Tesla and radium

[thx1138]

I'm interested in why Dr. Tesla believed radium being available at $1.00 per pound was important.

"Sending of Messages to Planets Predicted by Dr. Tesla On Birthday", New York Times, July 11, 1937. —Inventor, 81, Talks of Key to Interstellar Transmission and Tube to Produce Radium Copiously and Cheaply.

"Decorated by Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Reports of discoveries by which it will be possible to communicate with the planets and to produce radium in unlimited quantity for $1 a pound were announced by Dr. Nikola Tesla yesterday at a luncheon on his eighty-first birthday."

I think I know but my idea is pretty much out there in left field. Thoughts anyone?

[giantkiller]

Well the right field is basically slow which leads to prolonged wrongness.

Fess up. Society has been changed by the left fielders for a long time.

[thx1138]

Tesla believed that if radio active materials could somehow be shielded from cosmic rays they would not be radio active.

[e2matrix]

Transmutation.   And important because it's still low level enough to be fairly safe but strong enough to trigger action like Moray used in his radiant energy device.   

[thx1138]

Researching the price of Radium in 1935 I found the following:
The Sydney Morning Herald, February 11, 1935, "Price of Radium. Big Drop Expected."
London Feb. 10.
"The 'Sunday Express' says: - 'By the development of sources of radium in the Great Bear Lake (Canada), which are believed to be sufficient to supply the whole Empire, it is expected that the value of radium will drop from £10,000 to £1,000 per gramme. The present world's stock is 600 grammes; London hospitals between them have three-quarters of an ounce (about 31 grammes) valued at £250,000.'"
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17152322

A British Pound in 1935 has the purchasing power of about £58 GBP today. So in 1935 the cost in today's money was £580,000 per gram and was expected to be reduced to £58,000 per gram. Dr. Tesla speaks below of obtaining radium for $1.00 per pound and there are roughly 450 grams in a pound so it would be about $0.002 per gram.

My idea is that Dr. Tesla considered radium to be the "catalyst" for harnessing "radiant energy". If the 1937 Pierce Arrow did in fact exist and work as proposed the "normal 12 volt battery" may have been something quite different, i.e. a nuclear battery. He said it could also be used to power the lights in a home when not in use as a vehicle.

So imagine the upper plate, and possibly the lower plate, in his radiant energy patents to be coated with radium. Bringing the cost down to $1.00 per pound would then make nuclear power affordable for everyone. Keep in mind that government regulation of radio active materials was not prevalent until the 1950's.

It would also explain why the car "disappeared." Not that it was being kept secret for financial reasons but because when he died scientists were already working on the atomic bomb.

Take a look at the attached file.

[thx1138]

The fear of radioactive materials is both intense and almost universal. I found credible info that that fear may be founded on intentionally misleading efforts of scientists who established the radiation exposure standards in the 1950's. The gist of it is that the genetic damage upon which the standards are based and have been in use since the 50's was based on the radiation exposure encountered in Japan's nuclear blasts and linearly extrapolated back to lower levels of medical xrays and below but there was evidence that there was and is a threshold level below which radiation is not nearly so damaging as higher level ionizing radiation exposure. The part that showed a threshhold was the part that was ignored. So the linearity of the danger to lower levels below that threshold is probably false.

The problem, of course, is that any mention of radioactive materials today immediately scares people away from research with low level radiation obtained from non-processed materials. It is said that one can hold pitchblend in the hand without any danger whatsoever but noone seems to understand that.

So this could well be a way of suppressing research into use of low level radioactive materials in batteries. That fits very nicely into suppressing Nikola Tesla's work on radiant energy and the reason we don't have nuclear powered cars like Tesla's 1931 Pierce Arrow. Governments didn't get into regulating nuclear materials until the late 1940's and the studies that all following regulations are based upon are now being said to be flawed.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130813201434.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110920163320.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111220133911.htm

[Peterae]

Seems funny Tesla found a cheap way to produce Radium, maybe the radium was the waste product from a new form of energy generation, in effect a byproduct of producing energy.

I wonder what the fuel was, as we know free energy devices are probably merely conversion devices.

Input Atom XXX = energy release >> Radium.

Work that out and we will probably work out how the Pierce arrow was powered.

Some form of Nuclear battery does sound like it would fit with any of the devices we have heard about over the years.

I wonder what the price of Thorium was back in Tesla's day, could the Pierce Arrow have been powered by a Thorium reactor that transmuted Thorium or something similar to Radium and released loads of energy in the process?

Thorium produces a radioactive gas, radon-220, as one of its decay products.

Tesla was known to have said that radiant energy was suspected to be in the form of a gas.

The only doubt i have is that he lived to a ripe old age   so if the device was radioactive then this discounts hard radiation and therefore a process that utilizes soft radiation with minimal shielding would qualify.

I would say mix resonance with LENR and that's what Tesla was up to.

We already know the sun emits radiant energy and we also know the way the sun produces radiant energy.

[giantkiller]

He had a stun gun chair that produced radient energy that he sat in quite often. I'd say similar to Lahovsky multiwave oscillator, Rife ring.

[thx1138]

Seems funny Tesla found a cheap way to produce Radium, maybe the radium was the waste product from a new form of energy generation, in effect a byproduct of producing energy.
Or it could be that the process didn't generate the power but made the source material into less dangerous radium so it could be used to directly generate electricity.

I wonder what the fuel was, as we know free energy devices are probably merely conversion devices.

Input Atom XXX = energy release >> Radium.
Hard Xray (or something) impacts Thorium (atomic number 90) to free 2 protons results in Radium (atomic number 88).

Work that out and we will probably work out how the Pierce arrow was powered.

Some form of Nuclear battery does sound like it would fit with any of the devices we have heard about over the years.
Yes, and keep in mind it was said the '31 Pierce-Arrow energy source could light a house when not in use as transportation. That's what got me thinking about batteries and led me to the atomic batteries used in spacecraft.

I wonder what the price of Thorium was back in Tesla's day, could the Pierce Arrow have been powered by a Thorium reactor that transmuted Thorium or something similar to Radium and released loads of energy in the process?
Early on it was pretty rare and so expensive. Later it was used in gas light mantles to give off white lite. This demand caused higher production and so reduced the price somewhat from when it was a laboratory element only. But around 1925 it's use was declining because electrical lighting had mostly replaced gas lighting so, with lessening demand, would have become cheaper because the mining and refining operations would still have been operating but selling their product at a lower price just to stay alive. Interestingly, Coleman lantern mantles contained thorium into the 1990's when it was mostly replaced with yttrium.

Tesla was known to have said that radiant energy was suspected to be in the form of a gas.
I don't remember this. Do you have a citation?

The only doubt i have is that he lived to a ripe old age   so if the device was radioactive then this discounts hard radiation and therefore a process that utilizes soft radiation with minimal shielding would qualify.
Tesla's views on "radiant energy" changed over time. The earliest reference I could find was this: "...streams resembling the cathodic must be emitted by the sun and probably also by other sources of radiant energy, such as an arc light or Bunsen burner." - "Tesla's latest Roentgen Ray Investigations", Electrical Review, New York 28 No.17 - 1896 05/22 Age 39

I think there is a lot of misconception about what Tesla's "radiant energy" is. You can see from the above quote it could be termed simply "energy that radiates". Looked at in that light it isn't anything mysterious. The mystery before Roentgen was how could a vacuum tube emit particles without breaking the tube. It was still thought that the atom was the indivisible minimum of matter.

It wasn't until much later that Tesla started working with radioactive materials. "Tesla has maintained ever since that radium is not a generator but a transformer of energy, the emanations being caused by cosmic rays of immense power capable of penetrating all obstacles however thick. The existence of this radiation – which, he says, should not be confounded with the comparatively very feeble 'cosmic rays' observed more recently – he has proved by mathematical theory agreeing closely with experiment." - Popular Science Monthly interview with Nikola Tesla by Alden P. Armagnac - 1928 11 Age 72 He lived to be 86 so his experiments would have only covered 14 years and, as far as I know, he didn't have much money or a lab at this time so the actual physical experiments would have been rare.


I would say mix resonance with LENR and that's what Tesla was up to.
I've been wondering lately what I would get if I coated an aluminum plate with pitchblend and insulate with a dielectric and smacked it with soft xrays. I'm still studying the safety devices I'll need.

We already know the sun emits radiant energy and we also know the way the sun produces radiant energy.
And so do all stars, black holes, and other galactic processes. I believe Tesla was talking about neutrinos in his later years which sounds crazy to us but then we're not Tesla. We know that neutrinos rarely interact with matter so are hard to detect. But Tesla believed that if radioactive materials could be shielded from them (which they can't) that the material would not be radioactive. There's a kind of logic to that: a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. There are billions upon billions of neutrinos traveling through our bodies at all times so the entire universe is awash with neutrinos. Could it be that the tiny mass of a neutrino on occasion, hitting an unstable radioactive atom, provides the tipping point for the atom to emit a particle? In other words, are neutrinos the cause of radioactive decay?

See comments above in bold.

There are some more interesting notes on thorium. It was discovered in Sweden - Moray's "Swedish stone" ? It naturally decays into radium in some circumstances.

http://nautilus.fis.uc.pt/st2.5/scenes-e/elem/e09010.html
http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele090.html
http://www.ptable.com/

[thx1138]

He had a stun gun chair that produced radient energy that he sat in quite often. I'd say similar to Lahovsky multiwave oscillator, Rife ring.

Do you have a reference or citation for the "stun gun chair"?

[Peterae]

Tesla was known to have said that radiant energy was suspected to be in the form of a gas.
I don't remember this. Do you have a citation?

I cannot remember now where i read this, but having just done a Google search there are some relevant quotes

Tesla and others believed that both electrical and magnetic forces were actually streams of Aether gas.

If you put that quote into google some pages come up  

A Stream makes me think of a high energy particle.
Maybe the radiation was ionizing the air around the source and they detected that.

There are some more interesting notes on thorium. It was discovered in Sweden - Moray's "Swedish stone" ? It naturally decays into radium in some circumstances.

This is fantastic, Thanks thx 1138

So now we know how Morays device was powered  

[ion]

Peterae said:

So now we know how Morays device was powered  Afro

It is my opinion that Ra was used as a catalyst to initiate a different form of conversion in his cold cathode tubes and other parts of the circuit. (See Coleman Gillespie which came a bit later) IMO it was not the total source of power. Even today it would be difficult to supply the kW he managed with few grams of the stuff.

A conservative estimate of only 20% energy conversion efficiency of _-particle energy into useful photons (e.g. one 5.44 MeV _-particle results in 105 2.2 eV photons) and a monochromatic conversion efficiency of only 30% could result in the generation of up to 5 mW by a device whose area is less than 1 cm2 and which would weigh approximately 3 grams assuming 2.5 Ci of Am241 is used (i.e., 2 _W/mCi).

5mW is not much.
https://rt.grc.nasa.gov/power-in-space-propulsion/photovoltaics-power-technologies/technology-thrusts/alpha-and-beta-voltaics/

Note also Paul Browns huge claims of 7500 Watts  using milligrams is highly suspect but worth a look into.

[thx1138]

I cannot remember now where i read this, but having just done a Google search there are some relevant quotes

If you put that quote into google some pages come up.
I looked at some of the google results but the ones i looked at all seem to be saying what the author thought about what Tesla thought. I've run into lots of problems with that approach, i.e. "the magnificence of 3, 6 and 9". No one can provide a citation for that. In my opinion it is some made up BS by, as far as I can tell, some numerology quacks that want to coop Tesla's name to give themselves some validity. Without the context the statement is meaningless.

I did, however, find the following - "What is electricity and what is magnetism? The most able intellects have ceaselessly wrestled with the problem; still the question has yet been answered. But while we cannot even today state what the singular forces are, we have made good headway towards the solution to the problem. We are now confident that electric and magnetic phenomena are attributable to aether, are perhaps justified in saying that the effects of static electricity are effects of aether under strain, and those of dynamic electricity and electro-magnetism effects of aether in motion. But this still leaves the question as to what electricity and magnetism are unanswered. ... we must remember that we have no evidence of electricity, nor can we hope to get it, unless gross matter is present. Electricity, therefore, cannot be called aether in the broad sense of the term but nothing would seem to stand in the way of calling electricity aether associated with matter, or bound aether, or, in other words, that the so called static charge of the molecule is aether associated in some way with the molecule. Looking at it in that light, we would be justified in saying that electricity is concerned in all molecular actions." - "Experiments with Alternate Currents of very high Frequency and their Application for methods of artificial lighting", Lecture before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Columbia College, 1891 05/20 Age 34. Perhaps that is what you were thinking of.


A Stream makes me think of a high energy particle.
Exactly. "...streams resembling the cathodic..."

Maybe the radiation was ionizing the air around the source and they detected that.
I.E. the plasma around an arc light or a spark gap - even a Bunsen burner. Emissions from the sun, the plasma around the arc in an arc light, the flame of a Bunsen burner are all plasmas. See the quote in the earlier post. The sun is a huge ball of plasma. The flame of a Bunsen burner, or a camp fire for that matter, is a plasma.

This is fantastic, Thanks thx 1138

So now we know how Morays device was powered.
Don't jump to conclusions. If I remember correctly the "Swedish stone" in Moray's device had three connections and was used as a semiconductor - basically the first solid state transistor. But his "valves", later known as vacuum tube diodes, had some radioactive materials in them which, when he used multiple stages of valves, could account for multiplication of the energy acquired through the antenna. Also pure raw thorium is black, not white like the Swedish stone was reported to be, but oxides of thorium can be light gray. It needs more research.

This might also explain government agents' interest in his work since that was the time (late 1940's and 1950's and onward) the government grew concerned about the use of radioactive materials. You have to remember that government had no interest in regulating radioactive materials until it was proven that they could be used to build atomic bombs. Also see the earlier posts about safe levels of radiation having a threshold.

See comments above in bold.

Of course the bottom line to all of this, for us today, is that thorium is not going to be available to us as amateurs. I don't know about the current cost of thorium but I do know there is a lot of current research into thorium reactors so I expect the demand would be rising which would make it more expensive. I don't yet have a clue what would be necessary to acquire thorium. Probably licenses and reams and reams of paper work.

[Chet]

Thx 1138

A good shovel and a bit of sweat
Google your country or planet [its even shown on the moon]

thx Chet

[thx1138]

A good shovel and a bit of sweat
Google your country or planet [its even shown on the moon]

At 6 parts per million average it's going to take a lot of shovels full depending on where you are. And a lot of processing after that. I'm not particularly interested in getting into the mining and processing business.

On the other hand the following link has it for sale - 10 grams, 99.1% for $615.75. So I guess I was wrong about it being tightly controlled. It is said to not be dangerous in its natural state as it only emits alpha particles which do not penetrate the skin but its dust should not be inhaled because that can cause cancer and liver failure. It does, however, decay to uranium. The decay to radium is a secondary decay. It seems though that since it can decay to uranium 233 which is fissile there probably are some controls on it.
http://www.mpbio.com/product.php?pid=05218799

It also seems I had the coloring wrong. It's black in the heavily oxidized state, grey with medium oxidation, and silver/white in the pure state. So it could well be a candidate for Dr. Moray's Swedish stone. I agree with ION that it was most likely not the primary source of power but a multiplier used in his tubes (valves) to multiply the power received via the elevated antenna.

ION said, "Note also Paul Browns huge claims of 7500 Watts  using milligrams is highly suspect but worth a look into." I would agree with that but am not familiar with Brown's work. The real question there would be how long it it supply 7500 Watts. If it was 7500 Watts for a few milliseconds that would be an altogether different thing than supplying a home or car.

Getting back to Tesla's Pierce-Arrow, I saw an article somewhere that stated the plates in the batterty could be changed out by a teenager in a few minutes with minimal tools. I think it might have been something about his work in Canada but I can't find the article now. Does anyone have any recollection of that article and/or a reference or link to it?

[Peterae]

Thorianite is a rare mineral and may contain up to about 12% thorium oxide.

So it is possible to find high % Ore

Thorium ore can have white in it as well.

White, i wonder if Barium could be at play here then, i dont know enough about Barium and short of time right now to work it out, but many compounds of Barium are white i believe.

I don't fully understand radioactive decay, i have a question, if an element has a half life of say a 1000 years then why does it not all decay at the same time,  surely because there's constant decay then it would mean that each atom was formed at a different time, with my little understanding, it seems more plausible that something is causing the atoms to decay all the time, and if that's the case then there must be a way to control decay or trigger it, i am sure there's probably a high school explanation, i must have been sick that day  

and then we have radioactive material that has 10 billion years half life, should that of even started to decay LOL

Does this disprove the big bang theory or is there a hole the size of a bus in Nuclear Physics.

I remember NASA announcing, the life of the New Curiosity Rover maybe less than expected because they found the Nuclear fuel was depleting faster than it should have.

[thx1138]

5mW is not much.
https://rt.grc.nasa.gov/power-in-space-propulsion/photovoltaics-power-technologies/technology-thrusts/alpha-and-beta-voltaics/

5mW is not much but one cm^2 is not much either. At that rate one meter^2 would produce 50W. The major problem with that device is the 30% efficiency of the convertion from from photons generated by the alpha emissions to electricity. There are other methods to convert directly to electricity. See this link http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~blanchar/res/BlanchardKorea.pdf

You also have to keep in mind that NASA's projects are intended for space exploration so launch weight is always a major factor so the nuclear powered probes are designed not to use much energy. The Voyager probes have 3 nuclear batteries that only output 740 Watts total but that is enough to fulfill their mission. The interesting thing about them is they will run 40+ years with no maintenance before they degrade to the point where the power will be insufficient to continue their mission.

[Peterae]

and what about the Beta decay

My point is that what if it was possible to cause & control decay.

[thx1138]

and what about the Beta decay

My point is that what if it was possible to cause & control decay.

That "cause & control" is exactly what nuclear reactors do. The problem as I see it is that all of today's nuclear reactors (uranium, thorium, whatever) are geared towards industrial scale power generation by generating heat to convert water to steam and use the steam to drive turbines. That's basically a waterwheel with a fancy river driving it. The turbines do, however, play an important role in that the frequency is controlled via the speed of the turbine and the steam driving it can be regulated. All of that is known technology so, investment wise, safe.

But if we want to generate power on a much smaller scale, it seems to me direct conversion would be more reasonable and that's what space probes do. Some of them do both power and heat because heat is also needed in space to protect the equipment.

All I've been able to find on radioactive decay is that the material decays because it is "unstable" and that led me to thinking about a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. So what's causing the decay? If it's "instability" how did the material come to exist in the first place? The latter question is fairly simple - it was created under different conditions, i.e. in stars and star explosions. That still leaves the former question unanswered. Tesla belived it was neutrinos or cosmic rays that caused radioactive material to be radioactive and that if they could be shield from the neutrinos/rays the material would no longer be radioactive.

Well we can't generate neutrinos without a particle accelerator but maybe some other type of particle might perform the function at a lower level. That's where I got to thinking about smacking a low grade radioactive material like pitchblend with X-rays. There are old radio tubes still available that emit X-rays as a byproduct of their function. I'm thinking of using one of those with a lead shield around it with a slit or hole in the lead which would allow directional control for aiming the X-rays at a metal conductor coated with pitchblend and covered in a dielectric insulation. The metal plate would act as the conductor for leading the electricity out of the device over a wire attached to it and the dielectric insulation would keep the charges in the plate from neutralizing with opposite charges in the air. The control would be in the size of the slit or hole and the duty cycle of the circuit driving the tube.

Overunity? Not strictly speaking but there could be an excess collected over the amount required to drive the X-ray emitting tube.

So would hitting pitchblend or thorium with X-rays generate Beta decay? I don't know enough about the physics of that process to know the answer.

[Peterae]

I can see i have you thinking in what i consider to be the correct direction  

Decay causes radiant energy in a form,if you have positrons or electrons imparting charge to a metallic plate you have radiant power, no doubt he was working to find any and all available sources at his means, when a candidate is found all you have to do is control decay to control the power developed, if you have a slow decay then speed it up, you will reach the point when the required amount of energy is produced which is obviously exactly what Steven Marks did.

as long as we are talking Beta or alpha shielding is negligible, Steve Marks was shut down by the Atomic Police right  

[Peterae]

If instability is caused by an atom because it does not have enough energy to maintain it's current state then something as simple as stress could trigger the decay.

How many of us have checked for Beta decay during our experiments, has anyone ever even looked to see if we have caused decay accidentally, i dont know anyone.

For instance there have been cases where people have had test equipment suddenly fail when pulsing coils, i have blown bags of fets up with my delayed pulse experiments because of a sudden RF Burst and high voltage that killed the fet.
Otto also managed to wipe out his test equipment trying to replicate a TPU, could this have been an indication of a Beta event, an induced sudden decay of a stable isotope mixed in with the wire he was pulsing.

It looks like some are waking up to the fact that Decay is not constant.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/oct/02/the-mystery-of-the-varying-nuclear-decay

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/01/faster_decay/

[thx1138]

Even today it would be difficult to supply the kW he managed with few grams of the stuff.

This is a thorium laser rather than radium but interesting nonetheless - 250kW for 5000 hours from 8 grams of thorium:
2009 Cadillac thorium powered concept car shown at Chicago Auto Show??
http://www.slatesenergy.com/cadillac_thorium_laser.htm

[Peterae]

Nice car 

There's other ways to skin the cat, McFreey Cu65 >> Cu63 Beta Decay

Michel Meyer used Fe56 >> Fe54 Beta Decay
http://www.nuenergy.org/fe56-energy-converter/

[ion]

Interesting that you can buy pure Thorium metal (expensive) on ebay or many of its compounds (cheaper).

I thought this stuff was as abundant as lead and expected the metal to be relatively inexpensive. I also thought it might be a regulated substance.

Also some interesting books about Thorium on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pure-Thorium-metal-element-sample-rare-vintage-50-years-old-polished-shiney-hot-/181264278786?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a34316502

[Grumpy]

radium was used in vacuum tubes

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/electrontubes.htm