Actually, it is clear that in large quantity manufacturing, a system that would usually generate 5,000 watts of electricity (and sometimes more than 10,000 watts), would probably only cost around $1,000. Isn't that something?
(If photovoltaic 'solar cells' were used for this large quantity of electric production, the equipment would cost at least $100,000, it would all be subject to failure from many causes, and it would only create maximum performance for a few hours around noon on really sunny days!)
I tested this system with a small-scale device (around 300 watts) early in 2003, and it worked excellently. However, I ran into an interesting roadblock in April 2003 when I planned to build a larger device (comparable in size to a walk-in closet), because the (part-time, $18/hour) Building Commissioner of the Village of Thornton, Illinois, a Harry Nolan, ORDERED me to divulge the entire invention to him, such that he could decide whether he would "permit" me to test the invention! He ranted and raved that, unless I got his personal permission, he would Condemn my house and then have it demolished for having such an experimental device! (He actually threatened several other times to Condemn and demolish my house for OTHER reasons in the following months, but so far, he has not been able to Condemn and demolish it! He had never even SEEN my house at that time! Curious!)
It seems to me that Mr. Nolan does not seem to understand the US Patent Laws and the rights that an inventor has regarding proprietary information on inventions, prior to the disclosures involved in a Patent. Since I received a US Patent on an earlier invention, I like to think that I have some familiarity with the subject. And I am pretty sure that no part-time Village employee can order me to divulge an invention to him, for ANY reason.
Well, I later learned that his authority was ABSOLUTE, that if he decided to Condemn and demolish my house, based on his own decision alone, without ever having to present any reason, no one would have had the authority to stop it. (Pretty impressive for a part-time Village employee who gets paid by the hour! The only thing that seemed to slow that down was my insistence on Appearing before the Judge who would have been required to Authorize the Condemnation, as I indicated that I had kept very complete records of all the bizarre things that town had done and threatened, including his decision to Condemn and demolish my house while never actually even bothered to go one block down the street to look at it! By the way, my house is old, but it is probably one of the most structurally sound houses in the entire town!)
In any case, such irrational threats, and the fact that no one would have stood up against him, caused me to decide NOT to build the full-scale device. So, I know it works for a few hundred watts, and there is absolutely no doubt that it will work just as well in generating all the electricity that a normal house needs, but I have not yet proven this last. Everyone can thank that Harry Nolan for the fact that I did not make this technology available around May 2003. At the time, I had intended to upload several web-pages which showed and described everything about it, including construction. If each American home was now creating ALL the electricity they needed from a relatively inexpensive and durable and reliable device in their back yards, wouldn't we already have been reducing our massive usage of imported petroleum, and reduced our effects on Global Warming, as well as each of us saving ALL the money we have always paid for our electric bills?
I had even prepared those web-pages in March 2003, expecting to provide complete construction drawings so that each person might build the necessary items.
In recent years, I have tried to apply my Christian principles through several thousand web-pages! The 8,000+ pages of the BELIEVE Religious Information Source Project/web-site, has INTENTIONALLY collected exactly ZERO dollars of income or donations in its 15 years of activities (beginning in 1992), even while now serving around 19 million visitors each year. Beginning around 7 years ago (in 2000), I have provided a set of web-pages that fully explain a totally free method of air-conditioning any house or building, with at least 9200 people (so far) indicating to me that they were installing that system for their own use. There are other web-pages that fully describe assorted other technologies that can be economically built and then used by readers. There are a few of the projects, such as the Rape Prevention System and an Electronic Anesthesia, which are delayed because I do not have sufficient expertise in certain fields of electronics.
These comments are NOT meant to sound arrogant or to be cultivating my ego! Actually, the Lord would frown on that! They seem necessary to help explain some of the following paragraphs. And to (hopefully) suggest that I am not delusional regarding the validity or effectiveness of at least some of my inventions. The University of Chicago did a REALLY good job of enabling me to think clearly and logically, as a Physicist must. That type of thinking has generated these assorted inventions and concepts.
Here's the central issue: I am a Pastor of a Christian Church, which means that I work directly for the Lord. I am supposed to "represent" Him in every way I can. Our Church takes that to mean by actions and attitudes as well as spouting wonderful words!
Say I provide that solar-to-electricity web-site, so that you and many millions of others would have ACCESS TO all the plans to build such a system. Sounds really wonderful at first, and in March 2003, I was within a few mouse-clicks of uploading all that information! However, the home-sized device is not really huge (comparable in size with a walk-in closet), but it is fairly heavy, over 4,000 pounds, more than most cars, and it is constantly moving fairly fast (rotating). Several questions immediately arise: Do YOU have expertise in making and forming relative large and complex metal pieces, and then carefully and accurately welding together various steel and aluminum pieces such that they wouldn't ever come apart and launch a 4,000 pound piece of metal through your neighborhood? A comparable question is whether, if someone provided you with all the needed instructions to build an automobile, could you? And even if you are good at following directions and make it correctly, would you have enough safety knowledge to be REALLY sure that it could never come apart and cause havoc? Never cutting corners on cost in using cheaper bearings than the somewhat expensive ones actually needed? Keep in mind that once this device would be installed, and you then got free electricity FOREVER, you probably wouldn't think much about safety maintenance, etc.
The point being, very few people would really be able to use such a set of complete plans, and even the ones that did would certainly need at least 500 hours of labor (full time 40-hours-per-week for 3 months) assuming that they had the specialized skills and talents to build it. An individual might not have fully thought about things like all the safety issues. So, then what? Who could make such devices? Well, local metal fabrication shops generally might be able to. However, the equipment that they have to work with is not well suited to building these specific objects. They would also likely take pretty close to 500 man-hours to build the entire set of components for this system. Such fab shops generally charge at least $25/hour for their labor, so this would be around $12,500 of labor, and this is not even counting the materials needed! However, even with rather high prices they would sell it for (possibly around $15,000 per system), this device would still be SO MUCH in demand, that the public would ALL immediately want their own.
As best as I have designed it currently, the system requires twelve separate assemblies made out of aluminum or aluminum-magnesium, resembling the aluminum engine blocks of many cars, but much bigger, each roughly the size of a Lazy-Boy chair. I have just not figured out any simple way to manufacture those assemblies, and if they have to be each welded together, each hundreds of pieces of aluminum, all those hours of labor are certainly involved. Assuming that the people had the specialized ability to weld aluminum, a rather weird process sometimes!
Now, think about that. "The public" described here would NOT include the poor, the people who might best benefit from such a system, because they couldn't afford to buy it! The only people who really could afford to buy a $15,000 system are ones who probably don't have much of a hardship regarding their electric bills anyway!
The point here is that "the poor" could not possibly benefit from that situation. And how many people would spend $15,000 or more for a system that could only save them maybe $1,000 in electric bills each year? It would never Amortize very well (pay for itself), especially if any repairs would ever be needed in those many years of use.
If I can somehow greatly simplify how it could be constructed, such that local fab shops could realistically build them in, say 40 man-hours of work, where they could possibly sell them for $1,500 or so, that would be great! I have tried hundreds of different ideas to try to find some way of arranging that. But I have come up dry so far.
This then gets to a whole new category of complications!
Now, it would certainly not be long before the government would get involved to regulate the safety issues and construction quality testing and output performance. As soon as one was made poorly or assembled poorly, or poorly mounted on the shaft and bearings, and a 4,000-pound giant spinning wheel broke loose and took off through some neighborhood, every government agent everywhere would decide to regulate everything about it! Essentially, something like the ISO 9002 standards would be set by the government before they could be sold. This is a REAL problem, as small fab shops would never be able to afford all the testing and regulatory visits. Only really large manufacturers could. REALLY large ones!
Now we're getting to my primary issue! As soon as the dozen huge multi-national Corporations (which essentially already own nearly all the thousands of businesses that we think are independent!) became aware that there was a probable market for at least 100 million devices each for at least $1,000 (and maybe $10,000 or more if they could get away with it), their Accountants' eyes would light up! If they see that AT LEAST $100 BILLION in guaranteed business might be theirs, they tend to get incredibly aggressive and self-centered, intending to get most of those profits for their own companies and themselves.
Keep in mind that MY motivation is Christian in nature, where I would (and nearly did) simply explain to everyone how they could make their own! At the time, I did not fully realize how difficult and time consuming that would be for individuals and small fab shops.
As my personal responsibility to "my Boss" (God), I cannot justify actively encouraging and assisting the greed and lust for power and money that drives all of the really giant multi-National corporations (which happen to have bought out virtually all other significant sized companies that make any profits). In fact, the Lord and the Bible make it crystal clear that I am supposed to try to do my best to REDUCE those Sinful motivations! Given the modern world, certainly an impossible chore! If there is a billion dollars, or ten billion, or a hundred billion, which might seem potentially available to such giant corporations, they constantly demonstrate and prove that they have no ethics or principles whatever!
Did you notice that the US government provided $100 billion of OUR tax money to help repair New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, but only ONE billion was actually spent for any actual construction. The other $99 billion dollars of American tax dollars simply got taken by greedy and corrupt individuals and corporations. I am sure that I do not even need to mention Halliburton, which has made countless billions in profits from the Iraq war (again, of US taxpayer money) and then decided to move Offshore to be able to avoid paying any taxes on those profits. You are familiar with the many thousands of such examples, where large corporations simply discarded the slightest semblance of ethics or morals or principles, just in order to seek greater profits.
As a Devout Christian, who feels he is familiar with what Jesus tried to Teach us, I see all this as very, very, very wrong! Can anyone ever actually do anything to try to improve this situation? Probably not, because of the scale of their wealth and power. But, should someone at least try? I believe the Lord expects EACH OF US to at least try! I see several of my "projects" as being potentially large enough to "get the attention" of giant corporations. Can one tiny Christian Pastor actually do anything to try to get them to re-direct their motivations? Probably not. Probably, there will just be "tire-tracks" on me as they trample over me to get to the profits they see which they see worth lusting for. Still, even knowing about those tire-tracks, I see it as my ethical responsibility to the Lord, to at least try.
Now, am I so stupid to think that I could actually stand up to multi-National corporations? Yes, I saw the videotape of that individual man with the bag of groceries in Tieneman Square in China "standing up" to that line of Chinese Tanks. No one could believe that he would not immediately have gotten squished paper-thin. I guess he has greater moral strength than I do, as I would be afraid of the certainty of what would be about to happen. If I were to "present" this concept (remembering that essentially no one would have the capability of actually building it!), and then think that I could somehow bully those mega-corporations into behaving ethically, well, all I see are tire-tracks! There is no conceivable way that they would even acknowledge me. Any more than the Wright Brothers were recognized as actually owning their Patent on the airplane, or the medium-sized company that invented the Jeep was even remotely respected or rewarded for their invention, or even the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers. MONEY is all that is seen that counts in modern society, and things like ethics and principles and morals are simply discarded if they get in the way.
Now, I have long had a personal opinion that those dozen huge multi-national conglomerates are WAY too rich and too powerful as it is! Pretty much any business that has seemed to be profitable has been bought by one of them, so the food companies, tobacco companies, oil companies, and most all other large businesses, are already owned (and therefore controlled) by that very small number of really giant corporations. If I had my way, they would each divest themselves of their corporate takeovers, so there was a greater diversity of people who actually had the control and power over the world. But that's obviously not going to happen, and they will continue to ONLY be focused on making more and more and more money. It's the American way!
Now, if I make this solar electric generation system available, whether in a web-page, or through publicity, or even with a Patent, I do not see ANY alternate scenario except that those few giant corporations would get even richer and more powerful, by manufacturing the tens of millions of systems wanted by customers. There is a specific reason for this, beyond the usual advantages of large scale. It turns out that if a rather large foundry operation could be used, it would only require a few man-minutes to make the difficult assemblies, and possibly a couple man-hours to manufacture the entire system. Do you see that the giant corporations would then actually be CAPABLE of manufacturing them to sell them at the $1,000 target that I want? If such a company had strong ethics and principles, I WOULD teach them how to make these things, such that people could be able to buy them for around $1,000. That would be awesome. Sadly, even better than my preferred idea of having 100,000 small fab shops build them so that a lot of employment could occur! Those little local fabrication shops MIGHT be able to produce a FEW assemblies each year. But if 100,000,000 people are each demanding to get their own, I rather doubt that they would be willing to wait a hundred years before receiving theirs! (100,000 fab shops each being able to make 10 per year is one million total produced each year, or 100 years.)
In the REAL world, giant corporations have Accountants, and Stockholders, and so they think of NOTHING other than maximizing their profits. I wish I could say that such giant companies actually care about our well being, but they really don't. That old joke about being willing to sell one's own grandmother is not to far off of the behavior of many of them. Things like Enron and a hundred other recent examples keep showing this mentality, that ONLY the bottom line matters, especially their personal bottom line!
So, here they would have a system that they could manufacture at a cost to them of say $800. They COULD sell it for $1,000 and still make a nice profit, right? I wish! Their Accountants realize that this is the American free market, and they feel they are EXPECTED to charge as high a price as the market will bear. Since they are aware that the only competing source has to charge $15,000, do you see that they then feel totally justified in charging, say $12,000, and then claiming and bragging about how conscientious they are?
Have you noticed the same giant corporations in their drug company businesses? They spend a fraction of a penny in making each pill, and then sell them at $10 apiece? Why? Because they can! Do people die because of that behavior by them? Sure! Do they care? It doesn't seem so. After years and years of enormous pressure (which started affecting their public image) they started making the same medicines available in Africa at 1/10 the price Americans pay. They are still making enormous profits. What does that tell you? Do they care about YOU? It's hard to see it.
So why would they behave any better for your benefit with something like my critter than they demonstrate every day? I would love to be proven wrong about that, but they all seem extremely single-minded about making maximum profits. Did you notice that they commonly lay off 30,000 employees, while simultaneously giving themselves an extra $hundred million bonuses? And they never blink at sending thousands of jobs to India or China or Taiwan or Mexico. What is actually important in their universe? I do NOT see that anything that the Lord Taught us is even there in the tiniest amount! I feel that I am supposed to at least make an attempt at trying to change this.
These comments started out fairly brief! But many people have RIPPED into me, in incredibly nasty and cruel ways, pretty much insisting that THEY deserve to be given this information! That I am somehow violating the Lord's desires by denying them access to it! I am more appalled at their reactions (nearly all of whom have made clear that they are Christians, pretty much implying that I may not be!) It sure gives the appearance of aspects of "personal greed" doesn't it? In any case, it seems that it has been necessary for me to expand these comments to more thoroughly describe what my concerns and my mindset is regarding this system. It is hard to believe that it has been necessary for me to defend my Christianity! And from Christians! Interesting!
OK. I actually see an entirely different reason for my decision! IF I thought that there truly would be long-term benefit from it, and especially for poorer people, sure, I would make it available. But you might look at the link down below that presents actual Government and Industry figures regarding remaining existing quantities of petroleum, natural gas, Uranium, and other possible energy sources. It is terrifying stuff! According to official figures, the US has already run out of all the Uranium (and therefore closed all 39 Uranium mines some years back) for supplying American nuclear electric power generation plants. There is insanity in our Congress seriously discussing spending a hundred billion dollars more of our tax dollars to build a hundred new nuclear power plants! The earliest they could become operational is around ten years! Not only would the US still be entirely dependent on imported Uranium then, but the WORLD will have used up far more of the known remaining supplies! It is conceivable that once we would pay for and build all those shiny new nuclear power plants, there might not be any nuclear fuel to put into them to produce any electricity!
The situation regarding petroleum and natural gas are nearly as dark.
It really seems clear to me that the world, and especially the USA, will need to greatly re-evaluate the massive wastage of power that occurs now. Did you know that only around 13% of the actual chemical energy in the coal or Uranium or natural gas actually gets to your house as electricity? The other 87% of the energy simply gets wasted, all being lost as many forms of heat.
SO! My current thoughts are that I should put the plans for this critter in some sort of Time Capsule, to become available around 2020 or 2025, at a point where society might (hopefully) have developed a healthier attitude regarding energy and wastage. I suppose that THIS concerns another responsibility to the Lord, regarding the fact that we humans are allegedly "custodians of the Earth" which we are now doing an astoundingly poor job of accomplishing!
Interestingly, many Christian writers have insisted that I have a RESPONSIBILITY to vacuum in countless millions of dollars, because of (alleged) Christian reasons! It seems to me that their logic has been polluted by our society's total focus on money and material things, but they insist that I have that responsibility because then, with all those bushel baskets of money, I would then be in a position to give it away to Charities!
I certain admire the concept of giving and charity, but they may not realize that of every dollar you give to the famous Charities, something like a third of it goes to pay for TV ads to try to get others to send in money, and that often another one-third goes to finance enormous bureaucracies. I used to regularly give to the Red Cross, until I learned that many of their Executives all get millions of dollars a year for a paycheck, plus bonuses! But I might have even swallowed that except for that incident where wonderful Americans gave the Red Cross around $700 million dollars for the victims of 9/11. Those Red Cross Execs decided that they didn't need that much for the victims and they spent (do I remember $400 million of it) most of those generous donations to buy themselves a lot of new computers and office equipment. If I had any authority, I would have had every one of those Execs fired! And I probably would make many other changes, to try to make sure that more of donated dollars actually go to the purpose that the giver intended. (Actually, my outrage over that caused me to come up with the "Helping" web-site and concept, where exactly 99% of any given Donation is directly transferred to the specific desired destination, within seconds, so that the victims of a hurricane or Virginia Tech or a tsunami or an earthquake might immediately have some way of having food and shelter THAT NIGHT. Nothing has come of that, and there has been essentially zero interest in it!)
In any case, the idea that I have some sort of religious responsibility to become disgustingly rich, just so I could then give it to Charities, seems pretty bizarre to me! I smile when I think of what Jesus would Counsel such people regarding such thoughts! I also smile at imagining Jesus becoming a Banker so that He might have amassed huge amounts of money (He certainly could have!) in order to be able to give it away to the poor! It just seems to me that some people may have lost track of what Christianity is actually supposed to be about. I am not entirely sure that it is meant to be managed in multi-million dollar mega-Churches, either. But it seems like I am going off on a tangent from my previous tangent! So I will now shut up about these matters!
Yes, this is primarily philosophy! I am trying to deal with ethical dilemmas that are pretty enormous, way too big for my little brain to sleuth through! On the plus side, I think I might be in a position to enable a hundred million American families save their entire electric bills every month, forever. That is a powerful reason. IF I can just get smart enough to figure out some simple and easy way to build my system!
In principle, this might greatly reduce the amount of heat (and more importantly, carbon dioxide) sent into the atmosphere by electric power plants burning coal, gas and oil. That argument is actually not as compelling, for a sad reason. Even if ALL human beings stopped ALL burning of oil, gas, coal, gasoline, and other such non-renewable energy sources today (2005), the Earth would and will certainly keep increasing in temperatures for at least 140 years and probably much longer. It is a well known phenomenon called hysteresis. (No one in the news seems to be aware of this, where they seem to assume that the moment we would stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, everything would immediately start to get better!) But the reality is that when such causing sources suddenly quit, a momentum of the effects always continues. Actually, all the carbon dioxide that we have dumped into the atmosphere figures to stay there for thousands or millions of years! A scientist recently mentioned in a TV interview that the carbon dioxide released by the earliest Model T cars a hundred years ago, is still in the atmosphere! This is extremely sad, because the American government (and those dozen multi-national conglomerates) are so greedy to continue to produce profits that they have decided that they could always stop at some point in the future when they HAD to, which then supposedly allows them to continue to collect large profits as long as they possibly can. Unfortunately, the reality probably is that if mankind had stopped ALL fossil fuel burning around 1970 when the concept of global warming was first seriously discussed, we would still now be having the polar caps melting, glaciers melting, and ocean levels rising today, from the hysteresis effects of fossil fuel burning BEFORE 1970. In any case, the argument that I should release this technology because of global warming, would only start to have beneficial value for people beyond a hundred years from now. This is solidly scientifically true. So I am not swayed by that argument! But I agree that it is an absolutely valid point!
Another argument is that it could reduce the "raping of our planet" by reducing our amazing consumption of oil, natural gas and coal. Regarding coal, that might be true. But we consume amazing amounts of oil just to create the plastic packaging that all modern products are sold in, which are immediately thrown away. If I could help in reducing oil consumption, I don't see how or why anyone would slow down wasting it for countless other foolish reasons.
Regarding these matters, I assembled a web-page, linked below, that presents Government and Industry data regarding oil, gas, nuclear, etc, energy supplies, speculated unfound supplies, and consumption rates. That data is amazingly frightening! The National leaders seem to have neglected telling the American public how dire and desperate our situation is regarding centering our lives on oil and natural gas. The only up-side I see from that data is that, in only around ten or twenty more years, the Mid-East might not have very much more oil for us to ever worry about!
Now, a related issue MIGHT be valid! America is unbelievably dependent on foreign oil supplies, particularly from the Mid-East. And we have VERY large numbers of nuclear weapons! Add that up! Now, say that the Saudi Royal family is offered much higher prices (like double what we want to pay) for their oil by the Chinese, such that they no longer are interested in selling to the USA? (This seems to me to be an absolute certainty, within five years.) Or, similarly, say the Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia simply kill the Saudi Royal family, and THEY would certainly not sell a drop of oil to the USA. The US economy would immediately be completely destroyed, and every American family would suddenly need to seriously wonder how they might heat their homes and families, or drive their vehicles, and even IF they might still have a job! This would represent every type of catastrophe simultaneously for America, most businesses having to close due to a lack of (fossil fuel) energy. I fear that our present (W.) Administration might easily decide to retaliate with nuclear weapons, because America would not have any economic muscle left to try to throw around! The really scary part to me is that it seems obvious that one or both of those scenarios (Chinese buying or Wahhabi terrorism) seems certain to happen before the end of 2008 or 2010. And this President scares me regarding not using any logic in deciding many of his policies and decisions.
Yes, these comments have gotten FAR afield of solar and electricity! But I feel the need to try to explain why I (so far) cannot find any way to release this technology. Weird? Even I think so!
I am also recognizing here that there are many problems in the world that I have no way to try to solve! My various inventions are each "tiny" and somewhat irrelevant! Ten years ago, I presented a far better approach to trying to save Beached Whales than the cloddish ways otherwise used. I think a FEW whales might still be living due to that presentation, but most still died. The world as a whole has little interest in such ideas, UNLESS the source happens to be a part of some multi-National conglomerate where they can promote the concept! I find that very interesting and very sad.
In any case, regarding me, yes, if I thought there was a valid chance that we might minimize our STARTING global warfare in the near future, or even that we might be somehow able to avoid severe devaluation of the dollar (another effect China can cause any time they wish) and the other financial catastrophes that seem unavoidable in the near future, I might actually be willing to let those giant multi-national conglomerates to get even richer and more powerful. But I have studied all these issues in great depth, for a couple years now, and I believe my facts and logic are accurate, and I do not see truly compelling reasons to do that, EXCEPT for my tremendous desire for eliminating everyone's electric bills! And, unless persuaded by REALLY compelling and fact-based reasoning, I do not see that as being a sufficient reason. Sorry!
If someone can explain to me, in terms that my little brain could understand, that if by enabling the few multi-National mega-corporations to gain extra hundreds of billions in profits, that that would somehow result in a lot of good resulting somehow, I would certainly listen!
OK! In case you are one of those people who are in the mood after reading this to rip into me, before you start typing your nasty comments to me, I want to remind you that, aside from allowing the mega-corps to run rough-shod over everything, even if I provided these complete directions for free tomorrow, you would almost certainly either have to devote at least 3 months full time in making it or pay a local fab shop maybe $15,000 for it. NEITHER of which seems like a helpful option as I see it. Now, IF I could either force some multi-National corporation to have wonderful ethics, where they would actually sell them for the $1,000 that I believe realistic, OR if I can somehow figure out some much simpler and easier construction, I guarantee that I am on board at IMMEDIATELY benefiting as much of the world's population as possible.
Therefore, I have concluded that IF AND WHEN even just a million people finally decide to install the free A/C OR IF AND WHEN just a million people choose to eliminate their $2000 per year winter heating bills with the "HeatGreen" (again free, and very low cost to build) "super-compost" system, at THAT POINT I could see that people might actually be serious ABOUT TAKING SOME SIMPLE ACTION TO BENEFIT THEMSELVES! And then I would likely upload all the necessary info, construction instructions, and all the rest for THIS solar-to-electric system. Seems like a fair expectation on my part. I intend and desire to make ZERO money from the free A/C or the HeatGreen concepts, so I am clearly not trying to amass a fortune. I just want to see at least a SMALL indication that people might actually be willing to take some effort to help themselves! I am not even expecting most of them to realize that they will actually be helping the environment and the planet in the process!
I must admit that I was pretty full of myself for a while after that test! I did this test way out in the woods, and without any guidance, it landed up in some trees, and it took me a while to figure out how to get it down! I never did a second test, and a few weeks afterward, took the device apart and burned all my sketches and notes about it. It had taken a little while to dawn on me that, even though there really were the "civilian uses" that I had already realized, there were so many potential military applications (and terrorist uses) that it was really frightening. My nightmares then envisioned a very tiny version that could fly in a house window, carrying some sort of gun, zipping around and shooting so fast that no one could catch it. And even worse nightmares! The Christian part of me would NOT aid our military or anyone else's to develop even more effective weapons, i.e., killing machines. The Lord would definitely NOT condone that! My hope is that it will never get invented again! I realize it probably will some day, and that scares me. I sense the distress those researchers had in the 1930s and 1940s as they designed the atomic bomb. Many of them were pretty screwed up afterward, with a sense of guilt. I don't want that!
And my web-page that explains the Physics of an automobile engine (all solidly based), used to include several paragraphs regarding an advanced engine concept that I had come up with. I had those paragraphs in there UNTIL I actually tested it (in May 2004). A (different) 3.5 HP lawnmower engine, SEVERELY modified, momentarily produced 43 HP (at around 6300 rpm) just before it exploded! The parts of the engine just could not withstand that much power (and speed) and nearly everything in the engine was destroyed. It took a while to remove all the pieces of shrapnel from the walls and ceiling near where it blew up! Regarding this invention, it really is one that I would like to divulge, but many of the issues regarding it are the same as for the solar electric generation system, that ONLY the giant corporations would wind up prospering from it, and I do not intend to help them do that. Again, I have extensively studied the various issues and possible solutions, and I am not convinced that there is compelling enough reason to let them benefit from something of mine.
Say that someone told you that they could provide you all the plans for a Medical MRI machine! So they give you the plans! Certainly a very valuable piece of equipment! But I am guessing that you may have trouble actually building one??? My stuff is not quite THAT complex, but unfortunately more complex than most people are capable of working on. I wish I was smart enough to think of simpler variations. Maybe some day I will. I hope!
It just occurred to me that maybe I can turn this argument around on you! Imagine that you were Alfred Nobel, the guy who invented dynamite. Would you promote it and yourself? Nobel did. At the time, it seemed like a wonderful invention, one that really advanced the technology of the time. As a result, he soon became one of the richest people in the world. His dynamite certainly made construction and mining a lot quicker and easier, no doubt. However, ALL the millions of bombs used in World War I, and all but two of the bombs used in World War II, were directly based on his invention. I might ask "How many millions of human beings died directly as a result of Nobel's invention?" I am fully aware that someone else would have invented it eventually, but it still seems like a fair question to ask. It turns out that Nobel asked himself that question for much of the rest of his life! He regretted ever inventing dynamite, because of the consequences it later had. He created the Nobel Peace Prize pretty much out of a feeling of guilt for what he had done and for what he received his millions of dollars.
Those other two bombs used in World War II also represent an interesting invention. Nuclear energy might easily be producing the electricity your computer is now using to read this! Nuclear Medicine has added wonderful things to human existence. Yet, I noted above that most of the scientists who were involved in developing the atomic bomb wound up spending the rest of their lives pretty screwed up regarding their responsibility to all those innocent Japanese who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I realize that my inventions are nowhere near as important as those inventions, and don't deserve to be discussed in the same conversation. And most of my inventions do not seem to have any obvious horrible usage. But Nobel thought that, when he saw his dynamite as a great thing! And it IS. It just happens to have some really terrible usages too. I am not smart enough to know the implications in the future of whether any of my inventions might do anything useful or not. They may all simply be worthless! Or perceived to be of such little value as to not be widely used. All I see is how giant companies seem to really consistently behave, and I just don't want to aid them in that sort of behavior, or encourage them, or motivate them in that direction.
Again, I feel an intense responsibility to the Lord, Who I work for, to not feed that sort of behaviors or thinking.
Boy, if I could just come up with some way where the giant corps would have to "behave properly" in order to participate in getting their profits, that would be great. One might think that a Patent might do it. It should. But in recent decades, there have been at least a couple hundred wonderful inventions that came to the attention of giant corps, where private meetings then occurred between corp Execs and Members of Congress. Presto, a law would get passed that identified the invention as having to do with the National Security, and that the Patent holder was said to be too small to produce the numbers of units the government wanted manufactured, and that specific giant corp was given total rights to manufacture it! Check out the history of the Army Jeep! A decent sized company actually invented it in the early 1930s and worked hard and spent millions of dollars of their own money, during the Depression, at getting government attention. And then they were trampled and ignored when actual contracts were placed! It was one of the most obvious example of this, but it really happens far too often. Things like that are not supposed to be able to happen in America, are they? So, a Patent, or most other attempts at protecting an invention, really do not have much value with the big boys! Those companies each have hundreds of Lawyers, looking for things to do!
Even I see my "reservations" as being very odd and even rather stupid, from a business sense. But actually, if I really felt the need for a few million dollars, there are immense numbers of people who keep begging for my woodstove and so I have a really obvious way of getting there, IF that were important to me. But the Lord is FAR more important to me, and I am convinced that He Provides for me! So I actually have zero personal incentive to release or promote these (or even some other) concepts. I am happy, fulfilled, and very busy with the Lord's Work. And that's enough for me.
However, I fully realize the many complications of the modern world, especially Global Warming and the depleting of fossil fuel resources. So I felt the need to explain these things, just in case someone has a better insight for me to learn, such that I might change my opinion regarding releasing such a technology. Given that I have spent more than a year studying and thinking about the issues, I can say that probably an insight developed after a few minutes of thought might not bring anything new to the table! So, if you're going to suggest any line of reasoning, please consider all the months I have already thought about all this! Also, being educated as a Physicist, it is fairly hard to slip "sloppy thinking or logic" past me! AND, any argument would have to be compatible with what the Lord might want of us humans!
However, I would LOVE to be persuaded by a Perry-Mason-airtight-argument which would present some "better logic" to me! Or, if you just find amusement from these comments, I suppose you are free to joke about the "funny farm" being where I belong! This is America, and we each are free to think and believe and do what we feel strongly about. (Now I step down from the soapbox!)
I don't really see why I should need to defend my integrity, but I guess I could note that I have provided FREE complete instructions for a FREE air conditioning, which I am pretty sure that at least 9,200 people have installed so far (in a little over six years that it has been provided in some web-pages). I like another aspect of that even better than the fact that I have intentionally received exactly zero dollars for that invention. Some people have unusual applications, where they need to have a Technical Packet if advanced information. The web-site instructs people to GIVE $250(US) to ANY Charity, Church or deserving cause, upon which I have mailed (or otherwise provided) the Technical Packet to them. Around 4,700 people have so far requested that Packet. I never ask for any proof that they gave the described donation, but then send them their Packet. Assuming that they each actually made that $250 donation, between them they have given over $1,100,000 dollars to assorted causes! I LIKE that!
Beginning in 2004, I have provided complete instructions for a method of precise bodyfat measurement, with the intention of aiding in reducing Childhood Obesity. I suspect that some day, around 77,000 public facilities will each spend $50 to make the items described, such that all Americans could regularly know their precise bodyfat. I have never asked for nor received a dime regarding that, which I see as a potentially valuable concept.
Beginning in early 2005, I have asked for American families to consider spending $50 on materials to make an unusual water pump and then another $50 to ship it to some remote third world village that desperately needs safe drinking water. I regularly get notes from Missionaries asking how to get such pumps, but no one seems motivated to make any of the pumps for any of those villages. In this, I have done my best, as I never requested a dime regarding that whole effort, and simply wanted individual American families to be willing to spend a grand total of $100 to do a really good deed! None so far, but I guess it HAS only been TWO YEARS so far! Who is letting who down here?
In the 1980s, I invented a unique system where young women should never again have to be in danger of being raped. However, my personal expertise does not extend to microwave electronic circuitry, and I have begged and pleaded with countless people to help get that PSST system into operation. One man in 2005 was typical, in telling me that my hurdles were fairly simple and he could design the needed circuitry in just a few days. However, he is apparently a very busy man, and he told me that, if I wanted him to actually work on it, it would be necessary for me to pay for an assortment of expenses that totaled around $40,000 per day! Even if I could have afforded that, I found it extremely offensive that he apparently gave zero value to the well-being of millions of young girls! Sure, he would design the circuitry, but NOT for the girls, but for money! Amazing!
When someone has already decided that you don't have any integrity, it is not really possible for anyone to defend that they do! So these words are obviously wasted effort, and I am obviously totally guilty of all the horrible things that e-mailers describe of me! But I really do not know of anyone else who has GIVEN AWAY an air conditioning design that could have brought in many millions. Or given away the water pump concept (EXCEPT NOT to people who want to build them to sell for their own profit!) Or tried to provide the PSST rape prevention system. Or assorted other efforts. Instead, I am adjudged evil for feeling that there is not sufficient logic (yet) to disclose a solar device, which virtually no one could build anyway!
I truly appreciate the NICE notes that come in, and there are plenty of them, but the nasty and the vicious notes merely make me feel really sad for those writers. They apparently have an entirely different concept of life than mine, one that seems to intimately be related to financial issues. Interesting!
The Earth's Rotation as a Source for Energy
Waste Nuclear Power For Making Electricity And Heat?
The Physics of Efficiency In Electric Power Plants
Individual Ways of Reducing Your Energy Usage
Methods of Storing Energy for Later
How Much Energy Comes From the Sun? And Why is there Global Warming?
How does the Sun create so much energy?
Inventions Which Might Help Deal With Coming Energy Catastrophes
An Invention to Efficiently Make Electricity from Solar
Enormous Heating of the Atmosphere by the Alaska Pipeline
Air Conditioning without Huge Electric Bills and without Freon
A Method of Storing Summer Heat to (Nearly) Entirely Heat a House all Winter
An Extremely Highly-Efficient (and Fast, 200.0 mph) Transportation System for People and Products
The Sophisticated Woodstove I Invented in 1973
The Physics of Wood as a Heating Fuel
Why is the North Pole Heating Faster than the rest of the Earth?
A Possible way to greatly reduce Aerodynamic Drag of Airplanes
( http://mb-soft.com/public/index.html )
C Johnson, Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago