FORGOTTEN INVENTIONS OF LENR

by George Egely 

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INTRODUCTION
Since its inception as organized research in the 1980s, LENR tests were focused on excess heat production and transmutation in the order of ppm and micrograms, mainly as an academic investigation. The technical field is electrochemistry. At the same time, P.K. Shukla predicted the formation of dust-acoustic waves—far from the LENR field. But most LENR scientists are unaware of early dusty plasma experiments.

More than a century ago, in 1907, the transmutation of hydrogen into helium and neon was observed by several researchers in gas discharge tubes. It has happened in dusty plasma, and the dust was created by erosion, or sputtering. V. Mitkevich published a strange observation in Russian, in St. Petersburg, in 1905: an interrupted arc discharge showed an anomalous energetic “kick.” The voltage in the arc reversed at the moment when the arc was disrupted.

At about the same time, Nikola Tesla and Henry Moray (both of them radio developers) observed that they could get huge electric impulses from discharge tubes with strange shaped electrodes. Then similar devices surfaced from time to time and sank into oblivion.

In 1905, a young assistant professor of physics in Vienna found that strange forces acted on dust particles floating in the air.

The aim of this review paper is to show that different aspects of LENR were discovered in due course, in the early 1900s. Thus there is a vast, and yet untapped, opportunity to generate electricity from inexpensive LENR-driven tabletop devices in a controllable way.

All that is needed is to connect the dots, grasp the hitherto unknown connections between:

− the physical features of oscillating dusty plasma
− the insights and results of early and recent LENR research
− the forgotten transmutation and voltage reversals in discharge tubes
− the forgotten electricity-producing inventions containing dust-producing discharge tubes

Today tabletop plasma-based particle accelerators are being developed in the backwaters of mainstream physics, independently of the above areas, which provide better accelerations than giants like in CERN. They are laser or electron beam-driven plasma “wake field” accelerators. This is the principle behind the “next big leap” in particle accelerators.

Transient dusty plasma offers even higher local accelerations and energy levels (in the order of several GeV range) at a fraction of the expense and energy input of today’s accelerators.

The forgotten transmutation and voltage reversal results in discharge tubes are examples of early experiments in transient dusty plasma effects. The same holds for the string of forgotten excess electric energy-producing inventions.

In this context, LENR-driven plasma discharge devices are just the art of how to create high local spatial and temporal non-equilibrium conditions, in order to create extreme accelerating electric fields for Coulomb shielding, and thus fusion. This is done by self-organized, highly non-linear effects.

The physical features of dusty non-equilibrium plasma waves will be briefly reviewed in the Appendix (Part 4). Thus the reader shall grasp the plausible events behind the forgotten plasma discharge transmutation effects and inventions. The reader will be able to understand the identical physics behind the reviewed inventions, though technically not all of them are economic. The most feasible paths to exploit the release of LENR-based electric energy will be shown.

In the last 50 years, there have been no radical, disruptive new inventions which drove the economy, or industrial productivity so markedly as the steam engine, or electricity, or semiconductors.

Now LENR effects in the oscillating dusty plasma wave environment offer such an opportunity at the same scale, but they can be done only against the wind of mainstream science.

If this breakthrough ever succeeds, the devices will be revolutionary old inventions.

The age-old riddle of what drove these devices has a clear intelligent answer within the context of LENR effects. Ether oscillations, or a violation of energy conservation, is not the right answer here.

Part 1 of this series, “Electric Energy-Producing Effects and Inventions Driven by LENR,” published in Issue 133, gives the history of LENR discoveries from 1900 to 1930.

Part 2, “The Four-and-a-Half Heresies,” published in Issue 135, mainly describes Moray’s electric energy-producing invention.

Part 3 “Recent Inventions,” details other similar, more recent electric energy-producing inventions. It was published in Issue 136.

Part 4 focuses on transmutation and briefly the Mitkevich experiment. This final paper in the series, published in Issue 137, includes an Appendix on the physics of dusty plasma.