The first Fusor?
Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2022 2:19 pm
At our WaterStar summit near Los Angeles, we had a chance to see many files and unique items from the Farnsworth estate. Thanks to Jonathan Moulton, great grandson of Philo, we saw things that had not been seen by knowing eyes for decades.
I had the privilege of sorting through boxes and files, many in the hand of Philo Farnsworth himself. There were also a few boxes of unknown items. One box in particular had much old padding in it. On the padding were small sparkling pieces of what looked like fine broken glass. I put on some lint free archival gloves to protect myself as well as anything that might be in box. Some people chuckled at the site of the white gloves but being around archival items and items that should not be touched was natural for me. I was hunting treasure but did not know what I might find.
Seeing the sparkles, I was sad fearing that a treasure was in pieces in this box but I continued to unwrap the contents. The first item in the box was a copper hemisphere with a large circular cookie cutter type inside shell. Then the other hemisphere with a similar pattern on the interior surface. I was still waiting for the sad moment of what was broken but further inspection of the sparkles looked like mica. There was nothing else related in the box so the mica was coming from the hemispheres. Sure enough, the flat cookie cutout pattern on the inside of the shell was actually electrically insulated from the main shell with a thin layer of mica.
The picture shows the shells compete with vacuum and gas inlets, a viewport, and electrical feed throughs. The inner grid and the drawing were not yet brought together as we were playing a puzzle game to figure things out. Then the exclamation by Johnathan that he had seen a drawing that might be similar. Sure enough, there was the drawing and in a previously opened box, was the inner cone grid. The photo is of all of the existing pieces of the perhaps earliest of all of the fusors.
This design is interesting because the voltage potential could not be very high with only tens of thousandths of an inch on insulation. It appears that this design would have been running in an opposite polarity than we normal run. The design seems to suggest that ions were pushed to the center and funneled like particles into the interior of the cone inner grid. I find this interesting as the cone would make no sense electrically do get the job done but would make sense if it were a funnel to usher grains of sand into close proximity. This of course cannot work but is an interesting initial concept that after many years, men, and iterations became the fusor that we know today.
It is easy to look at the combined drawing, inner grid, and outer grid and make sense of it but things were no so clear when he first hemisphere was pulled from its storage box.
I had the privilege of sorting through boxes and files, many in the hand of Philo Farnsworth himself. There were also a few boxes of unknown items. One box in particular had much old padding in it. On the padding were small sparkling pieces of what looked like fine broken glass. I put on some lint free archival gloves to protect myself as well as anything that might be in box. Some people chuckled at the site of the white gloves but being around archival items and items that should not be touched was natural for me. I was hunting treasure but did not know what I might find.
Seeing the sparkles, I was sad fearing that a treasure was in pieces in this box but I continued to unwrap the contents. The first item in the box was a copper hemisphere with a large circular cookie cutter type inside shell. Then the other hemisphere with a similar pattern on the interior surface. I was still waiting for the sad moment of what was broken but further inspection of the sparkles looked like mica. There was nothing else related in the box so the mica was coming from the hemispheres. Sure enough, the flat cookie cutout pattern on the inside of the shell was actually electrically insulated from the main shell with a thin layer of mica.
The picture shows the shells compete with vacuum and gas inlets, a viewport, and electrical feed throughs. The inner grid and the drawing were not yet brought together as we were playing a puzzle game to figure things out. Then the exclamation by Johnathan that he had seen a drawing that might be similar. Sure enough, there was the drawing and in a previously opened box, was the inner cone grid. The photo is of all of the existing pieces of the perhaps earliest of all of the fusors.
This design is interesting because the voltage potential could not be very high with only tens of thousandths of an inch on insulation. It appears that this design would have been running in an opposite polarity than we normal run. The design seems to suggest that ions were pushed to the center and funneled like particles into the interior of the cone inner grid. I find this interesting as the cone would make no sense electrically do get the job done but would make sense if it were a funnel to usher grains of sand into close proximity. This of course cannot work but is an interesting initial concept that after many years, men, and iterations became the fusor that we know today.
It is easy to look at the combined drawing, inner grid, and outer grid and make sense of it but things were no so clear when he first hemisphere was pulled from its storage box.