Copper Ions

Stan Meyer said, at almost every lecture from 1989 to 1997, that Michael Faraday never found the electrical polarization process because he "worked with a very crude battery, and... just an electrical wire going into the beaker with chemicals" (New Zealand 1989, part 1, 32:21). This film takes him at his word and asks what would show it.

Faraday's law (Experimental Researches, Seventh Series, 1834, §783) ties chemical action to the quantity of charge alone: "the chemical power of a current of electricity is in direct proportion to the absolute quantity of electricity which passes." One coulomb can release at most 0.125 mL of hydrogen and 0.062 mL of oxygen (dry, 20 °C, 1 atm), or plate 0.329 mg of copper. Meyer set his process against exactly that law in Gas Generator Voltage Control Circuit — "apparently not a chemical reaction process such as in Faraday's Laws" — and in the Voltage Attenuation Circuit memo gave both a point of discovery ("If amps are being restricted during gas production, then voltage stimulation is dissociating the water molecule") and a figure: more than 100 cc/min at one amp, about nine times Faraday's ceiling of 11.2 mL/min.

So the measurable signature of his process is more gas per coulomb than Faraday's law allows. The same patent prescribes tuning "with a gas flow meter and an ammeter"; the film keeps the gas meter and replaces the ammeter, which misreads pulsed current (a true-RMS meter reads 1/√D times the average, as Fleming, 1896 separates ∫i dt from ∫i² dt), with a copper coulometer in series: two copper anodes and a copper cathode in acid copper sulphate, weighed before and after. Faraday's own words for why such an instrument beats a meter (§739): it is not affected "by variations in time or intensity... or even of intermissions of action." The textbook statement is Maxwell's Treatise, Arts. 237 and 255.

The numbers. F = 96,485.332 C/mol (CODATA); Cu 63.546. Copper 0.32930 mg/C. Mixed gas 0.187 mL/C dry at 20 °C (0.174 at 0 °C). Ten milliamps for an hour is 36 C: 11.85 mg of copper, at most 6.73 mL of dry gas, or 6.89 mL collected over water at 20 °C (vapour pressure 2.34 kPa).

The jar. Oettel's recipe (Bering & Getman, Standard Table of Electrochemical Equivalents, 1917, pp. 68–69): 15 g CuSO₄·5H₂O, 5 g concentrated H₂SO₄, 6 mL alcohol, 100 mL water. Cathode current density 4–16 mA/cm² (Arrhenius, Text-book of Electrochemistry, 1902, pp. 286–287); below it the deposit redissolves, above it it turns spongy. Mean error about 0.2% (Getman, p. 69). A balance reading to 0.1 mg gives better than 1% on an hour at 10 mA.

The trap. The copper jar counts net charge; water splits on current in either direction. A loop that rings could make ordinary electrolysis look like more than Faraday allows. Use two jars, each behind its own diode, and add them. One Microsecond found reverse current through a diode-fed cell in deionised water.

What has been measured. Meyer's 100 cc/min at 1 A (about 9×); Tibor Nagypál's letter of 4 June 1991, about 20 mA and 0.5–1 cc/min from tap water (2–4×); Electronics World, 1991, under 0.1 A and no volume; the Perkins visit of October 1992, under 1 mA and no volume; Vanags et al. 2012, 46–49% at the cell in KOH. None was counted in copper. The Dublin Institute of Technology report of July 1993 names the silver coulometer. Earlier films on the same question: Amp Leakage and Torque, Not Tension; for the other copper ions, the ones in the VIC's wire, The Bounce Is Real.

About the voices. Two synthetic voices speak, and neither is a person. NeuralStan is the archive reading aloud in a stock voice. Stan Meyer is a voice cloned from thirty seconds of the Deer Creek conference tape of 1985; it reads only his own words, from the New Zealand lecture of 1989, US 4,798,661 and the Voltage Attenuation Circuit memo. Treat both as readings, not recordings.