| Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002
18:54:04 -0600
Dear Steve,
As far as I am aware,
Sweet never filed a patent (the work, I think, was also a take-off or
derivative of Gabriel Kron's negative resistor, built at Stanford
University on a GE contract in the late 1930s). Sweet later worked for
GE, and Kron was his mentor and patron. Kron's real work was held and
never released, although I cite some quotations from Kron's papers to
show he tried to get through the censors the gist of what he had done,
including the "open path" between any two points in a circuit, whether
there is any physical connection or not. Again, Kron never fully
revealed the secret of his open path. I take a crack at it in my
forthcoming book, but it's my "best estimate". So I don't think the
Sweet VTA was independently patentable, though I may be wrong on that.
For the actual status,
one would have to consult a good attorney. Sweet signed several
conflicting agreements with different backers, none of which were ever
"cleaned up". So in my view it's an area to be avoided, because it's a
legal nightmare. Who needs such at my age? One can take the energy
from the vacuum in a hundred ways, not just one. Sweet's way was indeed
a very good way. There are also a hundred other good ways.
So it's a matter of
the patent law on how an inventor must pursue his invention, and all
that, and the interpretations of the various rulings that have been made
over the years. Only an attorney can advise on all that. Sweet also
was married, and so he left a widow. Depending on wills, state laws,
and such, what results for the patent rights is again a matter for
lawyers to determine. Even the lawyers may disagree.
The Sweet device has
been partially replicated by at least four experimenters. Each
succeeded in activating the magnets into self-oscillation, and in
getting power out more than the input. Today, self-oscillation in
magnetic materials is well-known in thin film work, but to my knowledge
they do not do it at ELF frequencies as Sweet did, nor do they do it
nearly so powerfully as he did. But the self-oscillation itself is
known, and you can even purchase books on it. A typical example is V.
S.
L'vov,
Wave Turbulence Under Parametric Excitation: Applications to Magnets,
Springer Series in Nonlinear Dynamics, Springer-Verlag, New York,
1994. This includes self-oscillation in permanent magnets. Professor
L'vov is or was with the Department of Physics, Weizmann Institute of
Science, Israel.
One part of the
problem is that the magnets have to be (1) barium ferrite, and (2)
specially conditioned so that the barium nucleus is in self-oscillation
with the adjacent vacuum, which acts as a semiconductor. A paper
showing that the vacuum can indeed act as a semiconductor in certain
case is
Richard
E. Prange and Peter Strance, "The Semiconducting Vacuum," American
Journal of Physics, 52(1), Jan. 1984, p. 19-21. The authors show
that the vacuum may be regarded as a semiconductor. In particular, the
vacuum in the region close to the nucleus of a superheavy element is
analogous to the inversion layer in a field effect transistor. The
authors introduce the idea of the inverted vacuum. Just as a
semiconductor may be manipulated by subjecting it to external fields,
doping etc., it appears that so can be the vacuum. It appears that
Sweet used this effect and special triggering techniques to stimulate
the barium nuclei into very powerful self-oscillation with the
surrounding vacuum.
These
days, ELF oscillation in nuclei is also known.
So the
major problem is to get a strong, stable self-oscillation established
in the magnets themselves, before building the unit. Once that is done,
the Sweet unit can be replicated. His first unit produced only 6 watts,
but his second unit produced 500 watts output for a 10 Volt, 33
milliampere input. So that's a COP (if I didn't drop a decimal
somewhere!) of about 1,500,000.
None of
the inventors I know of who replicated it, ever achieved such a COP. To
my knowledge, the longest they achieved the activation was about 6
weeks. At least one did light a 100-watt bulb or so, but the output
decayed. Often the activation (by the others) would last only a minute
or two, then a few minutes as they got better at it, etc.
And in my
view, yes, the unit could be replicated and developed, but only by a
very competent team having several disciplines.
Remember
there are more than 200 known effects in magnetics, and only about half
of them are well-understood. The rest are understood from "fairly well"
to "somewhat" to "not at all". The "very strong type of
self-oscillation" that Sweet achieved is, in my opinion, among the
"understood a little bit" category. The typical electrical engineer who
thinks of magnets only in terms of north and south poles, etc. is doomed
to failure. Magnetism is very much more complicated than that; simply
check any modern university text in materials science or in the
magnetics phenomena of materials science. Another thing is that Sweet
carefully chose his magnets from many surplus ones. Only about one in
30 has sufficiently uniform field from point to adjacent point, to hold
the self-oscillation. That's a matter of manufacture, and in theory
that could be licked. But finding magnets made to a 10% local variation
or less is difficult, with what is available off the shelf.
So when
one looks at the duplication effort, it would be quite costly (from the
individual viewpoint). It will require an experienced materials science
team, with specialists in a couple different branches of magnetics.
Such folks exist, but not a great number of them.
Anyway,
for me that was just experiences along the way. These days I'm totally
committed to our own MEG, and so am concentrating on that.
Best
wishes,
Tom
Bearden
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