The Practical Use of Atmospheric Electricity: Andry-Bourgeois's June 1923 Account of Jules Guillot's Double-Antenna Collector in La Science et la Vie

In June 1923 the French popular-science monthly La Science et la Vie opened its issue no. 72 (tome XXIII, pages 483 to 491) with an article by Andry-Bourgeois, "L'utilisation pratique de l'électricité atmosphérique". Its second half is a description of a collector built by the engineer Jules Guillot, with a portrait of the inventor, two photographs of the installation and two wiring diagrams. It is a contemporary magazine report, written in the year of Guillot's first patent, and it is openly enthusiastic. It is useful mainly for what it shows of the apparatus and of the reasoning behind it, and for one modest demonstration figure. It is not a test report.

Who is writing, and from what standpoint

Elsewhere in the same issue the magazine identifies Andry-Bourgeois as a civil mining engineer and one of its regular contributors. He does not write as a neutral observer. He says the capture of atmospheric currents overturns a number of theoretical ideas while confirming his own, and he closes by calling Guillot's invention a "heureuse et fructueuse révolution moderne". The physics he sets out is his own picture: the Earth electrified by its motion through a dielectric ether, gravitation as possibly an electromagnetic effect. These are the author's speculations, not findings reported from the apparatus.

The background the article gives

Before reaching Guillot, the article assembles reasons to think the upper air is a usable reservoir:

• The ground is described as negatively charged and the air above it as positively charged, with potential rising with height. Peltier's kite work is cited: nothing detectable up to one metre, a slow rise to 100 metres, a rapid one up to 247 metres, the greatest height his kite reached.
• The fair-weather current flowing to the ground is put at 1,500 amperes over the whole globe.
• Jean Lecarme, head of the physics section at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, is credited with lighting filament-less vacuum tubes at the Vallot observatory on Mont Blanc, at about 4,350 metres, from the antenna of the wireless receiving station there. Photographs show the ice-laden cables.
• The Thury direct-current line from Saint-Maurice to Lausanne (56 kilometres, a constant 156 amperes at 4,400 to 44,000 volts) is cited for its lightning arresters, resistances of the order of one megohm that bleed atmospheric charge off the line continuously.
• German trials with captive balloons on conducting cables, up to 3,000 metres, are mentioned in a sentence.

The article then states the real obstacle plainly: collecting static electricity at high voltage is not hard; the difficulty is that the current is always very small.

Guillot's idea: an "electric siphon"

According to the article, Guillot reasoned that the Earth acts like a vast dynamo, producing surface currents strongest toward the equator and weakest at the poles, and that the air carries electricity of both polarities. A conventional dynamo is compared to a pump, which must be driven continuously. Guillot's aim is said to be a siphon instead: something that needs only to be primed and then runs by itself. The priming is done with an auxiliary source, a battery for example, feeding a special coil; the article says this source is removed once the flow of what it calls the "fluide bleu" has started.

The apparatus as described

The demonstration installation is said to consist of:

• A double aerial on a mast of about 15 to 20 metres, depending on the site (one photograph caption gives a base 18 metres high). A fan of needles on a steel rod points to the zenith and is said to collect negative electricity. Insulated from it, and at 90 degrees to it, a single horizontal point faces south, toward the equator, and is said to collect positive electricity. The two are treated as the poles of an aerial current.
• A panel of horn-type lightning arresters between the aerials and earth, for storms in which, the article says, tensions reach millions of volts.
• Groups of regulators and tension equalisers, which the article calls one of the most important parts of the invention, since the captured voltage swings with the state of the atmosphere and would otherwise make the equipment dangerous to handle.
• Resistances and "neutralising couples" to absorb parasitic currents.
• "Aspirators", the electric siphons proper, described only as providing a magnetic field that draws in the charged layers of the air. Where rotating aspirators such as alternators are used, a separate direct-current supply for their field is said to be indispensable.
• Measuring instruments and a distribution board.

The whole ground installation is reported to occupy about 3 square metres.

What was demonstrated

The one concrete result is lighting. The article says the collector suits heating and lighting with ordinary commercial lamps and reports the lighting of ten lamps of 50 candles, giving an intense and steady light, in experiments carried out under the supervision of experienced engineers. The circuit diagram likewise shows 50-candle lamps as the load.

For motive power the article is more cautious. The raw current is said not to suit ordinary industrial motors, because it does not produce the usual magnetic effect in their windings. Guillot is said to use motors without windings, whose moving parts are simply "couples métalliques". No performance is given for them. A special static transformer, intended to supply the full range of currents that existing equipment needs, is described as still being built.

What the article does not establish

No voltage, current or power in watts is stated anywhere for Guillot's collector. The supervising engineers are not named, and the place, date, duration and weather of the lamp demonstration are not given. The article does not say whether the auxiliary source was disconnected and the lamps then observed over time, which is the point on which the siphon claim depends. The "aspirator" is characterised by its purpose, not its construction. The economic conclusions (no coal, no costly hydraulic plant, dams freed for irrigation) are the author's forecast.

How it fits the rest of the dossier

The geometry matches the later descriptions gathered in the archive dossier page on Guillot: a zenith-pointing fan for negative charge, a south-pointing horizontal aerial for positive, a mast of about 20 metres, 3 square metres of plant. The siphon image reappears in Robert A. Nelson's survey. What differs is scale. The outputs quoted from the 1930 encyclopedia article, about 2.5 to 3 kW and about 300 W, do not appear in 1923; the earliest account here goes no further than ten 50-candle lamps. The name used for the apparatus on the Eclator page does not occur in the 1923 article, which speaks only of a "capteur" and a "poste de captation".