Many here I’m sure are aware of the rumor/popular myth of “Die Glocke” (“The Bell”), a mysterious device built in secret by Nazi Germany using fiendish superscience—described alternately as an anti-gravity device, a time machine, and a “death ray.”
A purported photograph of the device, or one like it, has even been floating around, seen here, apparently sourced from the first book to reveal “Die Glocke” to the world, Polish author Igor Witkowski’s The Truth About the Wunderwaffe…
Obviously, all hogswash. Kitchy, endlessly entertaining hogswash.
My question though, is: what is the device shown in the photograph? I seem to recall that someone tentatively identified it as some piece of (fairly mundane) equipment used in physics research, and specifically one that would have been found in an Eastern European university—and thus, likely, something Witkowski might have seen or seen a photo of in his college days, and could artistically repurpose into a secret Nazi machine—but, I can’t find anything specific about that in my own notes.
A Quora post I’ve found makes an argument that it’s an electromagnet from a Poulsen spark gap transmitter, including a patent drawing that’s both an almost dead ringer for the “Glocke” photo, AND includes cutaway details that match up with purported diagrams of “The Glocke’s” innards (The outline of the Induction Coil being reinterpreted, as I recall, as a rotating cylinder filled with glowing radioactive mystery goo. A very versatile component, that!).
So…can anyone help me out in identifying for certain the specific piece of hardware pictures in the photo linked above?
‘The owner of this website (weekinweird.com) does not allow hotlinking to that resource’
Would that have happened if it was just a Poulsen spark gap transmitter? I think you’re getting in a bit deep there, Ranchoth. We can’t go looking for you at their secret moon base, if you disappear.
The picture of the patent for the Poulsen device is more akin to an Edison phonograph. It is a wire recorder. It isn’t a cross section. There is a vertical cylinder, wound with a spiral of wire, you can see the vertically moving tracking device on the left that follows the spiral. The actual machine is quite small. Maybe 40cm high. There is no dome shaped enclosure, just an arch shaped bracket that holds the bearing at the top. Even the title gives it away. It isn’t a transmitter. It has no resemblance to the fiendish device.
Good catch. Rotated correctly, Google Lens came up with this Russian site, which was too big for Google Translate to translate. It has the same photo, but edited to be more murky, and with the jug shopped out. Translating the photo caption, it is
