The Legacy of Marcel Vogel

Abstract

Marcel Joseph Vogel (1917 - 1991) was a research scientist for IBM’s San Jose facility for 27 years. He received numerous patents for his inventions during this time. Among these was the magnetic coating for the 24” hard disc drive systems still in use. His areas of expertise were phosphor technology, liquid crystal systems, luminescence, and magnetics.

In the 1970’s Marcel did pioneering work in man-plant communication experiments. This led him to the study of quartz crystals and the creation of a faceted crystal that is now known as the Vogel-cut crystal. The Vogel-cut crystal is an instrument that serves to store, amplify, convert, and cohere subtle energies.

Marcel’s research into the therapeutic application of quartz crystals led him to the investigation of the relationship between crystals and water. He discovered that he could structure water by spinning it around a tuned crystal, altering many of the characteristics of the water and converting it into an information storage system.



1: Introduction

This article presents an overview of the work of Marcel Vogel. It is not a technical paper, but rather a presentation of possibilities as demonstrated in the life and work of one man.

Marcel spent the last 17 years of his life doing pioneering research into the relationship between quartz crystals and water. In retrospect it seems that his entire life brought him to this work. In 1984, after almost 27 years as an IBM senior research scientist, Marcel retired and created his own laboratory, Psychic Research, Inc. The lab was dedicated to the study of subtle forces and energies that radiate from the body of living forms. It was his intent to quantify these forces and build a systematic language of identification for these energies which have most often been labeled and dismissed as “metaphysical”. Among his projects were:

1) the structuring of water for purification purposes
2) the structuring of wines to rapidly age them
3) the measurement of energy fields around a crystal
4) the therapeutic application of crystals and crystal devices

When visiting his laboratory in San Jose, California, one would find some rather sophisticated scientific equipment inside of what seemed to be a rather ordinary industrial and office complex. In one room there was an electron scanning microscope. Another room was virtually filled with a Zeiss Ultraphot microscope. It had over two hundred accompanying objectives and many applications – dark field, light field, interference microscopy, the use of a contrasting chamber and polarized light microscopy. All of this was attached to a camera, computer, and video display system. The Zeiss, which Marcel assembled during his 27 years at IBM, was used to detect (among other things) magnetic defects and errors. This was more than $500,000. worth of equipment donated by IBM to Marcel at the time of his retirement.

In another room of the laboratory was a Cary Model 15 spectrophotometer and other incidental equipment. Some was donated by the Stanford Research Institute while others were obtained through grants from the Arthritis Foundation.

In yet another room one could find a radionic instrument known as the Omega 5. This device was used to study the fields seemingly undetectable by the otherwise impressive standard scientific equipment.

Through his research Marcel hoped to prove that science and metaphysics are intrinsically compatible. How did he come to this work and what did he discover?


2: Background

Marcel Vogel was born April 14, 1917, in San Francisco. As a child he suffered from respiratory difficulties and at the age of six had a near death experience -- he was officially pronounced dead of double lobar pneumonia. So profound was the impact of this experience that it was very difficult for the young Marcel to return to the so called “normalcy” of childhood. In fact, he never did. He claimed that at this time he experienced a light and a sense of love and well being that was over- whelming. Physical plane life seemed pale in comparison leaving him, even at such a young age, to question the meaning of life.

From the age of six he became increasingly interested in the study of the fireflies that he saw in his back yard. He wanted to know how this little insect could emit such a light.

He applied this insatiable curiosity to himself as well. Each day he would walk to early morning Mass and in the quietness of prayer ask the question “Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life?”

After six years he heard a voice in his mind say “You will be a phosphor chemist. You will do pioneering work in luminescence. You will write a book and create your own business.” Quite a tall order for a young man of eleven years!

He and his father, Joseph, built a laboratory in the back of their home and young Marcel set about attempting to duplicate the chemical that made the fireflies in his backyard glow. At the age of twelve he had synthesized the chemical compound 3-amino-phthalaz-1-4 dione. This compound, when mixed in water with potassium ferro-cyanide and hydrogen peroxide, produces a chemi- luminescence that matches the light of the firefly. He continued to try to make a set of phosphors that would produce light in a tubular form. This was before the advent of fluorescent lights, but Marcel had seen a white powder of phosphor, in a tube, that would convert the ultra-violet radiation in the tube into a visible form – visible light. This was his main area of interest and even as a grammar school student he visited the Mechanics Institute and translated, from the German, original articles on phosphor chemistry. He then set about duplicating the outlined experiments in his own amateur laboratory.

Marcel had synthesized and manufactured a set of phosphors before he was fifteen years old. His vision, at this early age, was that the proper phosphor system would be a rare earth phosphor. The cation, or positively charged ion would be composed of a rare earth compound like Europium, and the anion, or negatively charged ion would consist of a tungstate or silicate structure. These ideas came from the translated scientific papers that were published in the “Analan der Physik” and other German scientific publications of the time. His objective before going to college, based on the answer to his years of prayer from the ages of six to twelve, was to become of phosphor chemist. He was able to see the blending of chemistry and physics that would bring about the advent of solid state physics. As was the case throughout his life, Marcel wanted to be on the forefront of what, in his vision, was the science of the future.

Throughout his high school and college years Marcel systematically researched all the existing publications and papers in the field of luminescence. There were no courses available so he had to teach himself. He majored in chemistry and physics at the University of San Francisco, working at night to fund his education Unfortunately, due to deteriorating health, he was unable to graduate with his class. From 1940 his education was completed privately with Doctor Peter Pringsheim. The two met when Doctor Pringsheim, a German refugee professor, was attempting to find information about luminescence at the university library. The librarian referred him to a young student, Marcel Vogel, who had apparently read everything in the library on the subject and would be of more value to him than the librarian. Two years later the two men jointly published The Luminescence of Liquids and Solids and their Practical Application (Wiley Interscience-1943). This book has since gone through three editions and was translated into German in 1953. It is currently out of print.

After the publication of the book, Vogel Luminescence Corporation was formed. From 1944 to 1957 Marcel pioneered in the manufacture of fluorescent bulletin paints for outdoor signs and billboards. He created a complete set of artist media fluorescents including fluorescent oil colors, phosphorescent paints, fluorescent chalk, crayons, tempers (day-glo) colors, bulletin paints, invisible ink, tracing and tagging powders used with insecticides detectable with portable black lights, black lights being another Vogel creation. Black light kits were also created for the detection of cancer, rodent contamination, and milk inspection.

With Ralph Benson, Marcel then published a paper entitled Vulvar Fluorescents: The Early Detection of Pregnancy and the Advent of Carcinoma. Vogel Luminescence also patented an egg candler that combined both ultraviolet and visible light to detect the Pseudomonis fluorescence bacteria that are present in eggs laid by chickens contaminated with the bacteria.

During this time with Vogel Luminescence Marcel also did part-time consulting work for IBM. With Ralph Flores and Don Johnson he developed a magnetic coating formulation that is still in use today on IBM hard disks. It was a stable, adhesive coating of magnetic materials for a 24 inch diameter hard disk that demanded a completely new composition of matter.

It should be noted that this magnetic coating did not come about by normal linear science. For many unsuccessful weeks, formula upon formula were created with horrifying results. The coating would fly off the aluminum disk when the drive was turned on or it would bubble up like some pox ridden biological specimen. Finally, at the point of total exhaustion in his 18 to 20 hour workday, Marcel collapsed into sleep at his tiny laboratory. Later, as he groggily awoke, he was in the midst of a dream – a can of molasses floated in the space before him with the words “infinite viscosity” resounding in his ears. He knew immediately what needed to be done. Two supposedly incompatible chemical agents were brought together, the results of which we still use today.

In 1957 Vogel Luminescence was sold to Ultra Violet Products and Marcel joined IBM as a full time research scientist. He was one of the “Big Blue’s” few non-lettered scientists. Such creativity and genius could not be allowed loose on the streets, despite the lack of a diploma. He became one of the most prolific new patent inventors in IBM’s Data Products Division history. Included among the many inventions are patents in the field of magnetic recording media, liquid crystals, and the creation and development of rare earth phosphors. Marcel also was granted many patents in the field of Opto Electronics. This was for work on photo-relays for analog to digital converters, as well as work with rare earth phosphors, which resulted in the development of the red hue for color televisions. His work with liquid crystals helped realize their emergence into everyday life in the form of digital displays on everything from watches to radios. He also received patents for the degassification of liquids, Dark Field Microscopy and its use in surface analysis, organic and inorganic photoconduction and more.
In 1969 Marcel gave a course in creativity for engineers at IBM. It was at this time that he read an article in Argosy magazine entitled “Do Plants Have Emotions?” about the work of polygraph expert Cleve Backster into the responsiveness of plants to human interaction. Despite initial rejection of the concept of human-plant communication, he decided to explore these strange claims.

He was able to duplicate the Backster effect of using plants as transducers for bio-energetic fields that the human mind releases, demonstrating that plants respond to thought. He used split leaf philodendrons connected to a Wheatstone Bridge that would compare a known resistance to an unknown resistance. He learned that when he released his breath slowly there was virtually no response from the plant. When he pulsed his breath through the nostrils, as he held a thought in mind, the plant would respond dramatically. It was also found that these fields, linked to the action of breath and thought, do not have a significant time domain to them. The responsiveness of the plants to thought was also the same whether eight inches away, eight feet, or eight thousand miles! Based on the results of the experiments the inverse square law does not apply to thought. This was the beginning of Marcel’s transformation from being a purely rational scientist to becoming a spiritual or mystical scientist.

Basically it was found that plants respond more to the thought of being cut, burned, or torn than to the actual act. He discovered that if he tore a leaf from one plant a second plant would respond, but only if he was paying attention to it. The plants seemed to be mirroring his own mental responses. He concluded that the plants were acting like batteries, storing the energy of his thoughts and intentions. He said of these experiments: “I learned that there is energy connected with thought. Thought can be pulsed and the energy connected with it becomes coherent and has a laser-like power.”1

Marcel discovered that the greatest cohering agent is love. This, of course, set him apart from his fellow scientists. At a time when many still don’t acknowledge that an observer affects what they are observing, the notion of love was a totally unscientific idea. Even when cloaked in the garb of a term like resonance it was unacceptable. To Marcel, love was (and is) a pure force. Certainly we experience it as an emotion, but this is our experience of something that is beyond emotion. He likened it to gravity, an attracting and cohering force present at every level of existence. Without this relationship an important aspect of scientific investigation is missing, preventing us from discovering and exploring the more, perhaps most, subtle aspects of life.

This is one reason why certain scientific investigations in the area of subtle energies cannot be readily replicated. It is not always a matter of scientific protocol, but a matter of relationship. Unfortunately many scientists would consider this to be some kind of inessential and perhaps bothersome epiphenomena. Although such individuals are scientists, to Marcel, they were technicians attempting to prove what they already thought was true. The true scientist is one who attempts to discover with childlike curiosity. Too often we, all of us, only want to confirm what we already believe.

The details of the work with plants can be found in the books The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird and Psychic Exploration: A Challenge to Science edited by Edgar Mitchell.

During this time period, 1974, Marcel gave many lectures about his work with plants and at one of these presentations, at the First Church of Religious Science in Los Angeles, he was approached by Dr. McKistry who told him about quartz crystals that she had with her. Apparently these crystals had the peculiarity of vibrating when held in the hand. Marcel’s ambivalent response to this was “So what?” Although he too experienced the vibration of the crystals in his own hand, Marcel was unimpressed with them. Nonetheless he accepted her gift of a small quartz point.


3: Crystals

What is a crystal?

The word crystal comes from the Greek word “krystallos”, meaning frozen light. A crystal is generally considered to be a systematic, orderly and repetitious patterning of molecules or energies. From a more metaphysical point of view, some consider that Light is stepped down through many levels of density before the physical form of the crystal manifests through the dynamics we understand in crystallography and geology. It is the forming aspect of Light that patterns the highly ordered array of energies we call a crystal. Should this light pre-form be altered in any way, the completed crystal will be altered from its original “intended” form. In fact, while viewing the growth of a liquid crystal, Marcel was able to alter its final form. Instead of maintaining the normal shape that an oleate of cholesterol would take, the outcome was a configuration clearly recognizable as the Madonna. Marcel had been focusing on an image of the Blessed Virgin in his mind’s eye while viewing the growth of the crystal under the microscope, uninterrupted, for one solid hour!

Marcel witnessed and photographed the precipitation of Light into crystal in his IBM laboratory while growing liquid crystals and subsequently wrote:

“When cool, if a liquid crystal state exists, the melt goes into a birefringent state under polarized light which can be readily seen under a polarizing microscope. From this state the sample will then crystallize into the solid state.

“In the course of the study of this state under the microscope I noticed a remarkable event, namely that before the melt went into the liquid crystal state, a blue flash of light took place and then immediately after that, the sample transcended into the liquid crystal state.

“This state was videotaped and, after one year of effort, a picture was taken at the moment of transition. What appeared on the film was the prefiguring in space of the crystallographic form the system was to assume. The blue flash contained information which formed into a geometric form. This geometric form was the source of the crystallographic form from which the crystal grew and developed2

The flash of blue light witnessed through the microscope was the transfer of information from the level of light-coding to the physical plane. This is discussed in metaphysical literature, but had never before been witnessed and photographed.

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