I agree Rose, if this is the same Butterfield than Wonderland Lab does make a lot of sense for his origin.
A Santa Maria Times article from May 8, 1948, proves that Townsend's "JF Butterfield" was definitely a "James F", so that's one step closer to a connection.
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/630219529/
Bv VIRGINIA MacPHERSON CP Hollywood Correspondent Hollywood, May 28. It wont be long, a scientist predicted today, before movie studios will be consulting invisible squiggles from outer space for the proper time to release pictures.
They can do it by sidereal radiation, James F. Butterfield says. Thats sort of like sun spots only not quite. And it just about hits the publics receptive cycles on the nose. "Sidereal radiation, in words you can spell, is a bombardment of rays from the stars and the space between the stars.
For some reason nobody knows about, they have a tremendous effect on mans physical and mental processes, Butterfield says. You cant see em and you can't feel em. But yotf can measure em. The sidereal radiation recorder looks like a pot-bellied black stove with dials and meters where the fire ought to be. Inside a recording drum on top, electric sparks burn holes in a piece of paper.
Butterfield and his helpers at Lake States Securities Corp. chart these holes day by day and come up with the pulse beat of the universe. One look at the chart and they can tell you when the public will be in the mood for a Bette Davis mellerdrammer or a Rita Hayworth musical a murder mystery or a comedy. Whether you feel optimistic or pessimistic, Butterfield explains, depends on the intensity of sidereal radiation. He says he can tell you and will what will be doing in the stock market next month.
In February, he pointed, out, we predicted the stock market would have a strong upsurge in March. It did rise sharply despite some of the most pessimistic news in recent years.
A 1947 Catalog of Copyright Entries shows Lake State operating as early as late 1946, in Laguna Beach:
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=QD4 ... es&f=false
- lakestate-copyright-1946.JPG (10.91 KiB) Viewed 13139 times
Edit: And as Paul pointed out back in August, we've got that actual brochure! It's in the Gray Barker collection, along with its sibling "Sidereal Radiation and the Stock Market".
http://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/petro/lake_sec_1.pdf
http://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/petro/lake_sec_2.pdf
Yup, "a pot-bellied black stove with dials and meters where the fire ought to be" is the best description of this variant of the Differential Electrometer. Big ol thing.
Things I notice glancing at this brochure again (it's been years since I last did):
* as well as the "Foundation-owned" building at 634 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, Lake State Securities was also in the "Union Commerce Building, Cleveland, Ohio" and "715 South Coast Blvd, Laguna Beach, California". I mean yeah, that's literally just the Townsend Brown Foundation, it's not even trying to be a different organization (although technically it was)
* a foreword ("the following report deserves serious consideration") by "Robert Lewis Turner", whoever he was
* "Collaborating physicists have suggested that these rays are electrically neutral particles of energy (possibly neutrinos) which strike the Earth more or less from all directions. Careful studies have revealed that, whatever they are, they come with the greatest intensity from that part of the sky in the general direction of the constellation Hercules. Because they appear to come from one fixed point among the stars, the effect is called sidereal radiation"
So Townsend was already thinking about neutrinos as a possible explanation in 1946.
(Remember that Townsend's Differential Electrometer didn't actually measure a spatial distribution of particles like a telescope, rather it measured a floating electric charge that appeared to vary both cyclically and semi-randomly with time. Similarly to Maurice Allais' pendulum experiments, and I think Erwin Saxl's charged pendulum (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Saxl ). The "sidereal" correlation and "Hercules" would come out of doing a statistical analysis on the data points and based on a cycle which appeared to match Earth's rotation against the stars, which is not quite the same as its rotation with respect to the Sun.)
* "Related Sidereal Phenomena" section looks *very* useful
E. Esclangdon, Comptes Rondus 182, 921 (1926); 183,116 (1928).
Kolhorster, Steinke and Buttner. Zeits f. Physik 50, 808 (1928)
Harlow Shapley, Nature 122, 482 (1928)
Karl G Jansky, Electronics 6, 173 (1933)
H B Maris, Physical Review 54, No 6, 478 (1938)
Dayton C Miller, Reviews of Modern Physics Vol 5, No 3 (1933)
Miller of course is famous for repeating the Michelson-Morley experiment for years and claiming a positive result, which was contrary to Relativity.
I don't know the others, except Jansky is the guy who invented Radio Telescopy! I remember researching him on Linda's site circa 2016. A very interesting guy. His particular "sidereal radiation" is presumably the radio waves coming from the center of the galaxy. (Townsend knew that whatever he was sensing, it was *not* radio waves, but still seemed to be coming from the sky.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Guthe_Jansky
After a few months of following the signal, however, the point of maximum static moved away from the position of the Sun. Jansky also determined that the signal repeated on a cycle of 23 hours and 56 minutes. Jansky discussed the puzzling phenomena with his friend, astrophysicist Albert Melvin Skellett, who pointed out that the observed time between the signal peaks was the exact length of a sidereal day; the time it took for "fixed" astronomical objects, such as a star, to pass in front of the antenna every time the Earth rotated.[5] By comparing his observations with optical astronomical maps, Jansky concluded that the radiation was coming from the Milky Way and was strongest (7:10 p.m. on September 16, 1932) in the direction of the center of the galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius.
Jansky announced his discovery at a meeting in Washington D.C. in April 1933 to a small audience who could not comprehend its significance.[6] His discovery was widely publicized, appearing in the New York Times of May 5, 1933,[7] and he was interviewed on a special NBC program on "Radio sounds from among the stars".[4] In October 1933, his discovery was published in a journal article entitled "Electrical disturbances apparently of extraterrestrial origin" in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers.[8]
Jansky was the same age as Townsend Brown, but died way too young in 1950 (age 44).
Other quotes are interesting:
"The late Alfred Biefeld of the Swasey Observatory, a classmate of Einstein at Polytechnikum at Zurich, declared: "This strange and decidedly new effect is of extreme interest in the evaluation of the theory of relativity... its importance cannot be denied.""
Well yes. A violation of Relativity would be important, if it could be experimentally supported. The current scientific consensus is that no such supporting experiments have ever occurred. The question is, did Biefeld really say this, and if so, when, and in what context?
And Miller himself got involved! So that's interesting. Miller, Allais and Townsend Brown were all tracking the same sort of thing. But I didn't know that Townsend actually corresponded with Miller.
"Dayton C Miller, who was associated with Michelson and Morley in making the original tests for the ether-drift, said, "The observed characteristics are notably similar to the residual phenomena of ether drift, an explanation of which was never permitted by the theory of relativity. Brown's discovery may necessitate fundamental changes in Einstein's interpretation."
Yep, Miller's on the money there. Of course that's a big "if". Yet, as with Allais and the recent replications of him, "nevertheless it moves", or seems to.
Ok so one slight difference between Townsend's electrometer and Miller's stuff: Townsend measured something that seemed to come and go quite a lot, sometimes with "bursts". Miller, and the Allais replications, I think had more smoothness to it. BUT even Allais reported anomalies during eclipses, and I suspect Miller's data *was* a bit chaotic. The noisiness of the data is probably one reason why it was never accepted by the physics community (though the main reason was that they were expecting an ether-drift signal of a certain strength based on ether calculations, and Miller's data did not show that strength, so it was all tossed out). Townsend made the assumption that the noise in his signal was an actual signal with influence on crop and human biology (and sociology). This might be the case, and would be interesting if so.
One fascinating factoid is that in "New Age" circles there has always been a constant repeated refrain (in "channelled" information that "the Earth is entering a new region of space that will have effects on human society"). This feels very similar to what Townsend was claiming in the strong "stock market" version of his Sidereal Radiation claims. I wonder which actually came first: the esoteric claim, or Townsend's sidereal radiation claims?
* "The latest recorder was placed into operation July 18, 1946, at the post-war radiation observatory of the Townsend Brown foundation at Laguna Beach, California".
Townsend started his recorder in July, and had the Lake States Security Corporation marketing material copyrighted by December. 1946 seemed to be a fast year for him.
And the other mini-biography on psychological cycles (which was a legitimate field of interest for historians and economists at this point, especially after the 1929 stock market collapse.. and I forget where astrology was at this time. The Theosophists had started rebooting astrology in the 1870s through 1920s, I think. When did sun-sign newspaper columns start appearing?)
* Emotional Cycles in Man - Journal of Mental Science - by Rex B Hershey, University of Pennsylvania
* Cosmic Terrestrial Research - The Scientific Monthly - by Harlan T Stetson, MIT
* Periodic Inspiration in Poetry and Music - The Poetry Review - by J H Douglas Webster
* The Long Waves in Economic Life - Review of Economic Statistics - by N D Krondatieff
* Mainsprings of Civilization - John Wiley and Sons, Inc - by Ellsworth Huntington, Yale University
* Putting Cycles to Work in Science and Industry - by Edward R Dewey, Foundation for the Study of Cycles
* Diurnal Potentials in the Maple Tree / The Meaning of Bio-Electric Potentials - Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine - by H S Burr, Yale University
* Growth Correlatives of Electromotive Forces in Maize Seeds - by Oliver E Nelson, Jr and H S Burr, Yale University
Krondatiev (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave ) is now well known, though not taken seriously; the others maybe not so well known.
Harold Saxton Burr (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Saxton_Burr) is the author of "Blueprint for Immortality" (1972) (
https://archive.org/details/harold-saxt ... e/mode/1up ) and seems to be anticipating both Townsend's "electroculture" interests in Hawaii (if we take that as a genuine interest and not a cover, though it might have been both) and Christopher Bird's "The Secret Life of Plants", which seemed to attract a small but elite fanclub in the Navy/CIA psi scene by the 1970s.
The second version of the pamphlet, "Sidereal Radiation and the Stock Market", adds an extra endorser: "Dr H B Maris of the Naval Research Laboratory"
H B Maris seemed to have similar "cosmic influence" interests to Townsend Brown, so I can see why he might endorse Townsend's theories. In 1932 ( "Work related to terrestrial magnetism and electricity of the Naval Research Laboratory"
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... 01p00158-1 ) Maris was wondering if terrestrial magnetic storms are caused by comets.
H. B. Maris completed a list of magnetic storms for the years 1839 to 1930 and found that certain storms, about one-fourth of the total number, had a semi-annual period and not the period of solar rotation. He concluded that these storms may be of non-solar origin and due to the passage of the Earth across the planes of comet orbits; a complete analysis is under way. Dealing with the remaining three-fourths of the storms, he drew the average curve of the seasonal frequency and found that this was well accounted for by the ultraviolet-light theory of magnetic storms (see Phys. Rev., v. 39, 504, 1932).
There's an even more intriguing 1939 paper by Maris in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union":
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... i003p00353
Evidence of a sidereal barometric-pressure Wave
Humphreys [Physics of the air, 1929, p. 229] has shown that the daily tide in barometric pressure is subject to seasonal variations. This fact is well illustrated by Figure 1 which shows average daily barometric-pressure curves for each month of the year at Key West, Florida, averaged for the 14 years 1891 to 1904. Obviously, if we could neglect changes for other hours of the day and plot pressure values of the peak at 10 a.m. against sidereal hour-angle, the strong maxima of December and January as against the weak maxima of June and July would give a sidereal maxima for 10 a.m. between December and January at sidereal hour 3. However, if all of Humphrey's data for these curves are plotted against sidereal hour-angle, a maximum is obtained for sidereal hour 21, which falls exactly on a January minimum. The data of Figure 1, therefore, suggest the existence of a sidereal barometric-pressure curve which is independent of seasonal variations of the solar-pressure curve. The form of this curve would obviously be distorted by seasonal variations of the solar curve, and in this particular case the solar curve decreases the amplitude of sidereal curve nearly 50 per cent.
And this was previously posted in 1938 in the "Science News" section of Science Vol. 88, No. 2283 (Sep. 30, 1938), pp. 8a-10a (
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1664637 )
DAILY CHANGE IN THE PRESSURE OF THE AIR
The US Naval Research Laboratory reports a new, and a previously undetected, factor which may upset weather forecasting. Changes in barometric pressure -- one of the basic effects used in forecasting storms and their centers of action -- have now been found to occur with a daily cycle which fluctuates with the hours of the day as determined by star time.
Dr H B Maris, in a report to The Physical Review, points out that the barometric pressure not only has tides due to the sun -- as has long been known -- but also shows stellar pressure tides. The greatest sidereal effect seems to come in high lattitudes, in the northern hemisphere, in the vicinity of a line drawn through Sitka, Alaska. At this lattitude the sidereal pressure change may be as great as .167 millimeters of atmospheric pressure. This seems small, but it amounts to one thirtieth of the entire barometric change that occurs in common storms. Since many of the storms that sweep over the United States arise in northern lattitudes any errors, due to the new effect, which may occur in forecasting there have repercussions southward in this country.
Dr Maris states that "The positions of the troughs and crests of the pressure wave, as viewed from a fixed star, shows a drift to the east with change in lattitude toward the south. This effective time lag suggests that the driving force is applied in the northern hemisphere."
(The Physical Review paper itself pings, but I can't get even an abstract without paying.)
Back to the "Stock Market" pamphlet: "Under an exclusive license the Lake States Security Corporation leases Sidereal Radiation Recorder Model M-29 from the Townsend Brown Foundation. Funds are therefore returned to the Foundation to support further scientific research... In order to introduce the subject, Lake States Security Corporation is currently offering a weekly chart service to a limited number of subscribers at cost. The right is reserved to terminate this service at any time and refund on a pro rata basis when a future investment trust program is organized which, for obvious reasons, restricts the user of the radiation data."
In modern terms then, Lake States was a "startup" with aims to grow -- I can imagine something similar to "AI" plays in Silicon Valley today -- but was starting small and trying to not *quite* fall on the wrong side of stock market law. And presumably James F Butterfield was the one paying the lease to Townsend Brown, and hoping to make back his lease costs from subscribers. I don't know but I would imagine that the scaling up to a full trust never happened and that he probably lost money on this deal.
Or, possibly, Lake States while being a real operation might also have been some kind of spy honeytrap? It's hard to know with so many military people involved.
MEANWHILE THE BUTTERFIELD WHO MIGHT WELL BE THE SAME BUTTERFIELD (because he seems to share a similar interest in technology and psychology)
An October 1968 Popular Electronics article about the "Stereo" James F Butterfield! It gives some more details about what he was doing in 1953: not quite the same as his Mexico stereo TV experiments, but a very weird colour-over-black-and-white TV concept. He didn't get to start a company based on it until 1967, but he got the idea in 1953.
https://www.n5dux.com/ham/files/pdf/Col ... 20Isnt.pdf
CAN AN ORDINARY black-and-white TV receiver reproduce a color image? "No," you say. Wrong! Believe it or not, the answer is a resounding yes -provided the telecast is in "electronic" color using the Color-Tel subjective color process.
Developed by James F. Butterfield, Sherman Oaks, California, electronic color is a remarkable TV broadcasting technique using relatively unknown optical principles to transmit a monochrome picture that appears to be in color when viewed on an ordinary black-and-white TV receiver. Actually, no color appears on the TV screen-it exists only subjectively in the brain of the viewer. Although most viewers see colors, there are some viewers who do not-for reasons not completely understood. On the other hand, normally color-blind people frequently report being able to see the
electronic subjective color display.
In 1953, Butterfield consulted a Dr. Derek H. Fender and asked the famed eye expert to help analyze the Benham disc phenomenon so that it might be used to generate synthetic color codes.
TV Applications. When Butterfield and Fender had completed their tests, the next step was to apply their theory of subjective color to TV broadcasting. This resulted in the development of the Color Translator, a special TV-camera attachment that contains a modified form of the Benham disc.
A blog article on Butterfield's Color-Tel "subjective color" process:
https://theanalogage.blogspot.com/2016/ ... color.html
On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.
A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)
It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).
The burst of color was not "living color" (as NBC frequently touted in the 1960s), but something called "subjective color." The process was developed by James F. Butterfield of Color-Tel, a corporation founded in Los Angeles in early 1966. It gave the illusion of color by pulsating white light in a particular sequence for each color with a rotating device attached to a regular black and white TV camera lens. Butterfield had found in his many years of research that the human brain perceives colors through complex electronic codes. Butterfield was able to figure out the individual codes for the colors red, green and blue, and by pulsating white light in predetermined patterns with the device on the camera lens, could induce the brain of the television viewer to perceive color. Beyond that, ordinary monochrome equipment could be used in filming or taping, broadcasting and viewing.
There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.
Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."
Popular Electronics (October 1968) went on to report, "Right now, Color-Tel engineers are checking into the possibility of using electronic color for such things as color radar displays, color computer readouts, and perhaps even color sonar pictures. It may be true that, in its present stage of development, Butterfield's process is nothing but a scientific curiosity — however, 25 years ago, so was television."
Popular Science predicted, "You can expect color on your black-and-white TV by this fall [1968]." But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.
Although James F. Butterfield had many patents to his credit before his death in 2013 [sic], it appears this experiment didn't go as far as the press of the time might have suggested it could. Color-Tel last renewed as a corporation in 1972, and we can not find any evidence of other "subjective color" broadcasts beyond the Squirt commercial.
Butterfield died in 1983, not 2013. This blogger seems unaware of that.
So who was Butterfield's collaborator, Derek H Fender? His obituary from New York Times, 9 June 1997: (
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/09/us/d ... brain.html)
Dr. Derek Henry Fender of the California Institute of Technology, a biologist who studied eyesight and the functioning of the brain, died on May 28 at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 78.
He suffered a lengthy illness, said a spokeswoman for the institute, where Dr. Fender taught from 1966 until his retirement 20 years later as professor emeritus of biology and applied science.
Much of his research was based on innovative uses of contact lenses to determine the eye's position during his experiments.
He discovered that the eye sees as a result of a series of flicks and that the brain is limited in the complexity of the visual design patterns it can identify. He also found that the visual system is more acute in looking at vertical objects than horizontal ones.
To learn more about how the brain works, he devised an electrode-studded helmet with which he investigated the visual cortex, in the back of the brain, and the propagation of brain waves.
Born in England, Dr. Fender trained and taught at the University of Reading, where he also received a doctorate in physics in 1956. His interest in his specialty derived from service with the Royal Signal Corps in World War II, when he helped to improve radar by developing control systems for antennas and antiaircraft guns.
He is survived by his wife, Sue; a son, Antony, also of Altadena, and two granddaughters.
A WW2 radar expert, like everyone else in the post-war tech scene. I'm guessing then that Butterfield was one too.
Fender was 78 in 1997, meaning he was born in 1919. Same generation as Butterfield: just one year older. Also, if Fender only earned his physics PhD in 1956, then he wasn't in fact *Dr Fender*, and possibly not yet a "famed eye expert", when he consulted with Butterfield.
By 1971, Fender is at Caltech with a very strong "Dr Emmet Brown in the throes of mad science" game. His brainwave helmet is glorious and makes me think of Douglas Trumball's "Brainstorm" (1983):
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2850/
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2850/1/brain.pdf
Watching the Brain at Work
Caltech's Derek Fender is trying to find out what goes on in the brain when it's thinking, and what patterns nerve impulses follow when they are activated by light.
What goes on in the brain when it's thinking? What patterns, if any, do the nerve impulses follow when they are activated by a simple stimulus such as a flash of light? In short, how does the brain work?
The problems in answering questions like these seem at first to be nearly insurmountable. For example, the inherent fragility and complexity of the brain itself, as well as the electronic speed of its activities, defy investigation. Even if direct observation were possible, the observer wouldn't be able to see anything, since the brain's activity occurs through countless electrochemical circuits at electrical potentials on the order of millionths
of a volt.
Nevertheless, Derek Fender, professor of biology and applied science, and his graduate assistant Robert Kavanagh, have found some preliminary answers to the question of how the brain works. Through an apparatus they have designed and assembled in the Booth Computing Center, together with some computer software painstakingly developed over the past 24 months, they have reached the threshold of being able to visually follow the
interactions among the parts of the brain as it performs some low-level perceptual and cognitive processes.
The technique with which Fender "sees" what happens in the brain involves using a helmet bristling with electrodes that are linked up to an IBM 360-75 computer. Looking like an exotic hair dryer, the helmet is custom-made for each subject, air-conditioned, and vacuum-fitted to the head so that each electrode makes a good contact with the scalp. The brain waves are picked up, recorded on digital tape, and transmitted to the computer. The computer in turn is programmed to translate the digital signals into a visual pattern on a cathode ray tube - somewhat like a television tube. The result is a picture of the brain waves - a contour map of the peaks and troughs of electrical activity as "seen" through the top of the subject's head.
Each picture on the tube is photographed and ends up as a frame in a movie, which is then studied to see how the brain waves emanate from the various regions of the brain. Fender and Kavanagh have made two such movies, each a little over a minute long, representing the brain
wave activity in a quarter of a second-but slowed down 250 times.
Fender and Kavanagh have studied the brain wave patterns of 27 people. One of the things their investigation has already shown them is that perception of a simultaneous light flash and clicking noise will stimulate activity in three distinct locations of the brain. One area analyzes visual images. The second analyzes sound signals. Fender thinks the third area is the one that tries to decide whether the flash and the noise come from the same place.
https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalo ... _ssort+asc
- Researcher Derek Fender fitting apparatus for measuring brain waves on head of test subject at Caltech, 1974
Nate