The Imaginary Engineer – Karl Hans Janke's Flights of Fancy

During a slide lecture in 1970, Karl Hans Janke laid out for the audience his radical vision for producing infinite quantities of energy. Janke’s method, which did not require any fuel, relied on a new conception of the atom that could be used to harness the magnetic energy of the universe: “My atom, on the other hand, could be called a space-electron atom. … Since countless space-electrons are turned into energy in my power plant, it would be correct to call this a nuclear power plant. In contrast to the Soviet atom, I refer to my atom as the ‘German atom.’” As the lecture continued, Janke found occasion to lament the neglect from which his revolutionary scientific work had suffered: “It’s both strange and unfortunate that, over the twenty years in which I’ve lived in Hubertusburg, no government official has ever noticed or even shown interest in my work.” Janke’s very next sentence suggests a cause for this official neglect. “In sum, I would like to state that a spiral nebula, bar ma ... Read full article.