Historical research guide · 0009 · 1991
Kenneth R. Shoulders patent family
Kenneth R. Shoulders
In one minute
Kenneth Shoulders spent three decades at the small end of vacuum electronics, and the patent record carries seventeen grants in his name. The early ones, filed at Stanford Research Institute between 1965 and 1968, are the micro-fabrication foundation: a needle-type field-emission electron source, a thin wafer-channel electron multiplier, information storage tubes. The set that matters to this site was filed for the Jupiter Toy Company in 1988 and granted between 1991 and 1992. In it Shoulders describes what he named Electrum Validum — EV — a discrete, self-contained, negatively charged entity about a micrometre across, carrying on the order of 10¹¹ electron charges, produced by a high electric field between a cathode and an anode and then steered along dielectric guides. Four of those patents cover producing, isolating, selecting and switching the entities; two cover taking energy back out of them with a travelling-wave conductor. For where that energy comes from, Shoulders cites Boyer on the classical vacuum and Forward on extracting energy from the zero-point field.
Connection
Chapter 9 asks what a self-organised ball of charge actually is, and chapter 6 asks what it means when one gives back more energy than was put in; the Shoulders family is the patent record standing behind both questions. It is also the charge-density route to lowering the effective Coulomb barrier that chapter 12 reaches from the lattice side.
From the source
A high electric field between a cathode and an anode produces a discrete, self-contained, negatively charged high-density entity — Shoulders names it Electrum Validum, EV — typically about one micrometre across and carrying on the order of 10¹¹ uncompensated electron charges, with at most one positive ion per 100,000 electrons; the minimum charge observed for a one-micrometre entity is 10⁸ electrons.US 5,018,180 — Summary of the Invention
The entities travel at about one tenth the speed of light under applied fields, respond to fields as negative charge, and show a charge-to-mass ratio close to that of a free electron.US 5,018,180 — Summary of the Invention
Apparatus is disclosed for isolating the entities from the gross discharge and then guiding, selecting, splitting, delaying, deflecting and imaging them along dielectric channels — the toolkit of a working laboratory rather than a single device.US 5,054,046; US 5,054,047; US 5,148,461; US 5,153,901
Energy can be taken back out of a propagating entity by a travelling-wave conductor beside its path; travelling-wave stages can be banked or stacked, the output of one used to generate the next entity, and the same entity re-used in a circulator. Shoulders states the object as extracting energy converted from the vacuum by means of the EV, citing Boyer’s account of the classical vacuum and Forward’s 1984 Physical Review B proposal for drawing electrical energy from the zero-point field.US 5,018,180 and US 5,123,039 — Summary of the Invention
Captured on a matched electrode, a one-micrometre entity of 10¹¹ charges moving at a tenth of light speed yields a pulse rise as fast as about 10⁻¹⁴ seconds, which the patents build into pulse generators, X-ray and RF sources, stepping registers and a flat-panel display.US 5,018,180 — detailed description, FIGS. 50–79
The earlier Stanford Research Institute patents establish the micro-fabrication that the later work runs on: a needle-type field-emission electron source and its manufacturing method, and a thin wafer-channel electron multiplier.US 3,453,478; US 3,497,929; US 3,458,745
The way in
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Kenneth+R.+ShouldersHow to cite it
Kenneth R. Shoulders (1991) Kenneth R. Shoulders patent family https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Kenneth+R.+Shoulders