[shakespear1]

Having read the post on the Capacitor, jarred my memory about Nathan Stubblefield. He is usually ( if ever ) mention with regard to Wireless Radio but he also apparently worked on an earth cell, Stubblefield Cell.

Stubblefield Cell Did anyone cross paths with this idea for an energy source?

[Trindelm]

This seems to be in line with Tesla's ideas of harnessing the magnetic field. If we applied more of Tesla's discoveries it would be a far different world. Kinda like Command and Conquer Red Faction?
Perhaps, but Peak oil might be something that the Plastic manufacturers would have to worry about 100 years from now.

[J-Rod]

I did some reading myself on this very matter. I have yet to actually try and build one, mostly out of laziness. However I did get the patent pages, and hosted them here.

http://www.game-art.org/jrod/Stubblefield%20Patent.html

From what I have googled around, telluric currents have been accepted as fact, however the current is very very small. It's hard to say what might be going on there, maybe the currents are stronger in some areas more than others. He stated that they worked even when the ground dried up, so it can't all be from chemical reaction. As well he said that the currents got stronger over time. There needed to be some sort of a *jump start* to make the grand amount of power he was claiming. Maybe some sort of an electric shock primer or whatnot. I have a feeling it might be hoopla though, as the experiments would be so simple to conduct, if there was commercial levels of power to be obtained I would think someone would have found it by now.

On the other hand, even if it can only make a tiny fraction of amperage, many of those batteries in series might be enough for a 12v backup, when the wind is slow or the skies have been cloudy for awhile. I dunno.

[shakespear1]

I was intrigued by the "story" that at Stubblefield place there was always plenty of bright lighting which some people thought was generated by his inventions. This would imply "self" sufficiency in energy.

Also interesting was the "story" that all his work was collected and supposedly "vanished".

What ever the truth in the story it seem that the guy was on to something. I wish I was an electrical engineer to explore this. As the best ideas frequently come from unusual places.

[Devil]

As an electrical engineer, I know it is easy to induce earth currents. A specific problem occurs, for example, if you have tram lines running along a street with metallic water pipes running alongside, even a few metres apart. The current in the relatively high-resistance forged steel rails jumps from the rails to the pipe (lower resistance), along the road and back again to the rail. This is a common cause of corrosion of the pipes, to the extent of perforation, allowing water to leak, lowering the rogue circuit resistance even more. For this reason, a hefty copper conductor is often connected to each rail to provide a minimal resistance path, plus copper bridges across each weld in the rails.

In the early days of telephony, it was common to have a single wire connection, using the earth as the return path.

Scammers like Stubblefield were ten a penny with their marvellous "inventions". The 19th c patent files are full of them, some of them being very cleverly done. A common trick was to connect large buried metal meshes a few tens of cm underground to a large battery (hidden, of course). By hammering in a couple of spikes, apparently at random, one could light a bulb between them. Of course, the spikes were of two special alloys to fool the gullible! Apparently gullibility has not left this world in this pretended age of reason and science, as is seen only too often in this forum!!!

[shakespear1]

See, People are Ingenious in many ways.