The 1939 Beam Ray Machine
In 1938, A group of British
researchers headed by Dr Bertram Winter Gonin, sought to buy some
experimental machines from Rife to confirm his work. At that time, Rife
had no commercial operation capable of handling the orders, and at the
instigation of his old friend Ben Cullen, Rife consented to the formation of a
commercial company called Beam Rays Inc. At that time, the majority owner
of the rights to the machine was an electronics engineer called Philip Hoyland.
Hoyland had designed and developed all of the original Rife machines since late
1934. Hoyland and Rife became partners in Beam Rays Inc. The company
produced a small number of machines but suffered internal conflicts because of
the actions of some of the other partners and because of frictions between
Hoyland and Gonin's group. Hoyland believed that Gonin and his partners
were trying to steal the technology for themselves. Subsequently, the company was destroyed in 1939/1940 when Hoyland
brought a lawsuit against Beam Rays in an attempt to stop one
of the partners from illegal stock trading and also to dissolve the contract
with the British. Fuller details of this are
being written up and will be posted here in the near future.
The Beam Ray Corporation produced a number of machines. I'm not sure of the exact number as I have seen varying accounts, but I believe that about 17 machines were produced and shipped to MD's in California. Another four machines were shipped to England to Dr B. Winter Gonin of the London School of Tropical Medicine. There was some argument between Rife and Hoyland over these machines and their operating principle, however various MD's including James Couche used one of these machines for many allegedly successful treatments of patients for many years.
The U.K. Rife Research Group managed to get access to one of the machines believed to be one of the originals that were shipped to California in the late 1930's. I reverse engineered that machine and present the results below. I have a lot of data on this machine of which this is only part, I will add things as I get time as much of the data needs to be organised properly. The exact date of the machine is unknown - we know that it was built sometime between the autumn of 1938 and the early part of 1939 - so it may actually be a 1938 machine.
I would like to express my thanks to Robert Harrison, an expert valve/tube engineer (I'm not a valve/tube expert) who gave me massive help and support during the reverse engineering process and who corrected numerous silly mistakes that I made! My thanks also to Stuart Andrews and Bob Haining for their help and support in this effort.
Below are the machine schematics and links to some photographs. The schematics have been rendered into PDF format which allows them to be zoomed to resolve fine detail.
WARNING: These schematics are
presented for information only. Do not try to construct a copy of this machine
unless you are knowledgeable and experienced in high voltage valve/tube work. The
tube filaments need to be heated for a couple of minutes before switching on the HT -
failure to do this will blow them. In addition, some
parts of this circuit use up to 1750 volts DC at
substantial current and can easily kill in inexperienced hands.
Original Plasma Tube Schematic
This is a link to various photographs I took of the machine's waveforms on an oscilloscope.
Note: these were taken with the 812A tube in place. The waveforms produced
when an 809 is used are smoother and more sinusoidal.
Below is a third schematic. This is for a transistor booster amplifier I
designed. It is possible to separate the Beam Ray machine output stage from the
oscillator stage and to drive the output stage directly from a modern digital frequency
generator. This allows much more precise and accurate frequency control than the
original. But the output stage requires over 40 V p-p to drive it properly at 100%
modulation and most modern generators are not capable of outputting this kind of voltage.
So the booster stage allows a low level signal between 20Hz and 200Khz (the
original range of the machine) to drive the output at up to approx 66 V p-p without
significant signal distortion (it can be driven at higher inputs of up to 2 V p-p with
clipping). An input of 951 mV will cause 100% modulation of the Beam Rays machine
and an input of 1.5 V p-p will result in significant overmodulation without distortion of
the modulating signal itself. The booster amplifier has a bandwidth of approximately
800KHz and so can also be used as a general purpose wideband, high voltage buffer
amplifier as well.
The following link is to pages with a more detailed description of the machine's
operation, an analysis and relevant observations.
Machine Description and Analysis
Plasma Tube Photos
The photographs below show two views of the Nazarov phanotron running on the Beam Ray Machine
 |
 |
And here is a closeup of the electrodes of the original plasma tube.
Inside the Beam Rays Machine
The picture below is of the output stage of the machine. The tank coil can be clearly seen on the right with the 812 output triode next to it. The output jacks are in the centre top. The HT transformer is at the back left with the two 866 mercury vapour rectifiers in front of it. Picture courtesy of Stuart Andrews.
The next photo is the underside of the output stage (note that some components on both stages had to be replaced with modern ones to get the machine working because the originals had deteriorated too much).
And this is a photo of the underside of the oscillator stage:
(c) Copyright Aubrey Scoon 2002
