Linda Brown wrote:
Think 1961 .... Satellites ....... And remember that this falls squarely in the " missing years" from 1958 to 1967. Linda
And in August 1964, Alexander de Seversky 'goes public' to Popular Mechanics with the Ionocraft. Another prairie chicken routine, or part of a 'limited release' strategy? Or completely unrelated?
The CEO of Seversky Electronatom company, at least at some point, is Beebe Bourne of the 'Bourne music publishing family' who at some point is also 'special assistant to the President of the United States'. She died in 2005, age not published but I'm guessing 60s-70s. Most of her awards are for services to music publishing. She had a reputation for being an extremely aggressive enforcer of copyright and was not well liked by her enemies.
A formidable woman, but I'm wondering what credentials Beebe possessed in the 1960s that would qualify her for CEO of an experimental aircraft company based on an entirely untried method of propulsion? And how did she get the ear of a President, and which one?
Possibly she runs Electronatom much later, after they got out of the aircraft business, since sometime between 1946 and 1955 the director is apparently Jack Frye, a much more sensible choice it would seem.
http://www.sedonalegendhelenfrye.com/page24.html
An interesting and potentially relevant conspiracy-related book on oss.net possibly called either 'Gold Warriors' or 'Dear Jane', 2005 by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave, claims:
Remnants of OSS personnel in France worked for Donovan and Britain’s MI-6 under cover
of a company called Electronatom Corporation. FBI, bureau memo, 4 March 1954.
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:6l ... ectronatom
Here's another FBI memo:
http://www.smokershistory.com/Donovan.htm
"On 9/11/52 Bureau Agents interviewed [blacked out] at which time [blacked out] stated [blacked out] was trying to develop an invention which would take smoke out of the air, and in this regard, a corporation had been formed called the Electronatom Corporation with offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and laboratory at 7 West 45 Street, NYC. This corporation was being promoted by Gen. William Donovan" (NY Rpt, 9/29/52).
Does that sound familiar? I recall Mr Twigsnapper saying something about a special air conditioning unit for Winston Churchill who liked his cigars...?
Electronatom is doing business at least through 1971, when a wrongful dismissal lawsuit is decided against the company, but damages are not awarded. The suit appears to be cited as precedent several times.
Documents relating to it show up in the correspondence of journalist Eugene Lyons in 1975, but I'm not sure what they are.
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf8 ... &brand=oac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Lyons
Lyons seems to have had an interesting background: staunchly Communist until working for Tass in Stalin's USSR in the 1930s, then became a fierce critic of Communism and worked for Radio Free Europe.
Some of the technical claims from the Popular Mechanics article are interesting:
When practical craft are built, their designers expect to have a choice of several power supply systems now under development for NASA's space program. Some of these include:
Gas-turbine generators --- Several firms, notably General Electric and Allis-Chalmers, have come up with compact, light weight, kerosene- fueled turbines, originally intended as power sources for spacecraft. These may be used to generate electricity aboard Ionocraft.
Fuel cells--- These are chemical reactors producing electricity like a storage battery, but drawing their chemicals from external supply tanks. NASA is currently testing fuel cells converting hydrogen and oxygen to electricity, with drinking water as a byproduct.
Solar cells directly convert sunlight to electricity-the present energy source of most satellites. When high-efficiency solar cells are available, they may keep Ionocraft aloft for indefinite periods.
Power From Boiling Mercury ~
Sunflower --- A code name for another project aimed at deriving electric power directly from sunlight. It employs an umbrella-like reflector that focuses the sun's heat to boil mercury, which expands through a turbine and drives an electric generator (Solar-power supplies would be back-stopped by other kinds of power generators to take over whenever no sunlight is available.).
Microwave radiation --- Concentrated beams of high-frequency radio waves may transfer energy from ground stations to the Ionocraft if the craft is to be used as a hovering platform in a fixed position. Raytheon has pioneered this type of energy transmission through its Amplitron tube and has recaptured as much as 72 percent of the radiated energy at the receiver site. High-power laser beams may be similarly used for transmission.
Experimental hardware has already been produced for each of these off-beat power-supply systems.
None of the men working on the Ionocraft will be pinned down to any production timetable. "It's a pretty wild project," admitted technical director Bruno, a veteran 20 years in the missile business. "But that's what they said when we started working on rockets."
...David Yorysh, one of the project engineers...
The flight patent for the Ionocraft, according to the document up on the Blaze Labs site, was filed in 1959.
Another patent the Ionocraft is apparently based on is this one for an electrostatic air filtration system, which de Seversky, 69 at the time, claimed was his own invention which led to his discovery of EHD as a new means of propulsion.
A wet electrostatic precipitator including at least one annular gas passage defined by concentrically arranged collector tubes have liquid distributors mounted thereabove to produce downwardly-flowing uniform liquid films on the walls of the passage. A discharge electrode structure is disposed in the annular passage, a high voltage being applied between the electrode structure and the liquid films on the collector walls to create an electrostatic field causing ionized particulates in a gaseous stream conveyed upwardly through the passage to migrate toward the films to be carried downwardly thereby for disposal. Incoming contaminated gas at high velocity is fed into a reagent chamber communicating with a Venturi inlet leading to the annular gas passage, the chamber containing one or more manifold rings provided with an array of jet nozzles for spraying a reagent into the chamber and Venturi inlet to intermingle and react with chemical contaminants in the inflowing gas to produce reaction products in particulate form which are precipitable in the passage. The axial positions of the rings within the reaction chamber relative to the Venturi inlet are adjustable in order to optimize the reaction with the gaseous or chemical contaminants in the incoming stream. In addition, a ring of catalytic material may be included in the reaction chamber to enhance the chemical interation.
This filtration system seems to have been later developed for the timber industry, linked to a C. Girard Davidson:
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:GP ... ectronatom
The Business Interests series includes folders on the Alaska Pacific Lumber Company that
was founded by Davidson in 1957. This was the first modern sawmill and chipping plant in the state,
located in Wrangell, Alaska. He sold the company to the Puget Sound Plywood Company in 1967.
That company, in turn, sold the operation to the Wrangell Lumber Company, a Japanese firm. Other
timber business interests include: Pacific Northern Lumber Company for the construction of the
sawmill in Wrangell, Alaska, 1959; Seversky-Electronatom, a company that developed basic patents,
designs, and concepts for the creation of a commercially feasible device to eliminate particulate and
gaseous emissions caused by incineration and other forms of combustion or Hydro-Precipitrol;
Edit: A Google for 'Hydro-Precipitrol' yields this 1979 patent, assigned to Bethlehem Steel:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4256468.html
calling the general class of devices 'wet electrostatic precipitators', and references
Other References:
Fluid-Ionic Systems, "Hydro-Precipitrol," Attachment 7, HP1, 1/5/76.
Fluid-Ionic Systems, "Hydro-Precipitrol," Wetted Wall Electrostatic Precipitator, 9/1977.
Hydro-Precipitrol, Pollution Engineering, Aug. 1976, p. 55, Press Release, 3/31/1976.
M. Mazer et al., Adaptation of Wet Electrostatic Precipitators for Control of Sinter Plant Windbox Emissions, Presented Jun. 20-24, 1977 at Air Pollution Control Association, Toronto, Canada, pp. 1-16.
Hmm, wonder who Fluid-Ionic Systems are? Is that what Electronatom became?
Oh, here's another reference. 1985
http://www.wikipatents.com/ca/1180664.html
The precipitators that have heretofore been manufactured and sold by the Fluid-Ionic Systems division of the Envirotech Corporation included annular distributor members having tubular overflow nozzles of constructions that are identical to the nozzles 62 depicted in FIG. 4 hereof--that is, each nozzle is comprised of a threaded cylindrical tube having open lower and upper ends, with the upper end including notches adapted to disrupt any meniscus that may tend to form thereat during operation.
Oh hello there!
http://www.envirotechcorp.com
Hmm, a pretty heavy duty company, they do military hazmat consulting.
http://www.rexresearch.com/desev/desev.htm
http://www.blazelabs.com/l-desever.asp
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F ... -1327.html
http://www.americanheritage.com/article ... rsky.shtml
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3856476.html
http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/334610
And there is a postscript, of sorts, in the aerospace world. De Seversky’s device and the novelties mentioned above need air to operate, but in space a different form of ionic propulsion has proved valuable. In this method, a beam of atoms, typically of a noble gas, is ionized with electrons, accelerated with a positively charged grid, and ejected through a nozzle. The principle is the same as with a rocket engine ejecting hot gases, but ionized particles can reach much greater velocities because of their high charge-to-weight ratio.
This technology is useful for keeping the microwave antennas of communications satellites pointed toward the earth and their solar panels pointed toward the sun. Adrian Popa, formerly of Hughes Research Laboratories, explains: “The ion engines work well in the vacuum of space because the exhaust beam of ions can reach 100,000 km per hour, so that they use only one-tenth of the amount of fuel that similar chemical thrusters use to provide the required thrust to keep the spacecraft oriented correctly for 15 years.”
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