A Substack post by the author writing as bellerian1 describes a home-built version of the four-electrode apparatus patented by Leon Sprink, powers it from an improvised high-voltage supply and reports what a hand-held field meter, an oscilloscope and a signal analyzer showed nearby. The first half of the post is a copy of the source page on Sprink, already covered in Leon Sprink: Form Emissions, Electrostatic Activation and the FR866491 Patent. This article concerns the second half: the build, the readings and an update dated 27 April 2022. It is a bench diary by one hobbyist, not a test of Sprink's chemical claims.
What the patent text asks for
The post reproduces Canadian Patent 580548 (given as equivalent to GB 685522 and DE 868592), and that text is the yardstick for the build. It describes a non-conducting frame carrying four fine metal points at the corners of a square, wired so that the two ends of each diagonal sit at opposite poles of a high-voltage DC generator. The plane of the electrodes is to be set roughly perpendicular to magnetic north. The patent's own examples use 5000 volts across a 0.50 metre diagonal, 60,000 volts across 1 metre, and 160,000 volts. The patent says the device must run continuously for a long period, giving 15 days to 2 months as an example, before material treated 3 to 60 metres away is said to respond. The effects claimed are chemical and thermal: saponification falling from 24 hours to 3, lime burned at 790 calories per kilogram instead of 1200. Nothing in the patent describes a meter reading taken beside the apparatus.
What was built
According to the post, the frame is a wooden drum hoop 20 inches in diameter. Four 1/4-inch threaded rods, each 12 inches long, pass through it and are held by nylon nuts; motorcycle spike lugs screwed onto the inner ends serve as the points. Solid-core 18 AWG wire joins the top two electrodes, and a second length joins the bottom two. The builder reads the patent as putting positive on top and negative below, and notes that which pair is which depends only on how the hoop is connected to the supply.
The first run
The builder did not have a 50 kV DC module ready and instead used a supply they call an RPS, set to deliver -100 kV DC on one side and -50 kV DC on the other. The post is not consistent about what this amounted to at the gap: it gives the relative potential as -50 kV DC in one paragraph and about 10 kV DC, entirely negative, in another. The builder also says the two sides were at first connected the wrong way round. The supply drew roughly 600 mA at 120 VAC, or about 6 amps at 12 VDC from a battery bank through an inverter.
With an older analogue AlphaLab TriField meter, the post reports:
- a magnetic reading above 100 mG within about 5 feet of the gap, steady as the builder moved around;
- an electric-field reading with a similar reach, about 5 to 6 feet;
- a slow rise and fall in the electric reading, which the builder estimates at roughly 1 Hz, noticed while the builder stood between the meter and the device;
- on a signal analyzer, an amplitude that came and went periodically in the range below 100 MHz;
- no radio-frequency reading on the meter, which the builder attributes to the absence of a spark: "This is more like a Glow Discharge gap."
The builder notes that the reach is far short of the 60 metres in Sprink's patent, and compares the slow pulsation to their own heartbeat. They also observe that their body shielded the meter and changed the electric reading.
The April 2022 update
The update reports that capacitors in one supply module had failed. Run capacitors rated 20 uF at 480 VAC were found to have dropped to 15 to 17 nF, which the builder says kept power from reaching half of the series arrangement; with those parts in place the discharge could not cross a 1/4-inch gap. The supply was cut down to a single module with good capacitors, which then fired across a 3-inch gap.
For the second run the top pair of points was made positive and the bottom pair negative, with no separate spark gap in the circuit. A variac was turned down to 30 to 40 VAC input, at which the builder says the supply entered a resonance and gave about 60,000 volts DC. No arcing occurred. The post reports a pulsing magnetic reading swinging between 5 mG and 100 mG, which it says was absent in the first run; oscilloscope spikes now on the positive side, with a stepped shape the builder likens to another experimenter's circuit; and analyzer activity from 0 Hz to about 800 MHz. The builder left the apparatus powered for about an hour.
What the readings do and do not show
The post reports meter deflections within about 5 to 6 feet of a high-voltage device that the builder describes as behaving like a glow-discharge gap; the post reports nothing done to confirm that description. The readings come from a hand-held hobby meter, with no calibration and no independent check reported. The post does not establish more than that.
- No chemical reaction, change of state or fuel saving was tested, so the claims described in Electrostatic Activation of Matter are untouched either way.
- The hour-long run is far shorter than the weeks the patent requires, and no orientation to magnetic north is mentioned.
- The post gives no reading taken with the supply running and the hoop disconnected, and no background reading, so the hoop is not separated from the transformers, inverter and wiring that drive it.
- The first-run voltage figures conflict with each other, and the supply was later found faulty. The update does not say whether the fault was already present during the first measurements.
- The meter's electric reading shifted with the observer's position, by the builder's own account.
- The post refers to videos of the runs but reports no logged data, calibration or instrument settings, and no one else is reported to have repeated the measurements.
The builder closes with a guess that the arrangement might charge capacitors indirectly, without drawing current from the source. The post presents this as an idea to try, not as a result.
Place in the dossier
Sprink Claims vs. Evidence: Patents, Press Reports and the Absence of Independent Validation records that the Sprink material rests on patents and retellings. This build is the nearest thing in the dossier to hands-on data, and it measures something the patents never claimed while leaving what they did claim unexamined. The same holds for the gravitational and magnetic effects attributed to the related apparatus of Jacques Ravatin: the post quotes those claims but reports no test of them. See also FR866491 for the earlier French filing.
References
- bellerian1, "The Leon Sprink Device for Space Activation", Substack, with an update dated 27 April 2022: https://bellerian1.substack.com/p/the-leon-sprink-device-for-space
Source notes & attribution
- https://bellerian1.substack.com/p/the-leon-sprink-device-for-space