Charles M Brown's Page

rectified Johnson noise energy

I was granted U.S. Patent 3,890,161 DIODE ARRAY on a chip which absorbs heat from material warmer than absolute zero and releases an equal energies worth of direct current (D.C.) electrical power. The diode array contains billions of nanometer scale diodes in parallel where all the anodes lead to one electrical conductor and all the cathodes are connected to a second electrical conductor (consistent alignment parallel) . An electrical device may consist of several of these aggregates of diodes wired in series to build higher voltage. The device works by rectifying Johnson noise, radio frequency thermal power, which occurs uniformly distributed at random from zero to about one terahertz.

The diode array, if proven workable, would greatly advance civilization. Future appliances would have clean, cheap, widely available, safe, quiet, reliable, CO and CO2 free power with or without a power grid. Air conditioning would more logically release electricity. Air conditioning would produce abundant electricity in warm climates. Food and medicine could be kept cold reliably in stand alone chests. Crops could have better and cheaper soil, watering, harvesting, and storage. Many kinds of electric vehicles would become practical. These vehicles would be clean enough to run in confined spaces. These vehicles would obtain their energy as they moved so energy storage would not be needed. Diode array powered shipping would be fast, cheap, and pervasive. Bird like automated aircraft with million kilometer maintenance intervals unless shot or snared could be built. Diode arrays in computers with minor inputs and outputs would recycle the heat from the operating chips so the system would not release heat or need external power while using lots of high power high speed logic.

The diode array will not automatically prevent its applications from becoming weapons. That is too much to ask of any technology. Diode arrays may remove the frustration that leads to terrorism. Civilization would become more diversified because diode arrays would support campers, people in fortresses, underground extensions of homes, nomadic bands, teenage floaters, hermits, recluses, deep survivalists, shantytown denizens, space travelers, underwater colonies as well as placid box dwellers.

I want this to be commercialized without fussy licensing restrictions on the diode array or its applications so all humanity can be involved in its synergistic development. NonDisclosure Agreements and noncompete requirements are not in this spirit. I would like very soft patents that do little beyond acknowledge the creative originality of inventors. Society should not be enmeshed in a burdensome license tangle. Diode array applications become unpatentable if they are widely published and they are developed by skilled craftsmen rather than overwhelming creativity.

First, a international prototype development group needs to emerge. Later, many application development groups should emerge. Micro angel capitalization is the cleanest form of financing. A smooth, free, open, and fair market should support useful applications using commodity chips made by commodity equipment. The technical details would diffuse to the educational system where the next generation of application developers would learn about the craft efficiently. The first developers would recover their specific research and development costs with a modest positioning premium on their price. Positioning is an effect that arises in consumers because of a need to reduce the number of alternatives when shopping.

Profiteers may try to sell diode array based products at exorbitant prices. The response is to aggressively bring in more reasonable suppliers. It may become socially rude to deprive a debtor of appliances that are very important to basic survival yet have little commercial value.

Aloha,
Charles M Brown