformers. In order to make a Broadcast Electrical System possible it would be necessary to devise more efficient transformers. He set to work on this very task, examining and dissecting every fundamental part of his existing Transformers.

Tesla discovered that excessive sparking, though impressive to observers, were actually “lossy instabilities”. The distant radiant effects he desired were interrupted and distorted whenever sparking occurred. Both sparking and brush discharges actually ruined the distant broadcast effects of radiant electricity, a situation which had to be remedied. Tesla sought elimination of the discharges now. Tesla had already found that metals could focus radiant electrical effects. Additional stability in his Transformers could be achieved with the addition of large copper spheres to the active terminals. Tesla considered copper spheres to be “aether gas reservoirs”, providing his transmitters with an additional aether gas supply.

Copper spheres attached to Transformer terminals reduced the required electrical levels for an efficient electric radiance. Copper spheres significantly reduced the injurious instabilities of visually spectacular brush discharges, but did not eliminate them entirely. What Tesla required was a new means for transmitting the radiant electricity without loss.

Tests with elevated copper spheres facilitated efficient transfer of radiant power between the Transformer and surrounding space. Now, Tesla Transformers became true Tesla Transmitters. Tesla found it possible to broadcast harmless radiant electricity with great power to very great distances. Numerous subsequent patents recorded his progressive conquest of the broadcast power principle.

He succeeded in making radiant electricity safe for human use. It would simply travel around conductors if made to impulse quickly enough. Only specially entuned receivers could properly intercept the radiant power for utility. Not three years before he had accidentally discovered the radiant electrical effect. He dreamt of safely sending electrical power without wires in 1892. Now, in 1895, he had realized his dream. Would the system work across the vast distances which he envisioned?

He took his more portable Transmitters outdoors, away from the confines of his South Fifth Street laboratory. Both in northern Manhattan and Long Island, Tesla tested his radiant broadcast systems without restriction. He measured the distant radiant electric effects of these designs in electrostatic volts. Broadcast power could be converted back into current electricity if so desired, the harmless high voltage becoming current in appropriate low resistance transformer coils.

He found to his very great surprise that very distantly positioned vacuum tubes could be lit to great white brilliance when the primary system was operating. The requirement for this action was twofold. First both the system and the receivers had to be grounded. Second, specific volumes of copper had to be connected to the receivers. When these two requirements were satisfied, lamps maximized their brilliance, and motors operated with power.

Copper in the receiver had to “match” the copper mass of the transmitter in a very special equivalence, otherwise radiant transfer would not be efficient. The requirements differed very much from those of ordinary radio antennas. He also found that elevated copper spheres more powerfully enhanced the broadcast radiant power from his transmitters. This was Tesla’s means by which his transmitters and receivers could be better “connected” despite their distance.

Tesla believed that these electrical beams invisibly linked both his transmitter and receivers together. He considered each as “disconnected terminals” to ground. Electrical radiance spread out in all directions from the elevated copper sphere of his transmitter. The secret in receiving a maximum signal was to match the transmitter’s copper mass with the receiver mass. Then, the aether streams would actually focus into the matched receiver. This affinity would take time, the transmitter energy “searching” for better ground sites. Radiant electricity evidenced curiously vegetative “growth characteristics”.

Receivers now were outfitted with small copper spheres. These provided a more efficient affinity and absorption for the radiated power. The additional copper spheres which surmounted Tesla transmitters effectively lowered the input electrical power for the production of focused aether discharges.

Tesla took the gas dynamic analogy to another level when he found that both low pressure gaseous and vacuum tubes could replace copper. Electro-radiant effects from gas-filled globes were projected with less electrical loss and even greater power. Large low pressure argon gas filled globes were empirically found to broadcast tremendous radiance when used atop his transmitters. Additionally, he found that argon gas at low pressures could serve as an equivalent receiver as pure copper spheres. The gas filled globes would be less costly than copper spheres to disseminate in public use. He was approaching a totally efficient system. Numerous personages were invited to observe these historic tests. J.H. Hammond Jr. was one such individual. Enthralled with Tesla’s developments, he and his wife invited Tesla repeatedly to their home in later years. Tesla was their honored guest for months at a time. Later in years, after World War I, both Tesla and Hammond worked on robotics and remote control.

Tesla envisioned small power units for both home and industrial use. The installation and maintenance of these units would require a small monthly fee. Through these wireless units one could draw sufficient power to operate factories and homes alike. Electrical usage could be metered. The superiority of this new broadcast power system was obvious to all who observed it in operation.

Tesla also described the use of these power units for transportation. Transatlantic ships could simply draw their motive power from continental power broadcast stations. Trains and automobiles could be operated by drawing their power. The potential fortunes would soon stimulate financiers to invest heavily in the “coming activity”

In keeping with his publicity-mindedness, several investors were always invited to Tesla’s private demonstrations. Tesla knew that their urge to support his new world-shaking venture would become irresistible when once each had beheld his small broadcast power system. The demonstrations were deemed by these individuals as “entertaining”, in their typical dry tone. But, he rarely heard from these people again.

Here was a new change. Shy moneymen. A true contradiction.

Their reticence left Tesla in a state of bewilderment. Once, in a ditch, his conversation alone was sufficient perfume to attract the bees. Now? None would dare leap into the new world sea. Why? What sharks were there besides themselves? Tesla could simply not understand this new “dearth”, this incredulous conservatism and lack of imagination on the part of New York investors.

Eager to begin, Tesla patiently waited for the messengers to call. Had he known more of the world around him, however, he would have stopped waiting. Shortly after Tesla’s private demonstrations were concluded, Morgan’s agent approached Tesla with a “business proposition”. The bribe being sizable, contracts would have placed Morgan in control of Tesla’s new system. Tesla laughed at the pale little Mr. Brown in his pinching-tight tails, informing him that he himself was already a millionaire. Why should he need such an affiliation at all? He was escorted very graciously by the amused Tesla.

While dining in the Waldorf several hours later, a rude interruption informed him that his laboratories were ablaze. The connection between his refusal to bow and the flames which now reached skyward was not made until all was consumed. That night, the world changed completely for Nikola Tesla. He lost everything of his past. Everything. The totality of his technological achievements were burned into vapor. Books, priceless souvenirs, delicate equipment, patents, models, drawings, new pieces of apparatus. Everything was burned. He read the message well.

There was a two week period where he simply vanished. No one could find him. Kolman Czito, his trusted technical foreman and machinist feared for Tesla’s life. Katherine Underwood Johnson was beside herself with anguish. She was the wife of a close friend, the only real love of Tesla’s life. The fire was meant to kill. It was a message as clear as anyone would need. The assassination attempt failed to kill the intended victim. It certainly did not kill his dreams.

Wherever he was for those two weeks, the dreams were with him. But a part of Nikola Tesla died in the fire. It was the part which was tied to the past. His eyes on the future, Tesla developed his discovery into a major technology which the world seems to have forgotten. Of all those who prayed and wept over Tesla’s disappearance, one person was no longer concerned. Never again would Anne need to be troubled by the thought of Nikola Tesla. His love was already sealed. Tesla recovered from the flames.

His subsequent discoveries and inventions surpassed his former works for forty more years; special radiation projectors, self-acting heat engines, power transmitters, remote control and robotics, the “World Broadcast System”, Beam Broadcast transmitters, “aetheric reactors and aetheric engines”, cosmic ray motors, psychotronic television: the list of astounding inventions is truly awe-inspiring. Tesla demonstrated each of these systems for a select group of witnesses.

Furthermore, despite rumors of his public and scientific demise, Tesla maintained two penthouse suites atop the Hotel New Yorker in a time when such extravagance was otherwise unobtainable. One of these suites was converted into a complete radio laboratory, several accoutrements of which having been retrieved by antique radio enthusiasts. Tesla was an indefatigable researcher.

Indeed, the biography of Nikola Tesla is replete with truly mysterious designs and developments. But these are parts of his biography which must be told in other volumes…

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) was a visionary, inventor, and engineer, most commonly known today for his revolutionary contributions to the field of electromagnetism, including alternating current and radio, but, as we on the Borderlands know… that’s not all he did for us!

Interested in Nikola Tesla? Want to read more about his own research and the research his work has inspired? Check out our Nikola Tesla books, including the incredible Tesla technology research of Eric Dollard and George Trinkaus, all available through our Borderland Research Catalog.

The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (Part 2)

admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:00:07 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. LII, Number 2, Second Quarter 1996)

Continued from Part 1

TRANSFORMERS

Tesla operated the magnetic arc system at higher power levels, experimenting with various impulse lengths and repetition rates. He measured the mysterious electrical current which apparently flowed through space from this system. These radiant fields operated at far greater power than before. Strange effects were suddenly appearing at certain distances from the magnetic impulser. For one thing, Tesla noticed that metallic surfaces near the impulser became covered with white brush-like corona discharges. While the sparks played in trails across the metal surfaces, Tesla observed physical movement among the metal objects. Tensions and rocking motions. Both phenomena occurring simultaneously, he was utterly fascinated. The sparks themselves seemed alive. The moving metal objects seemed to suggest new motor effects. What was this strange coalition, this synchronicity of phenomena?

Brilliant white coronas came forth with a gaseous “hissing” sound from metal points and edges. Metal plates were soon poised all around the device for observation. Tesla recognized at once that these effects were not identical with those obtained earlier while using high frequency alternating currents. These new discharges were white, energetic, and strong.

The electrical behavior of copper plates, rods, cylinders, and spheres near his primary impulser brought forth a great variety of white fluidic discharges. Strong discharge brushes appeared from the ends of copper plates. These came in prodigious volumes, hissing and arcing wildly in all directions, especially from sharp points. Tesla tried copper discs. These seemed to produce more stable discharges. He observed the curious manner in which these white discharges seemed to “race” around the disc edge at times, blending and separating with all the other sparks. Here was a greatly magnified example of Reichenbach’s Od force perhaps!

He noted the manner in which white brush discharges appeared from copper conductors of different shapes. Each form, poised near his impulser, gave a characteristic corona distribution. This coronal correspondence with specific geometric form greatly impressed him. With certain metal forms the discharges were very fluidic in appearance. Smooth, fluidic sheaths covered copper cylinders of specific size. This absolutely fascinated Tesla. There was an aerodynamic nature inherent in radiant electricity.

Copper cylinders produced remarkable volumes of white discharges. The discharges from certain sized cylinders were actually larger than those being applied. This inferred that an energy transformation effect was taking place within the cylinder. This reminded him of his initial observation with the shock-excited wires. Those which did not explode gave forth far greater voltages than were initially used. He had never understood why this was occurring. Here was another instance in which applied energy was seemingly magnified by a conductor. Why was this happening?

The key to understanding this bizarre phenomenon might be found here, he thought. He observed the discharges from copper cylinders of various diameters. Each became edged with white brush discharges when held near or actually placed within the conductive copper strap of the impulser. The discharge effect was most pronounced when cylinders were placed within the periphery of the copper strap.

Tesla noticed that white corona sheaths were actually covering the outer cylinder wall at times. These would appear, build in strength, and disappear on sudden discharge with a surprising length. The sheathing action was repetitive when the cylinder had a critically small volume. Very small cylinders behaved like rods, where discharges only appeared at their edges. The stability of these strange sheath discharges varied with cylinder diameter and length.

Tesla noticed that not every cylinder performed well near the impulser. Only cylinders of specific volume produced stable and continuous white electrical sheaths. If the cylinders were too small; then the sheaths were intermittent and unstable. There was an obvious connection between the supplied impulse train and the cylinder volume. But what was it?

Tesla surveyed the entire range of his recent discoveries. Impulses produced a radiant electrical effect. Radiant electricity, was mysteriously flowing through space. As it flowed, it focused over metal conductors as a white fluidic corona. When the shape and volume of the metal conductors were just right, the energy appeared as a stable white corona of far greater voltage than the impulse generator supplied. More questions. More discoveries.

Rods produced sparks from their edges, but not as long as copper cylinders did. Tesla selected a cylinder which worked very well, and placed several horizontal “cuts” all around its surface. He was totally surprised when, on testing, the spark discharge from the cut cylinder was notably larger than before. Increased spark length means increased voltage. But why did this diminished conductivity force the voltage up?

The cuts diminished conductivity in the cylinder by forcing the energy into a tighter “squeeze”. He had noted that electrical impulses displayed a tendency to traverse the outer surface of metal conductors. Certain cylinders were often ensheathed in a fluidic white discharge which smoothly traveled between coil ends in a tightly constricted layer. Here was something truly notable. His input voltage was far less than that produced from the upper coil terminal. But why from end to end?

The essential reason why current preferred outer surface conduction was precisely because they were impulsing. The sudden shock which any conductor experienced produced an expansive effect, where the electrical charge was rejected by the conductive interior. This “skin effect” was a function of impulse time and conductor resistance. Highly resistant objects forced all of the impulse energy to the surface.

Now he was getting somewhere. Frustrated radiant electricity constricted into a tighter surface volume when encountering metal surfaces. This intense surface focusing effect brought the voltage up to tremendous values. Here was a new transformer effect! He believed it was an electrostatic transformation. Impulse currents each possessed an electrostatic nature. The bunching of charge in the impulser brings this electrostatic field to a peak in a small instant of time.

Constricting this field volume produces a greatly magnified voltage. Placement of any conductor in the field space alters the field by constricting its shape. When symmetrical conductors of special shape, volume, and resistance are placed in this space, the field is greatly constricted. Because the impulsing electrostatic field is very abrupt, it “snaps” over the conductor from end to end.

Tesla knew that here is where the secret lies. If resistance in the conductor is great enough, the snapping electrostatic force cannot move any charges. It is forced to “grow” over the conductor surface until it discharges at the end point, where greatly magnified voltages are obtained. When the wire diameter is small enough, the wire explodes under electrostatic pressures which exceed those seen in dynamite.

In effect, Tesla had managed to interrupt a high voltage direct current several thousand times per second. In doing so, he had discovered a way to completely separate electrostatic energy from current impulses. Tesla pondered these facts, wondering if it was possible to force the magnification effect beyond the limits of standard electromagnetic transformers. In other words, how high could voltage be raised? Was there a limit to the process?

In order to achieve such enormous voltage levels, he needed a conductive shape which offered so much resistance to charge movement, that all the applied energy would become electrostatic. In effect, Tesla wanted to convert a quantity of supply power into a pure electrostatic voltage. This phenomena suggested that his goal was not impossible.

Tesla extended his idea of the cut copper cylinder to coils. From the viewpoint of electrostatic impulses, flat copper coils appear to be “continuously cut” cylinders. The electrostatic field focuses over the coil as it did with the cylinders, from end to end. A simple magnet coil of specific volume would offer so much resistance that it would be difficult to predict the actual resultant voltage which results without an empirical test.

WHITEFIRE

Constructing several of these, he was ready for the test. When each copper magnet coil was impulsed, Tesla saw tremendous white brushes leaping from their free ends: discharges approaching one million volts! But his supply power was nowhere near these voltages, and the coil was not wrapped in thousands of windings. These previously unexpected voltage magnifications were the result of an energy transformation, one which took electrical power and converted it completely into pressure. Watts into Volts, an unheard thing. It was the key to a new and explosive technology.

Tesla also found that such coils required very thin coil forms. He ceased using cellulose and cardboard forms, preferring “squirrel cage” type forms made of thin end-braced wooden rods. Wire was wound about these cylindrically disposed rods, producing the very best effects. Spacings were also tried between successive coil windings with excellent results. Spaced windings reduced sparking to a minimum.

Tesla remarked that the electrostatic potentials along the coil surface (from end to end) could be as much as ten thousand volts per inch of winding! A ten inch coil of proper volume could produce one hundred thousand volt discharges. In addition, and in confirmation of his suspicions, no current was ever measured at the free terminals of these coils. A “zero coil current” condition! It was simply another paradox which would occupy the academicians for several more argumentative decades.

Tesla suddenly realized that coils represented a truly special and valuable component in his quest. The instantaneous resistance which any coil offered to an applied impulse was so immense that current could not flow through the wire length. As a phenomenal consequence, no current flowed through the coil windings at all! But sparking was observed, traveling from coil end to end. Here was yet another anomaly!

He began placing these “secondary” coils within his “primary” impulser circuit. The strap which connected his magnetic arc to the capacitors formed the “primary”. He made necessary distinctions among his Transformer components. Few engineers actually appreciate these distinctions. The “primary” and “secondary” of Tesla Transformers are not magnetic inductors. They are resistive capacitors. Coil-shaped capacitors! Tesla Transformer action is electrostatic induction.

There were conditions for the most efficient manifestation of the effect. Maxwell could not predict these values. Tesla empirically discovered most of the rules for impulse behavior. He found that the transformative abilities of these smooth copper coils were maximum when the coil mass equaled the mass of the impulser’s conductive copper strap. It did not matter how thin the coil windings were. The equality of copper masses brought maximum transformative effects. When this equal mass condition was fulfilled, Tesla said that the coil-capacitors were “in resonance”. Electrostatic resonance.

Tesla found it possible to produce millions of electrostatic volts by this method. His first Transformers were horizontal in orientation, both free ends of the secondary coil-capacitor producing unidirectional impulses of great power. White discharges from each of these free ends had very different characteristics, indicating the unidirectional flow. Electropositive terminals always appeared brushlike and broad. Electronegative terminals always appeared constricted and dart-like.

His next Transformer series employed vertical cylinders with the base connected directly to ground. Free terminals stood quite a distance above the primary capacitor strap, spouting a brilliant white crown. These marked a turning point in his theories concerning electricity, since it was possible for him to develop well over one million volts impulse power in a device scarcely taller than a child.

These discharges were of an intense white coloration. Whitefire. Very sudden impulses color discharge channels with the brilliant whitefire because Tesla Transformers separate the effusive aether from electrons. Tesla Transformer conduct tether, not electrons. The whitefire brilliance is the distinctive aetheric trademark of Tesla Transformers.

During this time, Tesla discovered the peculiar necessity for streamlining his Transformers. Cylindrical secondary capacitors suddenly became conical forms. These presented the most bizarre appearance of all. Tesla used cone-shaped secondaries to focus the impulses. Whitefire discharges from these forms evidenced real focusing effects, the discharges themselves assuming inverted conical shapes. Their greatly intensified nature is seen in photographs which were taken under his own intrigued supervision. The magnified voltages were reaching those thresholds in which his laboratory enclosures were far too small to continue making industrial scale progress on radiant energy systems.

The fact that whitefire discharges pass through all matter, notably insulators, revealed the aetheric nature. Tesla saw that whitefire discharges could permeate all materials in a strangely gaseous manner. This penetration scarcely heated matter. In fact, the whitefire brushes often had a cooling effect. The sparks themselves, though violent in appearance, were “soft” when compared to all other forms of electricity. He had successfully removed the hazard from electricity. In blocking the slow and dense charges, he had freed the mysterious effusive nether streams inherent in electricity. Because of this, new and intensified radiant effects were constantly making their appearance across his laboratory space.

Tesla found that as these new “Impulse Transformers” greatly magnified power supplied to them, so also their radiant electric effects were equally magnified. He found it possible to wirelessly project electrostatic power to very great distances, lighting special lamps to full candlepower at hundreds of feet. In these experiments, he also conceived of signaling systems. It would be possible to switch radiant effects in telegraphic fashion. Distant vacuum tube receivers would then light or dim in corresponding manner. Tesla experimented with a special breed of telegraphic wireless in 1890.

He also found it possible to wirelessly operate specially constructed motors by properly intercepting this space-flowing energy stream. He had made his own polyphase system obsolete! The new vision was vastly more enthralling. The world would be transformed. He discovered ways to beam the energy out to any focus, even to the zenith. His plan to illuminate the night sky with a radiant energy beacon captured the minds of all who listened.

Tesla now possessed the means by which the radiant electricity could be greatly magnified and transmitted. He could transform the very nature of the radiance so that it could carry increasingly greater power. Now he could begin developing a new technology which would completely revitalize the world order. Power could be broadcast to any location without wire connections. Radiant electricity could be utilized in completely new appliances. A new world was about to be released!

SPACE FLOWING CURRENT

Understanding the analogue between these electrical impulse effects and the behavior of high pressure gases was of paramount importance. This gaseous aspect of impulse electrical radiance was perhaps the most mystifying aspect of these new-found energies. Those who sought out Tesla’s every lecture were very aware that a new electrical species had been discovered.

While yet a student, Tesla had became aware of certain scientific imperatives enunciated by Johann von Goethe. One of these was the preservation and extension of all activities-natural. Goethe implied that when natural conditions were preserved during experimentation, then nature itself was in the best configuration to reveal more unified phenomenal exhibitions to qualitative observers.

Tesla recognized that his new discovery of impulse, the result of an accident, was a total departure from polyphase alternating current. While his original vision of the vortex was applied by him to the designing of motors and generators, Tesla now realized that this was not its primary message. In fact, taken from the viewpoint which Goethe expressed, polyphase was a most unnatural form of energy.

Natural activity is suffused with impulses, not alternations. Natural activity is initiated as a primary impulse. Nature is flooded with impulses of all kinds. From lightning to nervous activities, all natural energy movements occur as impulses. Impulses were now seen by Tesla to fill the natural world. But, more fundamentally, Tesla saw that impulses flood the metaphysical world.

The mysterious flow of meanings during conversation occurs as a sequence of directed impulses in space. Though inert air vibrates in alternations with sounds uttered, the flow of meaning remains unidirectional. Intentions are also impulses. The unidirectional flow of intentions appear as impulses. Motivations proceed from the manifestation of sudden desires. Overtly expressed as actions, the initiating impulses are then fulfilled.

Tesla wished to comprehend where this “motivating force” came from, and where it went during the expressed actions. In all of this, he was very much the wonderful stereotype of the Victorian natural philosopher. His scientific pursuits followed these considerations until the last. Those who study his announcements recognize his metaphysical foundations, the basis of all his subsequent scientific quests.

Tesla observed the amazing “coordination” of new phenomena which daily seemed to bring new technological potentials before him. This wonderful synchronicity, this vortex, revealed his new and fortunate position in nature. Having somehow “broken” his fixation with the unnatural…with polyphase…he re-entered the natural once again. Impulses. Could it be that the induction of electrical impulses summoned the other impulse characteristics of nature? Was he producing a metaphysical vortex, into which all the impulse phenomena of nature would now flow? Was this the real sunset message which seized him in Budapest, so many years ago? Was electricity the fundamental natural energy. ..the motivator?

Victorian Science was not exactly sure what electricity was, there being so very many attributes associated with the term. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century natural philosophers conjectured on the nature of both electric and magnetic forces. Gilbert and Descartes shared the belief that these forces were a special kind of “flowing charge”, a space radiant stream which took place in tightly constricted lines. Some equated the electromagnetic forces with a “dark light”, which Karl von Reichenbach later proved in part.

Faraday adopted and modified the view that electromagnetic forces acted through space because they were a special flow of charge. This effusive charge movement changed when traveling through conductors, becoming more densified and retarded in velocity. Faraday’s “lines of force” were not conceived by him to be mere static tensions as modernists view them. Faraday envisioned these force lines as radiant, streaming lines. They were mobile, moving longitudinally into space.

Others would change the names, referring to electric force lines as “dia-electric” or dielectric flux, but the view remained essentially as conceived by Faraday. Young James Clerk Maxwell also believed that force lines were dynamic, longitudinal lines of flow. But flowlines of what substance? Here lay the principle problem which occupied physicists throughout the Victorian Era.

Victorian researchers and natural philosophers wished to discover the exact nature of the “flowing charge” of which force lines were composed. Most agreed that the mysterious flowing “substance” had to be an effusive, ultra-gaseous flux. This flux was composed of infinitesimal energy particles which effected the various pressures and inductions observed.

Henry and Faraday struggled with the idea of deriving usable electric power from static charges. The notions was that, since forcelines were made of a “flowing charge substance”, then fixed contacts placed on charged masses would supply electrical power forever. No one was able, however, to derive this flowing charge. Lossy discharges preceded every contact. Most researchers, whose attempts with highly charged Leyden-Jars failed, sought a more benign source of concentrated charge. The quest shifted to magnets, but the attempt remained as futile as ever. There remained no available way to derive power from the individual flowing charges of a forceline.

J.J. Thomson discovered electrons in vacuum discharges, assuming that these “electric particles” operated in all instances where electrical activity was observed. Victorian researchers did not accept this view completely. Thomson’s “electrons” were viewed as the result of violent collisions across a vacuum acceleration space. It was not possible to ascertain whether these same “Thomson currents” were active within electrical conductors operating at small voltages.

Very reputable experimenters besides Tesla continued claiming that “space flowing electricity” is the real electricity. Tesla’s classic demonstrations proved that rapid electrical impulses actually exceed the ability of fixed charges to transmit the applied forces. Charges lag where electrostatic forces continue propagating. One is compelled to see that electrostatic forces precede the movement of charges.

Tesla saw that electrostatic impulses could flow without line charges. His “zero current coils” operated simply because the charges themselves were immobilized. Electricity was shown to be more in the nature of a flowing force rather than a stream of massive particles. But what then was this “flowing current”?

In Tesla’s view, radiant electricity is a space flowing current which is NOT made of electrons. Later Victorians believed that there was a substance which both filled all space and permeated all matter. Several serious researchers claimed to have identified this gas. Notables, such as Mendeleev predicted the existence of several ultra-rare gases which preceded hydrogen. These, he claimed, were inert gases. This is why they were rarely detected. The inert gases which Mendeleev predicted formed an atmosphere which flooded all of space. These gaseous mixtures composed the aether.

Tesla and others believed that both electrical and magnetic forces were actually streams of nether gas which had been fixated in matter. Materials were somehow “polarized” by various “frictive” treatments by which an nether gas flow was induced in them. Most materials could maintain the flow indefinitely, since no work was required on their part. Matter had only to remain polarized, transducing the nether flow. The nether gas contained all the power. Unlimited power.

This ether gas power manifested as the electromagnetic forces themselves, adequate reason to pursue the development of an nether gas engine. Such an engine could run forever on the eternal kinetic energies of the aether itself, it being both generated and driven by the stars.

Tesla believed that radiant electricity is composed of aether gas. He based this belief on the fact that his zero current coils were not conducting the “slow and dense” charges usually observed in ordinary electrical circuits. Abrupt impulses produced distinctive and different effects … fluidic effects. The qualities ascribed by Tesla to “electricity” or things “electrical” in his numerous patent texts and press interviews are those which refer to the nether gas. Tesla did not refer to electron currents as “electricity”. He did not equate “electricity” with electron flow. Whenever Tesla spoke of “electrical” effects he always described their effusive, gaseous quality.

Tesla referred to space as the “ambient or natural medium”. Space, he claimed, was that which “conducts electricity”. He had found a means by which this gaseous electrical flow could be greatly concentrated, magnified, and directed. He saw that this radiant electricity was, in reality, a gaseous emanation. An aetheric emanation. This is why he made constant reference to fluidic terminology throughout his lectures.

Resistance, volume, capacity, reservoir, surface area, tension, pressure, pressure release: these were the terms upon which Tesla relied throughout his presentations. The terminology of hydraulics. Tesla also recognized that because aether was a gas, it had aerodynamic requirements.

Aether, in Tesla’s lexicon, was space flowing electricity: a gas of superlative and transcendent qualities. Aether was the electricity which filled all of space, a vast reservoir of unsurpassable power. Motive, dynamic, and free for the taking. Aether gas technology would revolutionize the world. Aether gas engines would provide an eternal power source for the world. Science, industry, corporations, financial alignments, social orders, nations— everything would change.

Concluded in Part 3

The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (Part 1)

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:00:37 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Borderlands (Vol. LII, Number 2, Second Quarter 1996)

THE drama of Twentieth Century Science and its intriguing relationship with financiers and governments unfold together in the remarkable life of Nikola Tesla. His is a biography replete with all the elements of tragedy. Tesla, a great discoverer of unsurpassed force, became the focal point of old insidious forces intent on destroying the future for the selfish sake of the status quo. Tesla remains a focal point of wonderment, of dream, and of worlds which yet should be to those who are familiar with his biography. For them, Tesla stands astride the quaint past century and the gleaming future. He is a technological Colossus, pointing the way to a new dawn.

The biography of Nikola Tesla should be the very first chapter in every child’s science text. Yet, we find his name stricken from the record in every avenue of which he alone holds priority. This conspicuous absence prompts wonderment. What the world does with discoverers determines the world course. In the life of Nikola Tesla we see the portrayal of our own future, the fate of the world. The achievements of this researcher were lofty. The world has not yet implemented his greatest works. For a time, all the world’s dramatis persona focused on Tesla. He remains the legend, the theme, the archetype of all Twentieth Century scientists.

But who was Nikola Tesla, and where was he from? How did he reach such a mighty stature, and what did he actually invent? Tesla was born in 1856, the son of an illustrious Serbian family. His father, an Orthodox priest, his uncles noteworthy military heroes of highest rank. He was educated in Graz, and later moved to Budapest. Throughout his life he was blessed, or haunted, by vivid visions. In the terminology of Reichenbach he would be termed an extreme sensitive. It was through these remarkable visions that Nikola Tesla invented devices which the Victorian world had never seen. Indeed, his visionary experiences produced the modern world as we know it.

He attended various Universities in Eastern Europe during his early adulthood. While delving into his studies, he became aware by the new and insidious scientific trends which questioned the validity of human sense and reason. An impassioned soul, Tesla felt the pain of modern humanity in its intellectual search for a soul. Finding no solace in any of his classes, he sought refuge in a more romantic treatment of science and nature. None could be found. Professors dutifully promoted the “new view” by which it was, declared that the natural world was “inert …dead …a mere collection of forces”.

This quantitative regime was mounting force among academes, who were then attempting the total conversion of scientific method. Those who would not accept the new order were compelled to depart from academic pursuits. Tesla totally rejected these notions on the strongest of inner intuitions. Most of his instructors would have said that he was not University material. Tesla, sensitive to every such dogmatic wind, rejected their thesis and sought some better means for knowing nature. If he was to excel in engineering, there could only be cooperation with natural force, never violence. It was clear to him that the new scientific world-attack would ultimately lead to violent responses from nature itself.

His inner conflict expressed itself openly and candidly, bringing young Tesla into certain disrepute among rigid University authorities. Universities were more like military academies than places where original thinking was conducted in open forum. Tesla challenged too many persons of esteemed rank with probing questions for which he was given rebuke but no real answers.

A gifted researcher and voracious reader, he chanced upon some forgotten volumes of natural science written by Goethe. He had not been aware that Goethe, long before he chose poetry for the vehicle of his scientific themes, had written several magnificent tomes on the natural world. Tesla found to his wonder that Goethe had experienced the very same emotions. When the new scientific dogma was just in its infancy, Goethe caught wind of it and reacted violently, even as one who stands watch in the night.

Goethe was well aware of the new scientific trend and its implications. The reduction of nature to forces and mechanisms was utterly revolting to Goethe. Now, Tesla found a notable compatriot in his experience. He secured a thorough collection of Goethe’s scientific texts and read these to the exclusion of all other philosophies. It was through this window that we may comprehend all of Tesla’s scientific methods and later statements. For in Tesla we see the quest for communion with nature, one based on the faith that mind, sensation, consciousness, and ordained structure form the world foundations.

The sense-validating Qualitative Theme again appears in Nikola Tesla. Armed with this foundation, he was able to filter and qualify every other new study with which he was presented. In addition, he was irresistibly drawn into the study of electricity, the “new magick”. In the following months, he absorbed the electrical engineering courses so rapidly that he no longer attended classes. He had taken a technical position in Budapest. Several new intuitions had seized him. Tesla became fascinated, obsessed with alternating current electricity. The problem he faced was considered insurmountable. Tesla was sure that he could devise an engine which was turned, not by contact-currents, but by magnetic field actions alone.

The struggle toward designing such a device, begun as a puzzling amusement, was now completely consuming his strength. The answer, tantalizing and near, seemed elusive. Undergirding all these efforts was the strongest desire to achieve something original, and by this, to attain financial independence for the sake of pure research. His only dream was to have a laboratory facility of his own.

The excessive labors and mental exertions nearly drove him to the brink of madness. He was, for as time, seized with strange maladies and sensitivities which physicians could not address. Reichenbach accurately describes these symptoms, characteristic of extreme sensitives. There come times when the neurological sensitivity of these individuals literally transforms and processes through their being. The emergence of these rare sensitivities affects such persons for the remainder of their lives.

Tesla found that his senses were amplified beyond reason. He was terribly frightened at first, nervous exhaustion permeating his frail being. Eventually learning to manage these rare faculties, he again resumed his life. But the visions which began in his youth were now more vivid and solid than ever before. When they came, unbidden, he could literally touch and walk around them. Now also, he was equal to receiving them. He was waiting for the revelation by which his alternating current motor would appear.

Tesla’s life came into a new focus while walking in a park with some friends, the year 1881. It was late afternoon, and Tesla became entranced with the sight of a glorious sunset. Moved to indescribable emotions, he began quoting a verse from Goethe’s “Faust”:

“The glow retreats, done is our day of toil;
it yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring,
ah, can no wing lift me from this soil…
upon his track to follow, follow soaring?”

As he reached this last line of verse, Tesla was suddenly seized by an overwhelming vision. In it, he beheld a great vortex, whirling eternally in the sun and driving across the earth with its infinite power. Completely absorbed in this glory, he became catatonic and irresponsive… to the great fear of his companions. His mind and body buzzing with the power of the vision, he suddenly blurted out, “see my motor here… watch me reverse it”. They shook him, believing he had lost his mind completely.

Rigid and resisting all of their efforts, he would not move until the vision subsided. When he was finally led to a bench, he seemed completely transformed. The remainder of the day was spent in a grand and joyous celebration, Tesla’s remaining funds supplying the feast. Throughout the long hours of that night he shared with his friends the great sight he had beheld. They spoke of the sure implications portended for the world’s future, and departed with very great expectations.

Moving to Strassburg, he was employed as an engineer in a telephone subsidiary of the Continental Edison Company. It was in a small machine shop that he constructed the world’s first brushless motors. He called them “magnetic vortex motors”. Their whirling magnetic fields baffled electrical engineers. Now, Tesla’s professors were studying his work. Goethe was absolute in his judgment of science and human nature: nature leads humanity to “follow, follow soaring”.

Tesla’s strange whirling devices worked on their very first trial. There were no connections between the rotors and stators, no sparking, lossy brushes. The motion was smooth and efficient. Numerous alternating current generators, transformers, and “brushless” motors, all were developed by Tesla in quick succession. The vision in material form. Himself a professional draftsman, he mapped out his entire Polyphase System. Tesla emigrated to America with a full portfolio of plans. America would be the place where his dreams would find fulfillment.

Continually attracted to engineering problems which none could master, his sudden visualization of the solutions became his normal mode of operation. In this respect, as well as others, he remained the wonder of all his technical assistants. He worked for Thomas Edison in New Jersey for a very short time period until securing a laboratory and financial supporters of his own.

In his first independent venture he developed arc lamps and lighting systems. When his financial supporters betrayed his trust, they left him bankrupt overnight. He became a ditch digger, suffering all the indignities which immigrants faced in America during the 1880′s. He learned the value of publicity after his incessant mention of polyphase and alternating current managed to attract the attention of certain new financial supporters. They drew him out of the ditch, but not before he demanded his own laboratory, a machine shop, and a sizable personal percentage “up front”. The result was our present day electrical distribution system.

Tesla did not invent alternating current. Tesla reinvented alternating current in the form of Polyphase Current. His Polyphase System was a novel means for blending three identical alternating currents together simultaneously, but “out of step”. The idea was similar to having three pistons on a crankshaft rather than one. Tesla’s method had wonderful advantages, especially when motors were to be operated. Formally, no one could make an alternating current motor turn at all simply because no net motion could be derived from a current which just “shuttled” to and fro.

Polyphase applied a continuous series of separate “pushes” to rotors. Tesla’s Polyphase System made brushless motors and brilliant lighting methods possible. Polyphase made it also possible to send electrical power to very great distances with little loss. Alternating electrical currents vibrated in the line. Current did not flow continuously from end to end, as in Edison’s flawed system. Edison’s direct current system could not supply electricity beyond a few city blocks before current virtually disappeared.

In efforts to discover a more efficient kind of polyphase, Tesla explored higher frequency alternating currents. During this research, he built and patented several remarkable generators. Higher frequency polyphase was found by Tesla to perform with far greater efficacy than the common sixty-cycle variety which we still use. He fully intended on implementing these special generators in the system which his patron and friend, George Westinghouse, had proliferated. The business arrangement rendered Tesla fabulously wealthy at a young age.

Tesla extended his generator frequencies in multiples of sixty until reaching some thirty thousand cycles per second. These very high frequency alternating current generators became the marvel of all the academic and engineering world. They were copied and modified by several other subsequent inventors including Alexanderson. Remarkably driven at excessive speeds, they constituted Tesla’s first belief that high frequency alternating current generators would supply the world’s power.

High frequency current phenomena were new and exceedingly curious. A line of experimental research was conducted in order to evaluate new safe and possibly more efficient ways for transmitting power along long elevated lines. Tesla stated that the transmission of such safe currents across very long powerline distances in the future would be a certainty, seeing their wonderful new qualities.

Tesla found that high frequency currents were harmless when contacted by the human body. Discharges from these generators traversed the outer surface of materials, never penetrating matter with depth. There was no danger when working with high frequency currents. He also observed their very curious and beautiful spark effects. They hissed and fizzled all over wire conductors, could stimulate luminescence in low pressure gas bulbs, seemed to traverse insulative barriers with ease, and made little pinwheels spin like delicate little fireworks displays.

Though curious, the effects were weak and furtive. They seemed to intimate some future technology which he was yet unable to penetrate. Tesla learned that his intuitions and visions were infallible. What he guessed usually proved true.’ This very personal revelation, he later claimed, was his greatest discovery.

As the safety of all personnel was his main concern, he was consumed with the idea of making his High Frequency Polyphase System completely safe for human operators and consumers alike. An extensive examination of each System component was undertaken with this aim in mind. Tesla was thorough and relentless in his quest for safety and efficiency.

But, his involvement with alternating currents would come to an abrupt and unexpected end. During a series of experiments which followed these high frequency tests, an amazing seldom-mentioned accident occurred in which Tesla observed a phenomenon which forever altered his view of electricity and technology.

SHOCKING DISCOVERY

Tesla was an avid and professional experimenter throughout his life. His curiosity was of such an intense nature that he was able to plumb the mysteries of an electrical peculiarity with no regard for his own comfort. Whereas Edison would work and sleep for a few hours on the floor, Tesla would never sleep until he had achieved success in an experimental venture. This marathon could last for days. He was once observed to work through a seventy two hour period without fatigue. His technicians were in awe of him.

The Victorian Era was flooding over with new electrical discoveries by the day. Keeping up with the sheer volume of strange electrical discoveries and curiosities was a task which Tesla thoroughly enjoyed …and preferred. His Polyphase System in perfect working order, the pleasurable occupation of studying new gazettes and scientific journals often fascinated his mind to the exclusion of all other responsibilities. A millionaire and world heralded genius before the age of thirty, Tesla sought the pure kind of research he had so long craved.

Whenever he observed any intriguing electrical effect he immediately launched into experimental study with a hundred variations. Each study brought him such a wealth of new knowledge that, based on phenomena which he observed, he was immediately able to formulate new inventions and acquire new patents.

Tesla’s New York laboratories had several sections. This complex was arranged as a multi-level gallery, providing a complete research and production facility. Tesla fabricated several of his large transformers and generators in the lower floors, where the machine shops of this building were housed. The upper floors contained his private research laboratories. He had attracted a loyal staff of technicians. Of all these, Kolman Czito was a trusted friend who would stand by Tesla for the remainder of his life. Czito was the machine shop foreman in each of Tesla’s New York laboratories.

Tesla observed that instantaneous applications of either direct or alternating current to lines often caused explosive effects. While these had obvious practical applications in improvement and safety, Tesla was seized by certain peculiar aspects of the phenomenon. He had observed these powerful blasts when knife-switches were quickly closed and opened in his Polyphase System. Switch terminals were often blasted to pieces when the speed of the switchman matched the current phase.
Tesla assessed the situation very accurately. Suddenly applied currents will stress conductors both electrically and mechanically. When the speed of the switch-action is brief enough, and the power reaches a sufficiently high crescendo, the effects are not unlike a miniature lightning stroke. Electricity initially heats the wire, bringing it to vapor point. The continual application of current then blasts the wire apart by electrostatic repulsion. But was this mechanistic explanation responsible for every part of the phenomenon?

The most refractory metals were said to be vaporized by such electrical blasts. Others had used this phenomenon to generate tiny granular diamonds. Yes, there were other aspects about this violent impulse phenomenon which tantalized him. Sufficiently intrigued, he developed a small lightning “generator” consisting of a high voltage dynamo and small capacitor storage bank. His idea was to blast sections of wire with lightning-like currents. He wanted to observe the mechanically explosive effects which wires sustain under sudden high-powered electrifications.

Instantaneous applications of high current and high voltage could literally convert thin wires into vapor. Charged to high direct current potentials, his capacitors were allowed to discharge across a section of thin wire. Tesla configured his test apparatus to eliminate all possible current alternations. The application of a single switch contact would here produce a single, explosive electrical surge: a direct current impulse resembling lightning. At first Tesla hand-operated the system, manually snapping a heavy knife switch on and off. This became less favorable as the dynamo voltages were deliberately increased.

He quickly closed the large knife switch held in his gloved hand. Bang! The wire exploded. But as it did so, Tesla was stung by a pressure blast of needle-like penetrations. Closing the dynamo down, he rubbed his face, neck, arms, chest, and hands. The irritation was distinct. He thought while the dynamo whirred down to a slow spin. The blast was powerful. He must have been sprayed by hot metal droplets as small as smoke particles. Though he examined his person, he fortunately found no wounds. No evidence of the stinging blast which he so powerfully felt.

Placing a large glass plate between himself and the exploding wire, he performed the test again. Bang! The wire again turned to vapor…but the pressured stinging effect was still felt. But, what was this? How were these stinging effects able to penetrate the glass plate? Now he was not sure whether he was experiencing a pressure effect or an electrical one. The glass would have screened any mechanical shrapnel, but would not appreciably shield any electrical effects.

Through careful isolation of each experimental component, Tesla gradually realized that he was observing a very rare electrical phenomenon. Each “bang” produced the same unexpected shock response in Tesla, while exploding small wire sections into vapor.

The instantaneous burst produced strange effects never observed with alternating currents. The painful shocking sensation appeared each time he closed or opened the switch. These sudden shock currents were IMPULSES, not alternations. What surprised him was the fact that these needle-like shocks were able to reach him from a distance: he was standing almost ten feet from the discharge site!

These electrical irritations expanded out of the wire in all directions and filled the room in a mystifying manner. He had never before observed such an effect. He thought that the hot metal vapor might be acting as a “carrier” for the electrical charges. This would explain the strong pressure wave accompanied by the sensation of electrical shock. He utilized longer wires. When the discharge wire was resistive enough, no explosion could occur.

Wire in place, the dynamo whirred at a slower speed. He threw die switch for a brief instant, and was again caught off guard by the stinging pressure wave! The effect persisted despite the absence of an explosive conductor. Here was a genuine mystery. Hot vapor was not available to “carry” high voltage charges throughout the room. No charge carriers could be cited in this instance to explain the stinging nature of the pressure wave. So what was happening here?

The pressure wave was sharp and strong, like a miniature thunderclap. It felt strangely “electrical” when the dynamo voltage was sufficiently high. In fact, it was uncomfortably penetrating when the dynamo voltage was raised beyond certain thresholds. It became clear that these pressure waves might be electrified. Electrified soundwaves. Such a phenomenon would not be unexpected when high voltages were used. Perhaps he was fortunate enough to observe the rare phenomenon for the first time.

He asked questions. How and why did the charge jump out of the line in this strange manner? Here was a phenomenon which was not described in any of the texts with which he was familiar. And he knew every written thing on electricity. Thinking that he was the victim of some subtle, and possibly deadly short circuit, he rigorously examined the circuit design. Though he searched, he could find no electrical leakages. There were simply no paths for any possible corona effects to find their way back into the switching terminal which he held.

Deciding to better insulate the arrangement in order that all possible line leakages could be eradicated, he again attempted the experiment. The knife switch rapidly closed and opened, he again felt the unpleasant shock just as painfully as before. Right through the glass shield! Now he was perplexed. Desiring total distance from the apparatus, he modified the system once more by making it “automatic”.

He could freely walk around the room during the test He could! hold the shield or simply walk without it. A small rotary spark switch was arranged in place of the hand-held knife switch. The rotary switch was arranged to interrupt the dynamo current in slow, successive intervals. The system was actuated, the motor switch cranked it contacts slowly. Snap …snap …snap …each contact produced the very same room-filling irritation.

This time it was most intense. Tesla could not get away from the shocks, regardless of his distance from the apparatus across his considerably large gallery hall. He scarcely could get near enough to deactivate the rotating switch. From what he was able to painfully observe, thin sparks of a bright blue-white color stood straight out of the line with each electrical contact.

The shock effects were felt far beyond the visible spark terminations. This seemed to indicate that their potential was far greater than the voltage applied to the line. A paradox! The dynamo charge was supplied at a tension of fifteen thousand volts, yet the stinging sparks were characteristics of electrostatic discharges exceeding some two hundred fifty thousand volts. Somehow this input current was being transformed into a much higher voltage by an unknown process. No natural explanation could be found. No scientific explanation sufficed. There was simply not enough data on the phenomenon for an answer. And Tesla knew that this was no ordinary phenomenon. Somewhere in the heart of this activity was a deep natural secret. Secrets of this kind always opened humanity into new revolutions.

Tesla considered this strange voltage multiplying effect from several viewpoints. The problem centered around the fact that there was no magnetic induction taking place. Transformers raise or lower voltage when current is changing. Here were impulses. Change was happening during the impulse. But there was no transformer in the circuit. No wires were close enough for magnetic inductions to take place. Without magnetic induction, there could theoretically be -no transformation effect. No conversion from low to high voltage at all. Yet, each switch snap brought both the radiating blue-white sparks and their painful sting.

IMPULSES

Tesla noted that the strange sparks were more like electrostatic discharges. If the sparks had been direct current arcs reaching from the test line, he would surely have been killed with the very first close of the switch. The physical pressure and stinging pain of these sparks across such distances could not be explained. This phenomenon had never been reported by those who should have seen and felt its activities.

Tesla gradually came to the conclusion that the shock effect was something new, something never before observed. He further concluded that the effect was never seen before because no one had ever constructed such a powerful impulse generator. No one had ever reported the phenomenon because no one had ever generated the phenomenon.

Tesla once envisioned a vortex of pure energy while looking into a sunset The result of this great Providential vision was polyphase current. A true revelation. But this, this was an original discovery found through an accident. It was an empirical discovery of enormous significance. Here was a new electrical force, an utterly new species of electrical force which should have been incorporated into the electrical equations of James Clerk Maxwell. Surprisingly, it was not.

Tesla now questioned his own knowledge. He questioned the foundations on which he had placed so much confidence in the last several years. Maxwell was the “rule and measure” by which all of Tesla’s polyphase generators had been constructed. Tesla penetrated the validity of Maxwell’s mathematical method. It was well known that Maxwell had derived his mathematical descriptions of electromagnetic induction from a great collection of available electrical phenomena. Perhaps he had not studied enough of the phenomena while doing so.

Perhaps newer phenomena had not been discovered, and were therefore unavailable to Maxwell for consideration. How was Maxwell justified in stating his equations as “final”? In deriving the laws of electromagnetic induction, Maxwell had imposed his own “selection process” when deciding which electrical effects were the “basic ones”. There were innumerable electrical phenomena which had been observed since the eighteenth century. Maxwell had difficulty selecting what he considered to be “the most fundamental” induction effects from the start.

The selection process was purely arbitrary. After having “decided” which induction effects were “the most fundamental”, Maxwell then reduced these selected cases and described them mathematically. His hope was to simplify matters for engineers who were designing new electrical machines. The results were producing “prejudicial” responses in engineers who could not bear the thought of any variations from the “standard”. Tesla had experienced this kind of thematic propaganda before, when he was a student. The quantitative wave of blindness was catching up with him.

Tesla and others knew very well that there were strange and anomalous forms of electromagnetic induction which were constantly and accidentally being observed. These seemed to vary as the experimental apparatus varied. New electrical force discoveries were a regular feature of every Nature Magazine issue. Adamant in the confidence that all electrical phenomena had been both observed and mathematically described, academicians would be very slow to accept Tesla’s claims.

But this academic sloth is not what bothered Tesla. He had already found adequate compensation for his superior knowledge in the world of industry. Tesla, now in possession of an effect which was not predicted by Maxwell, began to question his own knowledge. Had he become a “mechanist”, the very thing which he reviled when a student? Empirical fact contradicted what that upon he based his whole life’s work. Goethe taught that nature leads humanity.

The choice was clear: accept the empirical evidence and reject the conventional theory. For a time he struggled with a way to “derive” the shock effect phenomenon by mathematically wrestling “validity” from Maxwell’s equations … but could not. A new electrical principle had been revealed. Tesla would take this, as he did the magnetic vortex, and from it weave a new world.

What had historically taken place was indeed unfortunate. Had Maxwell lived after Tesla’s accidental discovery, then the effect might have been included in the laws. Of course, we have to assume that Maxwell would have “chosen” the phenomenon among those which he considered “fundamental”.

There was no other way to see his new discovery now. Empirical fact contradicted theoretical base. Tesla was compelled to follow. The result was an epiphany which changed Tesla’s inventive course. For the remainder of his life he would make scientific assertions which few could believe, and fewer yet would reproduce. There yet exist several reproducible electrical phenomena which cannot be predicted by Maxwell. They continually appear whenever adventuresome experimenters make accidental observations.

FOCUS

High voltage impulse currents produced a hitherto unknown radiant effect. In fact, here was an electrical “broadcast” effect whose implementation in a myriad of bizarre designs would set Tesla apart from all other inventors. This new electrical force effect was a preeminent discovery of great historical significance. Despite his fact, few academicians grasped its significance as such. Focused now on dogmatizing Maxwell’s work, they could not accept Tesla’s excited announcements. Academes argued that Tesla’s effect could not exist. They insisted that Tesla revise his statements.

Tesla’s mysterious effect could not have been predicted by Maxwell because Maxwell did not incorporate it when formulating His equations. How could he have done so, when the phenomenon was just discovered? Tesla now pondered the academic ramifications of this new effect. What then of his own and possibly other electrical phenomena which were not incorporated into Maxwell’s force laws? Would academes now ignore their existence? Would they now even dare to reject the possibility of such phenomena on the basis of an incomplete mathematical description?

Seeing that the effect could grant humanity enormous possibilities when once tamed, Tesla wished to study and implement the radiant electrical action under much safer conditions. The very first step which he took before proceeding with this experimental line was the construction of special grounded copper barriers: shields to block the electrical emanations from reaching him.

They were large, body sized mantles of relatively thick copper. He grounded these to insure his own complete safety. In electrical terms, they formed a “Faraday Cage” around him. This assembly would block out all static discharges from ever reaching Tesla during the tests. Now he could both observe and write what he saw with confidence.

Positioned behind his copper mantle, Tesla initiated the action. ZZZZZZ…the motorized switch whirring, dynamo voltage interrupted several hundred times per second, the shock action was now continuous. He felt a steady rhythm of electrostatic irritations right through the barrier accompanied by a pressure wave which kept expanding. An impossibility. No electrical influence should have passed through the amount of copper which composed the shield. Yet this energetic effect was penetrating, electrically shocking, and pressured. He had no words to describe this aspect of the new phenomenon. The shocks really stung.

Tesla was sure that this new discovery would produce a completely new breed of inventions, once tamed and regulated. Its effects differed completely from those observed in high frequency alternating current. These special radiant sparks were the result of non-reversing impulses. In fact, this effect relied on the non-reversing nature of each applied burst for its appearance. A quick contact charge by a powerful high voltage dynamo was performing a feat of which no alternating generator was capable. Here was a demonstration of “broadcast electricity”.

Most researchers and engineers are fixed in their view of Nikola Tesla and his discoveries. They seem curiously rigidified in the thought that his only realm of experimental developments lay in alternating current electricity. This is an erroneous conception which careful patent study reveals. Few recognize the documented facts that, after his work with alternating currents was completed, Tesla switched over completely to the study of impulse currents. His patents from this period to the end of his career are filled with the terminology equated with electrical impulses alone.

The secret lay principally in the direct current application in a small time interval. Tesla studied this time increment, believing that it might be possible to eliminate the pain field by shortening the length of time during which the switch contact is made. In a daring series of experiments, he developed rapid mechanical rotary switches which handled very high direct voltage potentials. Each contact lasted an average of one ten-thousandth second.

Exposing himself to such impulses of very low power, he discovered to his joy and amazement that the pain field was nearly absent. In its place was a strange pressure effect which could be felt right through the copper barriers. Increasing the power levels of this device produced no pain increase, but did produce an intriguing increased pressure field. The result of simple interrupted high voltage DC, the phenomenon was never before reported except by witnesses of close lightning strokes. This was erroneously attributed however to pressure effects in air.

Not able to properly comprehend their nature at first, Tesla also conservatively approached the pressure phenomenon as due to air pressure. He had first stated that the pressure field effect was due to sharp soundwaves which proceeded outward from the suddenly charged line. In fact, he reported this in a little-known publication where he first announced the discovery. Calling the pressure effects “electrified soundwaves”, he described their penetrating nature in acoustic terms.
Further experimentation however, gradually brought the new awareness that both the observed pressure effect and electrical shock fields were not taking place in air at all. He demonstrated that these actions could take place in oil immersions. Impulse charged lines were placed in mineral oil and carefully watched. Strong pressure projections emerged from sharp wire ends in the oil, as if air were streaming out under high pressure.

Tesla fast believed that this stream was wire-absorbed air driven off by electrical pressure. Continual operation of the phenomenon convinced him that the projected stream was not air at all. Furthermore, he was not at a loss to explain the effect, but was reluctant to mention his own theory of what had been generated by high voltage direct current impulses.

Tesla made electrical measurements of this projective stream. One lead of a galvanometer was connected to a copper plate, the other grounded. When impulses were applied to wire line, the unattached and distant meter registered a continual direct current. Current through space without wires! Now here was something which impulses achieved, never observed with alternating currents of any frequency.

Analysis of this situation proved that electrical energy or electrically productive energies were being projected from the impulse device as rays, not waves. Tesla was amazed to find these rays absolutely longitudinal in their action through space, describing them in a patent as “light-like rays”. These observations conformed with theoretical expectations described in 1854 by Kelvin.

In another article Tesla calls them “dark-rays”, and “rays which are more light-like in character”. The rays neither diminished with the inverse square of the distance nor the inverse of the distance from their source. They seemed to stretch out in a progressive shock-shell to great distances without any apparent loss.

MAGNETIC ARCS

Nikola Tesla now required greater power levels than those provided by his mechanical rotary switch system. He also saw the need for controlling ultra-rapid current interruptions of high repetition (“succession”) rates. No mechanical switch could perform in this manner. He had to envision and devise some new means by which ultra-rapid interruptions could be obtained. In his best and most efficient system, highly charged capacitors were allowed to impulsively discharge across special heavy duty magnetic arcs.

The magnetic arc gap was capable of handling the large currents required by Tesla. In achieving powerful, sudden impulses of one polarity, these were the most durable. Horn shaped electrodes were positioned with a powerful permanent magnetic field. Placed at right angles to the arc itself, the currents which suddenly formed in this magnetic space were accelerated along the horns until they were extinguished. Rapidly extinguished!

Arcs were thus completely extinguished within a specified time increment Tesla configured the circuit parameters so as to prevent capacitor alternations from occurring through the arc space. Each arc discharge represented a pure unidirectional impulse of very great power. No “contaminating current reversals” were possible or permissible.

Reversals.. alternations.. would ruin the “shock broadcast”. The effect was never observed when alternating currents were engaged. High voltage was supplied by a large dynamo. Tesla could speed or slow this dynamo with a hand operated rheostat. Power was applied in parallel across the capacitor. The magnetic arc was linked almost directly to one side of this capacitor, a long and thick copper strap connecting the magnetic arc and the far capacitor plate.

This simple asymmetric positioning of the magnetic arc discharger to one side of the dynamo supply produced pure unidirectional electropositive or electronegative impulses as desired. Tesla designed this very simple and powerfully effective automatic switching system for achieving ultra-rapid impulses of a single polarity. Capacitor values, arc distances, magnetic fields and dynamo voltages were all balanced and adjusted to yield a repetitive train of ultrashort singular impulses without “flyback” effects.

The system is not really well understood by engineers, the exceptional activities of the arc plasma introducing numerous additional features to the overall system. While the effects which Tesla claimed can be reproduced with electron tube impulse circuitry, these produce decidedly inferior effects. The overall power of the basic arc discharge is difficult to equal. Tesla eventually enclosed the magnetic arc, immersing the gap space in mineral oil. This blocked premature arcing, while very greatly increasing the system output.

Most imagine that the Tesla impulse system is merely a “very high frequency alternator”. This is a completely erroneous notion, resulting in effects which can never equal those to which Tesla referred. The magnetic discharge device was a true stroke of genius. It rapidly extinguishes capacitor charge in a single disruptive blast. This rapid current rise and decline formed an impulse of extraordinary power. Tesla called this form of automatic arc switching a “disruptive discharge” circuit, distinguishing it from numerous other kinds of arc discharge systems. It is very simply a means for interrupting a high voltage direct current without allowing any backward current alternations. When these conditions are satisfied, the Tesla Effect is then observed.

The asymmetrical positioning of the capacitor and the magnetic arc determines the polarity of the impulse train. If the magnetic arc device is placed near the positive charging side, then the strap is charged negative and the resultant current discharge is decidedly negative.

Tesla approached the testing of his more powerful systems with certain fear. Each step of the testing process was necessarily a dangerous one. But he discovered that when the discharges exceeded ten thousand per second, the painful shock effect was absent. Nerves of the body were obviously incapable of registering the separate impulses. But this insensitivity could lead to a most seductive death. The deadly aspects of electricity might remain. Tesla was therefore all the more wary of the experiments.

He noticed that, though the pain field was gone, the familiar pressure effect remained. In its place came a defined and penetrating heat. Tesla was well aware that such heat could signal internal electrocution. He had already made a thorough study of these processes, recognizing that such heating precedes the formation of electrical arcs through the body. Nevertheless, he applied power to the dynamo in small but steady intervals.

Each increase brought increase in the internal heating effects. He remained poised at each power level, sensing and scoping his own physiology for danger signs. He continued raising the power level until the magnetic arc reached its full buzzing roar. Tesla found that this heat could be adjusted and, when not extreme, was completely enjoyable. So soothing, relaxing, and comfortable was this manifestation that Tesla daily exposed himself to the energies. An electrical “sauna”.

He later reported these findings in medical journals, freely offering the discovery to the medical world for its therapeutic benefits. Tesla was a notorious user of all such therapies from this time on, often falling into a deep sleep in the warm and penetrating influences. Once, having overindulged the electro-sauna therapy, he fell into a profoundly deep sleep from which he emerged a day later! He reported that this experience was not unpleasant, but realized that proper “electro-dosages” would necessarily have to be determined by medical personnel.

During this time, Tesla found shorter impulse lengths where the heating effect disappeared altogether, rendering the radiance absolutely harmless. These impulse trains were so very high that the deepest nerves of one’s body could not sense the permeating radiant energy field. Now he could pursue his vision of broadcast energy systems without fear of rendering to humanity a technological curse, rather than a true blessing.

Continued in Part 2

Hearing Through Wires: The Physiophony of Antonio Meucci

admin — Sun, 01 Oct 1995 07:00:37 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 51, No. 4, 4th Quarter 1995)

Hearing Through Wires

The Physiophony of Antonio Meucci

ARRIVALS

Antonio Meucci is the forgotten and humble genius whose inventions precede every revolution in communication arts which were achieved during this century. The time frame during which his notable discoveries were made is a most remarkable revelation. How Meucci developed his accidental discoveries into full scale working systems is a true wonder in view of this time reference.

The culturing of technology from the simple sparks of vision is a feat of its own distinct kind. As the earliest chronicled inventor of telephonic arts he is justly applauded as the true father of telephony by afficionadi who know his wonderfully touching biography. But he invented far more than the telephone with which we are familiar. Meucci discovered two separate telephonic systems. His first and most astounding discovery is known as physiophony, telephoning through the body…hearing through wires. His second development was acoustic telephony, preceding every other legendary inventor in this art by several decades.

Meucci powered telephones with electricity taken from the ground through special earth batteries, and from the sky by using large surface area diodes to draw static from the air. Eliminating the need for employing batteries in his telephonic systems, Meucci first conceived of a transoceanic vocal communication system. His notion was grand and achievable. Marconi later employed methods pioneered by the forgotten Meucci.

He developed ferrites, with which he constructed true audio transformers and loudspeaking transceivers. He invented marine ranging and undersea communication systems. His numerous achievements in chemical processing and industrial chemistry are too numerous to mention in such a brief treatise. All of these wonders were conceived and demonstrated well before 1857.

Sr. Meucci was a prolific inventor, engineer, and practical chemist. Living in Florence, he worked as a stage designer and technician in various theaters. Antonio Meucci and his wife left Florence to flee the violence of the civil insurrections which raged throughout Italy. Many immigrants who wished for a peaceful life thought they might find some measure of solace in the New Land which lay to the west.

Unhappily restricted by law from entering The United States, persons such as Meucci and his family chose the route into which most other Mediterraneans were forced at the time. Being turned southward, they were literally compelled to dock in Caribbean or South American ports. There sizable populations of European immigrants remain to this day, legally restricted from North American shores. Most found that their presence there was received with an acceptance and warmth equal to a homecoming. It should have been in these lands that their legacies were written.

New arrivals in Cuba, the Meucci family made Havana their home. They found the warm and friendly nation a place for new and wonderful opportunities. Sr. Meucci pursued numerous experimental lines of research while living in Havana, developing a new method for electroplating metals. This new art was applied to all sorts of Cuban military equipment, Meucci gaining fame and recognition in Havana as a scientific researcher and developer of new technologies.

Several special electrical control systems were designed by him specifically for stage production in the Teatro Tacon, the Havana Opera. Electrical rheostats served the safe and controlled operation of enclosed carbon arclamps. Mechanical contrivances hoisted, lowered, parted, and closed heavy curtains. The automatic systems were a wonder to behold.

A young and dreamy romantic, Meucci found the beauty of theater work quite entrancing and inspirational. There, dreams became realities, if only for the short time during which hardened pragmatism was suspended. Fantasy and wonder were magickal liquids which perfumed the soul and opened the mind’s eyes. As in childhood, one could receive the elevating epiphanies of revelation necessary for discovering unexpected phenomena, and for developing unequalled technologies.

The decision to move to Havana was indeed a good one. Genuine acceptance, and loving recognition added joy the lives of the bittersweet exiles. Meucci’s wife was often amused by his more outlandish inventive notions. But, as their stay in Havana continued, she scolded that he had better develop something solidly practical on which to “make a living”.

A long time fascination with physiological conditions and their electrical responses, Meucci was prompted to begin study of electromedicine. With just such a practical view in mind, he established and maintained an experimental electromedical laboratory in backrooms of the Opera House. Investigating the art of “electro-medicine”, as popularly practiced throughout both Europe and the Americas, Meucci investigated the curative abilities of electrical impulse. Applying moderate electrical impulses from small induction coils to patients in hope of alleviate illness, Meucci learned that precise control of both the “strength and length” of electrical impulse held the true secret of the art.

As viewed by Meucci, pain and certain physical conditions were treatable by these electrical methods provided that very short impulses of insignificant voltage were employed. Impulses of specific length and power were necessary to rid suffering patients of their pain. In addition, Meucci imagined that tissue and bone regeneration could be stimulated by such means.

What really intrigued Sr. Meucci was the length of impulse time involved in body-applied electricity. To this end, he developed special slide switches which were capable of specifying the impulse length. It was possible to slide a zig-zag contact surface over a fixed electrical source. By varying the spacings between such slide contacts, Meucci could mechanically generate very short electrical impulses.

Rheostats could also be employed to control the current intensity. By the employment of these two control features, he was able to apply the proper impulse “strength and length”. Meucci wished to chart a specific impulse series which would neutralize each specific kind of pain or illness. Developing catalogues of electrical impulse cures was his real aim. Such a technology, if developed thoroughly, could arm medical practitioners with new curative powers.

Sr. Meucci applied continual experimental effort toward these medical goals. He often applied these same impulses to theater employees and stage artists alike. These people came to regard such electric cures as definitive. Meucci’s method was known to reverse conditions completely. He paid special attention to the placement and size of electrodes on the body. Tiny point-contacts were often held to the body at specific neural points, effecting their analgesic effects. He was especially careful with “shock strength”, applying only millivolt surges to his patients. Pain could be gradually made to retreat by the proper impulse administration.

Meucci had already developed fine rheostatic tuners for limiting the output power of his electrical device. He always applied the current to his own body in order to give completely “measured” electro-treatments. In this manner he was able to judge the parameters more personally and responsibly. It was his habit to administer treatments of this kind to his ailing wife, Esther. Crippling arthritis was becoming her personal prison, and Sr. Meucci wished to cure her completely of the malady. Watching and praying through until the dawn, Antonio struggled to perfect a means by which cures could be effected with selective impulse articulation.

As with each of Meucci’s developments, the fulfillment of his advanced medical ideas are found throughout the early twentieth century. Each researcher in this field of medical study employed very short impulses of controlled voltage to alleviate a wide variety of maladies. Independently rediscovering the Meucci electro-medical method throughout the early twentieth century were such persons as Nikola Tesla, Dr. A. Abrams, G. Lahkovsky, Dr. T. Colson. Each developed catalogues by which specific impulses were methodically directed to cure their associate illness. Each researcher developed a method for applying impulses of specifically controlled length and intensity to suffering patients, effecting historical cures.

More recently, several medical researchers have employed impulse generators to effect dramatic bone and tissue regenerations. They affirm that human physiology responds with rapidity when proper electroimpulses are applied to conditions of illness. These were closely regarded by government officials, eager to regulate the new science.

Most medical bureaucrats, fearing the elimination of their own pharmaceutical monopolies, sought opportunity to eradicate these revolutionary electromedical arts. Upton Sinclair obtained personal experience with these curative systems and the physicians who devised these methodologies. He championed their cause in numerous national publications with an aim toward exposing those who would suppress their work.

Sinclair pointed out the social revolution which would necessarily follow such discoveries. He was quick to mention that proliferations of new technologies would not come without a dramatic battle. Fought in the innermost boardrooms of intrigue, Sinclair underestimated the ability of regulators to eradicate technologies of social benefit.

This notable literary personage wrote extensively on the work of Dr. Abrams, who was later vilified by both the FDA and the AMA. An outlandish national purge quickly mounted into a fullscale assault on these methods. But this is a story best told in several other biographies. Meucci’s electromedical methods would soon be transformed into a revolutionary means for communicating with others at long distances.

SHOCK

The most central episode of Meucci’s life now unfolded. It was to be a serendipity of the most remarkable kind. Throughout his later years, Meucci recounted the following story which occurred in 1849, when he was forty-one years of age. A certain gentleman was suffering from an unbearable migraine headache. Since it was known to many that Meucci’s electromedical methods possessed definite curative ability, Sr. Meucci’s medical attention was sought.

Meucci placed the weak, suffering man on a chair in a nearby room. His weakened condition inspired an easy pity. Antonio had already felt the thorns of his beloved wife’s pain. Her eyes, like the man before him now, begged for the cure which lay hidden in mystery. Carefully, caringly, Antonio now sought to ease this man’s suffering.

In this severe instance, Meucci placed a small copper electrode in the patient’s mouth and asked him to hold the other (a copper rod) in his hand. The electro-impulse device was in an adjoining room. Meucci went into this room, placed an identical copper electrode in his own mouth, and held the other copper electrode to find the weakest possible impulse strength. Meucci told his patient to relax and to expect pain relief momentarily, making small incremental adjustments on the induction coil.

Migraines of severe intensity characteristically produce equally severe reaction to the slightest irritation. The man being now highly sensitive to pain, Meucci’s insignificant (though stimulating) current impulses were felt. The patient, anticipating some horrible shock, cried out in the other room with surprise at the very first slight tickle.

Momentarily, Meucci forgot the hurtful sympathy which he naturally felt in assisting this poor soul who sat across the hall. His focussed attention was suddenly diverted as an astounding empathy manifested itself: he had actually “felt” the sound of the man’s cry in his own mouth! After absorbing the surprise, he burst into the adjoining room to see why the man had so yelled. Glad the poor fellow had not run out on him, Meucci replaced the oral electrode of his suffering patient and went into the other room to perform the same adjustments…through closed doors this time. He asked the gentleman to talk louder, while he himself again held the electrode in his mouth.

Once more, to his own great shock, Meucci actually heard the distant voice “in his own mouth”. This vocalization was clear, distinct, and completely different from the muffled voice heard through the doors. This was a true discovery. Here, Antonio Meucci discovered what would later be known as the “electrophonic” effect.

The phenomenon, later known as physiophony, employs nerve responses to applied currents of very specific nature. As the neural mechanism in the body employs impulses of infinitesimal strengths, so Meucci had accidentally introduced similar “conformant” currents. These conformant currents contained auditory signals: sounds. The strange method of “hearing through the body” bypassed the ears completely and resounded throughout the delicate tissues of the contact point. In this case, it was the delicate tissues of the mouth.

Each expressed their thanks to the other, and the relieved patient went home. The impulse cure had managed to “break up” the migraine condition. Meucci’s reward was not monetary. It was found in a miraculous accident; the transmission of the human voice along a charged wire. In these several little experiments, Meucci had determined and defined the future history of all telephonic arts.

VOICES

Excited and elated Antonio asked certain friends to indulge his patience with similar experiments. He gave individual oral electrodes to each and asked that his friends each speak or yell. Meucci, seated behind a sealed door, touched his electrode to the corner of his mouth. As each person spoke or yelled, Meucci clearly heard speech again. Internal sound reception in the very tissues of the mouth. An astounding discovery.

Without question, Meucci’s most notable discovery in telephonics is physiophony. Meucci did not foresee this strange and wonderful discovery. Think of it. Hearing without the ears. Hearing through the nerves directly! The implications are just as enormous as the possible applications. Would it be possible for deaf persons to hear sound once again? Meucci knew it was possible.

His first series of new experiments would seek improvement of the electrophonic effect. To this end Meucci designed a preliminary set of paired electrodes. The appearance of these devices was strange to both the people of his time and those of own. Each device was made of small cork cylinders fitted with smooth copper discs. Designed as personalized transmitters, each person was to place their own transmitter directly in the mouth! The other electrode was to be hand-held.

Meucci verified the physiophonic phenomenon repeatedly. Upon experiencing the now-famed effect, visitors were awed. Furthermore, it was possible to greatly extend the line length to many hundreds of feet and yet “hear” sounds. The sounds were clearly heard “in the nerves” with a very small applied voltage. Sounds were being deliberately transmitted along charged wires for the first recorded time in modern history.

The auditory organs were not in any way involved. Meucci discovered that oral vibrations were varying the resistance of the circuit: oral muscles were vibrating the current supply. Spoken sounds were reproduced as a vibrating electric current in the charged line which can be sensed and “heard” in the nerveworks and muscular tissues.

With very great care for obvious injuries, it is possible to reproduce these remarkable results to satisfaction. The voltages must be infinitesimal. When properly conducted through the tissues, sounds are heard near the contact point the body. No doubt, the impulsed signal reproduces identical audio contractions in sensitive tissues. This is one source of the sounds internally “heard”. Nerves actually form the greater channel when impulses are arranged properly, directly transmitting their auditory contents without the inner ear.

Physiophony is Meucci’s greatest discovery, one which he should have pursued before also developing mere acoustic telephony. Twenty-five years later in America, an elated Elisha Gray would rediscover the physiophonic phenomenon. He would develop physiophony into a major scientific theme. Long after this time, these identical experimental demonstrations conspicuously appear in Bell’s letters; copying the identical experiments taken first from Meucci, then from Gray, and Reis.

During the early twentieth century, music halls for deaf persons were once found in certain metropolitan centers. These recital halls enabled nerve-deaf persons to hear music through handheld electrodes. Modifying the appliances in order to allow considerable freedom of movement, several such places allowed deaf people to dance. Holding the small copper rods, wired to a network on the ceiling, musical sounds and rhythms could be felt and heard directly. Physiophony, more recently termed “neurophony” holds the secret of a new technology. Physiophony, rediscovered of late, facilitates hearing in those afflicted with nerve-deafness.

Meucci discovered two distinct forms of vocal communication: physiophony and acoustic telephony. Meucci’s next experiments dealt with the development of a means for separating the physiophonic action from the human body entirely. He developed working systems to serve each of these modes, with primary emphasis on acoustic telephony. Replacing tissues of the mouth with a separate vibrating medium required extending the cork-fixed electrodes.

Meucci coiled thin and flexible copper wire so that it could freely vibrate in a heavy paper cone. Once more, Meucci varied the experiment. This time his own oral electrode would be enclosed in a heavy paper cone. Again each subject was asked to talk into the first cone-encased electrode as Meucci listened at the other terminal. Each time, speech was heard as vibrating air. This was his first acoustic transmitter-receiver.

Meucci wrote up all these findings in 1849…when Alexander Graham Bell was just 2 years old. Living in Havana at the time, Meucci conceived of the first telephonic system. He imagined that American industry would allow infinite production of his new technology. A telephonic system would revolutionize any nation which engineered its proliferation.

CANDLES

Freedom doors were not swung open in wide and unconditional welcome for Europeans during the latter 1800’s. Strict immigration laws forbade Europeans from even entering New York Harbor. It was more difficult, if not impossible, to find employment. New arrivals in America faced difficult, almost inhuman conditions. No support systems existed in the land of free-enterprise. No catch-nets for failed attempts in the land of the free.

True and unresisted freedom was reserved only for the upper class, who had already begun regulating and eliminating their possible competitors. Every means by which that prized upper position might be usurped was destroyed. Forgotten discoveries and inventions flowed like blood under the heavy arm of the robber baron.

The “New World” was not anxious to welcome these people. Discrimination against European immigrants went unbridled, unrepresented, and unchallenged. When American doors finally did open, there were no sureties for those who came to work and live in the New World. There was no promise, no meal, no housing, no job, no emergency support. To be in America meant to be on your own in America.

Prejudice against the “foreigners” was vicious during this time period. Immigrants who imagined a better life to the northlands would be sadly disappointed at first. Many of these newcomers preferred the temporary pain of atrocious city ghettoes simply because their eyes were on the future.

Europeans arriving in America came with trades and skills. Master craftsmen and technicians in their Old World guilds, these “unwelcomed” eventually won the hardened industrial establishment with their good works, many of them later forming the real core of American Industry. It is not accidental that Thomas Edison hired European craftsmen exclusively. In less than two generations the children of these brave individuals became leaders of their professions, giving the leukemic nation its periodically required red blood.

Established families despised the newcomers, who were regarded first with dread, then with resentment, and finally with a firm resolve. After ruthless campaigns by bureaucrats and moguls to eliminate the foreign presence in North America, wealthy puritanical antagonists sought the supposed surety of legislation to achieve elitist isolation. Neither cultivated nor creative, this ability to manipulate the tools of liberty for the sake of domination became a theme which continually stains their history. The unbridled and impassioned expansionism of these “foreign people” was so threatening to the impotent bureaucrats that legislation was installed for the expressed purpose of limiting their unstoppable movement. Sure that these were in fact the feared usurpers of a young and recently consolidated Republic, financiers impelled legislators to create a “middle class” economic stratum which has remained in force to this very day.

Bound to a life of tireless work and taxations, the children of immigrants no longer question the barriers to limitless personal achievement. While a very few wonder why their frustrations rarely allow escape into the true individual freedom of which America boasts, most simply satisfy themselves with banal consumer temptations.

Nevertheless, the “American” explosion in music, art, crafts, and technological arts followed the immigrants wherever they were forced to flee. When Antonio and Esther Meucci arrived in New York City, he was now forty-two. They made their home near Clifton, Staten Island.

Clifton was once a picturesque little town, nestled on a rocky ridge and surrounded by babbling brooks and lush forests. The year was 1850. The Meucci’s acquired a large and spacious house, filled with windows. Golden bright sunlight flooded the home in which Antonio devised the technology of the future. The rooms contained numerous pieces of striking art nouveau furniture which Meucci himself handcrafted. A beautiful four octave piano and several of these furniture pieces yet remain, the house itself having been declared a national monument.

His poor wife, now crippled completely, was confined to their second floor bedroom. It was there in Old Clifton that Sr. Meucci developed his “teletrofono”. The device was successively redesigned and improved until several distinct and original models emerged. Mundane needs being the primary necessity, Meucci developed a chemical formula for making special chemically formulated candles and opened a small factory for their production. His smokeless candles earned a moderate income by which the small family could maintain their place in the New World. Throughout the long years to come, he also supported countless others who were in need.

He patented this smokeless candle formula, along with several other chemical processes related to his small industry. Soon, Antonio found that his candles were sought by neighbors, parish churches, and small general stores. He therefore took his devotions, and went into production of the same. Marketing the product locally, he was now again able to supply his experimental facility. This was his encouragement. The inventions began flowing again like rich red wine.

Meucci installed a small teletrofonic system in his Clifton house, as he had done in Havana. Esther Meucci was now completely crippled with arthritis. Connecting his wife’s room to his small candle factory, Antonio could now speak throughout the day with his wife. The system lines were loosely wrapped up and around staircase banisters, through halls, across walls, and finally spanned the long distance to the factory building, naturally running slack in several locations.

Meucci made sure that the lines did not run tight in order to prevent wire stretching and cracking during winter seasons. In every model aspect, Meucci’s system was the prototype. Everyone of his surrounding neighbors had become personally familiar with his system, having been allowed to try “speaking over the wire.”

Meucci and his wife took boarders from time to time in order to afford minimum luxuries…the luxuries of ordinary people. When Garibaldi was exiled from Italy as an insurrectionist, he sought out Meucci. A small factory was established near his home for the manufacture of his chemically treated candles.

With this, his sole and sturdy financial source, Meucci continued his other beloved experiments. He had already established and regularly used several teletrofonic systems throughout his home and factory by 1852. Both he and Garibaldi walked, hunted, and fished in the lush greenery and flowing flowered hills of old Dutch Staten Island.

Each new teletrofonic design eventually was added to a growing collection box in the timber lined cellar. Improved models were made and brought into the general use of his system. With these modified devices it was effortless to communicate with his ailing wife, employees, and friends. Distances posed no problem for Meucci. His system could bring sound to any location. Numerous credible witnesses actually used his remarkably extensive telephonic system across the neighborhood. One such highly credible witness was Giuseppe Garibaldi himself.

Garibaldi was welcomed to live with the Meucci family in their modest Staten Island home for as long as he wished. Garibaldi, Meucci, and his wife vanquished sorrow and poverty with faith, hope, and love expressed in a myriad of ways. Each supported the other in the struggle against indignity, accusation, outrage, and all the particular little alienations imposed upon them. The Meucci household not unaccustomed to the deprivations through which character is developed.

Both Srs. Meucci and Garibaldi continued manufacturing candles and other such products of commercial value, supporting themselves and the needs of others in the new land. Frequent financial crisis never deterred his dream quest. Never did such reversals place a halt on Meucci’s laboratory experimentation or any of his devoted attentions.

As it happens in the course of time, new changes bring fresh opportunities and joys to lift tired hearts. The sun rose in the little windows after a long winter’s dream. An old friend from Havana came to visit Meucci and his wife. Carlos Pader wished to know whether Meucci had continued experimenting with his now famous “teletrofono”.

Pader was shown the results, but Antonio confessed the need for new materials. Both Sr. Pader and another friend, Gaetano Negretti, informed their friend Antonio that there was an excellent manufacturer of telegraphic instruments on Centre Street in Manhatten. And so, Sr. Meucci was introduced to a certain Mr. Chester, a maker of telegraphic instruments.

Mr. Chester was an enthusiastic and friendly tradesmen. He enjoyed speaking with Antonio. The two shared their technical skills in broken dialects. Meucci was always welcomed there on Centre Street. Meucci visited this establishment on several occasions to purchase parts and observe the latest telegraphic arts. It was here that Meucci “gained new knowledge”. He set to work, purchasing materials for new experiments. New and improved teletrofonic models began appearing in the neighborhood.

Meucci was methodical, thorough, and attentive to the unfolding details of his experiments. Meucci kept meticulous notes; a feature which later worked to vindicate his honor. He worked incessantly on a single device before making any new design modifications. Meucci’s creative talent and familiarity with materials allowed him to recognize and anticipate the inventive “next move”. In observational acuity, inventive skill, and development of practical products he was unmatched.

Thomas Edison, after him, most nearly imitated Meucci’s methods. Meucci searched by trial and error at times when reason alone brought no fruit. It was, after all, an accident which revealed the teletrofonic principles to him. Providence itself in action.

Continue to next page

Gerry Vassilatos’s “Vril Compendium, V: VRIL CONNECTION”

“The discovery of nerve-induction telephony by Antonio Meucci in 1849 marked the true birth of telephony. In these documents, patents, and articles we read of developments whereby deaf persons could hear directly through the nerve-works of the body. These early attempts to approach true empathic transmission are the basis of systems which Nikola Tesla would later advance to a wary scientific public.”

Available now through the Borderland Sciences Research Catalog.

Nathan Stubblefield: Earth Energy and Vocal Radio

admin — Sat, 01 Jul 1995 07:00:00 +0000

Article by Gerry Vassilatos — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 51, No. 3, 3rd Quarter 1995)

The notion of drawing up electrical power from the ground sounds incredibly fanciful to conventional scientists, but numerous patents support the claim. A number of retrieved patents list compact batteries which can operate small appliances by drawing up ground electricity. Others describe methods whereby enough usable electrical power may be drawn out of the ground itself for industrial use.

Earth batteries have been detailed in a previous article. Their history can be traced back to experiments performed by Luigi Galvani on copper plates in deep stone water wells. Currents derived through these gave Galvani and his assistants “shivering thrills and joyous shocks”.

A certain Mr. Kemp in Edinburgh (1828) worked with earth batteries, so that we know these designs were already being seriously studied. They demonstrate the validity of very anciently held beliefs concerning the generative vitality of earth itself. Earth batteries are an unusual lost scientific entry having immense significance. Developed extensively during Victorian times, the earth batteries evidenced a unique earth phenomena by which it was possible to actually “draw out” electricity from the ground.

The most notable earth battery patent is one which operated arc lamps by drawing “a constant electromotive force of commercial value” directly from the ground. In addition to this remarkable claim, a vocal radio broadcast system… through the ground.

It all began one hundred and fifty years ago with the advent of telegraphy. The meandering wire went through rich dark ever-green forests. Lush com flowing valleys sparkled and languidly waved as the linesmen drew their trail. Across meadows where wild flowers covered the earth in fragrant bouquets, there went the line in its curious path.

Over rolling hills which soared into the hazy sunlight, the telegraph linesmen sang as they went. And the lines followed a mysteriously winding trail which few discern. Sorciers and Templars alike called these trails “woivres”. Anglo-Saxon geomancers called it VRIL, the black radiant organismic energy of earth.

Who is Nathan B. Stubblefield, and why do most citizens in the state of Kentucky justifiably revere his name? A native of Murray, Kentucky, Nathan B. Stubblefield had a love for the lonely wooded areas on the outskirts of town. Certain spots in these woods were mysterious and possessed of a strange magic all their own. Few would seek the magic of these places, and learn its true and deep power. There the song is sweet and deep, and still.

Vitalizing and sense-provocative, Stubblefield knew that specific locations could be unique natural energy sources. Rock outcrops, evergreens, and flowing springs each registered as strong sensual attractants. Could it be that they were sensual attractants because they conducted and projected special energetic ground currents? Can it he that we are enthralled and drawn into certain spots because of their projective energy? Furthermore, what is the exact nature of this energy? Does it contain or exceed the qualities of electricity?

A self-educated experimenter and avid reader of every kind of scientific literature, Nathan Stubblefield supplemented his living with farming. He remained a practical inventor of some of the most unusual electrical devices ever developed in America.. What he discovered and demonstrated before hundreds of qualified observers in his day seems to challenge many basic axioms of electrical dynamics.

He developed an extraordinary receiver of ground electricity (which produced great quantities of electric power) and numerous “vibrating telephones” which were used by local residents in 1887. The telephonic devices were patented in 1888 and represent the first commercial wireless telephones, using the ground as the transmission medium. The years when telephonic lines were suddenly made available to the world betrayed the fact that the new medium was one which only the very rich could afford. Common people could simply not be serviced with local telephones until prices were made cheaper.

While telegraphy employed thrifty iron wire, telephony demanded the expensive and better conducting copper lines. Telephones designed by A. G. Bell did not give powerful enough signals through iron wire at any distance because of the additional resistance represented. Other problems included the fact that the Bell telephone could not transmit or receive a strong and clear vocal signal without excessive battery power. The Bell System was not a truly “democratic” medium of communications.

A mysterious and unrecorded sequence of discoveries preceded Stubblefield’s early developments, but he was able to dispense with wire connections entirely. His was not a “one-wire” system. Nathan Stubblefield performed the “impossible”: he developed, tested, demonstrated, and established a small, democratic telephone service which did not require wire lines at all! His system utilized the ground itself as the conductive medium.

Mr. Stubblefield discovered that telephonic signals of exceptional clarity could be both transmitted and received through the ground medium. There was simply no precedent for this development. The first effect of this wonder was that common people could now have the much needed communications which both great distance and poverty prevented. Farms could be interlinked by the Stubblefield exchange by simply plugging both terminals into the ground. Wire would not take up the expense which the telephone exchange would later charge to the customers in addition to service. Signals were loud and clear. All those who experienced this kind of telephonic conversation declared that Stubblefield had discovered a true wonder.

We have photographs of his telephone sets. These reveal small, ruggedly built wooden cases which are surmounted by conventional transmitter-receiver sets. Heavy insulated cables rim to the outer ground from this apparatus. Stubblefield developed an “annunciator” (horn loudspeaker) which amplified the voice of callers. These sets of his appeared in numerous demonstrations on the east coast, from New York to Delaware. The signals were so loud and clear that they defied commercial levels of excellence provided by the now growing monopolies of American Telephone and Western Telegraph.

Thomas Edison broke the Bell telephone monopoly when he developed the carbon button microphone for Western Union. Sounds were louder when using the Edison carbon microphone. These carbon microphones needed excessive battery power, and batteries were not cheap. Some telephone companies began utilizing dynamo systems to power their lines. The fuel needs of dynamos drive customer costs much too far, prohibiting the ordinary people from having the system for their own moments of need.

Stubblefield developed remarkably unexpected systems by which available resources became the commodity. In the early Stubblefield system, twin terminals into the ground formed the initial bridge among telephones. System users were effectively joined together through the ground itself: wires were eliminated! The signals were exceptional, and did not fade or intensify with rain, a fact later to be considered in theoretical discussions. Those who experienced speech through the Stubblefield system each reported similar impressions.

Ordinary soil conduction telephonics require a certain degree of ground water for their operation. Stubblefield’s system did not operate on this principle for reasons which will become more obvious as we continue recounting his tale.

Stubblefield developed a means by which calls could be individualized among customers. Later, his central telephone exchange included power-amplifying relays, set in the ground at specific distances. Calls were handled by an elaborate system of two-wire, ground connected automatic switches and relays. Signal purity was remarkable for the time, using a single carbon button for both transmission and reception. Furthermore, Stubblefield’s telephones could be left on for days without weakening the power system at all. Now hundreds of ordinary people in widely separated places could afford the installation of telephone service.

The theoretical reasons why ground conduction telephony can occur had later been established by researchers in England, notably Sir William Preece. Preece successfully attempted only telegraphic signals across great distances of land and sea. Stubblefield was telephoning through greater distances with the legendary clarity and strength which became equal to his other mysterious developments.

The true difference between the Stubblefield system and these early “conduction telegraphy” systems becomes obvious as soon as we delve further into his biography. How were ground plugged relays acting as amplifiers in the Stubblefield system? This feature forms the core of an intensive investigation which several have reproduced in various forms today.

His discovery of an earth charging phenomenon permitted the development of an equally astounding invention, the Stubblefield earth battery. This device, an earthed electrode, drew up enough natural electric charge from the earth to operate motors, pumps, arc lamps, and his ground telephone system. The implementation of his earth energy technology would have changed the nature of American Society were it permitted free market expression in its day.

MEANDERING WAYS

As telephony gradually replaced the telegraph service, lines were also accommodated to telephony. Before becoming entirely reclusive, Mr. Stubblefield befriended a few employees of the telephone service. These friends obtained cast-off telephone equipment and parts for his experiments.

He became very familiar with the behavior of telephone exchange equipment in the natural environment. The telephonic systems of existing service companies were grounded systems. Each end of both telegraphic and telephonic lines were sunk into the ground, while the single expensive copper line formed the communications link. Ground sites terminated specific lengths of these service lines in special, thick metal plates. Plates were well-buried in selected ground. These plates were composed either of zinc or copper, and required specific ground placement for their continued operation.

Linesmen were taught to find “good ground” for these sites. Some later insensitivity among the growing numbers of hired crew members required the development of “ground location meters”; none of which were to give the special and anomalous characteristics observed in early linework.

Certain telephonic patents reveal extremely articulated” termination plates for these service lines: folded, stacked, coiled, and interleaved. Acting as accumulators of earth energies, these often became extremely charged. It was found that signals would both self-clarify and self-amplify to unexpected degrees when these special terminations were employed.

Telegraph linesman “felt” their way through woods, laying the paths for lines according to a peculiar intuition. Theirs was an intuitive path rather than a strictly mathematical one, carved through woods and vales in the artistic meandering way of the ancient “geomancers”. Older linesmen recalled the days when line installations took their winding routes through woods, across meadows, and sinuously along ridges, lakes, and streams. Linesmen innately sensed the most favorable paths along which lines should pass.

Geomancy is the ancient qualitative science by which “holy spots” are discerned, and sacred edifices are properly founded. Intuitive discernment, rather than mathematical objectivity, governs the geomancer’s aesthetic. Geomantic aesthetics governed the building of ancient villages and towns, and it is no wonder that most architects of any real artistic worth exercise these same aesthetics. Art-governed architects are natural geomancers.

Geomantic qualitative science precedes geologic quantitative science. A surveyor might simply draw a straight line across a section of land, and engineers would then employ powerful means to cut that straight path despite all natural barriers. Much of modern housing development is based on this “draw and cut” method. The sharp paths of engineers is effective and direct, but the old meandering rural roads dotted with their naturally placed homes are beautiful.

The old linesmen trekked across woods in a careful manner, turning aside from natural barricades. Maps of these first telegraphic lines may be consulted. It will be seen that these lines meandered with natural features. Telegraphic lines twisted and turned through the countryside and wilds; a twisting vine of iron on tar-covered wooden poles.

ELECTRICAL OCEAN

Properly ground-conformed telegraph lines were known to produce unexpected signal strengths, as well as unexpected signals. Night station operators were often “haunted” by spurious messages. These contained fragmentary words and sentences, and could not be traced to other station operators.

It is curious that the older placed lines demonstrated a remarkable and constant feature throughout their years, requiring few, or no batteries for their operation. This absolutely astounding fact is well documented in the telegraph and telephone literature of the day.

In these trade journals we find reports of lines in which current was everflowing! Company owners found this fascinating natural fact quite lucrative as well as surprising. The question was, where is the current coming from? The echo of the linesman resounded in the forest, the answer singing beneath his feet. Another equally remarkable fact involved the engineer’s methodically driven lines across land and through mountains. These lines did not manifest electrical self-excitations. Clearly, the difference of methods had produced completely opposed energetic results; the one active and the other inert.

As companies expanded across greater regions of ground, engineers replaced the oldtime lineman’s sense of “proper placement” with surveyor’s charts. It is not unusual for corporate expansions to bring about such a dramatic loss of quality – in exchange for a growth of quantity.

Mr. Stubblefield pondered the question of “taking current from the ground”. He stated in very plain language that the earth was filled with “an electrical ocean”. This electrical ocean was surging with huge “electrical waves” which could be felt in certain places. No doubt, he was one who felt the ground energy.

Telegraph lines were once two-wire lines: each completing the circuit among station receivers, batteries, and keys. It was quickly discovered that single lines, terminated in the ground with heavy metal plates, could achieve similar results. The immense savings in wire, poles, insulators, and maintenance was an attractive feature of this method for company owners.

Telegraph linesmen required skill in finding proper ground terminals. Improperly placed ground plates could ruin a system by not conducting signals properly through time. Spurious conductivity in a line could ruin critical transmissions and receptions. Telegraphic lore is filled with discussions about both “good ground” and “bad ground”.

The linesmen were workers in a yet primarily agrarian society, having experience with soil and earth in general. Many of them were farmboys who watched the oldtimers “divining” for water. Linesmen frequently discussed such natural means for discerning the “good ground” for terminating a telegraph line.

Thomas Edison adopted a method which could “valve” line signal by preventing unnecessary signal leakages into the ground. His method included the use of terminal rheostats in order to control the amount of current flowing to the ground during signal time. Several of these terminal rheostat patents have been found. One familiar model uses a thick cylinder of carbon with a slide spring contact.

The most amazing thing to the telegraph linesmen was the variation of rheostatic settings which each ground required before strong signalling could occur. Some terminal rheostats needed to be closed completely. Others could be opened full until signals were of sufficient strength to operate the system. Each ground had its own “character”. Each ground was possessed of activities which defied description except but by poetry, song, and twisting green vine.

Telegraph line was not copper, neither was it insulated throughout its length. Telegraph line was bare iron wire, and was supported on porcelain insulators fixed to tarred wooden poles. Signal strength along such resistive wire would have theoretically been extremely poor, but was exceedingly strong at times. So great was the developed signal strength that operators could “remove battery cups” and work with almost no current at all. Where did this extra energy come from? From what mysterious depths did this strange power emerge? Examination of telegraph systems reveals them to be radionic tuners on a vast scale. I suggest that VRIL articulate energy, the dendritic living energy found in the ground, was at work in all these systems.

EARTH RESERVOIR

Nathan Stubblefield’s experiments involved the development of earth batteries: buried metallic arrangements which produced electrical power. We find a good number of the earth battery designs in the Patent Registry. The earliest designs appeared in 1841 when Alexander Bain discovered the phenomenon. While working a telegraphic line, he chanced to discover that his leads had become immersed in water. This short-circuit through earthed water did not stop the actions which resounded through his system.

Mr. Bain took the next step to a greater distance, burying copper plates and zinc plates with a mile of ground between them. These, when connected to a telegraphic line performed remarkably well without any other battery assistance. Bain obtained a patent for his earth battery in 1841, using it to drive telegraph systems and clocks.

Stephen Vail (1837) observed the same effect, not knowing what caused it. The establishment of the first functional telegraph line seemed to require ever few batteries with time. Vail began with some 12 battery cups, reducing them gradually until 2 were needed. There came a point where he found it possible to remove even these, while operating the system.

This mystery persisted for years. I have heard such an account by a close friend and electrical engineer who reported that local telegraph stations remained in operation despite the fact that their batteries had not been recharged for a great number of years (W. Lehr).

J. W. Wilkins in England (1845) corroborated findings made by Bain, developing a similar earth battery for use in telegraphic service. An early English Patent appears in 1864 by John Haworth, the first true composite earth battery. This battery is drum shaped, having numerous solid discs mounted on an insulative axis, end braced, and buried. Their power was rated in terms of disc diameter and telegraph line distance: 1 foot diameter discs for 75 miles of line, 2 foot discs for up to 440 miles of line.

Patent Archives have revealed a great number of these devices including several remarkable operative descriptions. Earth batteries by Garratt (1868), Edard (1877), Mellon (1889), and Hicks (1890) yield therapeutic powers. Earth batteries by Bryan (1875), Cerpaux (1876), Bear (1877), Dieckmann (1885), Drawbaugh (1879), Snow (1874), Spaulding (1885), and Stubblefield (1898) produce usable power. In addition to these marvelous patents, there are those which found their way into telephonic service later: designs by Strong (1880), Brown (1881), Tomkins (1881), Lockwood (1881) provided power assistance and primary power for telephonic systems through out the countryside.

The well reputed fame of “earth batteries” centers around their very anomalous electrical behavior. The central mystery about earth batteries is that they do not corrode to the degree in which their electrical production rate theoretically demands. Exhumed earth batteries reveal little surface corrosion.

Nathan Stubblefield knew that probes (placed into various soils) reveal an amazing degree of strong electrical activity. These currents show an amazing degree of variation across any chosen plot of ground. Wet soils often reverse the expected electrical strength: weakening, instead of strengthening their appearance. Proper placements of metallic probes can produce strong currents for use.

Touching a well-grounded iron rod is a good first experiment to try in these regards. Try and find a place where power leakage into the ground is minimal, such as a park or wooded area. Take a yard-long solid iron rod whose surface is free of shellac or insulator coatings. Carefully drive the rod into the ground with a hammer. Wetted hands on the iron should produce a mild electrical sensation. These voltages may be measured. They “pin” sensitive galvanometers. The current does not cease after several weeks of activity when properly placed.

Stubblefield’s observations of natural electrical manifestations led him to consider the taking of “free” electrical energy from the earth. His initial revelation contended that such vast amounts of energy could be used to drive the engineworks of industry. Stubblefield sensed that the ground currents were arriving as electrical waves.

In Stubblefield’s view the electrical waves permeate the earth. Electrical waves were treated as ocean waves, constantly surging and cresting in specific locales. As ocean waves crash against fixed shores and rocks, so electrical waves also surge and crash against underground geological features. Stubblefield reasoned that this electroactivity should be extreme in certain locales: the “rocky shores” of the electrical ocean. Just as there are rocky shores, calm beaches, and surging ocean depths, Stubblefield clearly envisioned the mysterious dark waves of the vast and unsuspected electrical ocean.

Knowing these truths, Stubblefield arranged ground rods in specific locales in order to intercept the electrical waves for power. He knew that these electrical waves would only appear in very specific places, so he did not expect to find them everywhere in abundance. Stubblefield constantly spoke of “working the ground” before power could be taken from it.

Stubblefield observed the natural tides and boundaries of the electrical ocean in and around his lovely rural hometown. Concerning this earth energy, Tesla and other investigators later developed equivalent models. Tesla charted and used the earth waves in their surging impulses. Moray also intercepted these natural impulses in the “radiant energy” generator.

Some researchers believed that the vast electrical ground reservoir finds its source in the enormous solar efflux. Certainly daytime grounds yield a remarkable amount of static. Ground terminal shortwave reception is excessively “choked” during the daylight hours on certain bands. Despite the supposed insulative qualities of the atmosphere the solar efflux finds its way through space, eventually permeating the ground. Some researchers have referred to the ground-permeating solar energy as the “slow solar discharge”.

The “slow discharge” represents the enormous drift of aether through the entire body of ground. The earth evidences a constantly self regenerating charge. Tesla opposed the notion that this potent field was the result of decaying radioactive materials deep in the crust.

Numerous other researchers would refer to this “electrical ocean” as the vast reservoir of untapped natural energy. Somehow this reservoir is regenerated in a constant swelling. Where did the energy come from? Earth static was presumed by Tesla to be a solar activity which manifested in and across the ground. The ever growing static of earth was problematic for physicists who could not see the source for such energetic growth potentials. Tesla believed that ultrafine corpuscles from the sun permeated the entire earth, manifesting as static charge, and further conjectured that these rays came primarily from the sun, since it was ejecting matter “at excessively high voltages”. If this were so, reasoned Tesla, then sunlight contained something of this electroactive component, and it was certainly possible to derive electrical energy from sunlight.

Nikola Tesla announced these facts in 1894, finding only the silencing ridicule of academicians already hating his very name. When Tesla declared that “rays from space” were “bombarding the earth” he was absolutely rejected by the academic club who rejected these claims as “superstitious”. Upbraiding his findings, they later claimed for themselves the very same discovery (Millikan, 1932).

Tesla stated that the electrical energy released by the sun is a far greater, more permeating supply than sunlight itself. He certainly believed it should be considered as a first rate natural electrical source of enormous potential for commercial applications. His assertion was based on experimentally verified facts when, measuring steadily growing charge states in vacuum tubes, it occurred to him that earth charge was sourced in solar activity.

Tesla also demonstrated the extraction of free electrical power from solar energy. A well grounded mica capacitor is surmounted by a highly polished zinc plate. This plate may be poised in a highly evacuated glass container to best advantage, the zinc not exposed to corrosive influences. The tube is elevated and exposed to sunlight. The mica capacitor is connected in series with the vacuum tube. After only several minutes of exposure time, the stored electrical energy is formidable: producing a powerful white arc discharge.

Tesla patented this device. Since earth absorbs the permeating solar efflux, then these energies can be extracted for aeons.

Others have viewed the generation of ground static as a natural “radiant process” from the ground itself. Static charge appears as the inert by-product of the mysterious VRIL, the self magnifying organismic ground energy. VRIL, according to medieval mystical philosophers, is the ground of being from which all material manifestations emerge. VRIL connectively fuses metaphysical realities (dream, vision, ideation, impulse) with physical realities. (mineralogy, botany, zoology). By the radionic method by which telegraph lines may be locally “tuned” we may well surmise that this ground based regenerative supply is the true source of static.

Samuel Morse originally planned the burial of telegraphic lines between cities. Having done so across several tens of miles at great expense and through great labor, Morse found his system utterly incapable of operation. Static had so flooded his receivers that no signalling was possible at all. This first bad experience with the static of ground presented such a discouragement, that he almost stopped the entire plan. The uneconomical task of elevating all his cables later became the normal procedure.

Early telegraphers observed a steady growth of static throughout night seasons. This growth continued despite the absence of winds or storm conditions anywhere along the line. Researchers have often referred to this kind of power as “free energy”, meaning that the power source is extraterrestrial and natural in supply. Such an energy source would remain cost-free. The privatization of utility companies could conceivably be municipal and democratic; municipal groups could share the cost of installing the ground energy stations.

ENERGY RECEIVER

Mr. Stubblefield developed a peculiar bi-metallic induction coil which could (when buried) draw up sufficient electrical power to operate lamps and other appliances which he designed and tested. The patent specification describes a terminal which draws electricity out of the ground. This device required very specific placement – it would not work with equal effectiveness in all locations. A very precise placement of the device required an equally precise knowledge, and Stubblefield shared this knowledge with only a few of his associates.

I spoke with an academician who had the extreme privilege of speaking with Mr. Stubblefield’s son, Bernard Stubblefield. Bernard, by this time himself quite aged, told that his father’s method in locating the “right spot” was deliberate. His father referred to the device as indeed a receptive terminal and not a battery.

Despite the insistence of Patent Officers in calling the device a “battery”, Stubblefield declared it to be an energy receiver, a receptive cell for intercepting electrical ground waves. Its conductive ability somehow absorbs and directs enormous volumes of electrical energy. With this energy Nathan Stubblefield operated a score of arc lamps at full brightness for twenty four hours a day.

It becomes apparent that Mr. Stubblefield had witnessed (or experienced) some natural occurrence of discharging electrical energy in a telephonic system, and had determined the mode of its manifestation with simple means. His ground energy receiver (Pat. 600,457) remains a true electrician’s mystery. There was a definite trigger by which this energy was stimulated and maintained. The induction coil which bears his name is equipped with three coils which are wrapped around upon a heavy iron core. Bare iron wire and cotton covered copper wire are wrapped side by side, comprising a primary coil body. Each layer of this primary coil body is covered by a band of cotton insulation, bringing four wire leads to the coil terminus. Two leads of iron and two of copper are external to the coil. Commercial-electrical power is obtained through these connective terminals.

In addition to this bimetallic winding, there is a third winding: the “secondary”. This third coil is insulated from the primary bimetallic coil, serving as a trigger device. Presumably, a stimulating impulse shock was introduced into the tertiary coil, after which the upwelling electrical ground response brought forth powerful currents in both iron and copper coils.

Electrolytically (as a battery in acid or saltwater) the Stubblefield coil is disappointing, producing less than one volt according to those who have duplicated its construction. Stubblefield’s bimetallic coil was a “plug”: a receiver which intercepts the vast and free electrical reservoir of the ground itself. His patent and subsequent company brochures define the manner in which his earth battery was to be activated.

Technically, the Stubblefield device is a modified thermocouple (a bimetal in tight surface contact) but could not supply the degree of power which he reported. While this arrangement could develop a few milliwatts of power in appropriately hot ground spots, the thermoelectric explanation of the device cannot explain the phenomenal output reported in news reports of Stubblefield’s demonstrations.

Furthermore, though the Stubblefield power receiver is wound like an induction coil, it produces a steady direct current output. This poses additional problems for the conventional engineers. Electrical induction only occurs with electrical alternations, oscillations, and impulses. Witnesses described ground-powered motors which ran unceasingly and unattended for months without need for replacing or replenishing the ground battery. Small machinery, clocks, and loud gongs were run by other ground-buried cells as reported by credible witnesses.

Mr. Stubblefield reported that the burial of his “earth energy cell” required time to build up charge. Once the cell was saturated, however, the cell became a conduit of earth charge and flowed over in “commercial electrical volumes”. He did not claim complete knowledge of the phenomenon. He simply stated that (once the coil became saturated with the earth charge) it suddenly manifested an electromotive force “far greater than any known wet cell reaching into weeks and months of continuous work night and day” and poured this charge out for use.

Stubblefield used the cell as a “plug”, drawing out the electrical charge of the ground. The cell coilings acted as a lumped conductor. Charge saturated this conductor and flowed up into it, powering any electrically connected appliance. After repeated exhumations, the copper element of these cells “is not acted on in a perceptible degree . . . even after repeated renewals”.

Mr. Stubblefield described means by which such cells could be connected in series at short distances from one another. “With these, acting as electrodes . . . you draw from the electrical energy of the earth a constant E.M.F. of commercial value”. The phrase “acting as electrodes” is the heart of the Stubblefield energy cell. It is not a battery. It absorbs and flows over with the stupendous energy of the earth’s charge. Stubblefield may have discovered the auto-magnifying voltage effect of electrostatic induction in coils before Tesla, who later utilized the effect in his special electrostatic transformers.

Stubblefield’s buried bifilar coils may have become saturated with earth electrostatic energy, travelling up the coil. In such a case, the mere battery power of the coil was replaced by the electrostatic flow, the coil acting as an electrode. This seemed obvious when considering the fact that its ordinary battery current (1 watt) was gradually replaced by a continually growing electrical current of far greater proportion.

Continue

The Fifth Sun

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 1994 07:00:00 +0000

Article by Aymon de Roussy de Sales — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 50, No. 4, 4th Quarter 1994)

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Richard J. “Josh” Reynolds III, who passed from this plane earlier this year. Josh, a gentleman and a scholar in the truest sense of those words, was a great patron of borderland scientists. He was BSRF’s first Life Member and supported us in many ways, such as upgrading equipment and printing output. He also quietly aided many researchers in the alternative science fields. Josh never wanted any publicity for what he was doing; he did it for purely altruistic reasons, to enhance the quality of information available to inquiring minds. Josh was an honestly humble man of great insight and awareness, whose loss is great. This article, The Fifth Sun, was written by Aymon de Sales, Josh’s oldest and closest friend. Aymon says that this experience they shared those many years ago was instrumental in shaping Josh into the person he was. It is an amazing excursion into the borderlands…

THE Sun, a hot golden disc in the sky, unintelligible, unknowable, and, yet, thirty-three years ago it sent a message into my heart. It transfigured me and made me a wanderer on this Earth.

How did it all come about? The years passed quickly, the psychedelic revolution, the need to push the world into a new consciousness. It was down there in Mexico – the Indian continent that lay dark, submerged, and away from white man’s power. Maybe I’d been reading too much Kerouac, his Dharma Bums about drifting between Los Angeles, Mexico, and New York, a sacred triangle, poets seeking a Bodhisattva vision. I mean, could such things exist? And they were all down in that funky place Mexico, and things in New York were really boring, early 1961 nothing happening there except liquor and stale jazz, and so I’d split the scene, the nowhere scene as they say. It was all because this old friend of mine, Josh Reynolds had come up from North Carolina and started talking to me about legends, legends of Mu and Atlantis and about live legends down in Mexico. There in Oaxaca an old witch lived alone in the mountains, a soothsayer, an oracle for the vanished Indian nation. She spoke of pathways of the mind, a way to see things which we hadn’t dreamed about, and with this knowledge you could experience mysteries. It gave you a power, this way of seeing, a sort of psychic power. Far out! Like a bugle across an empty hill, it was a call I couldn’t resist. This old Marie of the mountain had known Aldous Huxley. It was she who turned him on to the sacred mushrooms. She was the keeper of legends, and later on she would send word through the grapevine to Harvard to warn Professor Timothy Leary to lay off, that evil spells come to those who play with the doors of perception. Josh and I rapping about magic and Indians, there in 1961 when you could turn everything upside down and look into a mirror. Josh was a big, young man with a round cherub face that was old and young at the same time. He was given to going out of his head, but without any drugs. I asked him once how that felt? And he told me it was very high. He always knew it was coming on, because he began to see things, but he couldn’t control it. The last time it happened to him, he was walking on a New York street, and he began to see those faint crystals fall. At first they were small, but they got larger and larger, crystal snowflakes out of the sky — red! until there was a blizzard of them, and he couldn’t see anything else. He was turning a comer on 62nd Street and Lexington Avenue, making his way through the silent red crystals falling all around him. The last thing he remembered was a tropical fish store, two white fish side by side, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a straight jacket. I liked Josh because he could see things we couldn’t see. I mean, I believe those crystal flakes are falling all the time – cosmic rays, man, but we have such bad eyes we don’t see them.

The knowledge of the Sun came to me those thirty-three years ago when I found myself in Mexico City. I was introduced to a poet called Philip Lamantia. He had these enormous dark liquid eyes like a deer, and they burned with an intense fire. He was a mystic, and upon meeting him I became involved with increasing rapidity in a strange set of circumstances. They had begun in New York City with Josh and a meeting in the Gurdjieff Institute, a bar called Malachay’s where we hung out, a beautiful woman called Helen DuFresne who liked to parachute out of aeroplanes, and Conrad Rooks, the filmmaker of Chappagua. He was down in Mexico, in Acapulco with Princess Zena Rachevsky taking psilocybin underwater and looking for androgynes in the ocean. He had invited Josh and Helen to join him for the experience. By different paths, it all came to being in Mexico City, three days before Easter Sunday. One of the more outstanding of these circumstances was a large vine covered house I went to. It had been a church hundreds of years ago, and was in an old section of the city. Josh, Helen, Philip and I had been talking all night about the connections with past ages, and how knowledge had been suppressed and even forgotten. Philip had brought us to the church because the “group” was into powerful magic, The people in it and the place itself had a heavy, pregnant atmosphere. The house was entered on the outside by a stone stairway. At the top of the stairs there was a massive wooden door with ancient seals carved in it. This door opened to cavernous rooms, and in one of the rooms several “Beats” were sitting around, their faces dulled by shooting smack. Large wax candles burned on the stone steps, leading into the room where they were. From other passageways came the musty smell of trapped air and incense.

One of the “Beats” was a black with GI fatigues who watched impassively as a pregnant girl with long blonde stringy hair sat on a three legged stool, moaning with labor pains. She wore a faded dirty smock, and her bare feet clutched the bar of the stool as the spasms of pain went through her. The others sat about listlessly with their heads bowed. She seemed to be cut out of space, and no one paid any attention. The vaulted ceilings of the rooms were high. Smoke from the incense and cigarettes curled there, and fanned a cloud that seemed to hold a presence in its ever-changing shape — it was strange and eerie and where we stood on the stone floor was roughly chalked a design of pentacles. The group that sat around was young. There were about twenty or twenty-five people, and they spoke in subdued voices, as if they were in fear of being overheard.

The oppressiveness of the atmosphere was not surprising, for afterwards I discovered that the people there had been attempting by mental conjuring to call on God. They felt that another reality existed on this earth, which they could enter into and communicate with. Easter Sunday was approaching, and they thought that was an auspicious time to attempt a magical act with God. Helen, Josh, Philip and I talked to a mysterious American man in his mid-thirties. He jokingly called himself the “Inspector of Space.” He was of a medium height with a small pointed face. He had a strange haunted look that was not pleasant. He had been looking for a chemical substance to “teleport” the mind. In fact he was hiding out in this church because a month earlier his underground factory had exploded, killing a Mexican worker. He said the American government was involved in psychic warfare programs, but he wouldn’t elaborate, and the reason they were trying to communicate with God was because these “Beats” felt the end of the world was near. Beings from the stars were using humans for energy. World Wars I and II had been a continuous war, a dramatic catharsis of the mind brought on by little understood events in Tibet and Turkestan. A third event, “a Covering of Wings,” would bring on a deep conflict in the fixture. These “Beats,” motivated by the apocalyptic images of Hitler and Hiroshima, were trying to exorcise the church, for it was involved in manipulating human destiny in a negative way.

The black GI joined in the conversation. He talked about impulses of the forebrain with its limited power, but what interested him was the sleeping beauty underneath the brain, which lay coiled like a snake. He spoke of hallucinogens that stirred this snake, and enabled him to see a fantastic reality.

“There’s a sacred dimension all around us,” he said, “but you can’t enter without the sacred substances that the ancient Aztecs used.”

Philip became excited by these prospects of dimensions and began waving his hands in an animated fashion. Philip, he was so out there, hugging trees and looking for visions.

“The waking of the Kundalini, when you wake it you have the knowledge of the ancients!” he cried.

I wanted to leave this church. I tried to get Helen to come with me, but she shook her head. She was with Josh. She wore this pale lipstick. It was the color of peach. I wanted to kiss those lips, feed the dark hunger in them. She had these smoldering eyes that flashed one message, “Take me out of my mind!” Back at Malachay’s bar in New York City, I remembered how she’d come in late at night, and wait there at the bar for me to go home.

“Give me a shooter!” she used to call out in a husky voice. The same smoldering eyes looking at me, asking me to jump with her into the hunger, but I was a long way from those nights in Manhattan, like a time warp away. The rest of the people in the church were slumped over against the wall, they did not take part in our conversation but were listening to other voices. The Beat Generation that had gone looking for beauty but only found trash in Americas. Kerouac’s On the Road had been a lot rougher ride than he ever wrote about.

Philip was saying, “The outcome has been predicted in the form of Huitzilopochtli, the Fifth Sun.

“It is known that this appears after four others have come and gone, and that this is itself destined to be superseded by another. It was all written down in their sacred manuscripts, the painted texts, that is why the Catholic priests burned them. They told of things that made the Christians fainthearted. There are various indications that the Fifth Sun is the creator of a great and indestructible work, and this work is the freeing of the human brain from duality.”

Duality, man, that was my whole life! Always split into two, trying to create while trying to work in the nowhere system of the West . . . Moon city always on my back. There had to be something better than what was happening. The grey fifties were still with us, trim green lawns and square dances, but this church was definitely giving me the creeps. I took a drag on a joint the size of a Cuban cigar that was being passed along, the weed going into me, clearing the head of old habits, Josh and Philip into conversations of Crucifixion and Rasputin…

“Did you know they knew each other?” asked Philip. “They met in some monastery in Southeast Russia, Gurdjieff and Rasputin.”

The sweet smoke was in my lungs – ahh so good. You had to let go of everything, that was the way – let go! Helen was sitting in front of me, who I loved so much six months ago. Six months is a lifetime these days. The long black hair on her shoulders, I remember when I met her in my apartment on Second Avenue in Manhattan, the noise of the trucks woke you in the night. But I couldn’t take her back now, she was Josh’s girl – in his southern gentleman way he had asked me if he could ask her out, I mean most friends would just take her from you, and I said, “OK,” I was exhausted from trying to keep up with her, anyway. She was connected to some lethal source of energy – and here we sat listening to stories of the land of Mu in a crumbling church. I had to get out of there! The blonde pregnant girl was moaning, rocking back and forth on the high chair. The black dude putting a long needle in his and sucking in his breath. African witness to some new reincarnation. Can you really contact God?

There were two figures sitting inside the chalk marks chanting – and the candlelight was brighter. Holy mother! run for it, before they open the gates — they might not get God, but they might get something else!

I ran for it, lickety split passed the oak door with the ancient seals and down the stone staircase to the outside! The lamps threw their light down the street in great spokes as I ran. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t care. I just wanted to put as much distance between the church and myself as I could. After several blocks of running, I began to tire and I slowed to a walk. It was then I realized how afraid I was. The sweat on my face wasn’t just from running. I couldn’t come to grips with my imagination. I had to clear my head of what had happened in the last forty-eight hours. What was taking place? I thought of my life as I walked.

Since childhood I had strange and terrifying dreams. These dreams were of earthquakes and titanic upheavals that would affect the entire world. It was more than a dream, it was a knowing, and it produced a fantastic feeling of euphoria as I remembered these things, so much raced through my mind. It was like a snake shedding layers of skin, this remembering. The meaning of my name, my childhood dreams, the strange ancestral connection with the famous Saint Francois de Sales who lived in the 16th century. These thoughts held no unity on one level of understanding but on higher levels they became clear. It was as if you had a puzzle before you, with hundreds of disconnected but somehow interconnected pieces, and in a flash these pieces came together. In an intuitive instant you saw the puzzle as a whole, then, afterwards each piece, a dream, a name, a strange occurrence took on meaning.

I was high on these realizations – they came over me wave after wave. I could hardly walk because of this feeling of exhilaration, and these emotions grew stronger with each passing minute. Inner possibilities were awakened in my mind. I was now walking on one of Mexico City’s broad thoroughfares with huge shade trees. I remembered Philip had said the Mixtecs believed they were descended from trees. There was so much to know, to find out – my brain raced.

I knew it was connected with the 360 degrees in a circle. A circle was much more than just a drawing, it was a whole mode of power – of thought power. With each minute of experience this new insight increased in power. I was hooked in some mysterious way, and that six hours was its duration. Somehow it had begun with the church. I did not understand any of it, though I felt enormous changes within me. All I knew was, it was happening incredibly fast, that my whole being as I walked was undergoing a mutation. Josh and Philip had spoken about the appearances of mutants, that it was something that was taking place all over the world, people were being born that were totally different in feeling and perception. They were far stronger mentally than their parents . . . but what was I meant to do?

I asked for a sign, a sign from where these forces came. I felt a magnet inside draw me on, but I needed a voice to confirm the connection. Before I got an answer, I had to choose between light and darkness, whether I would use this energy for my own purpose or for others, the most simple choice but one that would cause a thousand different things to happen. Suddenly I saw the image of Saint Francois. He seemed to be directing me from some vast distance, yet he was at the same time very near. There was only one choice, that of light. It seemed no matter what we did, all of us were drawn together for its purpose here in Mexico City.

My whole family had been connected with the Church and been in the Crusades. There in the Middle East near Jerusalem we rode in armor against the Arabs. I needed a sign to know what all the connections were about. The image of Saint Francois had made me feel elated. I felt as if the veins of my body extended back into time. As these complex emotions welled up in me, I found myself passing a movie theater. The motion picture was over and streams of people were descending this enormous stairway. I had the idea that the cinema was a new temple – and if I climbed the stairs into this temple I would find out what to do. Immediately, I went up the stairs against the crowd coming down. They were all dressed in white pants and sombreros and the women wore shawls. A great sea of nameless people pushed against me as I made my way up to the top. Several looked at me as I pushed against them, my face obviously agitated.

Through the large glass doors I went. I wanted a sign and there it was, forty feet across and twelve feet high – covering the whole wall of the cinema entrance, an enormous mural of a youth swimming down from space, his hair streaming backward with the solar winds, his eyes looking down at the planet Earth and in his gaze there was a power that comes from watching a place for centuries. He was bringing a knowledge with him from the stars – and on this Earth, rising like sacred totems from the continent of the Americas were these figures of Indian shamans rising up to greet this youth swimming down from the stars. The image transfixed me, I felt my mind expand. The message was this! I had to get to a place and communicate with the sky! That was where the message lay, in the stars. It did not come from out of our heads. It wasn’t from this planet. I was overwhelmed by the novelty of this thought. I ran out of the theater and down the stairs from the silver screen temple. I had received a message painted there by an artist whose name I would never know. The old wise men of Mexico believed the way to communicate with the Gods was through art, through flower and song. I had to get back to my hotel and figure out what to do! I grabbed a taxi and gave him an address in this city I’d never been in, but whose streets were leading me to a destination outside of time.

When I got to my hotel room I felt possessed of an incredible energy. I knew with certainty that forces beyond myself were directing me, the constant connections, the meeting with Philip Lamantia, the mysterious church, the sign of the boy swimming from space, the synchronicity of these events was producing a pattern.

In the room of the hotel, I tried to find a key to this pattern. I felt in me a tremendous power. I had no other word to describe the intense feeling in my body. There had to be an answer. I lay down on my bed to think. I looked out the window at Mexico City, and gradually my eyes caught the light of the star Venus, shining through the window of my room. It had a strange and compelling beauty to it. I do not know what made me do it, but I got up from the bed and turned out the lights of the room. I lay back down and began to stare at the star. This incredible energy was still in me — it was almost as if electricity was going out of my body. As a child I used to do a trick with my eyes and look at things out of focus. I found myself doing this, as I looked up at the star. I began aligning the starlight into the center of an imaginary triangle. At the same time my breathing altered and became deep. It was involuntary. It was something I just did without knowing why – almost as if I was being willed to do it, and the thought struck me, like a piece of fire in my brain, “I wanted to be there, there in the vast reaches of space, to let go! To go to Venus.”

When I had used my eyes this way before, I had had a feeling of coming into myself; but this time I knew I had to reverse the “feeling” and try to go out of myself. It was a feeling similar to being in a trance but more subtle, and I began making myself do it. I willed it. I focused on the starlight of Venus – and suddenly a larger circle formed around the star inside the imaginary triangle, and further as I watched a square formed around the triangle: the energy in my mind began to expand, and I felt myself beginning to move away – out of my body. The strangest thing was that it wasn’t surprising. It felt almost natural – like something I had known how to do all my life. Then I felt the sensation of movement stronger. I was out of the room, and then out of the hotel and with great speed I was above Mexico City, the lights of the streets below me. I was going out to the stars, and all the time this movement was getting faster and faster.

It was fantastic! I could look back at myself lying on the bed, I could see the room, I could see the city – all at the same time. There was no sense of cold or heat, and I felt as if I were leaving my body forever. I became frightened. What if I became suspended between one world and the next, and yet existing in neither? The idea terrified me. I had to get back to the one world I knew. With some effort I found the mechanism to will my brain down below and halt the rush of myself outward, and then I began willing myself back to my body, but it was a tremendous effort to do it. It took all my energy to get me back inside the hotel room. The whole experience was beyond belief. I lay on the narrow hotel bed, exhausted by this “out of body experience.” I knew now there were other levels of consciousness, and that through them I could travel distances beyond my wildest dreams, but still I had no answer to what was causing these experiences, or what I was meant to do. The state of my nervous system was at a terrific pitch. I was aware of things a hundredfold of what I would be normally. All the thoughts I had in my mind at this time would take up a book. As I lay on the bed, I continued to concentrate on what these mysterious events were leading to.

As I lay on the bed, I continued to concentrate on what I was meant to do. This place where modern Mexico stood, with its noise and grime and traffic, had been a great center of learning and of the arts. The men who had come here before the barbaric conquest of the Spanish studied the origins of flower and song. They understood the movement of stars in a living way, and they perfected the art of symbolism. These things we no longer hold dear. The emphasis of Western society has been on the perfection of ego and power. The Indians along with most of the ancient wise people were adept at the inward expansive movement of the mind. Somehow we have lost that sense, and advanced into a world of dementia, an instant reality where nothing means anything. We have become the living dead on a neon road where the only information comes from outside – and yet there were these other avenues which lay at our fingertips. The knowledge that Fray Diego de Landa destroyed was still there. If we could dig beneath the garbage of our schooling, we could find the same sacred hymns that the ancients sang at sunset.

Gradually I became aware, as I asked the question of what it all meant, of the mirror in front of the bed in the hotel room. I realized without knowing it I had been looking at it for some time.

I became absorbed in it. There was something in the glass, a substance beneath the surface. Slowly shapes were taking form in the glass, and they weren’t a reflection of any object in the room. I strained with my new consciousness to understand this phenomenon. Suddenly, three heads appeared in the mirror. They were just there. They did not materialize slowly, the heads were etched clearly in the glass. Their eyes were closed as if in contemplation, their foreheads were bowed, but I could not see their mouths. They were there on the other side of the glass. I had no doubt about it. I could feel a living vibration coming off their bowed heads. They seemed to be sitting in some kind of auditorium. They were heads of men, and they were of an age that is more than any man on Earth, they were very old, centuries old. Their skin was taut over their bones, brown and had a sunbaked quality to it. Behind them, the only glimpse I had of their mysterious world was a vague pattern-like mosaic tile. It was bluish and bluish-white and had a sterile shine to it and stretched beyond them until it was lost from sight. Their heads remained bowed slightly, the electric feeling in me became intense as I watched them. These mysterious beings in another dimension seemed equal in importance as they communicated through the mirror, though I had the impression the middle figure was more powerful than the others. I could not make out the expressions of their faces. Their mouths remained totally obscure, but there was this communication from them, a kind of subtle energy that came through the glass. It was hard for me to concentrate on it, and I sweated profusely from the exertion. It was like trying to make out the almost invisible design of a spider’s web. They held my mind for brief seconds so I could absorb their thoughts. Their foreheads glistened peculiarly as they did this. It seemed their skin was almost metallic in these moments. I was made part of their awareness, a kind of mosaic pattern. It was on a level higher than anything on a human plane. I was given the idea that they desired to “win the battle” on Earth, and to join in this battle would make a difference to what happened to me after life as I knew it. In the briefest possible way I’m trying to write down these extremely complicated impressions which flooded into me.

The image in the mirror became disturbed by the appearance of a fourth head. I could but vaguely make it out, and it hung to the right of the other three. It was distinctly different in personality. The other three became silent and ceased transmitting messages. I tried to see him, the fourth one. An inkling of fear crept into my mind, but I could not make him out. He was there, and it would be hard to say more. The message transmitted through the mirror was very clear. We were to go to the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan tomorrow, and I knew if we did this the extraordinary series of events we were involved with would come to a climax. It would be made clear why we travelled to Mexico.

The heads faded, and in their place was a huge room covered in the same blue and bluish-white tile I had seen before. It could’ve been an open terrace, but it was so alien I could not be sure. A huge statue stood alone in this room (or was it a statue?). I looked down on it from the right side. The statue was on a throne and was carved, sitting in very much the same attitude as an Egyptian sculpture. The expression the statue conveyed was of unrelenting will. He appeared to be made of a metallic substance. His form had a dullish shine, and at times as I watched him, I could not be certain that he wasn’t alive. I looked a long time at the statue in the room that seemed to be part of eternity. I knew I had a glimpse into another world, and I knew I had been given a fantastic knowledge. The image faded, and the mirror became an ordinary frame of glass in which I was reflected. I looked around the room to see what could have reflected the blue tile and the heads. There was nothing. The walls were cream-colored and the furniture was brown. The bed was soaked in sweat from the exertion of seeing into the mirror. I had to tell the others about going to the Pyramid, and I knew exactly where I would find them, though I had no idea how Mexico City was laid out. I got up and left the hotel. The neon sign outside was glowing blue as I got into a taxi and directed the driver to go through the unfamiliar city until I said stop. I had no knowledge of the streets or where they led to, I only knew by some peculiar wavelength in my brain where I had to go. It was like I was looking out the top of my head. I directed the taxi through a maze of streets – passed the movie temple where I had seen the fantastic mural, and at a corner of a large thorough fare I halted the taxi. I knew I was close. I ran from the taxi, across the street and down a few blocks. There, as I had foreseen, were the three friends walking: Helen, Josh, and Philip. They couldn’t believe I was there! After their shock I told them of what had happened, and the ancient heads in the mirror that talked to me, that we were to go to the Pyramid tomorrow on Easter Sunday. It was agreed we would go the next day before sunset.

Continue

Proclus: Fifth Century Borderland Scientist

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 1983 00:00:00 +0000

Clips, Quotes, and Comments by Riley Crabb on Appendix I of Robert K. G. Temple’s “The Sirius Mystery” — from Journal of Borderland Research (Vol. 39, No. 2, March – April 1983)

THE GREAT TRADITION OF BORDERLAND SCIENCE
AND ONE WHO CARRIED IT FORWARD IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

“To the lovers of the wisdom of the Greeks, any remains of the writings of Proclus will always be invaluable, as he was man who, for the variety of his powers, the beauty of his diction, the magnificence of his conceptions, and his luminous development of the abstruse dogmas of the ancients, is unrivalled among the disciples of Plato.”

Thomas Taylor

“There are many classical scholars,” writes Robert Temple, “that the Golden Age of Greece was the only significant era in Greek philosophy. Within this period one can conveniently place Socrates, Plato (427-347 B.C.), Aristotle, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, and the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon.

“These brilliant names tend to blind one into accepting the false notion that Greece at any other period in its history was merely second rate in the intellects it produced . . . there is no denying the tendency to ignore or belittle — even to suppress and deny — Greeks who preceded or followed the ‘Glorious Greeks’ who are most familiar to us. It certainly is an embarrassing fact, then, for certain classical scholars to have to face, that the Platonic Academy continued to function in Athens for over nine hundred years.”

THE ENDURING LIGHT OF THE WESTERN WORLD

And in those nine hundred years thousands of students of Platonic philosophy placed their feet on the path of Divine wisdom and occult science. Plato founded his school in the grove of Academus in Athens around 388 B.C. and taught mathematics, philosophy and occult science there until his death. His most apt pupils carried on, as Temple observes: “. . . the duration of the Academy (apparently on the same site) in Athens . . . for the 916 years of the life of the Academy as a philosophical institution was equal to the amount of time which will have elapsed from the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 to the year 1982. We thus see that Plato’s Academy existed longer on one spot Britain has existed since William the Conqueror.”

In the Nov-Dec 1982 Journal we briefly reviewed the writings of the French initiate, Louis Charpentier, on the great cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres. There he speculates on the mysterious origin of the sudden outbreak of Gothic architecture in the 11th Century in France, and suggests that the Knights Templars brought the new ideas with them when they returned from the Middle East, the land of Zoroaster. We find the answer in the Annex to Temple’s book on the Sirius Mystery, which suggests that Temple himself is a reincarnated Templar and before that a student at Plato’s Academy! This is the normal sequence of incarnations as outlined in Theosophical literature and in the Edgar Cayce life-readings, as the Life Wave moves from East to West.

“The Platonic tradition in the broader sense, with its Gnostic and heretical overtones and its myriad manifestations in later ages in such bizarre and fascinating figures as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, John Dee and even Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Leicester — not to mention the troubadours of Provence, Dante in Italy and the massacred tens of thousands of Albigensians in France, the Knights Templar, and an infinite range of hopeless causes over two and a half millenia, is an agonizing and impossible problem for the orthodox mind, whatever its creed.

“For Platonism in the general sense is a creed which denies creed, an anti-institutional tradition known to those who adhere to it as the Great Tradition. It resembles the Society of Friends (Quakers) in insisting on nothing by way of doctrinal dogma. It is truly free; it has no membership, no tithes, no rules which are enforced; it has no Pope, no Caliph. It terrifies those weaker mentalities which crave a structural belief system; they always try to destroy it, but succeed in only destroying individuals and individual ‘movements’ within the larger tradition.

A PERSECUTED UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS

“How can any ‘intellectual establishment’ conceivably admit that this undercurrent of spirituality has flowed outside the orthodox boundaries of the official religion of Christianity since the third century and the time of Origen? And how confess that Proclus, who lived seven hundred years later than Plato, had a mind as luminous in his own way, as Plato’s? What happens to the ‘hermetically sealed Greek miracle’ then? If Platonism is seen to continue as a persecuted underground movement for two thousand years and more, what conclusions must we draw from the supposed openness of orthodox Western culture?

“If our commonly accepted pattern of civilization is seen to be based on a lie, based on the denial of the non-orthodox, the implications are so immense that nothing short of a total intellectual upheaval could result. No person with a vested interest, whether a chair at a university or a weekly newspaper, a large corporation or a television station (or a Diocesan see) would be completely isolated from the results which would follow.

“The results need not be destructive in the sense of a political or social revolution; but they would be more fundamental, and hence more far-reaching in the end. It is fear of constructive change (which means fear of the unknown) which is here involved. These indeed are problems. And they go some way to explain why the reader hears nothing of a great many subjects which have a direct relevance in the matter. One of many such subjects is Proclus. No one dares discuss what Proclus really stood for and what he represents beyond his own specific ideas. Even to raise the subject of a figure such as Proclus is to bring the skeleton from the closet and rattle it with a vengeance.”

The liberal Platonic philosophy of Proclus aroused the animosity of the Roman Catholic Bishops of Greece after he took over the Chair of the School from Syrianus somewhere around Q50 A.D. He had to flee Athens for his life, probably across the sea by boat, to Lycia, the near west coast of Asia Minor. This part of the ancient world was familiar to him as he had been brought up there by his wealthy Greek parents, in the city of Xanthus.

That year of exile no doubt was put to good use in contacting the Hierophants of the Chaldean and Persian Mystery Schools still active at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. His parents had sent him to Alexandria in Egypt for his higher education. He studied grammar under Orion and philosophy under Olympiodorus the Peripatetic in the “public schools” at Alexandria; but of his private studies and initiations in occult science, nothing is said; for those were taken at Memphis and Thebes, no doubt, where he was sworn to secrecy. But Proclus made no secret of the results of those initiations! These put him in conscious touch with the Masters of the Occult Hierarchy of the planet, and with Visitors from Outer Space.

THE “SONS OF MILU” WERE HIS COMPANIONS

His biographer in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911 Edition) writes: “Proclus led a most temperate, even ascetic, life and employed his wealth in generous relief to the poor. He was supposed to hold communion with the Gods, who endowed him with miraculous powers. He acted up to his famous saying that ‘the philosopher should be the hierophant of the whole world’, by celebrating Egyptian and Chaldean as well as Greek festivals, and on certain days performing sacred rites in honour of the dead.”

Temple says that in his 35 years as head of the Platonic School in Athens, Proclus wrote twelve volumes of commentaries on Plato’s philosophy. We are approaching our 25th year as a “professor” of Platonic philosophy, and have a five-foot-shelf of Journals of Borderland Research to prove it. Other literary endeavors of Proclus included hymns to the Gods, seven of which are extant: to the Sun, Helios, to Aphrodite, to the Muses, to Athena, to the Lycian Aphrodite, to Janus, to Hecate — who appears to have been his favorite. To modern Cabalists Hecate is known as the Queen of childbirth and of witchcraft, but to the Greeks she was much more than that. Proclus claimed he could invoke Her to physical appearance, at least as a cloud of luminous mist. This indicates he had some abilities as a materializing medium, as well as clairvoyant and clairaudient powers.

“As an upholder of the old pagan religion Proclus incurred the hatred of the Christians and had to take refuge in Asia Minor,” says the Britannica; but after a year he did return to Athens and stayed there to head the Platonic School for the rest of his life. There must have been other attempts over the years, character assassination, subversive students, legal wrangles, poisonings, etc., all unsuccessful because Proclus had suffered martyrdom in a previous life and had thus earned the right to protection from the Gods.

We learn from Leadbeater’s “The Masters and the Path” that Proclus’ previous life was as a Roman, Alban, now the English St. Alban. He was born in the ancient capital of England, Verulam, now St. Albans, around 240 or 250 A.D. Manly Hall writes that Alban’s parents were affluent enough to send him to Rome to school. He may have met a young French Roman there, Amphibalus. When they returned to England, Albanus chose the military, Amphibalus the priesthood. Church historians claim Amphibalus was martyred because of one of Roman Emperor Diocletian’s sweeping edicts against the Christians, the one of 301 A.D. Actually, the edict was Diocletian’s attempt to control wages and prices in the Empire, especially the price of food; but his local satraps used the edict as an excuse to settle old political scores. Thousands of liberals, dissidents and religious leaders were rounded up and executed, depending on the religious preference of the Commissar. If the word Christian applied to Amphibalus it was because he was a priest of the Light.

THE HOLY WARS OF 300 A.D.

Today’s newspapers are filled with stories of the Holy Wars in Lebanon and the Philippines between Catholics and Moslems, and in Afghanistan between Moslems and Communists. In the early Fourth Century there was endless violent religious strife between the priesthoods and devotees of Krishna, of Apollonius of Tyana (the prototype of the mythical Jesus), of Hesus of the Celtic Druids, of Mithra, and of other sects too numerous to mention. There was no Christian Church until after the Council of Nicea, 325 A.D.

By this time Albanus had risen to the position of Governor of the Works there at Verulam. When Amphibalus was rounded up with other liberals and dissidents there under Diocletian’s decree, Alban used his power and position to protect the priest, his longtime friend. This gave Alban’s political enemies the opportunity they had been looking for. He was charged with sedition and executed along with Amphibalus and the others. But this effort to bring some semblance of order to the declining Roman empire failed and Diocletian gave up the throne in 305 A.D. at the age of 59; however, Diocletian gave England its first saint and ancient Verulam became and still is the town of St. Albans — while Alban himself set his feet on the Path — to re-enter the physical world again 108 years at Byzantium as Proclus, through a Greek mother.

By that time Constantine’s state religion had become a political power to be reckoned with. That Roman emperor determined to resolve the endless religious conflicts by creating a state religion; so he called the various high priests together to a council at Nicea to form one. In Oahspe it says that the high priests wrangled together for seven long years before Constantine finally had to knock their heads together” and force them to come up with a state religion, thus the Roman Catholic Church and the compound or composite “god”, Jesus Christ, to satisfy the followers of Krishna and of Hesus.

Constantine turned eastward rather than westward, against the tide of evolution, and moved the capital of the Empire from Rome to Byzantium, and renamed that Oriental city Constantinople. On his way from Rome to Byzantium he stopped at Delphi in Greece to consult the oracle of the Gods. For good luck he swiped the holy chair on which the oracle sat while delivering, her messages and took it to his new capital city with him. Manly Hall says the three-legged stool is still on display in an Istanbul museum.

COPERNICUS A NEO-PLATONIST?

The famous Polish astronomer of the 16th Century is likely to have been a graduate of the Platonic school in a past life. He is credited with establishing the Heliocentric system in modern times, with the planets revolving around the sun. This in contradistinction to the Geocentric system of orthodox science and the Church, with the earth as the center of the universe. But Proclus was teaching the Heliocentric system in Athens over a thousand years earlier. It is likely that copies of Proclus’ Greek texts were available when Copernicus studied and taught in Italy and thus shaped his radical ideas about the solar system.

Robert Temple tries mightily to prove that Proclus had specific information about Sirius as a binary system and Sun to a hundred suns, but could find no supporting references in the Proclus literature available today. There is abundant proof, especially in Proclus’ commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus, that his astronomy is surprisingly modern in its understanding of the stars as suns with the planets orbiting around them and also spinning on their own axes.

“Proclus speaks with full authority in insisting that certain invisible heavenly bodies definitely exist,” writes Temple. “These bodies are the moons of planets and the planets of other stars.” Furthermore, Proclus seems to have an incredibly enlightened view of celestial phenomena in many other ways as well.

“THE MOON IS CELESTIAL EARTH”

“In Book III of ‘In Tim.’ Proclus says (I, 425) that the Moon is made of celestial earth. Or why does the moon, being illuminated, produce a shadow, and why does not the solar light pervade through the whole of it? . . . we shall find that fire and earth subsist also analogously in the heavens; fire indeed, defining the essence of them, but each of the other elements being consubsistent with it . . . The elements being conceived in one way as unmingled, but in another as mingled, the first mixture of them produces the heavens, which contain all things according to a fiery characteristic . . . for all things are in the heaven according to a fiery mode. . .

“‘Hence the fire which is there (in the heavenly bodies) is light; and it is not proper to disturb the discussion of it, by directing our attention to the gross and dark fire of the sublunary region the below-the-moon or earthly region)’, And to make it beyond the slightest possibility of misunderstanding, he adds (page 282) that fire in the heavens is ‘fire which is not perfectly fire’ but rather, star-fire is more properly ‘fire which is energy’.

“These conceptions are astounding in the light of modern science . . . Proclus views the stars as congealed bodies in a celestial medium and that between them lies ‘fiery matter’ which is invisible to us (and that) the planets move in orbits which are clearly conceived as trajectory spaces . . . ” (“The Sirius Mystery” by Robert K. G. Temple, 1976)

Meade Layne and the Principles of BSRF

admin — Sat, 01 Mar 1975 07:00:00 +0000

A letter from Meade Layne to Roger Graham (October 1946), with closing comment by Riley Crabb, and appended commentary of Lao Tse (as channeled by Mark Probert) — from JBR (Vol. 31, No. 2, March – April 1975)

A statement of Borderland Sciences Research Foundation’s purpose and principles, as spelled out by our Founder-Director Meade Layne in a letter to Chicago physicist Roger Graham in Oct. 1946. Graham wrote Science Fiction for Ray Palmer and was deeply involved in the earliest Flying Saucer investigations a year later.

Dear Mr. Graham:

Your letter is unusual and interesting, and very welcome. As you know, I just don’t and can’t write long letters except on very rare occasions. I’m writing one to you for the same reason you wrote to me — because I want to. I think I’ll drift along following the main sequence of your ideas, though probably with out saying anything of importance. If I make cracks which sound offensive, please believe me that they were not so intended. I have no reason to feel anything but good will toward you, along with considerable admiration for your unusual gifts.

To tell the truth, though I am somewhat flattered by your interest in me and my small publications, I cant understand the reason for it. I have not made much effort to keep in touch with you, simply because I did not think there was much common ground. Your interests and work, and the probable value of them, command my respect, but I’m not competent in your field of activity. But it may be that we have things to say to each other that should be said. Quien sabe? (Who knows?)

A few words about myself, since you have given me considerable insight into your ways of thought. I am not a scientist or mathematician. I have a Doctorate in philosophy, though the thesis for the degree was actually done in comparative literature. I taught in various colleges and universities, also in high schools for several years. So I’m only an academician who has strayed into borderland sciences and psychic research. My occult background is in what is called modern esoteric Qabalism — which is no child’s play, I assure you. I found it more valuable than anything else I ever studied. Academic distinctions don’t amount to a damn to anybody who has even begun to grow up — I mean UP, except as a means of livelihood — in teaching. You may have a dozen degrees, for all I know; if you have, you’ll undoubtedly agree with me. They don’t necessarily indicate even a good I.Q., and often spell pedantry and intolerance. Enough of that stuff; I only want to say that my mental outlook is colored by this background and is of a feebly philosophic sort. I’ll add that I’m about 25 years older than you, which means you have a great edge on me in a half-dozen ways. (Mr. Layne was 63 at the time.) I’m a pretty active feller though, and can still climb mountains and run up stairs — when I’m fool enough to do it.

I confess I have not read your Amazing Story article, but shall if I can get a copy of this issue. I have been reading Graydon, and sometimes I read Eddington and Russell and Whitehead in a sketchy way. But in general it’s just too much effort and takes too much time for me to penetrate a new physical theory, with my limited equipment. I want to get what I can of your ideas, but my reaction to them won’t be worth anything, critically speaking. I would not dream of passing on their value. If I have a chance in the Beyond, I hope to learn something of such subjects.

THE REALITY OF THE ETHERS

One subject I shall only mention, on account of its complexities, the concept of a homogeneous ether. Most theorists seem oblivious of the inherent contradictions of this concept — and yet it seems to be a postulate that is necessary. I do not lose sight of the distinction between picture thinking and math expressions, but that does not solve the problem. A homogeneous substance or stuff is not matter at all, since all matter we know anything about is particulate. And a homogeneous stuff cannot possibly move, or transmit energy or motion; yet motion is a primary datum of experience. Apparently the homogeneous ether identifies with space. The Einsteinian concepts certainly do not obviate the necessity for a homo-ether; nor do the Morley-Martin experiments disprove it, since the Lorentz contraction takes care of the negative results. To my mind science is at a metaphysical impasse, and no cloud-cuckoo land of Hindu metaphysics is any more mystical. Lodge’s calculations alone show the impossibility of a homo-ether having any natural properties and yet, to repeat, I think the concept is a postulate. . .

From what little I know of you, Roger, I should be inclined to say either (1) as you think possible, you are in rapport with powerful minds on the “other side” — or else (2) you have the peculiar type of consciousness which enables you to receive material direct from your own High Self, or Augoeides — as Edgar Cayce did, though in trance. From what I have learned about you, I should strongly favor the second hypothesis. But this need not necessarily exclude the first.

The danger — if you’ll allow me to seem almost impertinent here — is the natural one, that any person with this type of consciousness is likely, unless fully instructed, to attribute everything to his own personality, and hence develop a powerful egoism or egotism. Certainly I do not accuse you of such folly. But it is a real danger. But the poet or musician, or genius in any form, who simply hears or sees, and then sets down in words of colors, or wood or stone, knows very well that it is not he-as-personality. He knows it is not his virtue and excellence. It is that which comes, or is given; and he is the instrument; and he is humble and grateful — if he is wise and not obsessed with a childlike egotism. But how hard it is for most of us, to stop saying “I did this; see what I can do!” instead of saying “I am the channel and the instrument” — in all this using “I” to mean the personality and the brain consciousness.

I have had touches of this sort of thing. Now and then, through the decades past, I have written verse which poets have called poetry. Now, every line I have written which has received recognition has been one which “came”, which I “heard” with the inner sense, or almost objectively — but which I did not create — as a personality. It might as well have been told me by some passerby, so far as my share in it went. I would be a great fool to take credit, plume myself. I don’t say that every contribution of the sub- or super-consciousness is valuable and good; but every work of genius, invention and discovery appears to be rooted in such communication, from beyond the borders of brain awareness. The intellect refines, elaborates, perfects; but its creative power is small. In science and math this continues to hold good — or so I firmly believe. No man is in greater danger than the inspirational genius, and I believe you are of this calibre. Doubtless you are well aware of the risks of which I have been speaking, and have kept clear of them.

THERE MAY BE A COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

It may be you do not accept the psychological background which seems valid to me, in broad outline. This happens to be a kind of special interest of mine, and I only say that all of my own thinking is conditioned by it. The subject is enormous and I won’t dilate on it or argue it. It does not necessarily imply reincarnation, though of course associated with that belief. I think you will come in time to see that no “plane” can be understood in itself but only by reference to another which lies above or behind, so to speak. The atom, the plant, the animal, the human being, all come out of dark backgrounds of formative energy. All the “realities” of science: matter, electricity, energy, force, gravity and so on are principles known only through manifestation. A law is a mode of activity of a principle. It is simply the way things act. There is no power in a law. It is a formulation. Formulae exist in mind, or minds. If laws exist apart from our thinking them, they must exist in of cosmic life — maybe a cosmic consciousness. This is my own way of thinking. You may have other and better ways. But many real scientists would agree quite readily with what I have been saying. But don’t think me dogmatic, or that I am trying to be instructive — which God forbid!

I quite agree with your general position about “truth”, if I understand you correctly. Absolute truth, if it exists, is not for us. 2 plus 2 seems to be a truth because it represents a natural functioning of the normal mind — that it equals 4. That Na (sodium) plus Cl (chloride) gives common salt is a truth in the sense of being a fact of experience. But the truth or falsity of non-Euclidean geometries, and the truth about the structure of matter — in these cases the word is almost meaningless. A coherent logical theory of matter is true, I suppose, in the sense of being coherent and logical. It’s a relative truth, because the actuality of the universe is inexhaustible, and we can never have all the data. I don’t decry such systems. They represent the progress of knowledge. But like you, I don’t like the word truth except under rigorous definition.

To accept things and fact and work with them, that seems to be very wise, and about all we can do. But nobody knows what a “thing” really is. Bertrand Russell says “an atom is a wave of probability with nothing to wave in”. That doesn’t negate science, but it points to the unpassable limitations of science. I believe, as you do, that we are basically in agreement in many ways, though we might express ourselves quite differently. Certainly I would like to have you writing for Round Robin, but the trouble is, Roger, to find the right stuff for you, having the RR readers and limitations in mind.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BORDERLAND SCIENCE RESEARCH ASSOCIATES

The idea of the Round Robin is about like this. It stands for what I call the New Realism, or the higher realism. I mean the realism which accepts a great mass of psychic and occult data as factual, as established, and deals with their implications in a cold-blooded way, without religionism, without “uplift”, without cultism.

Round Robin does not want to argue the case for elementary psychic happenings. It is written for people who already know and accept such things. If people don’t believe in survival and commun- ication, in materialisation, apports, levitation, ectoplasmic phenomena and so on — that is all right — but let them go to the ten thousand books dealing with such subjects. I don’t give a hoot what they believe.

If you were publishing a journal on chemistry, you wouldn’t write for sceptics who doubt that H (hydrogen) and Cl (chloride) will combine. We have a great body of borderline facts, not yet accepted by “official” science, though known to thousands of individual scientists. There are methods of work which are valid and scientific, but still outlawed by official science.

Round Robin (BSRA) does not carry on propaganda, except for realistic acceptances. The masses are babes in arms. I will not thresh old straw if I can help it. Take telepathy, for instance, it’s been proven so often that one is nauseated by the thought of arguing about it. I know it isn’t proven to professor X, Y and Z. But what is proof? You can prove the theorem about the hypotenuse of a right angle, and that H (hydrogen) combines with O (oxygen) to form water, and that the binomial theorem is logically correct; and in a court of law you also have rules of “proof” based on a preponderance of evidence, and on a definition of evidence. You can’t prove that you have a pain in your neck. That’s a fact, but it’s personal, and so undemonstrable. Now, in a psychological laboratory, or a seance room, or in occult operations, you have proofs also, of their own order, not of the 2 plus 2 order. Certain facts exist. The argument nowadays is not about the existence of occult phenomena, but about their meaning, their significance. That is what RR is concerned with.

The basic problem of contemporary psychic research is psychological. Just what is the structure of the human mind-body complex? Unless we know what the here-living person can do, we can’t distinguish the acts of the “dead” person — that is, give proof of survival. I don’t believe such a line of demarcation exists. We constantly operate on both sides of the line — in both planes of consciousness. But the psychological problem remains supreme. So, RR (BSRA) gives much space to problems of doubles, and poltergeists, and projection and so on, because they bear on the structure of personality.

TRYING TO HELP THE NEWLY DEAD

A third objective, which may seem fantastic to you, is that of getting people to try to help the newly dead. I refuse to argue the questions whether people survive death, and can be reached and helped. Round Robin is addressed to people who accept these facts. Folk who cannot believe such “stuff” must go elsewhere for their instruction.

A fourth present objective of Round Robin is Huna (Hawaiian magick as interpreted by the late Max Freedom Long) which offers a practicable healing method based on the most ancient wisdom in the world. All students of occult matters will recognise this at once; and Round Robin makes no effort to “prove” these relationships, or that Huna works — except by offering it to those willing to try.

Of course Round Robin throws its weight about a bit, to make the reading livelier; but we do not want the propaganda of cults, or controversy in the usual sense. Instructive differences of opinion should be expressed, of course. A good deal of the stuff seems inconsequential, but that’s to keep it from being too heavy. The main idea is a cold-blooded realism in the field of psycho-occultism, with all the principle phenomena assumed as accepted by the readers as to factuality — though not as to significance. It is for people who have begun to grow up in these matters.

I come finally to your check of $10, which is generous and needed and helpful. I think Round Robin does some good and there is a place for it. You yourself know that publications of this type, that do not carry advertising, cannot possibly make money for anybody. The costs constantly increase. If it were not for such help as you have generously given, I could not carry on. I have almost no resources of my own. I get very fine letters from scholarly people, and sometimes checks from them. Their approval cheers me, but the checks pay the printer. I’m very greatly obliged for your help.

Sincerely,
Meade Layne

Mr. Layne shunned the limelight and personal publicity; so this is about the only autobiographical material he left behind him in the files when we took over in 1959. We thought it a fitting introduction to his best work, “The Coming of The Guardians”, and it is valuable as a clear statement of the purposes and principles of our organization, and of the publication policy of our Round Robin Journal of Borderland Research.

It was because of his New Reality that Meade was ready to accept the presence of the Visitors and the Invaders from Outer Space a good eight months before the term Flying Saucers became popular through Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of the UFOs near Mt. Rainier, Washington, June 27, 1947. He researched and verified the sighting of a UFO over San Diego, California, Oct. 9, 1946! One of the hundreds of San Diegans who saw the Flying Saucer in the night sky was Mark Probert, channel for the Inner Circle.

MAKING AN EXAMINATION FOR THE RECORD

It was through Mark Probert that control Lao Tse, the Chinese sage, made these observations about Flying Saucers in 1948. We quote from “Coming of the Guardians”:

“They have often come simply in quest for knowledge, just as you send expeditions to far-off places, to the Polar regions or to Central Asia. They are not here with intent to interfere in your affairs — nevertheless if there is another world war employing nuclear energies, they may be forced to intervene. The release of atomic forces has disturbed their sphere of existence rather seriously.

“Let it be understood that if ever such intervention becomes necessary, it will be wholly impersonal. There will be no taking of sides. It is contrary to the Law, that any one plane should interfere with the processes by which another works out its destiny.

“They are vastly your superiors in science — though every plane has its special forms of development and progress; so that we speak of differences, but not often of superiority or inferiority.

“The Etherians are large people, up to fifteen feet in height. I would say they belong to the human order of evolution. That is, you would not call them Devas or Nature Spirits. Yet the great forms you have seen and photographed, in the clouds and on the surface of the earth also, somewhat resemble them.

“You ask why they now suddenly are present in large numbers. Always, when a civilization, a culture has reached its height and is destined to collapse, the Etherians have appeared in numbers. They come to make an examination and final record, for their own knowledge, of the status of that civilization — somewhat as you might do with disappearing tribes and races. And it is true also that they have been alerted and disturbed by your release of atomic energies. But all past civilizations and races have had their day, and failed in some way, and passed out of earth existence, so with your civilization. The Etherians came and observed and made their records; so they come now.”

Journal of Borderland Research » Borderland Visionaries

Borderland Visionary: The Life of Sir William Crookes (Part 2)

ELEMENTS

WHITE LIGHT

TOYS

BLACK SPACE

EMERALD

RADIANT MATTER

RARE EARTH

Borderland Visionary: The Life of Sir William Crookes (Part 1)

ROYAL

GEMS

VERMILION

SPECTRUM

GLITTER

The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (Part 3)

ROYAL SOCIETY LECTURES

REVERSALS

BROADCAST POWER

The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (Part 2)

TRANSFORMERS

WHITEFIRE

SPACE FLOWING CURRENT

The Broadcast Power of Nikola Tesla (Part 1)

SHOCKING DISCOVERY

IMPULSES

FOCUS

MAGNETIC ARCS

Hearing Through Wires: The Physiophony of Antonio Meucci

Hearing Through Wires

The Physiophony of Antonio Meucci

ARRIVALS

SHOCK

VOICES

CANDLES

Gerry Vassilatos’s “Vril Compendium, V: VRIL CONNECTION”

Nathan Stubblefield: Earth Energy and Vocal Radio

MEANDERING WAYS

ELECTRICAL OCEAN

EARTH RESERVOIR

ENERGY RECEIVER

The Fifth Sun

Proclus: Fifth Century Borderland Scientist

THE GREAT TRADITION OF BORDERLAND SCIENCEAND ONE WHO CARRIED IT FORWARD IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

THE ENDURING LIGHT OF THE WESTERN WORLD

A PERSECUTED UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS

THE “SONS OF MILU” WERE HIS COMPANIONS

THE HOLY WARS OF 300 A.D.

COPERNICUS A NEO-PLATONIST?

“THE MOON IS CELESTIAL EARTH”

Meade Layne and the Principles of BSRF

THE REALITY OF THE ETHERS

THERE MAY BE A COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BORDERLAND SCIENCE RESEARCH ASSOCIATES

TRYING TO HELP THE NEWLY DEAD

MAKING AN EXAMINATION FOR THE RECORD

THE GREAT TRADITION OF BORDERLAND SCIENCE
AND ONE WHO CARRIED IT FORWARD IN THE FIFTH CENTURY