The Patent Of William Barbat

[lfarrand]

Thanks Chet. I'll have a read through the thread.

I also found this in one of the Mannix / Steven Marks emails:

By the way, something strange is that, once I made a unit with some old corroded wire for the collector and it worked very well for it's size. I made another identical collector with shiny new wire and it did not work quite as well. I never found out why, but there was a difference.

Sounds like wire with some sort of surface plating might have played a part in the SM TPU. As I mentioned in another thread, the author of patent US20140159845A1 seems to think that semiconducting coating is important.

Applicant has further deduced that such low-mass electrons must have originated in a thin-film coating of cupric oxide (CuO) on the antenna wire. CuO is adull-black, polycrystalline, semiconducting compound that develops in situ on copper and bronze wire in the course of annealing the wire in the presence of air. Such CuO coatings have been observed by Applicant on historical laboratory wire at the Science Museum at Oxford University, U.K., and on copper house wire of that era in the U.S., indicating that CuO coatings were commonplace. In later years, annealing has taken place under conditions that prevent most oxidation. This is followed by acid treatment to remove any remaining oxides, leaving shiny wire.

[Centraflow]

Tin plated copper, copper has 28 electrons and Tin has 50.

Regards

Mike