from: Rene Blondlot: N-Rays
Rene BLONDLOT
N-Rays (maybe Orgone )
Quartz seems to be playing tricks on a lot of scientists
Rene BLONDLOT
N-Rays (maybe Orgone )
A focus tube emits, as I have already proved, certain radiations susceptible of traversing metals, black paper, wood, etc. Amongst these, there are some for which the index of refraction of quartz is nearly 2. On the other hand, the index for quartz of the rays remaining from rock-salt, discovered by Prof. Rubens, is 2’18. This similarity of indices led me to think that the radiations observed in the emission of a focus tube would very likely be near neighbors of the rays discovered by Rubens, and that, consequently, they would be met with in the radiation emitted by an Auer burner, which is the source of such rays. I accordingly made the following experiment: an Auer burner is enclosed in a kind of lantern of sheet-iron, completely closed on all sides, with the exception of openings for the passage of air and combustion gases, which are so arranged that no light escapes; a rectangular orifice, 4 cm wide and 6.5 cm high, cut in the iron at the same height as the incandescent mantle, so that the emerging luminous pencil is directed on the aluminum sheet. Outside the lantern, and in front of this sheet, a double-convex quartz lens is placed, having 12 cm focal length for yellow light, behind which is a spark gap of the kind already described, giving very small sparks. The spark is produced by a by a small induction coil, provided with a rotating make and break device, which works with perfect regularity.
The Professor of Biophysics in the School of Medicine, Augustin Charpentier, became especially adept at seeing the new rays. In a single month (May 1904) he published seven papers on the subject. He found that rabbits and frogs gave off the rays, Tendons stretched by muscles gave no effects, but the biceps muscle did. N rays increased the sensitivity of the human to vision, smell, taste and hearing. Soon he found the rays from living matter were somewhat different from the N rays, and he called them "physiological rays".( Bions ) These latter could even be transmitted along wires. Thus a small copper plate is fixed at the end of a copper wire 90 cm long. At the other end is the phosphorescent screen. When the human body is opposite the plate, the screen lights up, indicating transmission of the radiation through the wire. Both the physiological rays and the N rays were transmitted in this way, he claimed. A long list of medical and biological effects were chronicled in a book published at the time (Ref. 7).
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