Marcum describes how his original small-scale Jacob's Ladder, powered by a laser from a CD player, caused a steel screw to vanish for half a second before reappearing two feet away. His new design replaces the laser with rotating magnetic fields on the advice of a physicist, creating what he believes will be a vortex of electrical energy capable of punching a hole in spacetime. Art notes the striking similarity to both the Philadelphia Experiment and Bob Lazar's descriptions of extraterrestrial propulsion systems.
Callers offer suggestions ranging from strapping a camcorder to a pole to sending a clock through the field, while Marcum's psychiatrist has diagnosed him as delusional. Art volunteers to fly out and videotape the experiment, whether it documents the first time travel or serves as a memorial.
Key Moments
The disappearing screw and the original Jacob's Ladder: Markham recaps his original tabletop experiment - a small Jacob's Ladder running 20,000 volts at 100 milliamps in a five-gallon bucket of oil, with electrodes the height of a straightened clothes hanger. He threw a metal screw through the arc; it vanished and reappeared on the table about two feet away.
How he liberated six utility transformers and dimmed Stanbury: Markham describes hauling six 25-kilowatt utility transformers (about 350 pounds each) out of a King City substation and wiring them through 400-amp breakers straight to his back porch. When he flipped the switch, his big-version Jacob's Ladder pulled enough load to dim the entire southern half of Stanbury, Missouri to about 80 to 90 volts. A neighbor's BB-gun incident eventually drew police, who walked in at 11 p.m. with a search warrant and surrounded him asleep by the stove.
The new apparatus: 168 electromagnets in seven rotating rings: Markham reveals the redesign that occupied him after prison. He has built a vortex of seven stacked rings of 24 electromagnets each - 168 magnets total, each weighing about 200 pounds, the rings about 10 feet in diameter - driven like a distributor cap so the magnetic field rotates around a central electrode and a screen-mesh anode.
Three million volts on a backyard generator: Markham lays out the power chain for the new machine: a 15-kilowatt generator with 440-volt output, six step-up transformers each going 440 to 500,000 volts, summed to roughly 3,000,000 volts at about three milliamps applied to the central rod inside a screen-mesh tube - which Bell immediately compares to the Stargate film, and Markham confirms.