Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

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Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

This is gonna look familiar.

[As regular users of this site are aware, we had a bit of hiccup back in mid-December when we tried to upgrade our server capacity. Long story short, there was a SNAFU over the IP address; for a few days there were two versions of the site, and new posts were going onto an "old" version of the site. Unfortunately, that site got deleted right about the time we discovered what was going on, and we have been unable to recover the content that was posted between December 15 and 19. That included this post. I had created this post in my word processor before I drafted it here so it is easy for me to recover and re-post. Unfortunately that is not the case with Richard Hull's very detailed and erudite recounting of the research that was conducted at the ITT/Farnsworth lab in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the 1950s and 60s. It's really a lot to ask, but I do hope that Richard will recreate that post. In the meantime, here is my post that got disappeared in the SNAFU:]

- - - -

It it a Farnsworth – or a Hirsch?

This is a bit of a shaggy dog story, so bear with me.

My interest in all this has been percolating again, as it has from time to time over the course of the past 45 or so years. Remember, I was first introduced to this subject in 1973; I met the Farnsworth family in 1975, and the story has woven in-and-out of my life ever since. That origin story can be found here:

http://cohesionarts.com/2019/10/09/the- ... cruz-1973/

A couple of months ago, I just got the idea to search the podcast universe to see if there was anything on the subject of fusion available. I was not really surprised to find "The Fusion Podcast" which was created and produced by Dr. Matthew Moynihan, a fusion (and former polywell) advocate with whom I have had a bit of contact over the years.

https://www.thefusionpodcast.com

Among the listings I was pleased to find an episode featuring Carl Greninger...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t ... 0412182299

...who has been a contributor to these forums and operates the very successful Northwest Nuclear Laboratories in Seattle:

https://www.nwnlabs.org

One thing that Carl said I'm that interview piqued my interest. He describes the fusor as...

".... a technology that was actually developed back in the 1950s. A man named Philo Farnsworth, who is also credited with inventing the first television set (sic) developed this machine. At the time telemetry and instrumentation was primitive compared to what it is today, and he fabricated the machine based on assumptions about the behavior of particles and energies as he knew them at that time and it is apparent from our studies that he didn't fully principles of the operation of the machine simply because he didn't have the instrumentation to fully measure all of the forces that are at work as he went about working with it and consequently drew some conclusions that weren't entirely accurate..."

I wondered what exactly he meant by that, so I wrote to Carl and he replied:

"Attached you will find the work of Jake Hecla, one of my early students, who figured out that the majority of the fusion events attributed to the Farnsworth fusor were in fact occurring anistropically and not isotropically.  That is to say, that the fusion was predominantly occurring in the walls of the reactor vessel, and not the negative potential well as Farnsworth had reported." 

The paper Carl referenced is here:
JakesFusion.pdf
(4.1 MiB) Downloaded 3257 times
Now, I know that I'm a complete dilettante when it comes to the actual science embodied in these devices. Nevertheless, when I scrolled through this document, this is the thing that got my attention:

HMV patent illustration.jpg
HMV patent illustration.jpg (135.33 KiB) Viewed 20214 times

You see what it says at the bottom there? It says this is a "Schematic of a Farnsworth IEC Fusor."

Well, if I've learned anything from all this discussion over the past 20 years it is this: that is NOT a Farnsworth fusor. It is what I like to call the "Hirsch/Meeks Meeks Variation" of the Farnsworth fusor.

Robert Hirsch has a long and curious history with fusion research. After earning his PhD in nuclear physics with an emphasis in fusion, ITT – which had acquired Farnsworth, the company, the man and his work, in 1949 – hired Hirsch so that the fusion lab in Fort Wayne would have a credentialed executive on board to give the program... well, credibility. Hirsch was brought on as the guy who could convince the Atomic Energy Commission to fund ITTs fusion research so that ITT wouldn't have to spend its own funds on such a pie-in-the-sky undertaking as Philo Farnsworth's fusion bong.

But Hirsch had ideas of his own, not the least of which included an ambitious career trajectory that would ultimately propel him to the top spot in the Department of Energy's fusion program, where - despite his experience with Farnsworth and IEC – he funneled billions of dollars into hot whirling donuts.

While he was with Farnsworth in the mid-60s, Hirsch built fusors of his own design. He knew that he needed to persuade the AEC to siphon funds from other more entrenched institutional research. Working with a skilled engineer named Eugene Meeks ("the best hands in the business"), Hirsch developed the scaled down model of the fusor that we are all familiar with. There is one great photo of young Robert Hirsch and another ITT/Farnsworth engineer, Steve Blaising, getting ready to roll the first incarnation of the Hirsch/Meeks Variation into an AEC meeting. That's the infamous gathering where the officer in charge settled back in his chair, arms folded defiantly across his chest, and asked of the others present, "OK, whose budget is this going to come out of?"

45_portable_hirsch_blaising1.jpg
45_portable_hirsch_blaising1.jpg (192.25 KiB) Viewed 20214 times

The Hirsch Meeks Variation (let's call it the "HMV") is what we are all experimenting with here at Fusor.net - and what Carl Greninger and his students like Jake Hecla are working with at the very fine Northwest Nuclear Laboratories. Don't get me wrong. I think the HMV is a marvelous device and it daily proves the principle – that a star can be bottled using the principles and properties of the actual particles that are being confined. They don't need to be pressed together by massively brute, external forces.

But it is my contention that as useful as the HMV has been, despite the body of knowledge that has been accumulated here and elsewhere about its construction and operation, it has been more than 50 years since anybody has built an Actual Farnsworth Fusor (which I'm going to henceforth refer to as "AFF").

What's the difference? Well, let's start with this illustration from Farnsworth's patent:

Farnsworth Fusor Illustration.jpg
Farnsworth Fusor Illustration.jpg (123.2 KiB) Viewed 20214 times

Remember, this is the patent that was described to me, when I first met the Farnsworth family in 1975, as "incomplete." The process of the patent's creation is recounted in both my biography of Farnsworth and Pem Farnsworth's memoir. By the time the patent was being prepared, Farnsworth himself had become sufficiently frustrated with the entire process (and concerned about the possible impact) that he'd slipped into the long, slow process of self-destruction that resulted in his untimely demise in 1971 at the age of 64.

What is most obvious about this illustration is the construction of the cathode at its center. I have actually seen one of these cathodes, and this is what it looks like:
Cathode-DSC_0163_HDR-crop.jpg


It should be very obvious that this cathode is VERY different from the sort of wire grid that we (yes, I use the term loosely) are building into the fusors we are experimenting with at Fusor.net.

I showed this photo of an AFF cathode to Frank Sanns recently, and his immediate observation on seeing it was that the large openings are Einzel lenses, as described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einzel_lens

So right away, we know that the Farnsworth approach to this process was very different from the Hirsch approach.

At the very least, the presence of an electrostatic focusing feature in the cathode suggests a result very different from the "weren't entirely accurate" conclusions that Jake Hecla and Carl Greninger report from their work with the HMV.

Here my actual understanding of these things starts to go off the cliff. I don't know what else that cathode can do.

And so the questions:

Though both work on the same essential principles, what are the real differences between an AFF and and HMV? Obviously the design and construction of the cathode/grid is a big difference. And obviously the AFF illustration includes ion guns.

In conversations with Kent Farnsworth many years ago, he inferred that the large openings also gave whatever protons the reaction produced a way to reach the anode, where they could "work" toward the direct conversion of electrical output from the fusor. I guess that's one possibility.

What about the ion guns? Taken in combination with that remarkable cathode/grid, what do they add to the equation?

Despite all the work that has been done over the past two decades with the Hirsch/Meeks Variation, it has been more than FIFTY YEARS since anybody has attempted to build or experiment with an Actual Farnsworth Fusor.

Which begs the question: has the time come?
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by ian_krase »

Now this is super interesting.

(one feels a little quantum of the legend akin to what Doug Coulter has been working on).

If those rings are einzel lenses, what make up the start and end elements? Are they insulated from the center somehow?
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Maciek Szymanski »

The design of this cathode is quite well explained in both - the Hirsch's paper form 1967 in Journal of Applied Physics and in the Farnsworth's patent:

Robert L. Hirsch Inertial‐Electrostatic Confinement of Ionized Fusion Gases
Philo T Farnsworth METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PRODUCING NUCLEAR-FUSION REACTIONS

The purpose of applying the separate biasing potential to cathode ports was to compensate for electron leak current, not for beam focusing.

There are also some photos of the cathodes in J. Willard Marriott Library collection:

Image

Image

Image
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Richard Hull »

Oh God....All my good deeds wasted. I had posted a long history of the fusor related to Paul's original post that he has now reposted. All of this was lost in that famous dead zone week.

Here goes a second pass attempt.

Farnsworth's original fusor, as built in the little bell jar, was first run up in 1960-61 time frame. It used electrons as the active element along the lines of his original multipactor. It failed to do fusion! Not so much as one fusion event was ever captured. So all the early years were a bust.

Finally, Farnsworth was convinced to make a slightly larger bell jar fusor that accelerated deuterons rather than electrons. This worked, but not well at all.

In late summer of 1963 Robert Hirsch was in the final year of his doctoral work and arrived at ITT as a guest worker. Hirsch told me that they were still just piddling with the bell jar systems!! I just re-listened to his taped sit-down, face-to-face interview that I recorded in 1999. So, for about 3 years the much vaunted Farnsworth team was still, more of less spinning their wheels with all glass fusors with all glass plumbing and mercury diff pumps!! Bob made some suggestions that others on the team had been making on and off and got them on the modern all metal systems. He then left to finish his doctorate. His suggestions were so well received that the Admiral, (Furth), got Hirsch to come to work full time at the ITT fusor effort. Bob was now the titular head of team's physics and George Bain remained the head of the engineering effort. Farnsworth was never a full time player in the lab, but would still oversee the overall effort from his office on the second floor.

Formal ion Gunned systems were introduced and the team were doing much better by late 1964 due to both Bain and Hirsch pushing for real results. The effort by the team was focused on a fusor in what was called the "pit" area. A large sunken pit in the ground floor into which an automobile hydraulic lift was mounted allowed the fusor to be worked on at ground level and lowered for testing to avoid neutron exposure at the floor level where all the instrumentation was located. Both Hirsch and Meeks confirmed that the levels did not warrant all this hoopla as the neutron levels were not dangerous at that stage of their work.

Farnsworth was convinced that the fusor would suddenly "take-off" and become a dangerous source of radiation, thus all the precautions. There were personality issues all along between George Bain and Gene Meeks. Meeks was a sharp technician, but rather sure of himself. (Hirsch noted to me that of all the workers on his arrival only Gene had a good comprehensive understanding about fusion and what they were about.) Hirsch and Meeks hit it off right away. Hirsch suggested that if he could have his own effort with Meeks as his "practical engineer" he would like to work on a second stream of parallel research.

George Bain noted to me in my face-to-face interview with him in 2000 that he was delighted to separate Gene from the purely Farnsworth "pit" effort and persuaded both the Admiral and Farnsworth that the parallel effort would be ideal. This expansion demanded a second "safe area" for the Hirsch-Meeks effort. A special borated, cinder block area was created that went all the way to the ceiling with a right angled entrance alley of borated block. In this sealed off 12X12 area called "the cave", a large tall mirror looked down the alley way to give a reflected image of fusor within the cave. (No cheap TV cameras back then).

All people involved repeated the same tale of how Farnsworth was almost never in the lab, but up in his office dreaming up new ideas which he forced or rather recommended to the Bain-Haak Team working the pit fusor. The only time Phil was in the lab was for major runs, tests and group discussions. Days would often pass without Farnsworth visiting the lab. The days of Farnsworth as an active laboratory participant, as in the early days of the TV work, were over. Fred Haak was pulled from the "Tube Lab" upstairs to come to work with the Farnsworth team in 1963. Fred was very familiar with the modern all metal vacuum systems and got the team out of glass plumbing and mercury vapor diff pumping.

In 1964 another technician was added to the team. Steve Blaising would be the final member of the "working team". By 2002, I had interviewed via multiple phone interviews and face-to-face interviews every living member of the Farnsworth fusion effort! To my knowledge I am the only person who has ever interviewed them all. Today, all are dead save Robert Hirsch. I also interviewed Pem Farnsworth, (Phil's wife - also now deceased). I feel I must now tell and list in order, from the most credible and useful to the least useful of the interviewed folks.

Gene Meeks and Steve Blaising (technicians) about 90% of all I know regarding the technical effort was the work product given me by these two guys who were there and hands-on everyday. I cannot over stress the value of these two people in the telling of this story. Gene obtuse, opinionated, complicated, yet brilliant and multi-talented reminded me of myself. We formed a close bond and Gene is a very hard man to bond to. Steve Blaising, seemed kind, generous and very knowledgeable. He would provide many images and reports that he had retained over the years. When these guys lived they represented the bulk of the technical and personal oral history of the effort.

George Bain (Lead and Head Engineer) Sober, circumspect and cautious all during my 7 hour face-to-face taped interview gave me great insights to the relationships and engineering difficulties he faced in what he referred to as having to herd a bunch of often sophomoric group of smart, but often, recalcitrant people. Of all the folks I interviewed, I felt he did hold back things he worried might get back to other living members of the Farnsworth family or team members. George was very careful about questions related to Farnsworth. I will note that everyone I interviewed felt warmth towards Farnsworth and mentioned that "Phil was always coming up with stuff to do which they were hard pressed to bring to fruition." George was in a precarious position, he noted, as he had to directly interact with Farnsworth whom he respected and the Admiral who all feared and respected. George would then have to go herd "cats" to turn Phil and the Admiral's orders and desires into a working effort that functioned at some level. In addition, George was the budget master as Phil was somewhat aloof to the nitty-gritty of submitting yearly budgets. This is where the Admiral really shone! Fritz Furth, ("The Admiral") worked hard and always came through with money to keep the effort fully funded, especially after the "lean years" of 59-63. Admiral Furth was the former head director of the highly respected U.S. Naval Laboratory in Washington, DC. He retired and came to work for ITT as a vice president of research in the New York corporate headquarters. He would make several visits to the Fort Wayne, Farnsworth fusion operation each year.

Fred, ("freddy"), Haak (vacuum engineer, specialist) Freddy was a short little power house, quick of wit and very outgoing. Unfortunately, he had a totally debilitating stroke about two years prior to my meeting he and Gene in 2000. What a recovery! He was fully functional and playing golf regularly and full of life! He and Gene smoked like chimneys. Fred admitted that he was a bit fuzzy on details after his stroke, but some of his memories were coming back out of the fog. For over two days, Fred and Gene and I talked about the time of the fusion effort they were involved with. All three of us actually got into the now abandoned Pontiac Street lab building and they took me on a tour. We actually went to the old lab area and many tales were told.

Robert Hirsch ( head of physics in the effort) Bob struck me as a "mover and a shaker", full of energy and with a natural and immediate "winning way" . He was congenial and as sharp as a tack. Bob has been the head of the U.S. DOE fusion effort in the late 60's and early 70's, A V.P. at Exxon, A V.P. at ARCO petroleum, the CEO of his own corporate "Think Tank", and would become a Senior Analyst at Rand Corporation. To say he was very successful is an understatement. He knows Washington and government and they know him. I have lost touch with him in the last decade.

My interview was straight forward and was about two hours in the morning, then we lunched, and another 2 hours afterward. I taped much of it. Bob was very cautious in many ways but would give immediate answers to scientific questions. His history took up half the interview as I was most curious about his forming and ultimately running the controversial "HARP project. Bob supplied a tremendous amount of information about his cave efforts that added to and confirmed much of Gene Meeks testimony of that effort.

Pem Farnsworth - (wife of Philo) I interviewed her in the old Farnsworth, Fort Wayne, State Street home. She gave me a lot of insight into the family and some of Farnsworth's foibles. Most interesting was the tale of how Phil hired Gene Meeks who worked at ITT for some part time work at the State Street home. This was in late 1958 after ITT had refused to fund the fusor fusion effort. Geek would leave work with Phil and Pem would fix them supper. They were going to build and install a full fusor system in Farnsworth's basement. Pem noted that they would work so late that she would often fix a late night snack and on a few occasions, breakfast before they had to go immediately back to work. This explains the close bond between Farnsworth and Meeks.

Now back to the fusor - "what is it?" issue

All, that is 100% of the latter-day fusors, both pit and cave types, were ion gunned fusors. None had simple wire grids. Bob Hirsch noted that many different grid structure were used and constant reworkings of the grids was common. The upshot is that the original, "as first built, Bell jar", Farnsworth fusor was the only true Farnsworth fusor! The later ion gunned fusors were "team developed" designs of numerous variants.

One significant advance came when Bob casually mentioned that 100 times more fusion was possible with Deuterium-Tritium fusion, (D-T fusion). Bob noted that to get a license would be a nightmare. Fred Haak broke in on hearing this and said that one of the tube lab chemists has an AEC tritium site license! So, by late 1965, all fusors were using the D-T mix and were doing good fusion in the 10e8 range. Ultimately Bob's cave fusor would top out at 10e11 neutrons/sec.

Gene, according to Bob, had "some the best hands he had ever seen at work" Gene was having his own ideas after working and learning from Bob, and asked Phil if he could develop a third system. Phil who had a long and close, pre-existing, personal history with Gene, agreed with Bob's blessing. Bob noted that this was Gene's time to shine and "I was not going to be the one to hold him back". Gene went to work on what he called his "Mark II Prime" in a separate room off at the end of the lab. Steve Blaising was now assigned to Bob's work in the Cave.

ITT was was getting concerned that the fusion effort was not going anywhere and questioning their involvement in the nuclear business. In 1966 they had Bob write out a report and send it to a lot of other scientists with the team's results asking for those scientists written comments on the effort at ITT. They would be paid by ITT to participate and submit their own papers. The budget for 1967 was approved, but ITT really wanted to hand the whole effort over to a university or, better still, have the AEC fund it. Bob was granted a hearing by the AEC fusion division. Bob knew that seeing a device might make all the difference. Bob and Gene put their heads together and designed what we now know as the "Hirsch-Meeks" fusor. (Image in Pauls original post above.) The design did away with the complex ion guns and replaced them with a heated, biased filament to allow for ionization of the the D-T mix between a spherical "ionizer grid" and the spherical vessel's shell. A central wire grid formed a reaction zone. The entire thing could be mounted on a cafeteria serving cart and carried to Washington for the hearing. In this manner it could be seen to produce fusion right in front of the audience.

Meeks went back to work on his fusor and Hirsch and Blaising would make the system up on the cart. (They are pictured above in Paul's post) The effort impressed all at the hearing but the AEC declined to fund it and once all the requested reports were in, the scientists were rather negative on this form of fusion. ITT had decided to limit funding for 1968. Farnsworth saw the handwriting on the wall and would leave to start up his own company, "Farnsworth and Associates", in Utah. He would drag George Bain and Gene Meeks with him as partners. Fred Haak actually went out to Utah to see if he wanted to come in with them. Freddy told me that the whole thing looked rather "put up" and "jack legged", he quickly returned to ITT and to his old secure job in the tube lab. He ultimately retired from ITT with a good pension.

Bob Hirsch had so impressed the AEC that he went to work for them. By June of 1968, Steve Blaising was the last person in the lab and said goodbye to Bob Hirsch. For a couple of weeks Steve came to work and just sat around in the empty lab. He went to his old boss in charge of the vacuum coatings lab and asked if he could return to his old job. He was told absolutely, he would be welcomed back. Thinking that he would wait at his fusor lab until his old boss put in the transfer papers, he again sat around in the lab, reporting to his assigned work space every day for a couple of more weeks. One day, the Admiral poked his head in the door and said, "Steve!, what are you doing here. this project is shut down!" Steve told him that his old boss was going to take him back to the coatings lab and he was awaiting his transfer back.

The Admiral told Steve to follow him. They went into the Pontiac street facility manager's office. The Admiral also got the secretary to summon the coatings lab director to the office. The Admiral was hot under the collar and dressed both directors down in front of Steve. He wanted to know why the facility director had not done as he directed in a memo to return the fusion lab goods to the storage area and re-purpose the space. Furth also asked the coatings lab director why he had not transferred Steve over as he agreed. The Admiral said do not bother with any excuses. "I want the lab cleared and Steve will direct the removal and storage of all ITT assets from the lab at his current pay." When done, Steve was to report to the tube coatings lab, again at his fusor team salary. A report would be submitted to the Admiral confirming all of this to him and indicating to what use the cleared space would be assigned.

Farnsworth Associates would collapse within a year in 1970, George Bain would return to Indiana and open a photo camera shop. Gene Meeks would stay in Utah and work with professor Andy Gardner at the Brigham Young University in Utah operating his Mark II Prime fusor in a student physics training program. In 1973 the Brigham Young program ended and Gene moved back to Fort Wayne, went to work in a coatings lab and then in a TV repair shop for a few years and in the end, became a projectionist in a local movie theater until retirement.

Sometime in the 1980's, both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois would create a student fusor lab based on the true Hirsch Meeks design. These are still active today.

Tom Ligon working under Doctor Bussard as his system's engineer was directed in the mid 1990's to sell the idea of the IEC fusion device to science fair kids in high school. Ligon, realized the issues with a complex dual grid system with a filament heater would be too complex. He did away with the heated filament and ionizer grid and created the simple demo fusor with a metal or glass bell jar shell and single central wire grid. It was never supposed to fuse at the science fair level. Once Richard Hull befriended Tom Ligon and saw the demo fusor that Tom had cobbled together, both he and Tom realize nothing would stop this simplified device from doing fusion if placed in a proper stainless steel chamber and supplied with a deuterium atmosphere and a much more elevated voltage......And here we are today....

Summary

We are not building a true Farnsworth fusor.
We are not building the fusors of the ITT fusion effort.
We are not building a true Hirsch-Meeks fusor.
One might say we are building the Ligon fusor.
However, more to the point, we are truly building a simplified variant of the Hirsch Meeks fusor.


Richard Hull
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Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Frank Sanns »

Richard, thank you very much for taking the time to rewrite your post. I have been doing daily backups and have just backed up the site again with your post with it. We should be good.

You summary should read: We are really building the Ligon-Hull variant of the Meeks Hirsch fusor.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Just checking in after seeing Richard's post to echo Frank's sentiments: Thank you Richard for posting this again. I am going to save the post to my local drive and hope you will do the same.

Also, Maciek Szymanski, thank you for posting those images of the cathode from the UofU archives, they're rather dazzling.

The actual cathode, as seen in my photo, lives at the Farnsworth/TV museum in Rigby, Idaho. I assume it was a gift from the Farnsworth family. I spoke with the curator there a couple of weeks ago to ask if they would loan it to us to inspect more carefully (and perhaps replicate?) and the answer was a rather firm - and I dare say uncharitable – "no."

He did extend an invitation to visit Rigby to inspect it.

Maybe when it stops snowing in Idaho.

--P
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Ed Meserve »

Hello Folks,
It's been a while since I've last posted anything, but I lurk the forum semi-regularly.

I just happened to be in Idaho this week on business, and had a day to kill before flying out, so I took a trip up to Rigby and stopped into the Farnsworth Museum. The gentleman volunteering at the door kindly let me get a real close look at the cathode in question, so I took a bunch of pictures and tested for electrical continuity on the various isolated parts.

I also passed through Scoville,ID and hoped to stop in and check out EBR-1, but unfortunately it's off season (though I did get to see the experimental heat transfer reactors they were testing for nuclear jet that the INL folks kindly left outside.)

Here's a record of my visit, in photo form:
EBR-1, First Nuclear Power Plant
EBR-1, First Nuclear Power Plant
Experimental Heat Transfer Reactors 2 & 3
Experimental Heat Transfer Reactors 2 & 3
Farnsworth TV and Pioneer Museum, Farnsworth Room:
Farnsworth Display
Farnsworth Display
Looking in the Window
Looking in the Window
Cathode Through the Window
Cathode Through the Window
I tried as best I could to capture the various dimensions with my set of calipers and record them in pictures; so here they are in no particular order:
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Ed Meserve »

More Pictures of the Cathode:
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Ed Meserve »

A Few more Pictures:
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There was also a book the Museum attendant brought to me with a couple of diagrams of the full assembly, and in the cut away drawing you can see the arrangement of the cathode:
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Ed Meserve »

I also brought in my multi-meter to check continuity of the various parts of the cathode. The wire mesh on the larger openings (at least the outer mesh, I didn't think to check the second layer of the inner mesh on the openings) were insulated from the main shell by what looked like ceramics. The mesh on all the openings were connected to the insulated "bell" of all the smaller openings. You can see wires carefully insulated on the sides of each larger opening and the smaller bells were insulated by a ring of ceramic.

None of the smaller openings seemed to have been configured for a mesh.

Were the smaller "bells" used for recirculation?
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Richard Hull »

I already had about 30 photos of this stunning grid from Bert Poole of Texas who sent them to me when he went to the museum in 2010. Thanks for your images with measurements. We will probably never know much of the ins and outs of what was meant for this grid or if it was ever used in a real fusor. According to Gene Meeks and Robert Hirsch, not one of Farnsworth's brain stormed cathodes made a bit of difference in the results of any of the pit model fusors neutron/fusion outputs. Hirsch said " we were constantly reconfiguring for new grids!"

There are tales, and just that, of run-away events, all poo-poo'd by the living testimonies of all the people involved in the hands-on, day-to-day work. Hirsch noted that the very year they were getting a bit of fusion boost from D-T in the pit and cave systems, (1966-67), was the year that ITT was seriously trying to get a university or the AEC to take over the entire effort as ITT was weary of funding it. As such, by early 1968, all work stopped at ITT. Any reports, as seen in the above photos, dated late 1968 or 1969 was pretty much fluff blown out by Farnsworth Associates which never got going at all in the fusion arena.

I and others have copies of letters to Farnsworth Associates from ITT and its lawyers warning Farnsworth not to step on any of the many fusor patents granted to ITT prior to Farnsworth's dismissal from ITT. ITT noted they would actively prosecute any infringement by Farnsworth Associates. This effectively ended any work by the new firm on fusion beyond drawings and dreams. Many other venues were planned other than fusion for the Associates. All came to naught and all of Farnsworth's ITT team who followed him out to Utah rapidly filtered away. Fred Haak was enticed to go to Utah and check out the Associates. Fred told me that he was stunned at how poorly instituted the entire venture was and did not even stay the weekend there. Every single one of the Indiana people returned to Indiana within a year or two at most.

Only Gene Meeks remained, but not with Farnsworth. Until 1972 Gene worked at the BYU ( Brigham Young University) with Professor Andrew Gardner, as operator of a fusor there at the university for teaching purposes. When that project ended in 1972 Gene returned to Fort Wayne, Indiana for a job in a coatings lab for a year or two and then worked in a TV repair shop and finally as a projectionist at a movie theater. George Bain left Farnsworth in Utah and returned to Bloomington, Indiana and opened a camera and film development shop.

Farnsworth was an idea man in his later years. Gene told me that in Farnsworth's big office, there were large glass cabinets and cases filled with failed ideas, tubes and grids that were never tested but built by the model shop, the tube lab and machine shop. One super cathode idea that Farnsworth put Gene on to complete in a rush, forced Gene to work over time to complete it in 1966. He delivered it to Farnsworth, but never saw it appear downstairs in the fusor lab. Later, Gene said he saw it in one of the glass display cases. "Phil was like that"....Gene said. "Soon we got to be able to read him"...."know his methodology and could tell when he would follow up"..."We did what he said most of the time, but ignored a lot of his ideas that we knew would take time and go no where."......"alone in his office, he just had ideas"

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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Rex Allers »

More great sharing of your efforts to accumulate fusion attempt history. Thanks, Richard.
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Nicolas Krause »

Thank you for all the wonderful photos Ed, do you recall the title of the book? I can't make it out from the photographs you've provided.
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Ed Meserve »

It was a hard cover book, "Philo T. Farnsworth, The Father of Television", by Donald Godfrey.

https://www.amazon.com/Philo-T-Farnswor ... 445&sr=8-3
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

First, copious thanks to Ed Meserve for making the arduous journey over the river and through the snow to Rigby Idaho, and for sharing those outstanding, detailed images of what we (well, <I> have been referring to as "the Rigby cathode." It's a cathode, it's in Rigby, so...

Also, I see that Ed posted a couple of images from Donald Godfrey's Farnsworth bio of one of the early fusor models. I just spent four days in the presence of that device, which I first saw tucked away in the corner of a bedroom/study at Pem Farnsworth's house in Salt Lake in the summer of 1975. We're calling that one "The Little Guy" - as you'll appreciate when I post a photo of it alongside the larger "cave fusor" that, along with much of the Farnsworth Family archives, as found its way to a home in Los Angeles.

In the meantime, here are two better renderings of "the little guy." This was a spot-welded device that lived inside a bell jar. A closer inspection of the lab journals will eventually render more info on its place in the litany of fusor experiments in the early 1960s.

This is an artist's rendering of a cross section:
The Little Guy Cross Section.jpg
And this is a schematic identifying the various components:
The Little Guy Schematic.jpg
I did not take a lot of pictures of this while I was in L.A. this past weekend, but I don't think it's too late to get some. I'll see what I can do in the days ahead.

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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Richard Hull »

Thanks to the Paul for giving the nick name, "little guy" to this much used bell jar fusor. This was one of the last of the bell jar fusors according to Hirsch. He noted that none of the bell jar fusors did much if any fusion ever. "They were still monkeying with the bell jars in mid-1963", Hirsch noted. He said that when he arrived, they had just started to work at D-D ion fusion and let go of the electron knot virtual cathode of Farnsworth's original multipactor concept. "The pit was being dug and outfitted then.... They were not doing fusion with those bell jar systems."

I have corrected an error above. Gene worked with Andrew Gardner at BYU and not at the Univ. of Utah. Gardner passed away in 2010.

Gardner and Hatch did a paper that got published in 1975

Measurements on a spherical electrostatic confinement system employing 6 ion guns
Andrew L. Gardner, Dorian M. Hatch, A. I. Y. Chan†, and Robert P. Evans†
Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 251, 179-189 (1975).

This most certainly was the result of the Meeks fusor work at BYU with Gardner.
Gardner had earlier published papers on mirror machines!

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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

So let me see if I've got this straight:

Farnsworth started the whole thing, but he didn't know what he was doing, so they brought Hirsch in, and he's the only one who could produce any results (neutron counts). Despite those results, Hirsch couldn't get any funding out of the AEC, so instead he went to work for the AEC and funneled all the research money into giant whirling hot Russian donuts – which, twenty years later, he would disavow.

Is it any wonder that we haven't got useful fusion energy today?

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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Frank Sanns »

Some pictures that I took.
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Richard Hull »

Intrinsically, Paul's short summary is correct. Though somewhat brutal to all concerned. Farnsworth had his ideas and way of doing things. The team, mostly due to George Bain and silent collusion by Meeks turned the team around and started making a pitiful number of neutrons and fusion about 6 months prior to Hirsch's arrival. Farnsworth would quickly come to see the value of ion based fusion due to the "Bain incident" and Phil was all for it having spun the team's wheels on the "electron multipacting virtual cathode for 3 to 4 years. This wrong headed approach was going no place and all of the three other players on the team knew it, yet said nothing. After all, Phil was in charge of the entire effort at ITT. Nobody had the guts to tell the emperor he wore no clothes. (sad but true). I am still trying to figure out why they followed the dead end road so long. Respect for Phil? Fear of being the first to initiate a mutiny? The Admiral was in the idea with Phil. Would it be like "off with their heads" as spoke the irritated the queen in Alice in Wonderland, or would they precipitate a shut down of the program by ITT?

You had to have listened to the chorus of workers who universally were frightened over both the direction, failure to produce, and, in the end, the loss of their jobs. Everyone universally respected Phil, but slowly they realized that his direction was wrong and feared more years of bell jars and failed virtual cathode generation and, thereby failed fusion efforts with a natural road open to cancellation of the program. I am starting to transcribe my short notes and info. gathered from the mouths of the doers in my effort over the years 1999 - 2005.

As for Hirsch... He was the Admiral's idea. George Bain was writing some pretty painful engineering reports to the Admiral while Farnsworth was claiming a glorious fusion success. I figure the Admiral wanted nuclear PhD. level reports to read rather than conflicting reports from an electronics engineer in charge of the lab and his good friend Farnsworth's reports. The solution.... Bring in a person of such an education in nuclear physics that he would find out what was actually happening at Pontiac street.

As for Hirsch....Once ensconced as the AEC's head of fusion energy division in the Carter administration, he cleaned house of several go nowhere fusion programs and made a number of mortal enemies in doing so. Pay back for the snubbing of the fusor. To paraphrase Hirsch to me in my personal 2000 interview.........Here I was having killed programs that left the AEC with millions of dollars in the budget now floating about, unspent....I was forced by higher powers in the AEC to allocate the funds ASAP or congress would see we had too much unspent money and lower the amount in the next budget.....It is the way things work in Government funding.....At that moment in time the Russians were doing the best fusion in the world with their tokamak....The tokamak seemed a positive move at that moment in time so I threw all that money into tokamak research. I saved the funding for the next year and got a slight increase.....I did not feel proud at that moment and less proud today.....I created a monster that unlike the future for fusion energy would be the only thing self-sustaining and self-perpetuating in the world of fusion. I tried to interest the AEC into following up on electrostatic fusion, but there were still some hangers-on who remembered my presentation that they rejected and they had friends in the fusion effort whose programs I canceled..... So, I was beating a dead horse. I am still a booster of IEC fusion and hope it is taken up at some point, but I fear it is still a dead horse and, sadly to say, perhaps another dead end.

There is much, much more especially about the ITT effort to be told from the mouths of those who did the work and confided in me.

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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Richard Hull »

Most all of the preceding in this thread was before I dug out the final batch of notes, tapes and videos taken in my last visit to Fort Wayne. This last learning process pointed out by Gene Meeks, the absolute lack of a working neutron counter until late 1961 or early 62. In Pem Farnsworth's "Distant Visions" she claims that the singing counter confirmed Phil's ideas in the late 1960 first run of the early bell jar electron multipactor device. Gene said Phil and the team used a Geiger counter until they got the neutron counter! A counter that never clicked in late 1961. Pem might not be a good or reliable scientific reference here. A short missive of 3 pages written by Kent Farnsworth related to his Dad's work, as he remembers it, noted clearly that he and Pem were not allowed to visit the fusor labs due to security issues. He further states that on only one or two occasions were they allowed in the labs.

This counter issue is more fully explained in detail in Hull's attic. It was the lack of the neutron counter to indicate neutrons that first clued George and Gene to Farnsworth's possible self-delusions. Again, fully explained in Hull's attic. Farnsworth knew a bit of fusion physics and was so confident of his ideas that the GM counter was enough for him. Did Farnsworth ever admit to himself or others that the team spent the better part of 2 full years in total delusion??!! The GM counter pointed to all of this is....With no real neutron counter, was Phil's electron multipacting idea never really fully developed and properly tested??!! They moved on to the later fusor idea only once they had a real neutron counter. Gene did note that until the reversal of polarity, the Eberline counter never indicated fusion via the presence of neutrons in the bell jar systems.

The team, as assembled, consisted of two people.... Bains and Meeks who knew zero about detailed fusion physics. They had to rely on Phil's word. Their job #1 was to assemble the system. Only as the team matured after 1962 did they read and learn enough fusion physics to no longer rely on Phil's pontifications, but chose to follow the word of the newly acquired Eberline PNC-1 neutron counter as the true herald of fusion. We will never be able to speak to these two key early team member ever again to find out more.

Haak and Blaising came to the team only after the neutron counter was in use. The early electron multipacting work via GM counter acceptance on Phil's word to his two fusion neophytes doing the work in the darkness and ignorance of fusion physics was never viably tested as it should have been. Only these two early workers now, long dead could tell us more. Their early efforts were mechanical, electrical and engineering efforts relying on the ideas of a man they were in awe of, whose word they accepted at face value and as gospel. It was Phil's ideas being tested in the early days, not theirs. They were in no position to question his thoughts and commands. This was a constant reply to many of my questions as to "why and what", regarding their early roles. "we did what we were told and it was not our place to question"... A theme repeated at the Nuremburg trials. Back then there was a hierarchy in science and engineering. Underlings were to behave like good little Nazis and obey orders as if handed down from mount Olympus. Too much chaffing and decent or questioning and you might get a "pink slip". Gene came close to getting a pink slip at ITT, as noted in Hull's attic.

I am glad I listened to these old tapes where I grilled Gene on this issue. The only reason I did this is solely due to my real work and understanding about neutron measurement which I had to master. Would another non-technical interviewer have pressed Gene to the floor on this nuance? I did and was amazed at what I was told.

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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Frank Sanns »

No argument here on the historical data. It is what it is.

With that said though, I think there are other aspects to the story. Thanks to Jonathan Moulton (Philo's grandson), Phil Savernick for hosting and Paul Schatzkin for fanning the embers, I had the opportunity to examine some pieces of that history.

Having personally examined boxes of pieces of the earliest Farnsworth from the private family collection, up through some of the later, I can say there was an evolution in place. Opening an old box with something totally foreign to me, and experienced Fusor builder, was informative.

The science of how to do controlled laboratory fusion was in its infancy. The first Ivy Mike fusion weapon was only detonated a few years earlier. A laboratory race was also started to create controlled fusion for energy. Just about all of the approaches that you hear about today had their infancy in those years of the 1950s and 1960s. People were trying many approaches to make fusion viable. Much of what was learned was now difficult to do things but equally important, what would not work.

I view the Farnsworth contribution to this. It was his conception of a new idea to throw on the table and see what might come of it. Having held the precursor to even the one in the famous picture of Philo looking into bell jar, it was clear that much thinking was going on in the vacuum of knowledge of the entire world when it came to laboratory fusion. Even today, 50 years later, laboratory fusion is not yet working.

The days of Philo were full of dreaming of the solutions and not stopping to try to achieve those. In his personal notes are visions of what he personally believed a small fusor could do for the populations of the world. He dreamed of fantastical uses of fusion power in everyday life. Things that are the stuff of science fiction that might have been reality had he or others succeeded. Farnsworth did not want a device a mile long. He wanted something that could fit in the trunk of a car and power it or could make it fly with its endless power supply. I really admire his vision and his work in those days.

It is easy for us today so say that he was going down an unproductive route but then again we have 2020 vision in 2020. When I unpacked a piece of copper and some sparkles came off, I realized how little knowledge was available at that time. The sparkles were mica broken off from larger pieces that thinly insulated a multi circle template out of a copper sphere. It was the electrical insulation that was probably only good for a couple thousand volts at best. Or was it simply a capacitor for RF feeding of that inner template. To me it was visionary and left an impact on me. Not because it ever was successful but it gets and A+ from me as a novel approach from everything else out there. This continued in other designs and especially when people with other ideas and knowledge came to the party.

While the Hirsch Meeks design is what some of us have built as fusor, it is the direct result of the inspiration and vision of somebody driven for a SOLUTION. Will the new cube Fusor of HM design crossed with an Einsel lens be the new unit called a Fusor? Only time will tell but the initial seed and vision all started back with those earliest designs.

With that said, most of us would agree that metrology early on would have been appropriate but in the end, would it have really changed any results? I personally spent the majority of my work with various configurations studying the plasma itself before ever putting deuterium in to see if that was a little or a lot better than the previous design. We are making minor adjustments to a lossy system. Farnsworth was not looking minuscule changes. He was looking for the home run. Had he found the fusion sweet spot, gamma, activation, heat and other indicators including illnesses and death would have made it obvious even without proper neutron detection. Real fusion at useful rates is not subtle.

And then we had the funding issue then as we have it now. Progress and inflated reports have always been a problem when you are trying to get funding from the scientifically illiterate pencil pushers.

I just wanted to add this to the record to frame this and what is written in Richard's Attic. Perspective is everything. Hindsight is easy for us but stand in those shoes, with those dreams, and those purse strings and see how you would have aimed for the moon.
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Richard Hull »

Thanks for that perspective Frank. It is sobering in hindsight to wonder how anyone with any grasp of fusion might have thought it was possible in any simple or exceeding complex device in a laboratory space or even a gymnasium sized space. Nature and the physics militates strongly and rightfully against any form of fusion, save on the grandest scale that our feeble minds can comprehend. Even totally out of control fusion as done on earth in 1952 with the hydrogen bomb demanded a minimum of the power of a 20 kiloton atomic fission bomb to begin to create the instantaneous temperatures needed to burn the liquid deuterium and later liquid tritium in the fusion part of the bomb.

Again fission is internally stored nuclear energy and easily released as nuclear energy at a totally controlled rate! Like coal burning, you can easily and simply control the release of the nuclear energy. It is extant there stored internally. It is a totally mechanically controlled release of nuclear energy held in U235 at room temperature in the lab to create a mere warming due to a mechanical process. This warming process is smoothly controllable through a huge range from that of a summer day to far beyond the core temperature of the hottest stars. (A bomb)

This is not the case at all with fusion. There is no stored energy in any neutral light atom lest it fuse with a like atom. Therein lay the rub. "lest they fuse"! Not a single fusion is possible unless a huge amount of input energy force the two fusible atoms together against their coulombic will. Even then, where visible and measurable fusion takes place, the fusion energy is too weak to be harvested and not equal to the input energy. The entire endeavor, in addition, is probabilistic in nature. The fusion process is soiled at every turn "on the small", on "the laboratory scale". Will we ever learn that while bigger is, indeed, better in fusion, we can't make it "pay", even if we make it work in the humongous for billions in the treasure spent?! Fission and fusion are two different animals. One is ready to use nuclear coal and the other a mere nuclear physics dream and a seeming bridge too far.

The 2020 hindsight in 2020 might be good in pitying the work of the past wide-eyed experimenters, but it turns out it is not a learning experience for those of today. All that work from 1952 and Lyman Spitzer on to 2020 and beyond has taught us one thing. Bigger must be better. The pity is they are right!! The question is how big and how expensive will any successful, distributable fusion watt-hour be?

Regarding the name of the fusor. To my way of thinking, we might call any iteration of a non-linear, acceleratory, mechanical AMATEUR fusion system doing fusion, partially or totally, in velocity space, a fusor, regardless of innovations related to its internals. I do believe due to progress in amateur fusion, we have and can expect future improvements to varying degrees. the key is "amateur efforts" needed to determine the fusor concept.

In the end, is there a possible fusion, "lucky donkey"?

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Joao_P »

Thank for the information about the history of the Farnsworth fuser. The information and photos were very valuable. I made a lot of notes on technical terms to search in more detail. Thanks to mr. Paul_Schatzkin, Richard Hull, Frank Sanns for information, stories and photos.
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Re: Is It A Farnsworth... or a Hirsch (redux)

Post by Dennis P Brown »

All posters are required to use their full names. I've mentioned this to you previously - you certainly have it correct in the main panel but could you fix it for the titling in your posts. Thanks.
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