Conspiracy, or merely ideas that fell flat?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/06/2005 (7668 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LIKE a full moon, a spike in gas prices seems to bring out the “suppressed technology” conspiracy theorists.

Remember Charles Nelson Pogue? He allegedly built a 200-mile-per-gallon carburetor. These pages in 1936 regaled in his 26 miles to a pint, which when extrapolated exceeds 200 MPG.

He “heated” the gas to extract every last drop of kinetic energy sealed within its molecular bonds. Think it worked? You may be surprised to know that even Pogue, eventually, admitted it didn’t.

Ever hear of Josef Papp? It’s pronounced pop, which not coincidentally, rhymes with flop.

He worked, from 1958 until his death in 1989, on a so-called fuel-less engine that used sealed charges of inert gas, energized by electricity into explosive expansion, to push down on pistons not unlike the pistons in a standard gas engine. The only fuel required would be a twice-yearly recharging of these sealed charges.

Once “started” by a pulse from a battery, not unlike the way starter motors kick a gas engine into gear, the noble-gas engine would power itself, using the motion of the motor to drive an alternator that would provide the charge to energize the inert gases.

It’s the stuff of Art Bell, the guru of all things paranormal, and paranoid.

Depending on which conspiracy theorist you speak to, you’ll hear a common, but slightly altered, version of why neither C.N. Pogue nor Josef Papp died as the richest man alive.

At its core, the conspiracy theory says that both “inventions” were suppressed by the one company that controls everything. That would, of course, be Pepsi. Or it is Microsoft?

Patents were bought, or stolen, by oil companies loathe to see the world’s population not consuming fossil fuels like drunken frat boys at a kegger. Or by car companies who didn’t want to be embarrassed by not being the inventor. People were threatened. Families broken.

At its extreme, the theory says aliens are controlling the pace of technological development on Earth from a cloaked mothership in orbit. I suppose Michael Jackson might be a person of interest in any investigation of that theory, but he’s hardly convincing evidence.

Deliberately overlooked in this tale — why let facts stand in the way of a good conspiracy theory? — is that today, any company, even an oil company, would make billions upon billions from exploiting these allegedly suppressed technologies. More money than could ever be made from the world’s dwindling oil supplies. Also ignored is that the patents on this suppressed technology have long since expired, such that nobody can suppress them any longer. If they worked.

Also overlooked is Pogue’s own denial that his technology had ever been suppressed, a denial that came about the same time a letter to the editor in Vancouver insisted Pogue had been murdered by oil interests, which came as news to Pogue.

Pogue himself, in his declining years as a maker of oil filters in Montreal, refuted his own claims of a 200-MPG carburetor.

If a carmaker, looking to escape millions of dollars in U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy fines, could knock off a large chunk of their corporate fuel economy simply by dusting off 70-year-old blueprints on technology for which patents expired decades ago, they would.

Point out that even on the most strident “suppressed technology” conspiracy websites, there is no credible evidence that either of these things ever worked and anything you say gets woven into twisted conspiracy theories that then implicate you in the web of those being manipulated by unseen forces.

Let’s look at both ideas closely.

Pogue theorized that by heating gasoline, you’d produce a finer mist of gasoline, which would allow the combustion process to extract the most amount of energy from a given amount of fuel.

Setting aside for a moment that virtually every carmaker on Earth has been working for the last 100 years to do exactly that, the main problem is that there’s a finite amount of energy in each drop of gasoline. Even if you could get 100 per cent efficiency out of the fuel (you can’t), you still wouldn’t come close to 200 miles per gallon.

You might get to 60, but you’d have no power. Zero-to-100 km/h would be measured in hours or minutes, not seconds.

Prof. E.A. Allcut, who in 1961 was professor emeritus in mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, said then that for Pogue’s carburetor to achieve its claim, it would be extracting from gasoline twice the amount of energy available in it. “This is equivalent to saying that you can pour about two pints out of a one-pint pot,” he wrote.

And don’t forget that it is mathematically and practically impossible to achieve 100 per cent efficiency with any mechanical or chemical process, never mind 200 per cent. Remember that as we look at Josef Papp’s noble-gas engine, which is an alleged breakthrough in cold fusion of helium.

Forget for a second that they don’t call inert gases “inert” for nothing. Forget for a second that famed physicists around the world have worked for decades on cold fusion to no avail. Forget that even the core of the sun lacks the energy needed to fuse helium.

Even if you could coax a mysterious blend of inert gases (helium, xenon, argon, krypton and neon, the story goes) into forming plasma filaments, which, the theory goes (and there does appear to be some credible theory to support the idea, actually) expand and then collapse almost instantly, you would never be able to get it to continue running on only the energy provided by an alternator powered by the same engine.

A fundamental law of physics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed: it can only be converted from one form into another. The potential energy in the bonds of gasoline molecules is converted into kinetic energy during combustion. The kinetic energy in moving water is converted into potential energy (electricity) in a turbine, and so on.

Put that against the law that says no machine or chemical process can ever be 100 per cent efficient, and it means that the energy going INTO an engine must be MORE than the energy that comes out. So even if all that engine did was power the alternator, there wouldn’t be enough energy driving the alternator to just keep the engine running, never mind actually move the vehicle.

Look into Josef Papp and the first thing you’ll find is a list of disappointed investors across the U.S., where the Hungarian-born Papp moved to complete his work. Whether it was a well-meaning but failed path to invention or a means to defraud investors isn’t clear. But it’s clear that a lot of money and a host of powerful people tried to make it work. It’s also clear that most of that money went into expensive homes for Papp.

The next thing you’ll find is that any attempt to publicly demonstrate the engine was cloaked in suspicion. Nobody ever saw Josef Papp concoct his blend of inert gases. Any attempt to verify (disprove, argue the conspiracy theorists) Papp’s technology always ended in bizarre, secretive failure. One time, apparently, the alleged engine ran for a while then exploded, killing not only a bystander but also any hope of proving (or disproving) the theory.

If Papp’s engine was suppressed, it was only by his extreme paranoia, which led him to take the secret of his engine — whether it was a scam or real — to his grave in 1989.

It’s a bit like Mr. Pogue of Winnipeg. When it came time to verify his “carburetor,” lo and behold, it was stolen! Police investigated the alleged break-in across from the Capitol Theatre but arrested nobody. Coincidence?

Looking at how both technologies vanished from view, the most charitable among us likely think “snake oil.”

The conspiracy theorists see that and scream “suppressed technology.”

My theory says the technology wasn’t suppressed, it was ignored because it didn’t work.

Next week: fuel-saving ideas that do work.