Chapter 4

The device did not impress Chuck.

“Grandpa, that’s the thing you’re so excited about? Rube Goldberg would love it!”

“You’re old enough to call me Morty, Grandson, and yes, that’s it. It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

“Nope. Chuck looked at the odd collection of machined parts and pulleys. “Where did you get all that stuff?”

“I salvaged some of the parts from machines that I don’t need now, the rest I made; eventually, I’ll be making all new parts from scratch. I admit it looks crude, but looks ain’t everything and the proof is what happens when I fire it up. Give me a second, and you should probably stand clear. You should be safe if you’re behind me.”

Chuck nodded and moved back as Morty flipped switches on a control panel. Had Morty shrunk, or he grown? It was much easier to look down at the old man and notice the wispiness of the white hair. Yet despite his age, Morty was active, moving around with an agility that would have been remarkable in someone much younger.

Chuck realized he was himself hampered as much as Morty, in part because of his crippled knee. But he also understood that part of his mobility issue had to do with the hours he’d spent sitting behind a keyboard. Maybe, now that he was no longer spending so much time working at the computer, he could work on his own physical ability? Even regain some of what he’d lost? But now it was time to pay attention. Morty was describing each action, each flip of a switch.

“The important thing is not to bring everything online at once; the machine draws so much current starting up that it will trip the circuit breakers, and then you’ve got to start again from the beginning. This switch powers up the front rotors,” Morty pointed to the left side of the panel, “and you have to let them get up to operating speed before you go any further. You also want to watch for vibration, and as soon as you spot the first sign of it flip the master switch off and let the main rotors run completely down to a stop before you restart.

“The second switch brings up the rear rotors, and they have to be counter-rotating at the same RPM before I do anything else.” He pointed to flickering spots of white on the rotors that soon stabilized, appearing to be stationary. That’s what the painted dots are for, to let me synchronize speeds. If I turn on the main motor before that happens, things fly apart,” He nodded at the wall. “You can see what happened when those earlier models failed.”

Chuck glanced around. The damage wasn’t obvious, but now that Morty had mentioned it he could see dents in the pegboard lining the shop’s walls. Lots of dents, some of them deep enough to crack the pegboard! “You’re lucky you didn’t get hurt, Morty!”

“I was careful, and I knew as soon as I applied full power that I was getting into new territory. I shut it down the first couple of times without ever giving it a full-power trial, I was that nervous! There’s a bunch of stored energy in those rotors alone, not to mention in the electromagnetic fields they generate; it’s not obvious, but each one is part of a Tesla turbine. The rotors have coils near the edge that spin through electrical couplers, generating extreme voltages and strong fields. The fields are the important part, but keeping them in place long enough, not to mention variable enough that I can control the output...” Morty’s voice trailed off as he concentrated for a moment, then resumed. “I’ve improved the rotors since then. I needed an adjustable dynamic balancer, and that’s what those three slots I machined in the outer ring are for. They’ve got adjustable weights on a threaded shaft, you just turn the knurled knob to change the balance. It’s precise, even if it is slow and fiddly. Anyway, it works. So far.”

“Those coils on the edge of the wheels; you called them rotors?”

“Right, the large wheels are the rotors, and they have a kind of flywheel effect. As soon as the rotors spin up to full speed, they’re essentially gyros as well as flywheels. Otherwise, the coils will cause enough drag to stop them from spinning when they start picking up the charge from the primary. The drag happens as the coils pass through the base coil’s field. The base coil is that thick copper spiral underneath; I epoxied it to the base and so far, it’s working. It carries a lot of current all by itself, and if it fails there can be a strong magnetic surge. It’s a problem, but it only lasts a half-second or so. As for the coils, I copied the design from Tesla’s notebook; they’re a variation on his high-frequency coil, the one Marconi used without permission in his first radios, and he claimed they were essential.

“As the rotor spins, the secondary coils charge from the primary in the base of the machine, which, according to Tesla, creates a revolving electromagnetic field. Again, according to Tesla, rotating the coils around a central axis—that’s what this main shaft is for—then rotates the entire field, causing it to interact with the fabric of space. I’m not sure I understand it, but I can’t dismiss it either. Tesla was a genius; you know about his broadcast power machine, right?”

“I read about it,” Chuck acknowledged. “He never got it working, right?”

“He ran out of money, so we’ll never know if it would have worked or not. His investors balked at how much it was costing. His original concept was really expensive, but he scaled it down by half and even then, the one in New York only had one trial. He built a different tower in Colorado, smaller than the one in New York, but even so it worked well enough that Tesla thought his theory was confirmed.

“Anyway, he built the larger tower on Long Island. One difference, he dug a deep basement beneath the tower and put in metal grounding rods. His tower was essentially a huge Tesla Coil that was intended to turn the ionosphere and the Earth itself into electrical poles. A user could hook up an antenna and a ground and that was all he needed to tap into the field. Crystal radio sets work like that, no battery or power cable needed.”

“Really? So what happened?”

“Earthquakes was the biggest issue, because residents complained. Plates fell off shelves, things like that. There were also lightning bolts as the coil’s secondary built up to full charge and people were scared that they would set their houses on fire. Tesla was the only one that was really disappointed when the investors pulled the plug. Anyway, he was onto something, and when he wrote that the impeller could interact with space I believed him. I started thinking about it, and I also had Einstein’s ideas about gravity distorting space-time to work with. Tesla likely never heard of the theories of relativity.”

“So how do the coils charge?” Chuck asked, his confusion obvious. “You said they’re part of a transformer?”

“Right, the primary coil is built into the base that the machine is mounted on and the rotating coils are the secondaries. The coils spin up with the rotors at first, not really doing anything, but when I power up the main motor, the central axle revolves and the spinning rotors pass the coils through the primary field.” Morty pointed to a heavy steel shaft running the length of each impeller. A pulley connected a powerful electric motor to the shaft by means of a thick rubber belt. “That’s a five-horsepower three-phase motor I salvaged from an industrial lathe. The two pulleys I installed are different sizes, stepping down the speed of revolution; as soon as I try to get the main shaft up to the same speed as the motor, that’s when it starts flying apart because the gee forces are just too strong. Stepping down the speed reduces the force, but it keeps it from breaking.”

“So what should I be looking at, Morty? You’ve got small motors driving rotors with secondary coils, and a big motor that’s going to revolve this whole mess. What’s with the rails the frame is mounted on? They look like railroad tracks.”

“The frame everything is mounted on has hooked flanges that hold it to the rails. They keep the frame from turning, in the same way that the hooks on a roller coaster holds it on the track. There’s a lot of counter-torque when I turn on the main motor. I mounted two of the smaller units on another frame so tht the torque canceled, but that one broke. This is the only one that’s working now.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Chuck said nervously. “So I stand behind you, you bring up the power, and what’s supposed to happen?”

“See that dial behind the frame? That’s a strain gauge. You watch the gauge, I’ll watch the machine, and with luck I can shut it down before it flies apart. Just watch the gauge, and you’ll see what I saw.” Morty watched the spinning rotors, judging when they were at the same speed. The white blur stabilized, becoming stationary dots. Satisfied, Morty flipped the final control, three switches ganged together to apply power to the big motor.

The high-pitched whine from the rotors changed and a new sound was added to the mix, a kind of rattling whirr over an underlying thrum. Chuck glanced at the strain gauge. The needle quivered, already halfway up the dial. Slowly it moved higher and the machine’s frame crept forward on the rails. Chuck realized that if not for the strain gauge attaching the machine to a large floor-mounted steel girder, it would have flown across the shop.

A sudden loud pop announced a tripped circuit breaker. The whining died away and the main motor slowed to a stop. Moments later, only the still-spinning rotors showed that anything unusual had happened.

“I’m ready for a cup of coffee, Chuck. Come on into the kitchen and we can talk about what you’ve just seen.”

“I agree, you can’t just dismiss the man,” Chuck commented, “but I never heard about this being in any of Tesla’s papers!”