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 Previous: The Amateur Amateur: Saturday in the Park with Ray, Part II |  Next: The Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzler |
By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
September 23, 2003
This week, we view a Web site that reveals what the inventor of television was up to after video.
After Philo T. Farnsworth invented television, he moved onto something bigger, as described in detail at the Fusor.net Web site. |
Fusor.net is devoted to the science of nuclear fusion, specifically the inertial electrostatic confinement of fusion energy as first introduced in the 1960s by Philo T. Farnsworth, who is better known as the inventor of electronic television. Farnsworth's work in fusion produced very interesting and at times startling results, but was left unfinished when he died in 1971. This site is dedicated to amateurs, academics and professionals around the world who are now experimenting with the Farnsworth approach to fusion, the ultimate solution to all of the world's energy needs.
According to the Web site, "Farnsworth spent his life and career outside the scientific and industrial mainstream. Though his contribution to our contemporary culture is undeniable, when the time came to deliver his second great invention, he was unable to either prove or disprove his theories. The work remains, in a word, unfinished.
"Experiments with Farnsworth's `fusor' in the early-to-mid 1960s were impressive but inconclusive: despite tremendous neutron counts (the evidence of fusion), the fusor never achieved the break-even point, i.e., the point at which there is more energy coming out of the device than goes in to start and sustain the reaction.
"Nevertheless, in the past few years there has been a resurgence of interest in the Farnsworth approach to fusion. There is now a small cadre of `fusioneers' building fusors in their basements and garages. These are low-power devices, based on a variation of the Farnsworth approach that was developed by Farnsworth's colleagues, that are relatively simple to build and employ all the multidisciplinary techniques that fusion requires: vacuum pumping, stainless steel machining, power supply management, etc. Believe it or not, some of these devices, which really do produce fusion reactions, have been built for less than the cost of a set of used golf clubs."
Read all about fusion, fusors and fusioneers at the Fusor.net Web site and learn something diferent and very interesting.
Thanks to Bill Allen, WA5PB, for suggesting this Web site. Until next time, keep on surfin'.
Editor's note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and has been a QST writer for over 25 years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager), but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio. As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater and weather station (WA1LOU-15) from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan, a long time advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio, wrote programs to dupe contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he is on the board of directors of Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) and uses his Mac to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio Web page. To contact Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.
| Previous: The Amateur Amateur: Saturday in the Park with Ray, Part II | Next: The Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzler |
