The "Waterstar Summit" - January, 2020
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2020 9:34 pm
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I'm not sure if I should call this "the <first> Waterstar Summit – or the second.
If this was the 'second,' then that would be because the 'first' was a gathering at the Farnsworth home in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the spring of 2001.
Present for that assembly were myself, Kent Farnsworth, and Kent's then son-in-law Tim Moulton. Kent had been pondering his father's unfinished fusion work for several years at the time and had some interesting ideas about the direction his father would have taken the research if a) he had sufficient funding and b) he did not harbor such misgivings about unleashing the beast on an unsuspecting (and perhaps undeserving) world.
I was just coming out of my (brief) tenure as an executive at Gaylord Entertainment, the company that had acquired my Internet music business, songs.com, a year earlier. That merger imploded 10 months later (October 2000), I was fired from my own company, and was looking for the next thing to do (I was also beginning to work on the Farnsworth bio that was published a year-and-a-half later, August 2002).
Gene Meeks was still living in the Fort Wayne area at the time, and we spent several hours with Gene after uncrating and opening the "cave" fusor that Kent had recovered from Utah and had stashed in his garage. (Funny moment: Kent asking his wife Linda "Honey, do you know where the fusor is...?" Not your typical domestic dialog).
At the time Tim, Kent and I were seriously (?) contemplating doing something to resurrect Farnsworth's fusion project under the aegis of what was at the time called "The Waterstar Project.
Why "Waterstar"? Easy, because the reaction we're talking about is a star, and the fuel can be distilled from water. I've been using the expression for, oh, 45 years or so (as well as "star in a jar.")
Nothing ever came of those 2001 discussions. But, if that meeting in 2001 was the "first" Waterstar summit, then, this past weekend will have to be regarded as the second.
A generation has past. Kent Farnsworth passed away (was it?) three years ago, but "the torch" – as JFK said exactly 59 years ago today – "has been passed to a new generation."
A few months ago, I started exchanging some correspondence with Tim Moulton's son (Kent's grandson and Philo T's great-grandson), Jonathan. I first met Jonathan (and his sister Jessica) in the spring of 2013 when the family descended on Los Angeles for Farnsworth's induction into the Television Academy (ATAS) Hall of Fame. Details of that event are here: http://philointhehall.com.
What I did not know when Jonathan first contacted me was that since Kent died, he has assumed stewardship of the Farnsworth Family Archives. Prior to Kent's death, those archives lived in a garage that Kent called "the Bob" – i.e. "The Building Out Back." That garage is where we found the crated fusor, and Jonathan rescued it and all the other random boxes of... stuff... that had been gathering dust there.
The Farnsworth family has a devoted ally in Los Angeles. Phil Savenick is an accomplished TeeVee writer, director, producer and multimedia artist who got sucked into the Farnsworth vortex after seeing the PBS/American Experience documentary "Big Dream, Small Screen" in 1997. Over the ensuing decades his home near UCLA has become a museum of vintage televisions and a shrine to the man who invented it. In the last years of Kent's life, he provided some material support for the family by purchasing artifacts and documents from the archive that now reside in his home (and a museum in Canada).
Once a dialog with Jonathan got going, it became apparent that there was a lot of material that had been spirited out to Los Angeles that might be worth looking at.
I discussed the prospect of going to Los Angeles to rummage through the archives with a few people at Richard Hull's HEAS event in October, and that is what happened this past weekend. Frank Sanns, Joe Ballantyne, Jonathan Moulton, Phil Savenick and his colleague Kevin Miller and I gathered in Phil's TeeVee Museum / Archive / Home in Westwood and spent four days rifling around in the Farnsworth family archives.
Over the weeks ahead we'll all be offering some posts describing what all we found and saw.
Of immediate interest is the notion that "everything we think we know about history of the ITT/Farnsworth fusion effort is wrong – or, at least, suffering from chronological challenges.
At the very least, it was surprising to discover that the very first fusor is NOT the "bell jar" device seen in photos like this one:
.
It turns out that THIS is the remains the very first fusor:
At first encounter, we did not know what to make of some copper hemispherical artifacts, as well as some curious center grid configurations, which you can see on the table in front of us in the picture at the top of this post.
We were mystified until sometime on Saturday when Phil pulled this out of a box:
As you can tell from the inscription in the middle of the page, this is a hand-drawn mechanical drawing of "the first Farnsworth fusor." By the 'EGF' notation we know this was drawn by Pem Farnsworth.
We're still at a loss re: what exactly this design was supposed to do, but if this is indeed the first iteration of the fusor, then it must be the one with the positive anode at the center rather than the negative cathode that became the norm with subsequent iterations of the fusor.
Frank and Joe spent quite a bit or time trying to sort out its design and construction, I will let them chime in re: what they figured out. Suffice it to say it's very different from any fusor we've seen before.
Before I punch out, take another look at this photo:
. .
1. The object that I am holding is the original spherical multi-actor tube where the ionization was first observed in the 1930s. That tube was supplied the progenitor of the fusor.
2. On the right, between myself and Phil Savenick, is a vintage fusor that we are calling "The Little Guy." That is the first fusor I ever saw – I first stashed away in the corner of a bedroom/office in Pem Farnsworth''s modest (cluttered) home in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1975. I believe it dates from the early 60s, and is different from the other fusors we've seen because the chamber is not vacuum sealed. The whole thing is spot-welded together and was operated inside an evacuated bell-jar, which itself lived inside a shatter-proof wire cage. Joe Ballantyine has some photos of it from the Farnsworth/ITT journals that he saw at the University of Utah Library.
3. In the front/center of the table is the copper device that Pem Farnsworth sketched.
4. On the left is the "cave fusor" - a ca. 1966 or 67 Hirsch design with a solid spherical cathode. That fusor has had quite a journey, from Fort Wayne in the 60s to Utah in the 70s, back to Fort Wayne in the 90s, and now out to California.
That's as LOT of Fusor History in one photo.
I'm going to stop here so I can get this posted tonight. There will be more to come in the days ahead - not the least a discussion of a very intriguing entry in Pem Farnsworth's hand in the last of Philo's "confidential" journals.
More on all that to come...
--PS
.
.
.I'm not sure if I should call this "the <first> Waterstar Summit – or the second.
If this was the 'second,' then that would be because the 'first' was a gathering at the Farnsworth home in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the spring of 2001.
Present for that assembly were myself, Kent Farnsworth, and Kent's then son-in-law Tim Moulton. Kent had been pondering his father's unfinished fusion work for several years at the time and had some interesting ideas about the direction his father would have taken the research if a) he had sufficient funding and b) he did not harbor such misgivings about unleashing the beast on an unsuspecting (and perhaps undeserving) world.
I was just coming out of my (brief) tenure as an executive at Gaylord Entertainment, the company that had acquired my Internet music business, songs.com, a year earlier. That merger imploded 10 months later (October 2000), I was fired from my own company, and was looking for the next thing to do (I was also beginning to work on the Farnsworth bio that was published a year-and-a-half later, August 2002).
Gene Meeks was still living in the Fort Wayne area at the time, and we spent several hours with Gene after uncrating and opening the "cave" fusor that Kent had recovered from Utah and had stashed in his garage. (Funny moment: Kent asking his wife Linda "Honey, do you know where the fusor is...?" Not your typical domestic dialog).
At the time Tim, Kent and I were seriously (?) contemplating doing something to resurrect Farnsworth's fusion project under the aegis of what was at the time called "The Waterstar Project.
Why "Waterstar"? Easy, because the reaction we're talking about is a star, and the fuel can be distilled from water. I've been using the expression for, oh, 45 years or so (as well as "star in a jar.")
Nothing ever came of those 2001 discussions. But, if that meeting in 2001 was the "first" Waterstar summit, then, this past weekend will have to be regarded as the second.
A generation has past. Kent Farnsworth passed away (was it?) three years ago, but "the torch" – as JFK said exactly 59 years ago today – "has been passed to a new generation."
A few months ago, I started exchanging some correspondence with Tim Moulton's son (Kent's grandson and Philo T's great-grandson), Jonathan. I first met Jonathan (and his sister Jessica) in the spring of 2013 when the family descended on Los Angeles for Farnsworth's induction into the Television Academy (ATAS) Hall of Fame. Details of that event are here: http://philointhehall.com.
What I did not know when Jonathan first contacted me was that since Kent died, he has assumed stewardship of the Farnsworth Family Archives. Prior to Kent's death, those archives lived in a garage that Kent called "the Bob" – i.e. "The Building Out Back." That garage is where we found the crated fusor, and Jonathan rescued it and all the other random boxes of... stuff... that had been gathering dust there.
The Farnsworth family has a devoted ally in Los Angeles. Phil Savenick is an accomplished TeeVee writer, director, producer and multimedia artist who got sucked into the Farnsworth vortex after seeing the PBS/American Experience documentary "Big Dream, Small Screen" in 1997. Over the ensuing decades his home near UCLA has become a museum of vintage televisions and a shrine to the man who invented it. In the last years of Kent's life, he provided some material support for the family by purchasing artifacts and documents from the archive that now reside in his home (and a museum in Canada).
Once a dialog with Jonathan got going, it became apparent that there was a lot of material that had been spirited out to Los Angeles that might be worth looking at.
I discussed the prospect of going to Los Angeles to rummage through the archives with a few people at Richard Hull's HEAS event in October, and that is what happened this past weekend. Frank Sanns, Joe Ballantyne, Jonathan Moulton, Phil Savenick and his colleague Kevin Miller and I gathered in Phil's TeeVee Museum / Archive / Home in Westwood and spent four days rifling around in the Farnsworth family archives.
Over the weeks ahead we'll all be offering some posts describing what all we found and saw.
Of immediate interest is the notion that "everything we think we know about history of the ITT/Farnsworth fusion effort is wrong – or, at least, suffering from chronological challenges.
At the very least, it was surprising to discover that the very first fusor is NOT the "bell jar" device seen in photos like this one:
.
It turns out that THIS is the remains the very first fusor:
At first encounter, we did not know what to make of some copper hemispherical artifacts, as well as some curious center grid configurations, which you can see on the table in front of us in the picture at the top of this post.
We were mystified until sometime on Saturday when Phil pulled this out of a box:
As you can tell from the inscription in the middle of the page, this is a hand-drawn mechanical drawing of "the first Farnsworth fusor." By the 'EGF' notation we know this was drawn by Pem Farnsworth.
We're still at a loss re: what exactly this design was supposed to do, but if this is indeed the first iteration of the fusor, then it must be the one with the positive anode at the center rather than the negative cathode that became the norm with subsequent iterations of the fusor.
Frank and Joe spent quite a bit or time trying to sort out its design and construction, I will let them chime in re: what they figured out. Suffice it to say it's very different from any fusor we've seen before.
Before I punch out, take another look at this photo:
. .
1. The object that I am holding is the original spherical multi-actor tube where the ionization was first observed in the 1930s. That tube was supplied the progenitor of the fusor.
2. On the right, between myself and Phil Savenick, is a vintage fusor that we are calling "The Little Guy." That is the first fusor I ever saw – I first stashed away in the corner of a bedroom/office in Pem Farnsworth''s modest (cluttered) home in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1975. I believe it dates from the early 60s, and is different from the other fusors we've seen because the chamber is not vacuum sealed. The whole thing is spot-welded together and was operated inside an evacuated bell-jar, which itself lived inside a shatter-proof wire cage. Joe Ballantyine has some photos of it from the Farnsworth/ITT journals that he saw at the University of Utah Library.
3. In the front/center of the table is the copper device that Pem Farnsworth sketched.
4. On the left is the "cave fusor" - a ca. 1966 or 67 Hirsch design with a solid spherical cathode. That fusor has had quite a journey, from Fort Wayne in the 60s to Utah in the 70s, back to Fort Wayne in the 90s, and now out to California.
That's as LOT of Fusor History in one photo.
I'm going to stop here so I can get this posted tonight. There will be more to come in the days ahead - not the least a discussion of a very intriguing entry in Pem Farnsworth's hand in the last of Philo's "confidential" journals.
More on all that to come...
--PS
.
.