Stan Meyer's 371-drawing patent: the Light-Guide Lens, 1981

One patent, 161 drawing sheets, 371 drawing figures: Stan Meyer's Light-Guide Lens, US 4,275,950, filed 4 February 1980 and granted 30 June 1981. It is the lid of his solar silo: an array of light-guide lenses, in materials of different refractive index, that "collects, redirects, transfers, and focuses or disperses incident light radiation to a central region irrespective of the angle of the sun." Inside each guide the light travels through a clear solid, bounced along its walls, which is the same idea Stan used years later for his resonant cavity: "like that of a laser… you bounce back and forth the photon energy before you release it out." Stan didn't invent the light guide. The idea is behind fibre optics and the thin glowing strips in many modern car lamps, where one LED feeds a clear rod. What he did was build a silo lid out of hundreds of them, for sunlight. The patent is on stanslegacy.com.

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 lecture · Deer Creek, Ohio
• Stan Meyer · US 4,275,950, Light-Guide Lens · 1981 · all 161 sheets
• Stan Meyer · US 4,275,950, Light-Guide Lens · 1981
• Stan Meyer · US 4,275,950, Light-Guide Lens · 1981, front page
• Stan Meyer · US 4,275,950, Light-Guide Lens · 1981, Figs. 1–5
• Fibre optics · Hustvedt · CC BY-SA 3.0
• Stan Meyer, Light-Guide Lens, US 4,275,950 (30 June 1981) — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer lecture, Deer Creek, Ohio, at 3:43 — stanslegacy.com
• Fibre-optic photo: Hustvedt, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0