STORY OF THE BOY WHO INVENTED TELEVISION
Before we begin Steve Blaising’s part of the fusion story, we need to make a correction. In last week’s credits for the fusion picture, the credit should have been given to Richard Hull, PhD Physics, instead of …Richard Hall. Richard has a web page at www.fusor.net. And his lab is in Virginia. In 1997 Richard came to Fort Wayne and interviewed Gene Meeks, Steve Blaising, and Fred Haak. Richard returned to Virginia, built a fusion model in his lab, and photographed a poissor (pictured Star in a jar). We owe a special debt of gratitude to Richard for allowing us to use his photo of an authentic poissor, and so far as we know, no other newspaper large or small has ever ran a picture of a poissor. Richard said the temperature of his star is approximately 330 million degrees Kelvin, which converts to 390 million degrees Fahrenheit.
In Farnsworth’s original fusion devices the outer shell was made of stainless steel and the poissor could not be seen and although they knew a star was inside, they couldn’t see it. Accordingly, during the third week of March 1963, Gene Meeks was assigned the task of constructing a rather crude wire-skeleton of a Fusor with outside optics. On March 26th, 1963 there occurred what was considered to be a major breakthrough and advance in the art of nuclear fusion. Using Gene’s model inside a high-vacuum bell jar, the actual formation of a poissor was observed visually for the first time! In the words of Admiral Furth, “It was a thrilling experience to watch the poissor start forming a spherical, bluish-colored cloud which almost completely filled the volume within the cathode and see the cloud decrease in size progressively as the voltage was increased. When the poissor was somewhat smaller than a golf ball, it became necessary to enclose the experiment in a shield to protect personnel against gamma radiation. It appeared that with but minor modifications in the optical system and admission of fuel gas, a substantial neutron count should obtain.”
Because nuclei are like-charged they repel one another like same poles on a bar magnet, but if they are heated up to hundreds of million degrees its possible to fuse them together into one nuclei. If before we fused the two nuclei we weighed them and then weighed the two combined or fused nuclei, we would discover the new single nuclei weighed slightly less than when it was two. The missing weight is the part that got converted to energy.
Einstein said, “Energy is liberated matter and matter is, but congealed energy.” This simple sentence began the nuclear age, for better or worse he published his E = MC squared formula; and it described the relationship between matter and energy. If we multiplied the missing mass of the newly fused nuclei by the speed of light squared we could then know how much energy was released.
By now some are asking, “What difference does this fusion stuff matter anyhow?” In his public addresses Philo began by saying, that in the future, historians would look back on the 1960’s as the point of demarcation between the high energy era we were now about to enter and the high-fuel low-energy period that preceded it. The energy contained in even a small quantity of hydrogen gas is so vast that only a tiny amount would provide the power needs of an entire city. Philo often cited calculations by Admiral Furth with engineers at Con-Edison’s power company, indicating that all the power necessary to run a city the size of New York for an entire month could be produced by fusion at a cost of about a nickel.
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