At 09:11 PM 1/25/05 -0500, Ardeshir Mehta wrote: > >I don't know what you think is so good about Jerry's post. Turbines=20 >have been used for decades to generate electricity, for instance to=20 >propel ships. My idea has to do with the DESIGN of the turbine, which I=20 >have not revealed to anyone on the list, and am not about to (seeing as=20 >I haven't made the idea public yet): it has nothing to do with the=20 >practicality of using turbines for generating electricity. (Jerry likes=20 >to think of himself as some kind of an engineer, of course, but we all=20 >know that's just Santoku envy.) > >Besides, "Gott sie danken" isn't even good German. (He's been making=20 >that same mistake for donkey's years (see=20 ><http://www.digistar.com/rollei/2001-03/1144.html>). Jerry would do=20 >better to stick to Russian and let others just THINK he doesn't know=20 >how to express himself in German, than to open his mouth in German=20 >itself, and thereby remove all doubt! Ardeshir Allow me to intrude here on several points. First, the original steam turbine design was produced by Charles Parsons (a junior son of the Earl of Rosse who had owned a phenomenal 48" telescope in Ireland in the middle 1800's, a size not matched for a half-century). Parsons spent a decade trying to sell his design to the Royal Navy but was rebuffed at every point. He finally placed one in a small powerboat and ran this boat, the TURBINIA, through the security forces at the 1897 Diamond Jubilee naval review held for Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight and told her directly of his problems. (This is an epic anecdote in naval circles: a vast armada of ships from all of the nations of the World, all there in praise of the Widow at Windsor. A small motorboat starts zipping in through the naval and police vessels, evades their efforts to block it; when it lands, Charles Parsons hops ashore to address his Sovereign directly. Charles Parsons joined his family's interests by founding both the Parsons turbine works which powered the Royal Navy from HMS DREADNOUGHT, the battleship, at least until HMS DREADNOUGHT, the nuclear submarine, and Grubb, Parsons, the great British producer of superlative optics and some of the grand telescopes still in regular professional use today.) Second, the gas turbine of Frank Whittle is a direct off-shoot of the steam turbine -- that is, Whittle began working on the gas turbine as the improvement from the old VTE ("Verticle Triple Expansion") reciprocating steam engine to the turbine was so immense that he understood a similar improvement could be had by shifting from the "suck-squeeze-bang-and-blow" reciprocating four-cycle petrol engine and a rotary design. He was correct and, just had been the case with the steam turbine, the gas turbine has proven to be a fuel hog. (The Royal Navy continued to use VTE gear on those most vital of WWII escorts, the Corvettes, simply to improve their endurance at sea while accepting the limited speed of 16 knots they had.) Third, steam turbines have been used for ninety years to power ships by generating electricity but this has always been a bit of an inefficent exercize: the US Navy was the largest single employer of such plants and the trade-offs were immense. In the end, the only major commercial use of such gear was with reciprocating Diesel engines generating electricty. The current use on warships of such designs is all over the board, though the Royal Navy's COSAG ("Combined Steam and Gas") was the standard for forty years. The US Army first adopted turbine field generators in the later 1950's. Our experience was less than whole-hearted acceptance, as the gear was fragile and required more attention than did conventional reciprocating generators, though the gas turbines did kick ouit a hell of a lot of juice. (Another issue was that of the "precise power" required by computers and medical gear -- that is, a fixed frequency of generation. As turbines tend to waver a bit in their power output, the frequency of the current produced would fluctuate. Today, this is simply handled by add-ons at the output adjusting the frequency but this is a factor of recent years and the workarounds used in Viet-Nam were rather complex.) Even today, the US Army uses reciprocating engines to generate power for field hospitals and the like, though I understand that this is now changing. Fourth, I am not certain just what improvements to the basic turbine design you have developed but, if you have done so, go for the gold! I am a student of engineering but I am certainly not an engineer, so I leave that to you. But if it is as good as you suggest, I would recommend strongly that you obtain a patent on this and pay the freight to do so. (I am offering this, of course, as legal advice which you requested and which will cost you 10% of your gross earnings forever -- your grandkids and mine will get rich together.) Fifth, Jerry's comment, "Gott sie danken!", is perfect Yiddish. Yiddish is late Medi=E6val German written in Hebrew characters and incorporating a number of Hebraic terms and phrases. And the phrase was used, according to my father's mother, by her father, a Penn Dutch type, in a sort of comic way -- my father would laugh at something and would tell me that his mother would quote her father as saying "Gott sie danken" on such occasions. (Part of my family tree includes folks from the German Palatinate who came to the US around the time of the American Revolution and who settled into south-central Pennsylvania: these are generally known as "Penn Dutch" though most, as have my family, have drifted away from their strong Calvinist roots. The Amish are a different matter altogether.) Bill Landau, a friend of mine, now dead and sadly missed, was raised in a Yiddish-speaking neighborhood in Philadelphia. (I recall that Bill stated that his family were not observant Jews though he became one in his later years.) Bill was drafted in the Second World War and found himself a rifleman in the 3rd Infantry Division. During OPERATION SHINGLE (the Anzio landing), his sergeant told him off at one point to take some Prisoners of War back to the collection apart. During this walk of a mile or so, one of the Germans glared at Bill and spoke to one of the other Germans: "why is this JEW taking us to the rear?" to which Bill replied, "because this JEW has the gun". He spoke no German, having studied Latin in high school, but did know Yiddish. (Bill went to college after the War and became an optometrist. He remained in the Army Reserve for years and was always intensely proud of his Army service during the War.) =20 It is a sad commentary to note that Yiddish is now regarded as a sort of shameful language in Israel, though there are still Yiddish newspapers in the US and, in some major cities such as New York, Yiddish radio stations. Finally, I was not aware that Jerry knew any Russian. Do you? I do. And German. And French. And I can even speak some Yiddish, on occasion. (And I hold a Master's Degree in Classical Languages.) In addition, I have a working ability to deal with Scots and Irish Gaelic and Welsh. (I know very little Arabic and even less Hebrew but I hope to study both at some point: I can read the New Testament of the Christian Bible in the original Koine Greek but I must learn Hebrew to deal with the Old Testament and the Apocrypha.) Marc msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx=20 Cha robh b=E0s fir gun ghr=E0s fir!