The Leaky Condenser

Meyer called the water cell a capacitor and, in the same article, a resistance. Fleming solved that case in 1896. With Gabel's measured tube cells and Fleming's time constant: only deionised water holds a charge long enough for the VIC to work. Part 3 of The Textbook Behind the VIC.

The archive's own copy, 23 September 2026 12 MB

Part 3 of The Textbook Behind the VIC. The water cell read as Fleming's condenser shunted by a resistance: Meyer's 'capacitor' and his 'in the form of resistance' as one textbook case; Gabel's tube-cell readings (rain water 21 nF at a dissipation factor of 29, about 260 Ω across it); capacitance ten times what the water's dielectric constant allows, the usual signature of the double layer measured by Vanags, Kleperis and Bajars; and Fleming's time constant applied to each grade of water, using the figures from Resonant Action for Meyer's own cavity; and Meyer's own water specification from Gas Generator Voltage Control Circuit.

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 Energy of the Future (raum&zeit, 1990) and the memo Dual Voltage Resonant "Q". 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 What the Iron Does.

the textbook behind the VIC Fleming Steinmetz water capacitor double layer water quality synthetic voice

What was said

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Machine-read, so expect the odd wrong word.

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Machine translation by Google, opened in a new tab. The archive stands behind the English.

NeuralStan · This is The Leaky Condenser, part 3 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 · Meyer is clear that the water cell is a capacitor.
NeuralStan · His patent calls the water a dielectric liquid between capacitor plates, and his raum und zeit article gives its dielectric constant, seventy-eight point five four at twenty-five degrees.
NeuralStan · And in a memo he says why a capacitor matters to the circuit at all:
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice) · This opposes any changes in circuit voltage.
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice) · A voltage change cannot occur until the stored charges can be altered through current flow, if allowed.
NeuralStan · A capacitor holds its voltage until charge flows in or out.
NeuralStan · That is the property the whole voltage intensifier leans on.
NeuralStan · But in the same article he says the water is also a resistance:
Stan Meyer (synthetic voice) · Water now becomes part of the V, I, C in the form of resistance between electrical ground and pulse-frequency positive-potential, helping to prevent electron flow within the pulsing circuit.
NeuralStan · It is easy to read those two statements as a contradiction.
NeuralStan · They are not.
NeuralStan · Every real capacitor with anything but vacuum in it leaks, and water leaks a great deal.
NeuralStan · Meyer is describing a capacitor with a resistance across it, and that is a case the textbooks solved.
NeuralStan · Fleming's condenser is the Leyden jar, and he describes its discharge with a picture worth keeping.
NeuralStan · When a condenser is discharged through a conductor, he writes, the potential energy runs down as a current, just as when a bent spring is released.
NeuralStan · More to the point, in section thirty-one of his third chapter he works through exactly Meyer's arrangement: a condenser with a resistance across its terminals, placed in series with a coil.
NeuralStan · He shows the pair behaves as though the coil's resistance had gone up and its inductance down, and that with the right values the leaky condenser cancels the coil's inductance altogether.
NeuralStan · We come back to that in the last film.
NeuralStan · Fleming gives the one number that tells you how long a leaky condenser holds a charge.
NeuralStan · Multiply the resistance by the capacity and you get a time, which he calls the time constant of the condenser.
NeuralStan · In one time constant the charge falls to about a third.
NeuralStan · And in a period of five or six time constants, he writes, the condenser is practically discharged.
NeuralStan · Steinmetz says what kind of change that is.
NeuralStan · With only one energy store in a circuit, he writes, the transient can only be a steady logarithmic term, a gradual approach.
NeuralStan · A leaky capacitor on its own never swings.
NeuralStan · It simply drains.
NeuralStan · Don Gabel measured the estate's tube cells in two thousand and nine, empty and with three waters.
NeuralStan · His meter reports a capacitance and a dissipation factor, which is what the part wastes divided by what it stores.
NeuralStan · A good capacitor reads well under a tenth.
NeuralStan · Empty, the cell is twenty-two picofarads.
NeuralStan · With rain water, the meter reads twenty-one nanofarads with a dissipation factor of twenty-nine.
NeuralStan · Read as a capacitor with a resistance across it, that is about two hundred and sixty ohms of water in parallel.
NeuralStan · Distilled water came out almost the same.
NeuralStan · Tap water was seventeen ohms.
NeuralStan · On a meter, at one kilohertz, every one of those cells is more resistor than capacitor.
NeuralStan · There is a second thing in Gabel's table.
NeuralStan · An empty cell of twenty-two picofarads, filled with water whose dielectric constant is seventy-eight and a half, should read about one point seven nanofarads.
NeuralStan · It reads twenty-one, more than ten times as much.
NeuralStan · And tap water reads twenty-five microfarads at a hundred hertz and less than six at a kilohertz.
NeuralStan · Capacitance that is far too large, and falls steeply as the frequency rises, is the usual signature of the double layer: the thin sheet of charge that forms where metal meets water.
NeuralStan · It is the same effect a University of Latvia laboratory measured in two thousand and twelve, pulsing a cell through a bifilar transformer and a diode.
NeuralStan · For a builder the lesson is simple.
NeuralStan · A meter's capacitance reading of a wet cell at low frequency is mostly the double layer, not the water.
NeuralStan · Measure at the frequency you will pulse at.
NeuralStan · Now put Fleming's time constant to work.
NeuralStan · Gabel's rain-water cell holds its charge for about five microseconds.
NeuralStan · The archive's film Resonant Action did the same arithmetic for Meyer's own cavity, a sixteenth of an inch of water between two tubes, across four grades of water.
NeuralStan · Tap water drains it instantly.
NeuralStan · Ordinary distilled water holds for a microsecond and a half.
NeuralStan · Very good distilled water, seven.
NeuralStan · Deionised water holds for a hundred and twenty-nine microseconds.
NeuralStan · At five kilohertz the gap between pulses is two hundred microseconds.
NeuralStan · So by Fleming's rule, only the deionised cell keeps any meaningful part of each charge until the next pulse arrives.
NeuralStan · Every other water has let it go.
NeuralStan · Meyer knew this.
NeuralStan · In his patent for the gas generator voltage control circuit of nineteen eighty-nine, he wrote that distilled water, like air, having no conductive medium, will inherently inhibit electron leakage, and that sea water or water with a mineral content would tend to draw current and curtail the operation of the generator.
NeuralStan · The textbooks say why.
NeuralStan · Everything the voltage intensifier does, the overshoot, the stepping, the ringing, needs the capacitor to hold its charge between pulses.
NeuralStan · The leak across the water decides whether it can.
NeuralStan · Water quality is not a detail of Meyer's specification.
NeuralStan · It is the condition the whole circuit depends on.
NeuralStan · So, what to measure.
NeuralStan · Your cell's capacitance empty, and then with your water, at the frequency you will pulse at, and always with the dissipation factor.
NeuralStan · The water's conductivity, with a meter, at the same time.
NeuralStan · From those, the resistance across the cell and Fleming's time constant.
NeuralStan · Then compare it with the gap between your pulses.
NeuralStan · And write the conductivity down beside every other number you take.
NeuralStan · A result without it cannot be compared with anyone else's, and that is the main reason so many replications cannot be compared with each other.
NeuralStan · The next film is the heart of the series: the resonant charging choke, and the doubling Steinmetz and Fleming both describe.
NeuralStan · The written tutorial, Gabel's readings and the Latvian paper are on the site.
NeuralStan · The archive is at stanslegacy dot com.
NeuralStan · Thank you for watching.
NeuralStan · Every source in this film is in the archive.
NeuralStan · The addresses are on the screen.

Referenced by

cited by

Episode 39: Twice the Pulse The round table

Mentioned in this episode

cites

Episode 37: What the Iron Does The round table
The Textbook Behind the VIC, 2: the water is a condenser, and a leaky one 2026
Dual Voltage Resonant "Q" - Part 2 2024
ENERGY of the FUTURE - R&Z - Vol 1 No. 6, 1990 2023
Gas Generator Voltage Control Circuit MEYER MARILYN · 1989

Read 3 more ↓

Episode 10: Resonant Action The round table
Water Electrolysis with Inductive Voltage Pulses (Vanags, Kleperis & Bajars, 2012) 2026
VIC coil readings 2011