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What's next?

In 1998 I was talking with a lifelong friend about charged spherical spaces, I learned he had heard about them from my brother years and years ago and that it had caught his interest to the point of still contemplating it from time to time.




the fusor in its crate

removed for close inspection

access door removed, I had a sit down with fusion lab staffer, Gene Meeks who was familiar with the model we brought back after our journey to gather materials. Gene was the man that made the new fusors which Farnsworth designed. (there is audio and video from that meeting) regrettably, we lost Gene a few years back.

He and I had always been folks that take action while most folks talk about something for a couple years and then forget all about it.

It hit me then, that day, that all that was missing from continuing my father's work could be the use of some modern tools, computer modeling came to mind first. In fact I realized that in the time since my father's death, I had functioned in a number of disciplines that would assist me in such a pursuit ... it was a real "aha" moment. I wondered to myself "why had it not occurred to me sooner to do this?" For whatever reason, in the space of a few minutes, we both realized that something was about to happen.

We began talking about who we knew that might help, and where we could look for a logical next step. He asked me to give him a first step, and I told him that we would have to travel the country and gather up materials in museums and special collections who were now custodians of his notes and journals. He countered with "while we are interesting people in putting some money behind this project," that we should make that first step and that he would bank that out of his own pocket.

So we did.

In doing so, we were wildly successful in getting his journals and notes. My son-in-law, at the time, owned a chain of copy stores, and he talked one of his affiliated stores into loaning us one of their larger copy machines, and we set it up in the building where my father's work was stored, and I began to read over the work there and flagged everything remotely connected to the work and my son-in-law copied them careful to keep everything in order ... we wound up with a pile of paper one person would be foolish to carry without help. I had already digitized the photos, important because a lot of photos of the fusion lab seemed to illustrate most of the hardware they used.

Later that same trip we visited a museum there who had a couple old fusors, and the larger one was too big to display in their space and it was collecting dust in the basement and I took custody of that then and there. We arranged to have it crated and delivered it to a trucking company for shipment to my home in Indiana.
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