A little aside about
Joe Papp, and the source of his ideas…
I always find it
interesting to look at how, or where, any particular researcher or
inventor could have gathered the information that led to their ideas. Nowadays lots of information is available via a few keystrokes, but
in the pre-internet days you really had to have some direct sources
of information – either through an area of work, higher education,
general publications, personal experimentation, or via
friends/relatives.
Joe Papp left the
Hungarian airforce around 1955/56 – where, in the latter stages of
his national service, he was carrying out tests on parachutes. On
leaving the airforce it is said that he was living as a cartoonist, and that he was arrested during the 1956 civil uprising and Soviet
invasion. He then left Hungary, along with thousands of other
refugees, and ended up in a Canadian refugee camp, working as an
agricultural labourer.
In later years he
would tell people that he had spent time working at an atomic
research establishment before leaving Hungary – but that doesn’t
sound feasible, considering his airforce service, and subsequent
rapid departure from the country.
However it seems
that the atomic research being carried out in Hungary, in the 1950s,
does bear some relationship to the odd devices that Joseph Papp later
built.
An institute called
“Atomki” was established in 1954, in Debrecen, and – despite a
lack of funding – managed to carry out some impressive research.
Atomki didn’t get its first (small) research reactor until 1959,
and didn’t get its first accelerator until 1961. Hence, for most
of the 1950s, they were using other means to create various
radioactive substances for their experiments. Some of this would
have involved exposing materials (e.g. gases) directly to naturally radioactive isotopes. Another technique was to
create secondary radiation (neutrons, positrons, gamma), from various radioactive mixtures, and exposing substances to that.
Essentially, these are all just ways to transmute elements into
more useful ones for experimental work. Some of these things were
being done in the very early days of nuclear research - but it looks
like the researchers at Atomki might have refined the techniques
still further, out of economic necessity.
See this video, which possibly includes shots of researchers
creating Helium-6 for the experiments that led to their claim of the
first photo of a neutrino reaction.
Interestingly, looking at Papp’s patents, he appears to be doing
something very similar - by also exposing his “noble gases” to
various radioactive substances. Unfortunately, though, some of the
patent text seems to be garbled - for instance mixing up atomic
number with isotope number. (The patent examiners have
let the descriptions stand, as they probably didn’t fully
understand, or even care about, the process being outlined.) So was
this deliberate obfuscation, on Joseph Papp’s part, or did he
actually file text that he didn’t really understand himself? And
if it was the latter, where did the information come from?
Maybe Joseph Papp’s tales of having previously worked in a Hungarian nuclear facility was just to hide that he was really getting his
information from an employee at Atomki. That could have been a
former airforce friend, or maybe even his own brother, Erno. Whatever happened to Erno? (Centre in photo, Joseph behind.)
)
