Larken (Edgar L. Larkin, Radiant Energy and Its Analysis, 1903): central claims
Source note (not a source gap): the whole folder is one scanned book (342 pages, 23 OCR pages, text layer good). Eleven passages were deep-read in full, including all tables and figures that matter (QE round added pp.143-150 and pp.17-19, 78-79, 145, 158-160, 190-191); pp.1-16, 20-77, 80-123, 182-189 and 192-204 are digest only (mainstream spectroscopy, solar photography and instruments, Langley's bolometer). The folder is named "Larken" but the author spells his name Larkin. "Radiant energy" in the title means electromagnetic radiation in the nineteenth-century sense (Melloni, Langley); the book does not describe a free-energy device or a non-Hertzian wave. It does state an energy-from-space aim, meaning solar radiation: "taking energy out of space and chain it to his servitude. Men pay for power now; it should be free" [p.78], by solar motors (pp.159-160) or by some way to "cut them out of space and make use of them as they are" [p.190]. All claims below are Larkin's own and rest on the book; the only second voice in the folder is S. P. Langley's 17 April 1882 letter on the April 1882 aurora and spot, quoted by Larkin [p.149]. No other second account was checked in the folder.
- All radiant energy (heat, light, actinic rays) is one electromagnetic wave motion, carried by J. J. Thomson's corpuscles (one-thousandth of a hydrogen atom, "electricity in its ultimate refinement") which saturate space and replace the ether; radioactive bodies and enzymes merely direct this energy from space. [pp.17-19, 39-40, 174, 177-178]
- Solar jets and bridges across large sunspots disturb the earth's magnetic field by electromagnetic waves at light speed, causing magnetic storms, earth-current surges in telegraph wires (table headed 16 July 1882 in the book; the storm is 16 July 1892 by the weekday and Larkin's Science letter: 133 mA in the text, 144 mA in the table, and 280 mA at 644 V New York-Providence) and the aurora, the earth's field being "tuned" to the sun's; magnetism is "a vortex in corpuscles" fixed in steel, and Crookes and Geissler tubes reproduce the aurora. [pp.122-150]. Mechanism as given (pp.143-146): thermo-electric currents in sun-warmed ore beds explain only the small daily variation; storms come from a "wave front of magnetic radiation from the sun" (Bigelow's spherical-magnet sun) striking an earth that acts as a coherer does. Dated evidence: his own 16 April 1882 spot changes (9 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and aurora (9 p.m. to about 1 a.m.), corroborated by Langley's 17 April letter on the same aurora and spot; Loomis's 1775-1875 chart ("the coincidence is complete", with Larkin's own exception of 1805).
- The sun's heat comes from gravitational contraction from a 25-trillion-mile sphere at absolute zero (Helmholtz and See: 49,048,200 degrees F water-equivalent, about 21.8 million years of radiation), with meteoric impact limited to about 1% and catalysis offered as the first mode of energy. [pp.162-181]
- Cosmogony: the universe began as a corpuscular ("ultra-gaseous", electrical) cloud 30,000 light years across; gravity made nebulae; electrical induction set them rotating; gemmation and tidal friction (after G. H. Darwin and T. J. J. See) built suns, planets and moons, and tidal friction "completely accounts for the evolution of the sidereal universe", the sequence ending in dead worlds (about eleven quadrillion earth-like bodies, one live sun in 320) and a return to corpuscles. [pp.258-294]
- A luminous "stellar floor" lies beyond the Milky Way, seen from the Lowe Observatory with over 100 rents in Scorpius and Sagittarius and "starless fields" (tubular empty lines of sight); a year of same-night comparison of bright and black fields is offered as a control against atmospheric dust haze (Larkin adds that the dark places "seem so to the eye through contrast probably" and doubts plates would show the floor). [pp.299-303]
Not central, but the bulk of the book (and checked in the deep reads as mostly correct, with slips listed in facts.json): textbook spectroscopy, Kirchhoff's laws, stellar parallax, binary-star masses by Kepler's third law and the Doppler shift.
QE note (2026-10-08): claim 2's April 1882 timing and Langley witness, the energy-from-space aim in the source note, and the 1892 date of the earth-current table were added or corrected after the QE; Larkin's solar motors (Ericsson 3 of 35 hp; Cawston 11 of 130 hp, about one-twelfth) belong to the energy-from-space aim, not to claims 1-5.