Scheidel's Electro-theraputics

By definition electro-theraputics means the treatment of disease or disorder by electricity. This may sound like any other common gri-gri, like homeopathy. It's not. Electro-theraputics reached the height of their popularity before 1920. Most of the treatments involve applying shocks to the rectum, urethra, vagina, testicles and every other cavity and orifice you don't want to imagine at the receiving end of a Taser. Even radio equipment was criminally misused by these quacks.

Take for example the induction coil. Early Induction coils existed before 1840, these were the work of Charles Page, James McGauley and Nicholas J. Callan to name a few productive tinkerers. But even in those early days it seemed to be used more often for sportingly shocking ones own body and unwitting test subjects. Both Page and Callahan shocked themselves often and deliberately in the study of these early induction coils. Neither of them believed this had any medical value. The one above appears to be the one patented by Henry Voelkner of Detroit as US456746 in 1891.

William Scheidel had his own induction coils which were advertised in quackery catalogs such as The Friedlander Company Catalog. Mr. Scheidel founded the Scheidel  Coil Company company in Chicago in 1901, and while he did manufacture legitimate early X-ray equipment he never could let go of shocking peoples' testicles.  The 1917 edition of the book Hawkin's Electricity writes simply of these devices "These are employed chiefly for the application of currents of varying voltage, strength and frequency and wave form to the patient..."

There were also medical rectifiers used in ways that were never approved by the FDA such as the Scheidel-Western Anti-Acid Interrupter. The book Hawkin's Electricity they describe it thus:

"In this type of interrupter an alkaline  solution is used. By using an aluminum plate in place of the lead plate, it acts as the alternating current both as a rectifier and an interrupter. It consists of steel and aluminum electrodes in an alkaline solution, the combination or cell acts as a valve, permitting the current to pass from the steel to the aluminum  plates, but not in the opposite direction (from the aluminum to  the steel). In this way a uni-directional current is obtained,  on which an electrolytic interrupter will operate."

So it sounds like a real rectifier at first but really it's just a battery. Batteries produce DC power, which is unidirectional. It does not rectify any signal per se, but it can still be used for shocking people in the genitals. That may sound like hyperbole, but the very next page in Hawkin's Electricity details the metals for intra-uterine electrodes, urethral electrodes and the proper technique for applying current to hemorrhoids. These people were sadists. More here.

L is for Lenz

Engineers use the character "L" as the variable symbolizing inductance. This is in honor of the physicist Heinrich Lenz.If you didn't already guess... he made a few contributions in early research regarding inductance.

Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz was born in 1804, in a town then known as Dorpat, which we now call Tartu, Estonia, but was then decidedly part of the Russian Empire. (as were again after WII) I only not the geography lesson because he studied  chemistry and physics at the University of Dorpat. After graduating he was part of a crew of scientists aboard the ship (Предприятие) Predpriyatiye under Captain Otto von Kotzebue. [Predpriyatiye is Russian for Enterprise.] The journey circumnavigated Africa and did a lap of the Pacific before returning home The journey took from 1823 to 1826. The Predpriyatiye was a warship taking reinforcements to Kamchatka. But Lenz still got to be a part of a team studying geography, ethnography and natural history. His part was studying climate conditions and the properties of seawater which he summarized in a not-so-riveting memoir. 

Things got more exciting when Lenz began studying electromagnetism in 1831. He was teaching at a secondary school in St. Petersburg called Petrischule. 1834, he discovered a directional relationship between induced magnetic fields and current. We now call this Lenz's Law. Michael Faraday had already discovered that induction existed but he stopped there. Lenz quantified the relationship in an equation that determines the direction of induced currents.In sum: the direction of a current that is induced by an electromagnetic force always opposes the direction of the electromagnetic force that produces it.

Imagine the classic physics demonstration— If magnet moves toward a conductive but nonmagnetic material, say a copper bar, two things happen. First , the moving magnetic field penetrates the copper bar and induces eddy currents in the conductor. Then those eddy currents in the conductor generates their own magnetic field, which opposes the magnetic field of the magnet.

This principle is how many devices function: stoplight sensors, metal detectors, and even why radio reception changes as you approach the antenna. His pioneering work in electromagnetic induction is now considered fundamental to electronics. He went on to independently discover Joule's law in 1842, just a year after James Prescott Joule discovered ti himself.  Lenz went on to teach at the University of St. Petersburg, Russia, where he later became as the Dean of Mathematics and Physics from 1840 to 1863 and where he later served as Rector until his death in 1865. 

Broadcast Energy Transmitter

Yes. that's a GI Joe reference. (Pop culture reference explained here.) The point is that the idea of sending energy through the air has been done before. It's what Tesla was working on this in his Shoreham Long Island lab starting back in 1905... until JP Morgan cut him off. It's based around a resonant transformer, same as those used in high power radio systems everywhere. More here. To put it bluntly, Tesla was as much a mad man as mad scientist. I've written of him before [Here].

I bring this up because in recent years a few companies have made less crazy, and more believable attempts in this arena.  In 2007 Powercast actually did come demos at CES (Consumer Electronic Association) with some small scale equipment that actually did work. The idea is that they are broadcasting over a small area, and that RF energy instead of just rectifying the signal, it's "harvested" to charge a battery, for example. Now as an engineer I know that small transmitters output bupkis. The RF field around a 1 or 2 watt transmitter is just a couple mV/m. But Powercast isn't imagining this to be a high amperage product, they're just suggesting that they can use it to continually charge a battery via their special receivers. That's at least in the realm of reality. Allow me to quote directly from their own website:

"Powercast is a leading innovator of wireless power technology based on RF energy harvesting. Micro-power can be provided over distance using the same common radio waves that are widely used by many devices including mobile phones, cordless phones, etc. Batteries can be recharged remotely and without wires, or devices can be made completely battery-free. Primary use includes wireless sensors for commercial, industrial, and defense applications."

Their  CEO explained further, "Our solution is, if talk time (on a cell phone) is 5 1/2 hours, by trickle-charging at work, now talk time is 10 hours because the battery never gets to dead..."  It's that word trickle-charging that tells me how this is working. It's not that kooky.  I can imagine a wireless keyboard, a webcam, or just LEDs, running off a system like this, but not a stereo, or a power drill. This is strictly for low amperage devices and batteries.

Another mroe recent one is the Rectenna.The word "Rectenna" starts with the wrong kind of prefix for this crowd. Interestingly both rectum and rectify have related word roots. Rectify  comes from from the old French rectifier meaning  "to make straight."  That comes form the Latin rectificare meaning "make right" from the earlier Latin rectus meaning straight.  The word rectum is from  the Latin intestinum rectum meaning "straight intestine, which again comes from the Latin regere "to straighten."  The word Rectenna is actually a portmanteau of the two words rectifying and antenna. What it does is convert radio waves into electricity (ostensibly.) More here.

My suspicion is that most of these actually operate via induction. There is no actual radio signal, just an electromagnetic field. Induction is the production of voltage in a conductor which is moving through a magnetic field. But the conductor doesn't have to move, Faraday's Law states that a varying electromagnetic field will induce an electric current. In other words, you can vary the field to the same effect and leave the conductor stationary. The theory dates to 1831, and for the record induction is DEFINITELY public domain.  The problem is that to induce a strong (i.e. large) em field you consume much mroe energy than you receive. It's very lossy. But it's all still sci-fi fun. You can watch their dog-and-pony show here:

The Induction Coil (Part 1)

Heinrich Daniel Rühmkorff removed the umlaut from his last name when he moved to England. Despite the timing, it was probably convenience and not politics as neither language uses them. It was a pragmatic decision, a common quality in engineers. He is often credited with the invention of the induction coil. it's not that simple of course, but the writers of history are pragmatic in an entirely different way.We'll get back to Mr. Rühmkorff in Part 2.

The image above is from The Handbook of Electricity in Medicine by W. H. Guilleminot, printed in 1906.  The Ruhmkorff coil is now known as an induction coil, and it was the invention that directly led to the modern electric transformer. Coiled wire behaves very differently under different circumstances. It is different from the Tesla coil (1891), or the Henry coil (1831). The mad scientists of the day liked to generate sparks. They also used the Holtz machine and the Voss machine. These were not props, but all early stages in the development of electronics.None the less these nuts seemed to enjoy shocking each other and themselves.  Let me quote Joseph Henry

"If the extreme poles of this compound arrangement be terminated by the copper handles, and these be brought in contact, holding one in each hand, a deflagration of the metal will be produced, and a thrilling sensation, scarcely supportable, felt in each arm."

The first real induction coil was invented by Charles Grafton Page and patented in 1836. Page had been trying to improve Joseph Henry’s calorimeter [Which was based on Hare's calorimeter.] There are some sources that suggest he was also familiar with Faraday's concept of self-induction but this is apocryphal. Henry developed a number of copper coil experiments. Page was a student at Harvard at the time and was studying the medical application of electro-therapy and took an interest in Henry's idea of fun. 

Page wound a coil of copper ribbon through a series of cups filled with mercury using them as electrical connectors. One terminal of the battery was then connected to the innermost cup of mercury and the other terminal to different cups elsewhere along the length of the coil. I'll quote Wikipedia on how Page liked to shock himself with the resulting product.

"He held a metal wand in each hand, and put these wands into the same two cups as where the battery terminals went — or any other pair of cups. When an assistant removed one of the battery terminals, stopping the current from going in the spiral, Page received a shock. He reported stronger shocks when his hands covered more of the spirals length than where direct battery current went. He even felt shocks from parts of the spiral where no direct battery current passed."

Working concurrently on a similar set of coils was British experimenter William Sturgeon. Sturgeon was familiar with Page and even reprinted Page's article in his journal Annals of Electricity. Sturgeon devised coils that were adaptations of Page's instrument, where battery current flowed through one, inner, segment of a coil, and electrical shock was taken from the entire length of a coil. Page in turn developed a coil  experiment with two wires, a primary and a secondary. The first was a primary coil heavy gauge copper wire wrapped around a bundle of thin iron rods. The second was a coil of fine wire wrapped around the outside of the primary coil with silk insulation in between them. Page  published an account of this which he documented in a paper titled The Compound Electro-Magnet and Electrotome. In the 1840s he worked at the US patent office and he build telegraph equipment for Samuel Morse

Sadly external events drove him out of science.  In 1863 Union soldiers in the trashed his lab and he quit the business. Virginia had joined the Confederacy in 1861 moving the war front to northern Virginia. It's likely his property was trashed in the retreat in the spring of 1863. he never returned to science. He died 5 years later at the age of 56.