Really nice letter from Hannes Alfvén to Mr. William E. Barbour, Jr. at Tracerlab in 1949

[Dekatron42]

My research into the Trochotrons, which were developed by by Hannes Alfvén has been really fruitful in the last months as I have been able to buy some important books in this field, apart from getting the RYG10 Trochotron to run successfully with the help of these books one book in particular contained a letter written by Hannes Alfvén.

The book title is "Theory and applications of Trochotrons" by Hannes Alfvén, Lennart Lindberg, Karl Gustav Malmfors, Torkel Wallmark and Ernst Åström, published in 1948, which contains a lot of information on their development of the Trochotron at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm during the 1940s.

The letter is written by Hannes Alfvén to Mr. William E. Barbour, Jr. at Tracerlab which places the development of the Trochotron in its time period as well as it mentions the production by LM Ericsson and also mentions improved development details. The report contains a lot of information on the whole development process for the first prototypes. The letter also has Hannes Alfvéns signature which of course is an extra plus!

I also bought the book "Development of Trochotrons" by Jonas Björkman and Lennart Lindberg, published in 1954, also by The Royal Institute of Technology, which shows the development of the Trochotrons made since the previous book above was published. This book shows more photos of the prototypes and discusses several different types as well as it mentions that the round Trochotron was first suggested by Mr. Dag Romell to increase the current capability of the Trochotron, it also mentions the Binary Trochotron and shows some photos of the prototypes.

I am right now trying to locate all of the relatives of the writers of these two reports to get their permission to publish these as PDF-files for download, I don't have a place myself to publish them but I guess that there are some people here on the group that would be willing to do so. So far I have been given a verbal agreement to publish them by one of Hannes Alfvéns daughters, Inger Alfvén, and she told me that her brother and sisters surely would agree with her as they see it as important to spread this information. So now I just have to find the relatives to the rest of the writers, I really hope that they agree with Inger Alfvén to let me publish them. I have also been in contact with the legal department at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and asked their advice, they told me to contact the relatives as well as ask the permission from KTH as these reports fall into a grey area where the copyright law is not clear.

I have also found out that the prototypes developed by Hannes Alfvén and his group at KTH have been preserved, but right now no one knows where they are stored! I have talked to some people at KTH who last saw them in 1995, but right now no one can really say where they have been moved so that hunt is still ongoing.

I'll let you all know if and when I can publish these reports and when the prototypes are found!

/Martin

[Nick]

Lovely bit of history.

Nick