Nick Palmer writes:
> People like Bill and Jed retain their scepticism for a very > good reason. They have had experience, or have knowledge, of how literally > hundreds of "free energy" type schemes have worked out.
Yup. Bill's essay is excellent. The Manning book describes many examples. There is at least one example of each of the outcomes described in Bill's flowchart. The stories of people like Sweet and some of the others are stereotyped as so similar they resemble 1950s science-fiction movies.
I hate to point this out, because I really do admire Goldes, but there have also been several inventors who claimed they had been granted patents and that manufacturing was only "months away," yet we never heard from them again. There have also been a few who said they were following the Beaty Prometheus Game rules, but they too have vanished as far as I know. See, for example, Manning, p. 68 - 69, describing an inventor in Vancouver names John Hutchinson in the 1980s and early 1990s:
". . . One day while experimenting, however, Hutchison cracked a crucial part and decided to take the unit apart.
He built a smaller, more portable model to take on his speaking tour. Resembling an Oscar statue in size and shape, the portable converter put out slightly more than a watt of power. It lit a tiny lamp as a demonstration and also ran a small motor. . . .
Back home, Hutchison's business advisor fretted that the inven�tor had given away his secrets. But Hutchison shrugged his shoulders; he had gone beyond the prototype technology he had taken to Japan. He now had a new secret�the stovetop process he called Dirt Cheap because the ingredients included common rocks.
The new process grew out of his use of barium titanate. He won�dered, "Why can't I make a material that works even better?" Hutchison knew that other researchers had put electrodes on certain rocks to show that the rocks generated a tiny electric current, somehow soaked up from the cosmos.
So Hutchison sorted through small stones on the street in front of his apartment and threw them into a test tube-sized metal container. Next, he added a mixture of low-cost, common chemicals -- he won't reveal which ones -- and put this rock soup on the stove to simmer. This allowed water to evaporate and tiny pockets of air to rise from the stones so that the chemicals could enter them. Before the mixture cooled into a solid, he added specially treated posts to draw electricity from the crystal-like substance that had formed. Again, no one is entirely sure as to how the Dirt Cheap method works, although one physicist told Hutchison that the Casimir effect, used by Ken Shoulders to create charge clusters, may be at work (see page 61).
When he first discovered his Dirt Cheap process, Hutchison didn't bother to patent it. He had heard from other inventors how their laboratories had been vandalized and their property had been stolen once the Patent Office had been notified, and he was not eager to be the first inventor to take a bold step by manufacturing a large home- or factory-sized unit that could restructure industries. Besides, in the 1980s -� when he was still working with the Hutchison effect -- he had received a few threatening comments from strangers.
How could Hutchison enjoy his peaceful life and still get a space-energy product to the public in a low-key manner? He says he has hit upon an unusual strategy: building miniature flying saucers powered by Dirt Cheap-supplied electricity, and selling them as space-energy children's toys. Hutchison hopes an environmentally safe toy that lights up without batteries will intrigue the public into buying Dirt Cheap devices that could power large appliances. And perhaps, the Dirt Cheap process could help lead to a world of non-polluting new energy. . . ."
Perhaps Hutchinson never went ahead with his plans for some reason, or perhaps he is a faker. He and The Truth are still out there. See:
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/8863/main.html
- Jed
