[Lowfer] Lovely Aurora Down South

[John Davis]

>Right and I forget how they esplaned that away
>I remember a drawing showing a piece of
>iron or something laying in a swamp with
>him adjusting the apparatus. The swampie iron
>was the return and the whole problem is the lack of
>any documentation. I believe he was given credit
>for doing a demo for the gov. where the signal
>went over a hill  ????
>
>wonder if it googles


Yes it does.  That's where I started my research, as the libraries around
here have a pretty limited Mahlon Loomis collection.  :-)

Unlike the company philosophy Ed was talking about yesterday, where they
assumed anything important could be found on the Web, the reality is still
far from that.  So many searchable sites on the Web tend to be pretty
superficial in the depth of knowledge available.  On the other hand, you can
get almost anything--eventually--on interlibrary loan, but you've got to
know what to ask for first.  That's where some of the references and
bibliographies in online articles come in handy.

At any rate, I know one rather respectable consulting engineer who doesn't
believe Marconi could have received his famous letter S on 12 December '01,
on fairly plausible technical grounds; but has no trouble asserting
dogmatically that Loomis invented radio, even though his own arguments
against the sensitivity of Marconi's detectors also work against whatever
hypothetical detector Loomis' apparatus could have accidentally contained.
Loomis' spark power at the transmit end wouldn't have been anything to write
home about, either!  The observed effects are consistent with and of the
correct order of magnitude to be...sky current.  No RF waves have to be
invoked to explain the results.

Unlike some early wireless crackpots, Loomis did not claim to have
discovered some new etheric force, and so far as I have been able to
discover, did not make a show of fiddling with any secret devices at the
mountaintop demonstration.*  The apparatus was, apparantly, just as simple
as the basic description implies.  Thus, it's entirely probable that Loomis'
own DC electrical circuit idea is closer to the truth than the
electromagnetic hypotheses of his modern supporters.

(*I deliberately limit that statement to the telegraphy demonstration,
because at other points of his life he claimed to have done the same sort of
thing with telephony.  But there were never any public demonstrations of
that feat, no appartus was exhibited, and no patent claims filed.  I suspect
it was the same sort of exaggeration for effect that De Forest did some time
years later when he claimed to be using a new type of arc transmitter in his
telephony experiments; said miracle RF source employing two
non-deteriorating metal electrodes and requiring no hydrocarbon atmosphere
for generation of radio frequencies.  Sheer bunk, of course...just "happy
thoughts" to keep the stockholders quiet while he sweated the details of
making his poorly built stuff actually work, plus a bit of misdirection to
keep him from getting sued for all the Poulsen and Federal Telegraph patents
he was infringing right and left!)

My filing system is pretty abominable or I'd e-mail you a rough sketch by
Loomis, from one of the articles I did find online, depicting the
mountaintop-to-mountaintop telegraphy demonstration.  (Fortunately, I have
until spring to locate it for the article I'm working on.  It'll probably
take that long.)  It is utterly simple and straightforward, and I'm sure the
experiment is thoroughly repeatable if anyone cares to try.

John