[CW] Crystal Amplification and Magnetic Amplification

[David Ring]

This was posted to the googlegroups "radio-officers" group, but even
though it is slightly off-topic, I believe that the readers of this
list would be interested in the subject.

73

DR

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R/O David Ring - N1EA <djrin... at gmail.com> wrote:

Early R/Os reportedly used Carborundum detectors and a battery to
achieve amplification.

In a Taped interview between Frank Polkinghorn, with Russel Ohl, taped
at Ohl's home in Vista Ca, in 1975, Ohl stated that he had shared a
boarding house with operators who claimed to have used crystal
detectors to achieve amplification.

Ohl: He gave me a copy that he had of, I think it was Electrician. It
was a British magazine, one of these big paged things, you know. In it
was a translation from a Russian paper in which they had used
carborundum with two contacts and a battery supplying one of the
contacts and had gotten a power gain of ten times. And this was way
back in the 1910s, so the fact that you could get a power gain had
been known, but it was never put on a controlled basis. I knew about
it because an operator of the Signal Corps back in 1919 had told me
that some of the operators used carborundum as oscillators for
receiving. When I had seen this article that Curtis gave me, I was not
astounded because I had known about this before I ever saw the
article. I had heard about it. I knew a former first sergeant in the
Signal Corps who had lived in, the boarding house that I lived and he
was an expert radio operator. He told me a great deal about the use of
crystal detectors on ships. He told me that professional operators
carried two crystal detectors with them. One of them was made of
carborundum and one of them was something like galena or something of
that sort. He said the carborundum was used for two purposes. They
used it in the harbor when they were close to a transmitter to prevent
burnout.

Ohl: They also used it at long distances with two points. One point
was excited with a battery and they were able to get long wave
oscillations out of it and in that we were able to be in long wave
telegraph stations.

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I wonder if any of us have any more information on this?

73
DR

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Hello All

  I found the letters on "Crystal Amplification" very interesting.  As
so often happens, inventions  like the tunnel diode and transistor,
can be traced back to early experiments that, for the most part, went
largely unnoticed at the time.  So called "Crystal Amplification" is
one of those inventions that was left in the dust with the development
and perfection of the vacuum tube, only to resurface many years later
when others re-discovered the same phenomenon.  However, the second
time around, there was a need for low mass, miniature devices with
reduced power consumption and research funding became available. The
increase in research funding for "solid state" devices  rapidly lead
to the solid - state technology we enjoy today.

  As a student of electrical engineering at U.C. Berkeley in the mid
1960's, I had a professor, one John R. Woodyard, who taught
electromagnetic theory and physical electronics.

  One day, while doing some reading in one of my electrical
engineering text books, I ran across a small footnote that lead me to
a paper or research note that  a transistor- like device had invented
by Professor J.R. Woodyard in his early working days (late 1940's ?)
after he had graduated from Berkeley.  Although Professor Woodyard was
enthusiastic about his discovery, it created little serious interest
at that time.  Professor Woodyard was actually being funded to work on
another project and I guess funding for his new discovery was out of
the question. At that time, any oscillations and amplification by a
diode-like device was nothing more than an interesting laboratory
curiosity.

  In my physical electronics lab at U.C. Berkeley, Professor Woodyard
had us conduct several interesting experiments, one of which was to
carefully back bias a diode to produce radio frequency oscillations.
I could tell from his remarks, when we finally achieved these
oscillations, that  Professor Woodyard knew far more about this
phenomenon that he  was letting on.  He even made a remark, as he
turned away from my  lab bench, that he had long ago discovered this
and other interesting phenomena with diode-like devices, but no one
seemed to be interested.

  In thinking about this over the years, I think Professor Woodyard
was still saddened the lack of interest he encountered at that time
with his solid state experiments and that maybe, if his research had
been funded, he might have become known as the inventor of the
transistor.  Having been a student of Professor Woodyard in those
days,  I have little doubt in my mind that such would have been the
case.

  73,

  Den Regan, K6ZJU

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Thanks, Dennis for this information.  I find the subject of both crystal and
magnetic amplification to be very interesting as both bring us back to
electric qualities that pervade radio and thence electronics.

Many in electronics are not as aware as we are - being "Sparks" who were
familiar with wireless radiation using electric phenomena - that electronics
is an electric field.

Oh, dinosaurs, I know - it is feeding time!

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