https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/de/5d/14/a57ffad14ccd94/US600457.pdf
It is not free energy, but it's so close that you should stop complaining and just build one. It won't last forever and you will have to re-build it every couple of years and buy new wire.
Basically, you make an extremely high iductance coil where the windings themselves are the electrodes in a galvanic battery.
When you tap off of the outer iron to the inner copper or the outer copper to the inner iron, this lets current flow through the battery and due to the fact that it's wound as a soleloid it produces a magnetic field.
The galvanic reaction occurs over the entire length of the wires so the voltage is produced along the entire length of the wire. This means that you don't really observe a delay in power delivery because the votlage reaches saturation immediately even though it's a very high inductance coil.
The votlage you are provided at the taps is delivered to the user as if it was a battery.
Nathan Stublefield used this to transmit radio. He would control the current draw from the battery and the battery would act as an amplifying radio transmitter.
By wrapping a secondary winding around the battery, you can step-down the "effective voltage" that drives the solenoid-battery. The higher the switching frequency on the battery, the higher the "effective voltage" being applied to the solenoid part is.
Nathan used this phenomena to get actual useful power you can use to power you house or farm.
It's not infinite energy, it will wear out.
But it's a lot more energy than you would normally expect if you were only looking at the galvanic reactions.
It is just battery and transformer in one casing. With all consequences. Able to produce as much power as same battery with surface of electrodes equal to surface of primary winding parts.
Idea is nice, but Fe-Cu elements are not the best ones among batteries.
Also, it is just unreliable due to thin secondary winding in water. It will rust quickly.
At the time it was great thing, really. There was no modern DC-DC converters. You had to connect a lot of separate galvanic cells to get high voltage. This invention allow to have relatively small high voltage source.
And no, it is not able to power your house. Transformer just transform low voltage, high current to high voltage low current or vice versa. Power is current by voltage ( I*U ). And for transformer I*U input = I*U output. Minus some losses.
PS: O, how I like that old technical drawings!
Yeah, it falls appart failry easily, but he did make separate claims about his battery. It's not "free-energy" per say but it does opperate with a COP
The rate of the galvanic reaction is kind-of set in stone by the rate you draw power from the battery part as well as the natural rate of rusting. But the magnetic field is not representative of the voltage and current you get from the terminals.
So check this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbaub2kkkpA, lasersaber ruined his battery by putting it in salt water and, it's a small one on top of it, not a full sized one.
The electromagnetic effect of this battery is still so powerful that, even with virtually no voltage left at the terminals and virtually no current, it's still spinning that reed switch motor.
It's because the "effective voltage" on the coil is higher than what's available at the terminals.
There is type of devices named "joule thief". This Stublefield battery could be first of that kind.
"joule thieves" today is just a transistor or IC, coil and few resistors. Funny devices, but they can't suck from battery more than chemistry could produce.
Well you're not sucking more than the chemistry can produce, what you are doing is actually getting everything the chemistry produces in an optimal set-up and the ammount of energy available from the optimal set-up is more than what is available at the terminals.
I'm also not sure about how this would work in a joule thief setup, since the coil is galvanic along it's entire length and the windings are tapped tesla style so that there is internal capactance in the coil and the coil is power factor corrected.
With the joule thief you're looking to build momentum in the electron flow, it's basically a "Watter" hammer lol. But for real, a joule thiefe is bassically a ram-pump that uses electron flow instead of water flow.
The coils is at peek voltage the instant you connect to the terminals because the whole of the wires are electrified by the galvanic reaction and the current flow stays constant as the galvanic reaction produces constant current.
So you could wind this coil to have 1000s of henries of inductance.
If the outer copper and inner copper are T1 and T2 and the outer iron and inner iron are T3 and T4. The solenoid is energised by tapping off of T1 to T4 or T3 to T2.
To get a sine wave you would have to use both taps and impose a sinusidal current flow.
The "effective voltage" on the solenoid is dependant on the frequency of the oscillation vs the inductance of the coil and the current flow.
This setup is far from optimal, because of drawbacks with fast wearing of wires and stuff in electrolyte.
IDK, if there was some attempts to develop this device further and get rid of that drawbacks, but modern electronics make this senseless. Why bother with large quantities of expensive copper, when you could do the same thing with few cents of modern electronic components?
I admit that idea of this invention is pretty cool by itself, but I do not agree this invention could be somehow actual today.