A number of years ago, one of the morning shows (Good Morning America, I think) featured a very serious 5-minute bit on a old guy who had supposedly perfected in the lab a way to get unlimited electrical power from a glass of salt water. He brought the apparatus into the studio and set it up and demonstrated it, and the blondie (Joan Lunden?) said, “Wow” respectfully, and turned to the camera and did this whole perfectly serious thing about how “we should keep our eyes on this guy, because this was the wave of the future”.
So what happened to him? This would have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s. And no, it wasn’t the cold fusion guys, this was something else. This guy had, like, hundreds of patents to his name, a backyard tinkerer, but he was misunderstood by the large corporations, not a team player, and had trouble getting funding for R & D, and that was all that was keeping America from weaning herself from dependence on dirty fuels like oil and coal…
I seem to remember them debunking him along the lines of … “Hey, why do you have to plug your machine in?”
Just kidding. I don’t know, but it would seem to me that his machine was either impractical in some major way, or too expensive to implement. Then again, maybe the energy companies paid him a billion dollars to keep quiet. Yeah, that’s it.
I saw that show! If I remember right, the exchange went something like this:
Martin: Behold, the power plant of the future, today!
Burns: Yuchh. Too cold and sterile. Where’s the heart?
Martin: But it really generates power. It, it’s lighting this room right now.
Burns: You lose – get off my property.
Exactly how was this guy claiming that you could get energy out of salt water? The only way I know of (other than hypothetical fusion reactions) is to exploit the electrolytic difference between salt and fresh water. Which is an interesting possibility in itself, but doesn’t sound like what you’re describing.
[hijack]As a veteran of having read Anthracite’s epic masterpiece on clean coal technology, I beg of all readers not to get him riled up on the wasteful and pollution-laden coal industry wink.[/hijack]
I would think that as a veteran of having read Anthracite’s epic masterpieces on any number of subjects, you would not want to get her riled up by using inappropriate pronouns.
[airily brushes aside minor quibbles over use of the word “dirty”]
I was speaking in the voice of the breathlessly admiring “friend of the Little Guy” GMA, of course.
But how amazing, Una! This is absolutely the guy.
That is it, exactly. Howdja do that, lady? Say “crazy man with salt water” to her and POOF! the exact transcript appears. Nothing up either sleeve…watch the Goddess of Engineering pull two rabbits, a gerbil, a crackpot inventor, and a side order of fries out of a hat…
Okaaaay, soooo? I am on the edge of my seat here. What happened to him? So does the thing work? It does seem odd–you have to plug it in to get it to produce electricity? I don’t quite follow that.
I keep tabs on these sorts of things, as it is my interest (although some people are now accusing me of being a partisan fraud…:rolleyes: )
Anyhow - to answer your question of what happened to him - I don’t know. He did not ever release details of his findings. He did not ever release details of the supposed process that creates heat, and removes radioactivity. He did not submit papers to common peer-reviewed journals. No one else in major private or government labs reproduced his experiments, or achieved his results. And, most tellingly, he did not bring his device to market.
Based on the extremely scant information available, and the total opposition to established and proven scientific principles, it seems that it was a fraud. And the fact that it appeared on GMA in no way adds weight to it; in fact, IMO, it makes it even less likely to be the real deal.
Like most of the early “Cold Fusion” crap from Pons and Fleichman, it was not reproducible, and eventually sorta dropped out of view. Since science depends so heavily on full and open disclosure of information and reproducibility, things that are presented in this manner are normally not taken seriously.
Okay, since Anthracite seems to be holding back for some reason, I’ll be the sceptic here. We can say with confidence that it doesn’t work. People making claims of this kind can often be found on sci.energy. Grandiose claims are made that contravene one or other Law of Thermodynamics, only vague information is supplied, and the accusation is made that either
-the closed-minded scientific community, or
-vested interests in the energy industry,
are conspiring to suppress the discovery.
Inevitably the burden of proof is reversed, with scientific types forced to defend against accusations of being blinkered, while simultaneously trying to discuss a scheme the details of which remain mysterious.
In itself, the fact that the device needs to be plugged in is not so odd. Fusion reactors are also huge net consumers of electricity (so far), but (hot) fusion is real enough.
No, the reason we can say it’s not so is that it would be easy to prove otherwise: just publish details of the experimental set-up, and if it can be replicated you can be sure that it will gain universal scientific acceptance, and there’s nothing “Big Oil” could do to stop it.
Also, the bit about the magic beads that neutralise radioactivity really takes the biscuit.
Arrggh, couldn’t get through to the server for some reason, and now it looks like Anthracite got there first after all. Oh well.
I just started reading ‘Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud’ by Robert Park, a professor of physics at the Univ of Md and director of the American Physical Society.
I’m only on page 50 but our Mr. Patterson appeared on page 10 and Park asked the question: If a device produces 200x the energy it comsumes [a goose that lays golden eggs], why was it only mentioned on GMA and not mentioned in any of the major newspapers or other media outlets? Park says this is an example of entertainment, not news or science. Wouldn’t it be great if it were true: a garage inventor trumps all of the researchers in the science ‘Establishment’; the underdog triumphs!
The Patterson Cell has a decent size entry in the index, but I don’t see the need to jump ahead to make this post. If this thing was real, any person capable of reading a newspaper would have heard about it.
Park also lets us in on a joke told at the Univ of Utah when cold fusion was reported. Fusion can produce at lot of radiation; the levels of fusion reported at Utah would mean serious radiation. The joke: Have you heard the bad news about the grad students in Pons’ and Fleichman’s lab? They’re in perfect health.
