The Colourful History of Metal Detecting

The wonderful history of metal detecting will of course follow the history of the gadget, metal detectors. Without it, the activity will not have been present. For different nations, all over the world, metal detectors have been great security tools.

They can be installed internally and externally; but the once very outlandish and bulky detectors of the past, have now been replaced by very sophisticated and hand-held versions.

A quick glimpse at the short history of the evolution of this very useful machine will begin by first defining what a metal detector does. This machine is an instrument that is built to detect the presence of metals.

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This can be used by a lot of different people; and through the years, metal detectors have evolved greatly into what it is nowadays.

A glimpse of the past

• In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a collection of scientists began to explore the idea of creating a machine that could detect metals. These machines, they believed then, would help detect different kinds of rocks containing ore elements beneath the earth’s surface.

• In the year 1881, US President James Garfield was hit by a bullet and a scientists, named Alexander Graham Bell, used the same concept to be able to detect the location of the metal. This effort proved a failure in the end, however, because the metal bed interfered with the metal detecting.

• In the year 1930, Gerard Fisher was able to develop a radio direction finding system that was used as a navigation system that was able to produce some deviation when it encountered areas with ore-bearing rocks. This led to the realisation that a separate device could be created to serve the purpose of detecting metals by the use of a search coil resonator which shall be placed at a specific radio frequency.

• In the year 1937, Gerard Fisher was given a patent for the detection device that he developed.

• During World War II, a Polish lieutenant Josef Stanislaw Kosacki refined the initial design. The machine, however, was quite heavy and operated on a separate vacuum that required the use of separate batteries. This was highly useful in detecting minefields that were laid by German soldiers.

• For five long decades, the American government secretly developed and modified the device. Once the concept was completed and introduced to the public, different companies worldwide, began manufacturing their own versions, with an American company, Whites Electronics, being one of renowned pioneers and responsible for the Oremaster Geiger Counter.

• The idea for the induction balance that depended on the theory of magnetism, was discovered by a German physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove even before the first metal detector came into being. The system made use of two balanced coils and an induction-balance system.

•When Charles Garrett invented the Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO), it brought about a significant boost in the development of metal detectors.

•After the transistor was introduced, metal detectors began to appear as smaller and machines which only required the use of small batteries. These small metal detectors cannot be belittled despite its site because they, in fact, perform better.

Metal detectors today are more sophisticated and compact. They are run by computers and use an integrated circuit technology to allow the user to set fundamentals such as sensitivity, tracking speed, notch filters and so much more.

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