The Amp Consuming Device

Meyer put a light bulb in the middle of the one circuit built to stop electrons moving, called it the amp consuming device, and drew it two different ways. Both drawings are his. This film reads all four surviving drawings of the Electron Extraction Circuit, costs out each topology from the filament's own arithmetic, and ends somewhere the archive did not expect: the bulb is not a consumer at all, it is the cheapest instrument in the whole design, and a builder should fit one.

About the voice. Where you hear Stan Meyer in this film, you are hearing a synthetic voice built by a machine from thirty seconds of his voice on the Deer Creek conference tape of 1985. It reads four passages, each his own words, from memo WFC 417 and the Electron Bounce Phenomenon chapter. The narrator is a stock voice and nobody in particular. Treat both as a reading, not a recording.

The two topologies

• FIG. 1-14, Electron Extraction Circuit (BB). An alternate power switch (O) feeds two branches through blocking diodes (R): one is the resonant charging choke (C, "resistive coil-wire R7") to the cavity, the other is the amp consuming device (S, "filament — wire R5"). A switching gate (Q) on a trigger pulse (P) picks between them. This is a flip-flop.
• FIG. 3-34, and FIG. 1-8 and FIG. 4-10. No switch. The amp consuming device (112) with its filament (115) sits in series in the single path, between resonant charging choke (56) and the positive plate.

Three of the four drawings are the series version. Every text describing the circuit — in WFC 417, in the water version and in the gas version — says the filament is energised "during alternate pulsing operations", which is the switched one.

A detail worth the whole episode. The text names the resistances that stop electrons moving: "Resistive values (R4, R6, R7, and dielectric constant of gas Rg) and isolated electrical ground (W) prevents 'electron-flow'…". On the drawing, R4 is the secondary pickup coil, R6 the amp inhibitor, R7 the charging choke. R5 — the filament — is not on the list. He names every resistance that blocks and omits the only one that conducts.

What the numbers say

A filament needs tens of milliamps to be visible. Taking three ordinary lamps at their rated hot resistance (12 V 5 W → 28.8 Ω; 6.3 V 150 mA → 42 Ω; 120 V 40 W → 360 Ω) and a radiative filament first visible near 800 K against 2,800 K rated, first glow is roughly 6–300 mW, or 26–72 mA. At 1 mA — the order of leakage the VIC exists to prevent — a 28.8 Ω filament dissipates 0.029 mW. It stays black.

So it forks, and both branches are useful. If the circuit works, the bulb is dark. If the bulb glows, tens of milliamps are crossing the water. You cannot have both.

And it costs nothing to leave in. At 40 mA the bulb drops 1.15 V. Against a 20 kV cell that is 0.006 %.

Which makes it a gas meter. By Faraday's law at STP, 1 mA is 0.007 mL/min of H₂; 40 mA is 0.28 mL/min; 417 mA is 2.9 mL/min, with half those rates again in oxygen. A bulb that has just begun to glow is reporting about a third of a millilitre of hydrogen a minute.

The flip-flop works, and it meters your supply. Energy parked on the capacitance is ½CV². On the 158 and 180 pF Don Gabel metered on the VIC5 core in 2009, at 10 kHz: about 0.1 W at 1 kV, 9 W at 3.4 kV, 80 W at 10 kV. It will light a lamp easily — on the energy the drive put there on the previous pulse. Conversely 10 W in parks ~3.4 kV on 170 pF; 100 W parks ~10.8 kV.

Where he was right, and it matters

B+ really does pull electrons out of water. FIG. 3-30, "Electron Ejection" shows the liberated electrons arriving at the positive plate and leaving by terminal 71, labelled "electron flow to electron extraction circuit (producing electricity)". That is the anodic half-reaction — 2H₂O → O₂ + 4H⁺ + 4e⁻, E° = +1.229 V — described in his own vocabulary. The observation is correct; what it costs is current.

The clustering is real, but not where he put it. A conductor cannot hold net charge in its interior: any charge put there reaches the surface in ε₀/σ, which for copper is 1.5 × 10⁻¹⁹ s — a 10 kHz period is 6.7 × 10¹⁴ relaxation times. There is no jam inside the wire. But charge does accumulate on capacitance: turn-to-turn, winding-to-winding in a bifilar choke, and across the cell. He drew exactly that, as Cda…Cdn, in Figure 7-3. See episode 21 for the copper, episode 14 for the water.

And he conceded the leak. From the Electron Bounce chapter: "Of course, in practical terms of component interaction, a minute amount of amp leakage is present and does occur due to Electronic Component Limitations but is negligible…". He never claimed zero. He claimed small — and small is a measurement.

What is assumed

Filament resistance is taken at each lamp's rated hot point, with the cold filament at about 1/15 of hot; the glow threshold uses P ∝ T⁴ between 800 K and 2,800 K, which is an estimate and not a datasheet. Gas rates are Faraday's law at STP with 100 % current efficiency, which is a floor on the current for a given gas rate, not a prediction of yield. Capacitances are Gabel's 2009 VIC5 readings. Copper conductivity 5.96 × 10⁷ S/m at 20 °C. The script that drew all three charts is in the repository beside this film.

On the bench, for under twenty dollars

1. A 6.3 V pilot lamp in series with the positive choke, where FIG. 3-34 puts it.
2. A second on a switched branch, per FIG. 1-14. The archive holds no build that has run both.
3. A burette and a clock: check the gas against the current. Any shortfall is heat.
4. The inter-winding capacitance of your bifilar choke, far ends open. The archive searched for a reading of this on 23 September 2026 and found none: Meyer's memos name it, the matrix engine models it, and Gabel's 2009 workbook meters L, R and Q but not Cww.
5. Photograph the bulb at the same exposure every run. It is the best log book there is.