STORY OF THE BOY WHO INVENTED TELEVISION
This week’s fusion story is a continuation of an exchange of emails between JES and an anonymous, but expert eyewitness with privileged access to Farnsworth’s lab notes. Last week our anonymous source took me to the woodshed for using unscientific terminology like heat and temperature in my fusion story. And, the thrashing continues this week, but what comes after that should be of great interest to us all. After interviewing Mrs. Farnsworth and the Fort’s fusion team, I asked two questions: Did Farnsworth ever successfully fuse atomic nuclei electronically? And, did he (Farnsworth), ever achieve a “sustained” fusion reaction? Mrs. Farnsworth, every team member and expert who I asked, without hesitation, answered, “YES,” to the first question, but there was not a clear consensus of opinion about the second question.
Our expert anonymous source continued: “Heat” the big lie! Research projects need PR. The spin people are either brought in, or are born from within a project. PR people are not as a rule, physicists, and the audiences they speak to are notorious for their collective ignorance. So, when fusion teams achieve a neutron count above any previous result they want to get the masses jazzed and instead of giving their results in terms of an energy level, it gets PR’d to the masses in misleading terms of temperature, and then they get the idea. “A temperature of ninety-six trillion degrees was reached and maintained for nearly one millionth of a second today officials from BOCOMAC Bogus Research said.” And, while true as anything can be, and sounding like the 2nd coming of…impressive as all get out, it means absolutely nothing…
The answers to your questions about a fusion event, and a “sustained” fusion reaction at the Pontiac Street lab are, “Yes,” and “Yes,” but the true sought-after commodity (between me and my associates) is “breakeven point.” Simply put, more power comes out of the fusion reaction than was input. Power in < Power out. No one has reached breakeven, and if they had, believe-you-me, we would know it the next day and it would mean the “end” for all nuclear fission plants. So the problem we have here is the wording of your second question posed…
Now, I think that everyone in the Fort Wayne fusion lab had his/her (don’t forget Pem Farnsworth) own private notions about the research, but today they seem to have a unique power of miscomprehension! When I was young, I visited the fusion lab and was shown the whole process, up close and (un)comfortable. What I witnessed there did not happen, not according to Gene Meeks. Phil and I talked of what I had seen many, many times. There was a device that Meeks constructed from raw materials which was expressly constructed to counter the adverse effects of the very thing I witnessed, which he (Meeks) denies. I opened my Farnsworth fusor for the first time in 40 years and when I asked Meeks, “What potential the ion gun extractor cone was held at,” he gave me the voltage in the wrong polarity? Since then I am reticent to trust facts from any source.
From what I have been able to learn, the distance to breakeven point was much closer than any of the fusion crew dreamed. There were micro, and millisecond events which most of the lab guys agree happened, that shot the meters off-scale but measuring equipment in the 1960’s couldn’t handle that magnitude, or scale. But, that is only the start of what happened there! Because I have to embrace the possibility of seeing any words I might type here in your article (s) I have to curb what I say. This ties my hands at talking frankly regarding what I believe was happening, and what was clearly ignored. An oversight of huge magnitude!
- Editor’s Obituary Note - September 27, 2024
- ‘She Rocks The Fort’ - September 27, 2024
- Celebrate National Public Lands Day In Indiana - September 27, 2024