Arnie reports that the meter movement was produced by a company called Murcom in Rosecrans, Louisiana.
A document called (approximately) ``Confidential Technical Bulletin: Calibration and Checkout Specifications'' included a requirement that when the resistance across the cans changed suddenly by a specified amount, the needle must reverse direction 7-8 times, but not 9.
A normal meter movement will not do this. A typical Radio Schack ohmmeter, for example, will use a damped meter movement to eliminate spurious needle motion.
In order to achieve the required twitchiness, Lerma reports that Murcom used an undamped ``taught band'' movement that operates something like a torsion bar suspepension in a car.
If you're going to build your own E-meter and want it to work just like the Scientology Mark V model, you will not be able to use an off-the-shelf meter movement. Lerma suggests that one might be able to simulate the effect of an undamped needle by using a final driver (amplifier) stage that rings, but this has not been verified experimentally.
From bill.long@toadhall.com Sun Feb 4 00:49:58 EST 1996 Article: 151599 of alt.religion.scientology Path: casaba.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!newsfeed.pitt.edu!godot.cc.duq.ed u!news.duke.edu!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcomsv!uu3news.netc om.com!netcomsv!uu4news.netcom.com!toadhall!bill.long Distribution: world Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Re: E-meter patents From: bill.long@toadhall.com (Bill Long) Message-ID: <73.88254.1578@toadhall.com> Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 01:45:00 -0700 Organization: Toad Hall ~ High Octane BBS ~ 415-595-2427 Lines: 91 [ *snipped *] I may shed a bit of light-but not much, and nothing on the patent procedure, but --- Ron built a meter on the idea of the whetstone bridge (sp?). It did what he wanted to do. Then in the U.S. we used the Matthison design to build meters and they did not do what Ron had wanted them to do based on what he had built. They had a built in dampening system built into them to slow the reaction on the needle. When this was discovered to be the flaw all future meters were built in England based on Ron's design and tested at St. Hill against Ron's meter to make sure of accuracy. ( A link in this chain can be seen in the HCO Bulletin "What are you waiting for, the meter to whistle Dixie". It appeared that auditors in the U.S. using the meters were not getting the results that they had before using the meters. So use of them was stoped.) Many years later I found one of the old meters in my closet and tested it against the new meter I had and there was a big difference in the operation. As I said, I don't know what this had to do with the patents but this is what I remember happened. Billl [ *snipped* ] ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- ~ [R2.00q] ~ The Papagayo Room BBS ~ San Francisco, CA ~ 415-563-3795 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet: bill.long@toadhall.com (Bill Long) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------