When Ayn rand wrote AG it was after the invention of Dr T. Henry Moray had been refused a patent at the US Patent Office (even with a working model that produced 5kw continuously for 159 hours.

Ayn would certainly have heard about the work of Moray in the circles she ran in. His "free" energy device was covered in the news for over thirty years prior to her writing A.G. It was the perfect model for John Galt's primary power supply for the valley.

The interesting thing is that Moray's device did exactly what John Galt detailed. It drew electricity out of the air with an antenna.

As a long-time researcher into Moray's device I am very close to duplicating his wonderful invention. Moray could not explain the source of the electricity from his device and that is (ostensibly) why the US Patent Office denied his application. He described its characteristics in great detail. I talked with his son John but found he did not pay enough attention to his father's research to be able to duplicate it.

However, I have identified the source of the energy that Moray's device converted to electricity. He gave enough clues to make this possible now. The ultimate source of the energy is the Sun and it's solar wind. As this 'wind' of protons etc constantly bombards the planets of our system, it is a source that is tied to the behavior of the Sun.

What Moray's device did was to convert the mechanical vibrations created in Earth's charged upper atmospheric layers into voltage variations on a charged antenna. He then trapped these voltage changes into a series of step-down Tesla coils.

To illustrate the method he used, visualize a comb stroked through the hair and then brought close to a small piece of paper. We all know that at a certain point the paper will jump onto the charged comb. What we have all seen but not dwelt upon is that by moving the comb away from and then back toward the paper we cause the paper to wave back and forth toward the comb. In the case of our charged atmospheric layers they are the 'paper' and the solar wind is the 'comb.'

Moray charged an antenna with high voltage. Then as the solar wind compressed and decompressed the charged atmosphere all around us the field around his antenna would also compress and decompress. As the antenna was capacitively linked to the charged atmosphere the oscillations of the atmospheric charges made voltage variations occur between the antenna a the ground. Moray made crude, high-voltage diodes to allow some of the increased voltage to be trapped into his step-down Tesla coils.

Knowing where the energy comes from allows mankind to develop methods to trap that energy and utilize it. I, too, filed a patent application for the basic circuit and concept and the patent office refused it saying that it could not work. Then, they released my application over the internet which was a direct violation of the security promised to all inventors who file.... If the application is denied the USPTO is supposed to keep the application in a secure place to allow the inventor to make changes to his application to make it more acceptable to the reviewers. By releasing my application they did one good thing though. They made the basic concept available to the world so that others might build upon my work and that of Moray.

I expect the latter -- and still marvel at the way his mind worked. -- j
.

Tesla was able to create thunder storms in the streets of New York City. No one understood how he did it because he didn't try to explain it--he just did it. I read one piece that offered the idea that Tesla purposely did not leave behind any clues, instructions or instruments that could be used to figure out what he knew, because he didn't trust mankind. Who knows? He also, tragically, ended up a person who was compelled to count every piece of food and order his plate into sections with 3 peas, etc. Mark Twain was a frequent visitor to Tesla's NYC workshop--a testimonial to his fame, and supporting the idea that Rand knew of his work and based the idea of the motor on it.

Nikola Tesla's laboratory was destroyed by fire at about the time of the Spanish American War. Just imagine what he might have accomplished had that fire never started.

That's capturing microVolts.
Any radio transmitter broadcast thousands of watts into the air, but by the time that signals gets to your radio, it's very very small.

RFID works on this principal.

I think it was mentioned that Galts motor worked by differential atmospheric electrostatic pressure. I couldn't find the reference.

and yet we hear nothing about antennas in AS.....
what I wish is that we could capture the energy in
clouds before lightning strikes, and store it for use
as needed. . almost became an electrical engineer
over this. -- j
.

Wow! Converting radio waves into electricity!
Old dino never imagined.
That would not have worked during the Jurassic.

When I was in high school I had a pretty good antenna on my parents' house. When I wasn't using it, sometimes I kept it hooked up to an analog field strength meter. The needle would always deflect some. Occasionally I'd see huge spikes, nearly pinning the needle. I had no spectrum analyzer, so I never found out the source.

With a good antenna, you can easily deliver a solid fraction of a mW into a 50-ohm load. A phone charger needs about a watt to do any significant charging, more like 5W in a typical charger. I agree with his thing in principle, but it's thousands of times the power required.

A typical radio station transmits thousands of watts in all directions. Typically you need to catch about a billionth of a watt to get good clear reception.

Actually, these ideas are not so much theory as they are behavioral models. While it is true that our understanding of what electricity "is" is hazy at best our understanding of what electricity "does" is extensive. This understanding permits us to design all manner of devices that perform useful tasks. As a physicist I have come to accept that knowledge of what something "is" is more of a metaphysical question than a scientific one. Our knowledge of reality is entirely based on our ability to observe what things do and we can only surmise what these things actually are. It's like a box that contains an unknown mechanism. We can observe what the box does and come to understand how that mechanism behaves however, if we cannot open the box the "true" mechanism will forever remain unknown.

You are correct, and this is one of the reasons we have not developed a Grand Unified Theory yet - we can not understand the differences between gravity and magnetism sufficiently.

Nicely done.

beautiful job, Tem!!! -- j
.

I have been supposing simply that the static electricity
potential in the atmosphere could be captured, rather
than trying to capture the potential between cosmic
particles doing a dance. . and storing the energy
is its own challenge -- batteries are being developed
which are much better than those in the past. -- j
.

But of course, in the Gulch, you wouldn't have to worry about regulations of that kind.

Yes! . very interesting!!!
do you know what a "hexacopter" is? -- j
.

the Cu and Al galvanic reaction gave you the half volt,
I bet, yet it wasn't strong enough to push much
current. . I just wish that we could send a couple of
weather balloons up when it's stormy, hook 'em up
to some Li-ion batteries, and run our lives until
it's stormy again. . dreaming. -- j
.

One minor detail: "dark matter" and its corresponding dark energy (though I would ask you to clarify on that one) are referred to as "dark" because they don't interact with normal matter. If you can figure that out you'll have a Nobel waiting for you...