Ring, Dead-Beat, and the Lock

Fleming's test for whether the VIC's choke and water cell ring or simply drain, with the measured coils; and his warning that it holds at one frequency only, which is why Meyer's circuits had to scan and lock. The last film in The Textbook Behind the VIC.

The archive's own copy, 23 September 2026 13 MB

Part 6 of The Textbook Behind the VIC, and the last. Fleming's §6, after Lord Kelvin: a condenser discharging through a coil rings if its resistance is below √(4L/C) and is dead-beat above it. With Gabel's measured chokes and Meyer's cavity the line is about 79.5 kΩ: the copper loop rings at about 2.6 kHz, while the resistive coils of the 1987 pencil pages (inductance assumed) sit just past it, and only deionised water leaks little enough for the loop to ring. Then Fleming's §31, 'the annulment is only exact for one particular frequency', Steinmetz on absolute resonance, Meyer's band 'dependent upon the amount of contaminants', and his scan-and-lock from New Zealand 1989 and the gas management system tape.

About the voices. Three synthetic voices speak, and none 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 house meeting of 1989. Charles Steinmetz is a stock voice, because no recording of his is known to survive; it reads only sentences printed in his books. Treat all three as readings, not recordings.

The written tutorial for this film is The Textbook Behind the VIC. The previous film in the series is The Electromotive Blow.

the textbook behind the VIC Fleming Steinmetz resonance phase-locked loop Fleming's test synthetic voice

What was said

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Machine-read, so expect the odd wrong word.

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NeuralStan · This is Ring, Dead-Beat, and the Lock, part 6 of The Textbook Behind the V, I, C, made by the archive at Stan's Legacy.
NeuralStan · I am NeuralStan, and I am a machine, not a man.
NeuralStan · Two other synthetic voices speak.
NeuralStan · Stan Meyer's is cloned from thirty seconds of him speaking in nineteen eighty-five.
NeuralStan · The other speaks for Charles Steinmetz, the electrical engineer; the archive knows of no recording of his voice, so it is a stock voice.
NeuralStan · Each reads only words they wrote or said, and every one is cited.
NeuralStan · Fleming's sixth section of his fifth chapter begins with a pendulum.
NeuralStan · Displace it and let go, and it swings back past its resting point, again and again, each swing smaller.
NeuralStan · Set the same pendulum in a thick enough fluid, and it creeps back to rest without ever passing it.
NeuralStan · He calls the first oscillatory and the second dead-beat.
NeuralStan · A condenser discharging through a coil does the same.
NeuralStan · Its charge either swings, first positive and then negative, always decreasing, or it drains away without ever reversing.
NeuralStan · Fleming credits the analysis to Lord Kelvin, and he gives the one number that decides which.
NeuralStan · Here is the test.
NeuralStan · If the circuit's resistance is less than the square root of four times the inductance over the capacity, the discharge rings.
NeuralStan · If it is more, the discharge is dead-beat.
NeuralStan · When it rings, the period is two pi root L C, and each swing is smaller than the last by the same proportion.
NeuralStan · The experiments that confirmed it are lovely.
NeuralStan · Feddersen watched Leyden-jar sparks in a revolving mirror.
NeuralStan · With a high resistance in the discharge, the image was one smeared band of light.
NeuralStan · With a low one, it broke into a row of separate sparks, one for every swing.
NeuralStan · This matters because everything in the last two films, the overreaching and the doubling, happens only on the oscillatory side of Fleming's line.
NeuralStan · On the dead-beat side, the condenser creeps up towards the pulse height and stops there.
NeuralStan · So Fleming's test decides whether Meyer's resonant charging choke is resonating at all.
NeuralStan · With Don Gabel's measured chokes, two point four henries, and Meyer's one point five two nanofarad cavity, Fleming's line falls at about seventy-nine and a half thousand ohms.
NeuralStan · Gabel's copper windings add up to about two hundred and twenty ohms, far below it, and the loop rings, at about two point six kilohertz, inside Meyer's own stated band of one to ten.
NeuralStan · The coils in Meyer's nineteen eighty-seven pencil pages are wound of resistive wire and add up to about ninety thousand ohms.
NeuralStan · The archive has no measurement of their inductance, so this assumes Gabel's, but if it holds, that build sits just past Fleming's line, on the dead-beat side.
NeuralStan · Meyer chose resistive wire deliberately, to restrict the amps.
NeuralStan · The textbook says what that trade costs: it can stop the loop ringing.
NeuralStan · And the water damps the ring from the other side.
NeuralStan · A leak across the cell drains the swing just as resistance in series does.
NeuralStan · For this loop to ring at all, the leak across the cell has to be above about twenty thousand ohms.
NeuralStan · In Meyer's cavity, tap water, and both grades of distilled water, fall far short.
NeuralStan · Only deionised water clears it, and even then the loop's quality factor is only about two.
NeuralStan · It rings, and the ring is gone within a few cycles.
NeuralStan · It is the same conclusion the series keeps reaching from different directions.
NeuralStan · The purity of the water is not a detail of Meyer's specification.
NeuralStan · It is the thing the circuit depends on.
NeuralStan · Now the second half of the story.
NeuralStan · Fleming shows that a condenser can cancel a coil's inductance altogether, leaving a circuit that behaves as though it had resistance alone.
NeuralStan · The inductance, he writes, is neutralised by the capacity, and the whole circuit becomes effectively non-inductive.
NeuralStan · And then the catch, for a condenser with a leak across it.
NeuralStan · The cancellation, he writes, is only exact for one particular frequency, and a change of frequency means a change in the leak needed to hold it.
NeuralStan · Read it the other way round: for a given coil and a given leaky condenser there is one frequency, and if the leak changes, the frequency moves.
NeuralStan · Steinmetz works an example where the reactances balance exactly, and puts the limit bluntly.
Charles Steinmetz (synthetic voice) · That is, absolute resonance takes place.
Charles Steinmetz (synthetic voice) · Obviously, this condition cannot be completely reached in practice.
NeuralStan · A resonance is a narrow thing, and a real circuit sits beside it rather than on it.
NeuralStan · Meyer stated his resonance as a band, and said what moves it.
NeuralStan · The established resonant frequency, he wrote in his memo on resonant action, is most generally in the audio range from one kilohertz up to and beyond ten, and is dependent upon the amount of contaminants in natural water.
NeuralStan · Contaminants set the water's conductivity, which is Fleming's leak.
NeuralStan · And while the cell runs, gassing and warming, its leak changes.
NeuralStan · So by Fleming's rule, any fixed drive frequency will walk off the resonance within seconds.
NeuralStan · Meyer's answer was not to use a fixed frequency.
NeuralStan · At a house meeting in New Zealand in nineteen eighty-nine he explained it.
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice) · We now electronically zero in to the resonant frequency of any form of natural water because it would change based on the contaminants within the water.
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice) · It automatically scans it right in, locks right in the resonance and holds it there.
NeuralStan · On the tape of his gas management system there is even a lamp for it: a lock light that comes on when the circuit has captured the resonant frequency.
NeuralStan · A drive that searches for the resonance and holds on to it is the correct engineering answer to Fleming's catch.
NeuralStan · Induction heaters and ultrasonic welders do exactly this today.
NeuralStan · That completes the series.
NeuralStan · Meyer's pulsing transformer is Fleming's induction coil.
NeuralStan · His water cell is a leaky condenser, and the leak decides everything.
NeuralStan · His resonant charging choke raises the voltage up to twice, when the pulse is matched to the ring.
NeuralStan · His amp restriction is the inductance of a coil under a sudden blow.
NeuralStan · His resistive chokes decide which side of Fleming's line the loop sits.
NeuralStan · And his resonance scanning answers Fleming's warning that a resonance holds at one frequency only.
NeuralStan · None of that proves anything about what happens inside the water.
NeuralStan · What it shows is that the circuit Meyer drew, and the words he used for its parts, belong to ordinary, well-founded electrical engineering, the kind Fleming and Steinmetz taught, and that every part comes with a condition a builder can measure.
NeuralStan · So, what to measure.
NeuralStan · Add up the resistance of every winding in the loop and compare it with Fleming's square root of four L over C.
NeuralStan · Ring the loop with one short pulse and count the swings on a scope, and time them against two pi root L C.
NeuralStan · Change the water and watch the swings die as it gets dirtier.
NeuralStan · And then the measurement Meyer's lock was built for, which the archive does not hold for any working cell: run the cell, and track its resonant frequency as it gasses and warms, with the water's conductivity recorded beside it.
NeuralStan · If you make that measurement, the archive would very much like it.
NeuralStan · The written tutorial, all six parts, is on the site, with Fleming's and Steinmetz's books in full, Gabel's readings, and Meyer's own memos and tapes.
NeuralStan · The archive is at stanslegacy dot com.
NeuralStan · Thank you for watching the series.
NeuralStan · Every source in this film is in the archive.
NeuralStan · The addresses are on the screen.

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VIC coil readings 2011