[Lowfer] Lovely Aurora Down South

[John Davis]

>There was a talk about Doc. few years ago at he AWA conference in
>Rochester
>he did use untuned kite / balloon antennas and the thought was that he
>may have
>been actually doing spark Transmitting. Although there isnt much info on
>his apparatus
>the general idea was that the  uhh natural electricity   caused a spark
>when he opened
>his antenna from the ground return,, setting up oscillations that were
>detected
>at the other site with the galvanometer.

I'm sure he generated minor spark oscillations, but I have never known a
galvanometer to detect RF on its own.  A far more likely explanation is the
one offered in the first article I ever read on Loomis, back in the
mid-Sixties.  (It wasn't Popular Electronics and it wasn't
Radio-Electronics...it was in the third one of that era whose name I can't
possibly recall until after I send this off, at which time it will pop into
my head embarassingly easily...the digest-sized magazine Tom Kneitel used to
be with.)

The normal air-to-earth current can indeed be collected by a conductor
elevated by means of a tower or kite.  If you have only one such grounded
conductor, the current will be mainly affected by weather.  If you then
raise a second such conductor some distance away, grounding it will divert
some of the current that would otherwise flow through the first.  Now, a
wire a few hundred feet up isn't going to divert very much of the normal sky
current from a similar wire 10 or 20 miles away, considering that the source
of the current extends all the way to the ionosphere; but you will see quite
a difference if the source is much lower, such as an electrified cloud.
Loomis' own writings indicate he was aware of this effect, but he regarded
it as only a temporary inconvenience, unrelated to his main goal.  Mere
telegraphy was just the beginning of what he thought he could do if he could
get above the first pesky couple miles of air, up to where the REAL
atmospheric electricity was just waiting for him to tap into it.

Too bad that (a) it jest don't work that way, and (b) someone else patented
the idea six months before he did, anyhow.  But Prometheus-complex
megalomaniacs don't give up easily.  They battle reality to the bitter end.

John