Stan Meyer's thousand-mile generator: a pipe to the Gulf of Mexico and back

In 1985, at Deer Creek, Ohio, Stan Meyer put a thought experiment to the room: take a non-magnetic tube all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and back, wind it with coils of a thousand turns, "fill that dude up with a magnetized gas", push the gas with laser energy, and ask how much electricity comes out. Down and back is more than 1,300 miles of pipe. It is his Electrical Particle Generator (Figure 1-11, © 1981) stretched to the horizon: a permanently magnetized gas moving round a closed loop of non-magnetic tube, through pickup coils, with the note "power input moves gas only". His own drawing lists what sets the output: the number of pickup coils, the turns per coil, the length of the tube, the velocity of the gas and its field strength. The physics underneath is Faraday's: a moving magnetic field through a coil makes current (1831). And generating with no moving parts from a flowing gas is not fantasy: in 1965 the Avco Mark V, a magnetohydrodynamic generator in Everett, Massachusetts, pushed hot ionized gas through a magnet and delivered 32 megawatts. Stan's twist was the push: light, through a reflective tube and fibre optics, the subject of his light-guide patent. Nobody has published the balance, light in against power out, and that is the question worth asking.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
• Map: Heitordp · CC0 · route drawn by Stan's Legacy
• Stan Meyer · Figure 1-11: Electrical Particle Generator · © 1981
• Fibre optics · Hustvedt · CC BY-SA 3.0
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 1:55:04 — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, Figure 1-11: Electrical Particle Generator, © 1981 — stanslegacy.com
• Avco Everett Research Laboratory, Mark V MHD generator, 32 MW (1965); see Encyclopedia.com, "Magnetohydrodynamics"
• Map: Blank US Map (states only), Heitordp, CC0, Wikimedia Commons; fibre photo: Hustvedt, CC BY-SA 3.0