Mch 9/39
Dear Dr Apgar:
We evidently have been grinding in the shunt valves too tight and without the right lubricant. The lubricant we have now found, a boiling water proof, sodalime proof lubricant used in hooking marine propellers and water pumps. We will send you a box and fix your "static" for good and all. The new piston installed by Puritan may leak, for each must be re fitted (only not so tight).
The status of intercoupling is to make a staticless high resistance cuff by a couple of winds of [ . . . ] 2 gauge on patients arm and anesthetist wrists and onto the knots of these clip a bull dog slit, connect to insulating wire that originates from the machine. This is OR at 15 percent of norm humidity. Your long born days is OR at 30 percent norm humidity. I have done a great deal of work in starting "explosions," i.e. igniting Oxg acetylene. Never has the gauge given an igniting spark. The self generated static walks thru the metallicized
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high resistors of Prof Hoilon of the M.I.T. as tho nobody was home and ignite gas every time.
Another unique finding is that with a high charge of static on myself, I can polarize a small metal body insulated from myself or can polarize the wet surface of rubber and get a spark to the "machine" and cause ignition. This then was the source of your spark, for disagreeing with Dr Williams, I do not think that dry rubber surface unless laboratory dried has the generating capacity to make and hold an igniting spark. Whereas a damp bag interior can be polarized and spark O.R. just like a leyden jar.
What I want especially from you.
(x) 1st was there a metal neck on the Heidbrinks bag which blew. If so the spark is easy to explain [ . . . ] charged from the anesthetist. Or if there was rubber to metal, and the (y) anesthetist hand was distant from the apparatus and well insulated by the bag, then we can best assume a polarization of wet bag interior to build the fairly substantial spark necessary to ignite I have not been able to ignite with mere gloves, or SLEP fire, or phosphorescent (in the dark) charges.
Please answer (x) and (y)
Sincerely
Karl Connell