In effect, whenever we want to understand what an inventor was really doing we go back to the beginning. The discovery in it's simplest form is always made at the beginning and everything after the fact is built on the initial discovery. This is literally how the process of invention works...
My talk with Mark McKay was
exactly that. Reverse-engineering and trying to break everything down to their simplest components+principles.
First to set the stage, an excerpt:
"In the workshop, a six-volt car battery rested on a table. Lead wires ran from the battery to a series of capacitors which are the key to Grays’s discovery. The complete system was wired to two electromagnets, each weighing a pound and a quarter.
The first demonstration proved that Gray was using a totally different form of electrical current – a powerful but “cold” form of the energy. As the test started, Gray said: “Now if you tried to charge those two magnets with juice from the battery and make them do what I’m going to make them do, you would drain the battery in 30 minutes and the magnets would get extremely hot.”
Fritz Lens activated the battery. A voltmeter indicated 3,000 volts. Gray threw a switch and there was a loud popping noise. The top magnet flew off with powerful force. Richard Hackenberger caught it in his bare hand. What happened was that Gray had used a totally different form of electrical current – a “cold” form of energy. The fact that Hackenberger caught the magnet and was not burned was evidence enough of that."
This was my thought-process with McKay assisting + filling in details as we went along:
* So, the earliest demonstration was the 'popping coils' demo, which led to the large investment to machine all the EMA motors.
* McKay describes the 'popping coils' as two electromagnets, with each electromagnet having 4 wires coming out.
* From this lets assume that each coil half is actually an equal/matched pair of coils. Hence the 4 wires.
* Lets reason from the progression that Gray motors are in-fact 'spinning popping coils' and that they both operate on the same unknown principle.
* I noticed and McKay confirmed that the rotor on the
Purple motor only had a 2 wires to the rotor brushes.* From this, we might extrapolate that the 4 coils in the original 'popping coil' demo is actually 3 coils. So now we're down to 3 coils used of the 4. 6 wires...
* Lets reason that the high voltage capacitors and thyratrons are necessary components, and that the Ignitron/Thyratrons are intended to provide short impulses to the system. McKay said that witnesses report corona and tremendous arcing and electrostatic fields (hair standing up like in a Vandegraff).
* McKay commented on the use of Iron wire (I believe from interviewing one of the original machinists that helped build the original motors?).
* Lets reason from this that iron wire is also a critical component, and thus should be present in at least one of the three original 'popping coils'.
So now we're down to 3 coils, 1 on one side and 2 on the other, with at least one winding ferromagnetic. Triggered by a high-voltage impulse of 3kv in some unknown configuration.
* We note the interesting results in delayed-pulse propagation for a pair of wires with a scope (I forget who did this test, will edit w/ link when I find it)
* We also note that ferromagnetic wire adds a parametric effect. The inductance of the wire decreases as the current running through it increases. That makes the result very complex and difficult to model. Even without adding a 2nd and 3rd coil.
* Besides being complex, it's also relatively unexplored territory. Very few experimenters work with voltage impulses over 1kv, and even fewer work with iron wire.
* High voltage is also consistent with a need to overcome high resistance (potentially other reasons as well)
Anyway, I hope some of that made sense
I don't even know if there's anything there, but it was fun playing detective, and McKay's a cool guy to talk to.
"An overly-skeptical scientist might hastily conclude by scooping and analyzing a thousand buckets of ocean water that the ocean has no fish in it."
Author
Topic: Edwin Vincent Gray's conversion tube (Read 96263 times)
