"The Inventions of Hans Coler" is a paper by Cyril Smith dated December 2005. It is a secondary account: Smith works entirely from BIOS Final Report No. 1043 and its appendices, retells the history of Hans Coler's two devices, and then proposes a physical mechanism for the battery-fed one, which he spells "Stromerzeuger" (the device this wiki files as Stromzeuger). The paper reports no new measurements on a Coler apparatus. Its value to the dossier is twofold: a compact outside summary of what the 1926 examiners recorded, and a clearly stated, untested hypothesis about where the alleged surplus could come from.
What Smith takes from the BIOS report
Smith summarises the investigation by R. Hurst and R. Sandberg and distinguishes the two inventions: the Stromerzeuger, said to deliver more DC power than its batteries supplied, and the self-oscillating Magnetstromapparat, said to need no power source at all. He notes that no example of either survived Allied bombing, that Coler rebuilt a Magnetstromapparat at British expense with what Smith calls partial success, and that attempts made after the report became public in 1979 produced no reported successes. For the Stromerzeuger he states that there appear to have been no replication attempts, then or since, and that the report describes it in words only, without circuit diagrams or layouts.
His history runs as follows. Coler showed a small version to Professor Kloss in Berlin in 1925; a request for a government investigation and a patent application were both refused on the ground that it was a perpetual motion machine. Smith dates the report by M. Kloss, made with Professor R. Franke, to 4th March 1926 and that by W. O. Schumann to 3rd April 1926. In 1933 Coler and a collaborator Smith names as von Rugh developed the Magnetstromapparat and a larger Stromerzeuger, which Fritz Modersohn agreed to back. Smith calls a 6KW version "reputed" and adds that Coler's own statements suggest the effect could only occasionally be reproduced. The 1942–1943 naval (OKM) work with Heinz Frohlich closes the account.
The figures Smith relies on
The numbers come from Schumann's report as Smith presents it. Three separate 6V batteries fed three circuits: a "spool" circuit of wire coils, a "plate" circuit of copper-strip coils wound bifilar with them, and an independent "exciter" circuit of electromagnet coils on iron rods. Those rods also formed branch connections between turns of the plate coils, so current passed along them lengthwise.
The switch-on order mattered. The spool circuit alone drew about 100mA; when the plate and exciter batteries were connected together, the spool current fell to about 39mA, the plate current rose to 48mA and the exciter drew 170mA. The load, a bank of light bulbs in parallel, is given as 3A at 3.5V. Smith computes 1.54W drawn from the three batteries against 10.5W in the load. (He gives the combined spool and plate input as 88mA; the two figures he quotes add to 87mA.)
Smith reports that Kloss and Schumann both checked the readings with their own instruments and both used a photometric comparison, matching bulb brightness against a bulb run from a separate battery. Kloss, he says, also tried a hot-wire instrument to look for superimposed AC and found none.
Smith's argument: the cores as the source
From the circuit as he reconstructs it, Smith argues that the extra load current could only have originated in the iron cores, and he cites Kloss and Franke as pointing to the magnet system. He is candid that the reconstruction is his own: "The following is the author's perception and may not be exact."
He treats a rod that delivers DC power as showing absolute negative resistance, and draws an analogy with published work on photon-assisted electron transport, in particular calculations by Durst and co-authors on a two-dimensional electron gas in a magnetic field, where microwave irradiation can drive the DC resistance negative. In those systems, Smith acknowledges, the power comes from the external microwave source. His proposal is that in iron the pump is internal: the electrons responsible for ferromagnetism precess at the Larmor frequency, and conduction electrons spiralling at the related cyclotron frequency could pick up energy from them. He pictures each precessing electron as the rotor of a tiny dynamo (he uses the term Quantum Dynamo, which he notes is a trade mark of Magnetic Power Inc.) and argues that the induced fields could act like a commutator, favouring acceleration over deceleration.
An annex estimates the scale. For precession at 10GHz, a moment of about one Bohr magneton and a miss distance of 10^-10 m, Smith gets about 10^-9 volts per pass, and 100 millivolts for 10^8 passes in series over about 0.2m. He qualifies it himself: "These are just rough numbers for guidance."
He also reads the coil layout and the switch-on sequence as ways of keeping magnetisation uniform along the cores, mentioning simulations without giving their details, and rejects Coler's own belief that conduction electrons were magnetic monopoles.
Where Smith departs from the rest of the dossier
Smith is far more confident in the 1926 tests than the BIOS investigators were. He writes that it can be assumed the apparatus did what was alleged, whereas BIOS Final Report No. 1043 records only a millivolt-level, non-repeatable result from the device actually built in 1946. He also dismisses the 1943 work: Frohlich, he says, wrongly took the 1926 output to be interrupted DC, never passed current through the cores, and ended with the vague idea of Ten Independent Oscillation Circuits. That is Smith's judgment, not an established finding.
Readers will notice differences of detail from other pages here. The power figures Smith uses, 1.54W in and 10.5W out, are not the same as the ratios this wiki records for the Kloss and Schumann tests on the Stromzeuger page; the collaborator's name and the device's spelling also differ.
What the paper does and does not establish
The paper documents a hypothesis. It contains no built apparatus, no measurement of negative resistance in an iron rod, and no demonstration that the commutating action it requires exists; Smith says no one appears to have taken up that challenge. A passing remark that experiments seem to confirm radio-frequency noise across a magnetised core is not sourced. The cited transport studies concern externally pumped semiconductor systems, and their extension to bulk iron is Smith's inference. The 1926 measurements remain exactly as strong, or as weak, as the original reports make them. For Coler's own explanation of the energy source, see Raumenergie (Space-Energy).
Source notes & attribution
- https://www.rexresearch.com/coler/LudwigInventionsColer.pdf