Larken · Source catalogue

Larkin's book is a popular course in late-nineteenth-century astrophysics in 43 short chapters ('papers'), each with an epigraph from Vedic, Buddhist, Egyptian or classical texts. Part I (pp.17-50) teaches radiant energy through the spectrum: heliostat, slit, prism and grating, Kirchhoff's three laws, the Lowe Observatory's spectroscope (a 14,438-lines-per-inch ruled grating, spider-web micrometer). Part II (pp.51-191) applies this to the sun: solar chemistry by absorption lines, the telespectroscope and prominences, the history of solar photography, eclipses and the flash spectrum, Hale's spectroheliograph, sunspots, then the solar jets and their terrestrial effects (magnetic storms, earth currents, aurora, pp.122-150), the sun's light, heat and 'velocity' potentials (pp.151-165), the source of solar heat (Helmholtz contraction, 'heat of impact', catalysis, pp.166-181) and Langley's spectro-bolometer (pp.182-191). Part III (pp.192-294) turns to the stars: parallax (Hooke to Bessel and Henderson), star counts and the Paris photographic survey, binaries (Kepler's third law applied to Alpha Centauri and Sirius), spectroscopic binaries by the Doppler principle (Campbell, Vogel), then Larkin's cosmogony: stellar and tidal evolution after G. H. Darwin and T. J. J. See (pp.258-274), a universe-wide primordial cloud of Thomson corpuscles (pp.275-285), nebular rotation by electrical induction demonstrated with charged croquet balls (pp.286-290), a mass estimate for the 30,000-light-year stellar system from stellar velocities (pp.291-292) and a cyclic summary (pp.293-294). The matter that bears on the project's title phrase 'radiant energy' is Larkin's own and is consistently the nineteenth-century physicists' sense: radiant energy is electromagnetic wave motion (light, heat and 'chemical' rays are one thing, citing Melloni 1843 and Langley), carried by 'corpuscles' of J. J. Thomson (one-thousandth of a hydrogen atom's mass, 'electricity in its ultimate refinement') that saturate space and replace the ether [read: pp.17-18, 39-40, 177-178]. He describes no free-energy device and no non-Hertzian wave, and his 'radiant energy' is not the later Tesla/Moray/Bearden sense. But the book does state an explicit energy-from-space aim, meaning solar radiation: 'The combined energies of man must be centered on the herculean work of taking energy out of space and chain it to his servitude. Men pay for power now; it should be free' [read: p.78]; 'The problem of all ages is now to either lengthen them for use of man or find some way to cut them out of space and make use of them as they are' [read: p.190]; the coherer 'is cutting waves out of space' [read: p.145]. The practical content is solar motors: Ericsson's engine (176 sq ft of mirror, 3 hp from about 35 hp of sunlight) and the Cawston Ostrich Farm motor at South Pasadena (1,788 mirrors, 70 sq yd, 11 hp indicated from about 130 hp of radiation, one-twelfth; 210 lb steam; 1,400 gal/min), with a call for 'a million accumulators' [read: pp.159-160]. Radioactive bodies are called 'simply more transparent to corpuscles from space' (p.18). He gives no design for 'cutting waves out of space', and the coherer passage does not distinguish a trigger from an energy source (deep read). The unusual material is: (1) the magnetic-storm and aurora chapters, which attribute storms to electromagnetic waves from solar jets travelling at 186,000 miles per second that act on an earth field 'tuned' to the sun (pp.122-150); magnetism as a 'vortex in corpuscles' fixed in steel; and Crookes- and Geissler-tube imitations of the aurora; (2) the solar-heat chapters with a long run of Helmholtz-style contraction figures; (3) the cosmogony of pp.275-294; and (4) the addendum on the 'stellar floor' (pp.299-303). Deep reads found the geometry and most of the arithmetic sound, with a list of slips (see key_claims and each deep read): 206,265/0.75 printed as 275,202 (275,020); the 62.5 x 1.41 x 28 line printed as 1,475 lb (2,467); the Stefan example done in ordinary degrees (9.7 not 16); the 'one-fifth' eccentricity ratio (0.017/0.82 is about 1/48); the earth-current table headed 16 July 1882 in the book (the date is 16 July 1892 by the weekday and Larkin's Science letter of Saturday, 16 July 1892; the Nov 1882 jets and 17 Nov 1882 storm stay 1882) printed with a 144 mA peak in the table and 133 mA in the text, and with the volts column consistent with I x R at about 3,700 ohms (100/27 and 252/68) against the stated 2,700 ohms (whether the volts were measured or computed from the currents is not stated); the Sirius companion's mean distance printed 1,232,000,000 miles where Larkin's own 24 AU gives 2,232,000,000. The book is single-authored. Larkin's own observations of the Nov 1882 sunspot jets, the stellar floor and the 15 Nov 1901 meteors are single-observer in these pages. The April 1882 aurora and sunspot are not: p.149 quotes Prof. S. P. Langley of the Allegheny Observatory, writing on 17 April 1882, on the same aurora (streamers converging 10 degrees south of the zenith) and the same naked-eye spot 'traversed by bridges of intense brightness' (the letter is quoted second-hand by Larkin; the original was not consulted). Pp.143-150 (deep read): the storm mechanism is two-tier. (a) Thermo-electric earth currents from 'vast beds of unlike ores' warmed by the sun, flowing east to west, explain only the small daily magnetic variation; Larkin says they are 'weak' [read: p.144]. (b) Storms and aurora come from a 'wave front of magnetic radiation from the sun' (Bigelow's spherical-magnet sun, Cut 62) striking the earth, which acts as a coherer does on a spark's waves; the solar explosion is likened to an induction-coil spark and the aurora to a brush discharge (Los Angeles-Avalon spark 750,000 V, 24 in.) [read: pp.144-146]. Larkin's own dated account of 16 April 1882 [read: pp.147-149]: a spot first seen on the east limb on 15 April, cut by bridges overnight; 9 a.m. two tongues pointing at each other; 12:30 p.m. the ends met and passed; 2 p.m. a circle, 'clearly a cyclone'; aurora arc seen at 9 p.m., crimson pillars at 10 p.m., maximum midnight to 1 a.m., streamers converging at the zenith. That is a gap of about 7 to 12 hours between the spot changes and the aurora, neither 8.3 minutes nor the 1 to 4 days of a coronal mass ejection (CME); Larkin does not discuss the lag. Loomis's 1775-1875 chart (Cut 64, panels: auroras per year, mean daily range of declination, relative spot number) is his main evidence that spots, auroras and storms rise and fall together: 117 auroras in 1786 and four in 1810, 'The coincidence is complete', with his own exception 'in 1805 there were quite a number of spots, but few auroras' [read: pp.149-150; page image p.150]. He forecasts a spot maximum for 1903-4. The PDF is a University of California library scan (Internet Archive-style file name) with a due-date slip, a Pacific Electric Railway advertisement and blank leaves at the end.

Key claims

• All radiant energy (heat, light, actinic rays, and the whole wave motion of the universe) is one electromagnetic wave motion carried by Thomson's corpuscles, which saturate space and replace the ether [read: pp.17-19, 39-40, 177-178].
• Radioactive bodies are 'simply more transparent to corpuscles from space', so their emission is energy directed from space rather than energy stored in them; enzymes and polonium or actinium likewise 'merely direct radiance already saturating space' [read: pp.18, 174].
• Solar jets and bridges across large spots disturb the earth's magnetic field by electromagnetic waves travelling at light speed, producing magnetic storms, earth-current surges in telegraph lines and the aurora [read: pp.122-125, 130, 136].
• The earth's magnetic field is 'tuned' to the sun's, as a coherer is to a spark, so a solar disturbance sets the earth's field into sympathetic turbulence and the aurora is the visible result; earth currents are driven by the sun's apparent east-to-west motion [read: pp.132, 137, 143-145]. Thermo-electric currents in sun-warmed ore beds, flowing east to west, are offered only for the small daily variation, not the storms [read: p.144].
• Magnetism is 'a vortex in corpuscles'; steel (iron with 1-2% carbon) can fix the vortex and so keep it as a permanent magnet, while soft iron cannot [read: pp.130-132].
• Magnetic storms are caused by a 'wave front of magnetic radiation from the sun' (Bigelow's spherical-magnet sun), the solar explosion acting like an induction-coil spark and the earth like a coherer that 'cuts waves out of space' [read: pp.144-145].
• Crookes and Geissler tubes lit by a static machine or induction coil reproduce every colour and form of the aurora; an electromagnet around the tube changes the colours to match [read: pp.137-141].
• On 16 July 1892 (printed 1882 in the book) earth-connected telegraph terminals registered 133 mA in the text and 144 mA in the table (New York-Boston) and 280 mA at 644 V (New York-Providence) during a magnetic storm and aurora; the volts column is consistent with I x R at about 3,700 ohms against the stated 2,700 ohms [read: page image pp.134-135; date correction per arbiter].
• The sun's heat is not due to meteoric impact beyond about 1% of the total, because more infall would disturb Mercury, Venus and the earth; 1/100 of the earth's mass falling at 383 miles per second would supply one year of solar radiation [read: pp.164-165].
• The sun's heat comes mainly from contraction from a primordial sphere 25 trillion miles across at absolute zero (Helmholtz, T. J. J. See); See's value is 49,048,200 degrees F water-equivalent; at 2 1/4 degrees F per year the sun has about 21.8 million years of radiation, 18 million past and 4 million to run [read: pp.167-179].
• Catalysis may have been the first mode of energy in the primordial mass, with electricity as 'the primordial catalyst'; affinity, heat and light are late products [read: pp.173-176].
• The sun's surface is a 'liquid gas' and the photosphere is a rain and hail of liquid and semi-solid diamonds (attributed to Sir Robert Ball) [read: pp.101-102].
• A stellar universe 30,000 light years across, filled initially with an 'ultra-gaseous' corpuscular cloud at absolute zero, condensed under gravity into nebulae and suns; the matter must once have been far thinner than any terrestrial gas [read: pp.279-284, 291].
• Electrical induction between charged primitive nebulae set them rotating (demonstrated with charged croquet balls and a balloon); conservation of areas then spins them up on contraction [read: pp.286-290].
• Tidal friction 'completely accounts for the evolution of the sidereal universe', the moon was born of the earth by fission, first day equals first month at 3 to 5 hours, and the final state is day equals month at 55 present days [read: pp.258-274].
• A star flying at 200 miles per second (1830 Groombridge) requires a mass inside the 30,000-light-year sphere many times larger than the visible suns; doubling speed needs four times the force, giving 11 quadrillion earth-like dark bodies and one live sun in 320 [read: pp.291-292].
• Dark worlds outnumber live suns; the cosmic cycle ends with stars dying, colliding and returning to corpuscles ('one wave', cut 125) [read: pp.292-294].
• Binary stars, including those found only by the Doppler shift of spectral lines, can be weighed by Kepler's third law; Alpha Centauri's pair holds about 1.5 sun masses (period 81 years) and Sirius with companion 5.5 [read: pp.232-235, 249-252].
• The universal 'stellar floor' (a luminous pavement beyond the Milky Way) is visible from the Lowe Observatory with over 100 rents and 'starless fields' in Scorpius and Sagittarius, compared on the same nights with black fields as a control against uniform atmospheric dust haze (a year of observation; the dark places 'seem so to the eye through contrast probably') [read: pp.299-303].
• Larkin's dated 16 April 1882 record: spot changes 9 a.m.-2 p.m. (bridges, tongues meeting at 12:30, a 'cyclone' circle at 2 p.m.) and the aurora from 9 p.m. to about 1 a.m.; S. P. Langley's letter of 17 April 1882, quoted on p.149, reports the same aurora and a naked-eye spot with 'bridges' [read: pp.147-149].
• Loomis's 100-year record (1775-1875) shows sunspots, auroras and the daily range of magnetic declination rising and falling together ('the coincidence is complete'), with Larkin's stated exception of 1805 (many spots, few auroras) [read: pp.149-150].
• Larkin's stated programme: 'The combined energies of man must be centered on the herculean work of taking energy out of space and chain it to his servitude. Men pay for power now; it should be free'; solar radiation is meant, harnessed by mirrors, boilers and accumulators (Ericsson 3 of 35 hp; Cawston 11 of 130 hp) or by some way to 'cut them out of space and make use of them as they are' [read: pp.78, 145, 158-160, 190].
• Langley's late energy table (as quoted p.191): ultra-violet 1/100, visible 19/100, thermal beyond the red 80/100 [read: page image p.191; the digest's '10/100' was a misreading].

Relevance: This is the only document in the Larken folder, so it is the whole evidential basis of the project. It matters because the phrase 'radiant energy' in the title is not the later free-energy or non-Hertzian meaning; reviewers must not read that into the text. What a learner can use: a period-accurate, worked account of spectroscopy, parallax, binary-star masses, the Helmholtz solar-contraction energy budget, Doppler shifts and Darwin's tidal evolution, with checkable numbers. What makes it unusual: the magnetic-storm and aurora mechanism, the corpuscle-vortex account of magnetism, the electrical induction origin of nebular rotation and the stellar floor observations. It also records first-hand, dated observations by Larkin (15-19 Nov 1882 sunspot jets, 16 Apr 1882 aurora, 15 Nov 1901 meteors, 10 Jun 1902 storm), which are single-source except the April 1882 aurora and spot, which Langley's letter (p.149) also reports. It also carries the book's one explicit energy-from-space aim (solar radiation; pp.78, 159-160, 190), which a reader drawn by the title should see.

Mainstream conflict: Conflicts: (1) magnetic storms and aurora are now explained by solar plasma (coronal mass ejections, solar wind) arriving one to four days after a flare, not by electromagnetic waves at light speed; Larkin's own Nov 1882 jets were drawn two days after the storm [memory: high; read: pp.126-128] and his April 1882 spot changes preceded the aurora by about 7 to 12 hours [read: pp.147-149]. (2) The sun's heat is nuclear fusion; Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction gives about 2-3 x 10^7 years and was superseded [memory: high]. (3) 'Corpuscles saturating space' as ether: special relativity and the electron as a discrete particle replaced it [memory: high]. (4) The moon's fission origin was dropped for the giant-impact model; tidal recession itself is established (lunar laser ranging about 3.8 cm per year) [memory: high]. (5) Tidal friction as the universal builder of stars and planets, and nebular spin from electrical induction, are not accepted; Darwin himself doubted the planetary extension [memory: medium-high]. (6) Nebulium was later identified with forbidden lines of doubly ionised oxygen [memory: high]. (7) Parallaxes of Polaris (printed 0.07 against about 0.0075), Arcturus and Aldebaran are wrong by large factors [memory: medium]. (8) The stellar floor is generally attributed to sky background and dust in the Milky Way, and the starless fields to dark nebulae; Barnard's Loop is too faint for the naked eye and is only a weak lead [memory: medium]. (9) The 'sun a spherical magnet' idea (Bigelow) anticipated the sun's general and sunspot magnetic fields, established by Hale from 1908 [memory: high]. (10) Larkin's offer of 'an absorbing medium, or cosmic dust' for the faint-star shortfall (p.219) matches interstellar extinction, established by Trumpler in 1930 [memory: high]. Most of the optics, spectroscopy, parallax geometry, Kepler and Doppler material is mainstream and, per the deep reads, mostly correct.

A travel-and-observatory essay bound at the end of the book. Pp.297-303 describe the observatory's setting (Rubio Canyon 670 feet, Los Flores Gorge 1,250 feet), the clarity of the air, then the 'stellar floor': a pearly background said to lie beyond the Milky Way, torn by 'over one hundred' rents in Scorpius and Sagittarius, with eight 'starless fields' for which the declination and right ascension are tabulated (read from the page image) and 'phosphorescing areas of the cosmical floor'. Larkin states that he waited a year before publishing, testing the glow against atmospheric dust by comparing fields on the same nights, and offers two readings: unresolved distant stars or a nebulous envelope. He admits the dark places 'seem so to the eye through contrast probably'. Pp.303-305 describe the 16-inch Alvan Clark refractor (focal length 22 feet) and Larkin's visit to Clark's workshop. Pp.305-308 are a short astrophysics essay ('Results') and the Mount Lowe inclined railway (3,000 feet, 1,325 feet ascent, power from the Santa Ana river, 33,000 volts, 50 cycles). Pp.313-317: a four-hour thunderstorm on 10 June 1902 (about two flashes a minute, bolts near the observatory and the Chalet Hotel) and the Leonid meteors of 15 Nov 1901 (661 counted, one to five per minute, silent, Larkin saw about a quarter). Pp.319-322: Lewis Swift's service as director (1894-31 Dec 1900; 1,302 nebulae and 13 comets) and a biography of Professor T. S. C. Lowe (balloon flight of 20 April 1861, Civil War balloon corps, water-gas patents). Pp.320-328: photographic plates (Ellerman prominences, new star in Perseus spectra, Barnard Milky Way, Yerkes 40-inch). Pp.329-334: index and errata. P.335: advertisement of the Pacific Electric Railway, Mount Lowe division. P.340: University of California library due-date slip; pp.336-339, 341-342 are blank or ornament.

Key claims

• A luminous 'stellar floor' beyond the Milky Way is surely visible from the Lowe Observatory, either countless unresolved stars or a solid nebulous envelope [read: p.299].
• More than one hundred rents and jagged openings in the floor were seen in Scorpius and Sagittarius; the 'starless fields' imply long empty tubular lines of sight [read: pp.300-302].
• A one-year test is said to have found the white shimmer not to be atmospheric dust, because it appeared on the same nights as black space in neighbouring fields; the control is a same-night field-to-field contrast only, and Larkin says the dark places 'seem so to the eye through contrast probably', and doubts that long-exposure plates would show the floor because foreground stars 'will store their light in excess' [read: pp.300, 302] [read: p.300].
• On 15 November 1901 about 661 meteors were counted from the observatory in the night, a quarter of them by the writer [read: p.315].
• On 10 June 1902 a four-hour electric storm produced chain lightning about twice a minute with bolts near the observatory [read: p.313].

Relevance: Gives Larkin's own first-hand sky observations (stellar floor, rents, starless fields) and the site, instruments and people behind the book, but nothing on 'radiant energy' as physics. It supplies the one dated observing programme and the only claim in the book that is a visual novelty rather than a theory.

Mainstream conflict: The stellar floor and 'tubular spaces' have no counterpart in mainstream astronomy as a universal envelope; modern readings are diffuse galactic light, unresolved faint stars, dust cirrus, airglow and dark nebulae (Barnard) [memory: medium]. The observations are visual and from one observer, so the deep read records them as untested rather than refuted. The storm and meteor accounts are ordinary.

Title page (Baumgardt, Los Angeles, 1903; dedication to John D. Hooker; the series appeared in the San Francisco Examiner Feb-Aug 1902; acknowledgements to Brashear, Lick Observatory, Barnard and Ellerman). Back matter: index with page references (useful for locating 'Cipher dispatch from the sun', 'One Hundred Million Suns', 'Quadrillions of Dead Worlds'), an errata list (cut 42 misplaced, cut 46 bottom up, cut 60 should read Geissler's), a Pacific Electric Railway advertisement naming H. E. Huntington as president, and a University of California library due slip. 23 pages needed OCR; none of the central physics is on these pages.

Key claims

• The book's text was first published as a newspaper series in 1902 and put into book form with the Southern California Academy of Sciences and J. D. Hooker's help [read: p.13].
• The author states that matter and energy 'at present ... are unknown' and 'may forever remain unknown' [read: p.15].

Relevance: Provenance only. The front matter establishes date, publisher and the instrument and people behind the observatory; the index helps reviewers locate passages. The advertisement is a commercial notice from an interested party (the railway) and is not evidence on the science.

Mainstream conflict: none