John Titor Time Traveler detractors: Identify this picture and win $100!

Factual Questions
1

Someone over at the Anomalies.net board has posted a $100 challenge to prove once and for all that the person claiming to be John Titor, time traveler from 2036, was hoaxing people back in 2000-2001.
The challenge is here:

http://www.mpghost.com/what_is_this/

Background on the story here:

http://johntitor.com/

Anomalies.net thread on the contest here:

http://www.anomalies.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000936;p=1

In brief: someone posted messages on-line in 2000-2001 in which he/she/they claimed to be a time traveler from 2036 named John Titor. His story has yet to be conclusively disproved.

Titor also posted various pictures, including scans of his time machine’s operations manual. Included was a cutaway diagram of the time machine. This cutaway diagram is the subject of the $100 challenge. If the story was a hoax, then it seems likely that the diagram is actually from some legitimate piece of equipment’s manual. Identifying that piece of equipment and getting hold of the original manual would pretty well disprove Titor’s story.

The leading theory is that it is a diagram from some vintage spectrometer of some sort. But nothing has been proved yet.

Please refrain from attacking the John Titor story on other grounds (i.e., “Time Travel is impossible, because then you’d have to go faster than the speed of light …”). This thread is simply dealing with identifying the photo.

2

Why does your first link say they got their image from the US Patent and Trademark office?

3

Because the guy running the contest feels certain that the drawing has been registered with the USPTO at some point in history. He did NOT get the drawing from there–he got it from one of the John Titor web pages.

4

You know, someone has to draw those diagram pictures in the first place. Couldn’t this Titor guy have drawn it himself? He’d still be a fraud, but at least he’d be an artistic fraud.

5

Oooh Oooh! Please sir! I know what it is! I know what it is!

It’s a drawing.

Seriously though - it’s a drawing - what reason is there to suspect that it depicts anything real at all.

Also: I don’t believe there’s a prize, but I do believe that you’ll just find yourself on some spammer’s mailing list if you enter the competition.

6

It is not even a good drawing; any first-year mechanical drawing student could have produced it. I don’t believe that it is from a real handbook of any type.

7

What Mangetout said.

This drawing that looks like it was done by a marginally talented student in a drafting class, is supposed to be so amazingly good that it *must be a cutaway from some real piece of equipment that we need to track down?

And the contest clams the pic is form the US patent office because…

“Because the guy running the contest feels certain that the drawing has been registered with the USPTO at some point in history. He did NOT get the drawing from there–he got it from one of the John Titor web pages.”

Well that’s good enough for me! Lets get looking!

8
      • I think it’s a nuclear-powered guitar amp; it’s got them little metal corner things like stage boxes do… <:D
        ~
9

Well, if you say so. I actually happen to be a professional illustrator, and I know I couldn’t whip that up. It seems more likely to me the guy had an old piece of lab equipment from the 1960s and scanned in one of the pages from the manual. But that’s just me. You might use Occam’s razor to slice it differently.

10

I think it’s the device my girlfriend uses to generate random relationship-oriented questions. :smiley:

11

It looks more like an illustration from a comic. You know the sort of thing; an inside look at Dr Evil’s nuclear shrinking machine.

1 - Phaser beam focusing lens.
2 - Oscillating quantum mirror
3 - Satellite receptor
4 - Voltage step adapter
5 - Fiddly bit that always breaks just after the guarantee expires
6 - Atomic Hoojamaflip
7 - Part no-one’s sure about, but it stops working when we take it out
8 - Very hot part you shouldn’t touch
9 - Paper clip
10 - Flux capacitor
11 - Earthing switch
12 - Cool bit with a flashing lights
13 - Bit that’s probably causing that burning plastic smell
14 - Evil generator. Generates 2-3.5 kw of evil when warmed up.
15 - Dangerous hole for babies to stick fingers in
16 - Painted on LED display. Always says “1234 Alert”
17 - Blinking red light
18 - Insert batteries here
19 - Spare Oscillating quantum mirror
20 - On switch

Next week: An inside look at Spider-man’s web guns.

12

You forgot the Oscillation Overthruster. (12-B)

13

7 is the Heisenberg Compensator

14

It must be from the Evil Overlord copy of the owner’s manual, because it conspicuously leaves out part #21 - the one part the hero can remove/reverse/damage/stuff chewing gum in which will not only render the device inoperable, but cause it to explode violently, taking out the Evil Fortress of Doom™ in the process.

15

I’m not 100% ceratin, but it looks possibly like an illustration from “The Starfleet Technical Manual” (I think it was called or some other such idiot title).

I’m from the year 2037 and John Titor is a liar as time travel has not beeen invented yet.

16

Some of those things look like vacuum tubes (or thermionic valves if you prefer).
And that thing in the middle looks like an old arc rectifier?

17

Part #3 looks like the copper rectifier in an old tektronix oscilloscope. They really packed the parts into those. There are lots of probable tubes, but I don’t see a connector for the CRT.

18

Part #20 looks like a toaster.

19

Wow, it does!!! #3 looks like an accordian too!

There’s nothing that looks like a flux capacitor or a backpack particle accelerator though.

Entertaining little story, John Titor. The really interesting part is that there are still ppl posting about him on the Anomalies forum.

20

I certainly looks like a modular part from on old tecktronics scope or the like, its the sort of thing you find at military surplus electronics junk shops.

I cant understand why it uses parts that are so patently early 1960’s or late 1950’s, and why is part 31, a thermionic valve, laid on its side instead of being mounted in a valve base.

Given that it is divided into certain areas, one assumes it has something to do with fairly high frequencies or at least a need to keep a signal as clean as possible.

I suppose it could be something out of an old sonar set or perhaps an old missile system, it looks very like a module out of the Seacat Missile system, part of the operator display system or one of the radar amps, something like that.

I do think a few bits and bobs have been added, as it would get very hot with the kind of components in there, in fact, if you look carefully I think you can see some parts that have been duplicated, its way too full of stuff.

It looks like someone has cut and pasted some of the other parts and them added them in, just look at what appear to be HF coils, parts 32 and 5, you just would not put a thermionic valve on top of them, part 5 looks to be sited how I would expect, but part 32 is just buried, and it does not make sense at all for many reasons.

Part 12 looks like a small crt display, of the sort found in short range radar sets or sonars, but it has been placed in there with the display face downwards.

I would also expect it to have some sort of mounting fittings, rather than the suitcase protectors at each corner, and it has to inerface with other systems, so one would expect connectors, and some evidence of a signal path, even if the connectors themselves are hidden from view.

There should be some evidence of the items orientation when in use, as it is you cant tell if it is used standing longways up, in a drawer rack or what, and its important for the dispersal of heat, maintenance, shock protection, usage, so you’d expect to see somthing to interface with mounting brackets.

Presumably this is a cutaway drawing, and part 20, which has been pointed out looks like a toaster, has a button in the side, which would be completely inaccessible when the side case was in place, so that doesn’t belong either.
The whole thing looks like it has been lifted out of a military service manual, and since I’ve used them, the thing looks fairly standard in many aspects.

Think I’d go for a sonar subsystem with a few parts added, circa 1960.