James Burlin McKinley, Jr.

At 9 years of age he had built his first crystal radio set. At 10, he had wired a spark gap coil from an old Ford (the kind that was needed to force a spark across the spark plug) to the coil springs of his sister’s bed. It caused quite a shock when her fiancé, Dr. George Adams, home on vacation from active duty, climbed into bed and touched his bride to be. Apparently it caused a stir in the house too, since George was sneaking in.

In his Junior year he built his first radio and in his senior year he became an amateur radio operator with the call sign W6TXZ. This turned out to be highly fortunate, since it forced on him the Morse Code.

He joined the drafting department at Packard Bell to help with the design of Frequency Modulated (FM) radios for the military. This is where he met his future wife, Pauline.

During World War II he joined the Merchant Marines, because of his training and experience using the Morse Code in High School, he became the Chief Radio Operator during the last year of the War on the USS Bearpaw, a Merchant Marine oil carrier in the South Pacific.

He started two company’s “DEVELCO” and “Comtronic’s” then worked for Reed & Rees. While he worked for Reed & Rees, he helped develop an improved Radar System for Military Aircraft known as “Terrain-Following Radar”. It was sold to General Dynamics in San Diego, a Division of Convair, and he went with it working in the Electronics Division. He retired from General Dynamics at the age of 65.

His passion was inventing a new kind of energy to eliminate the overwhelming need for oil. He worked every night when he got home from work out in the garage on the “Resonant Energy Quantum Theory”. His manuscript explores energy behavior based on Resonant Phenomena and was completed before his death. In his final years he enjoyed tinkering in his garage on a resonant energy inverter, a mechanism for converting DC to AC energy using resonance. It’s particularly useful in electrical systems and electric cars. He was working on a more powerful demonstration of the idea when he passed away.