Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (77 page)

Instead of a factory producing Radiant Energy units, Henry Moray had one model which he tore apart—"cannibalized"—to re-use its expensive parts whenever he built an improved model.

Similar in another way to fellow independent inventors throughout the century, Moray's experiences with would-be financiers was discouraging. Moray Products Company, for example, seemed to be going well until Henry found out that the company's treasury was being pilfered from within. Stocks were being sold without benefit to either himself or the company; the thieves kept no records of those stock down-payments and also ignored offers from investors who would have exposed the pilfering. Henry Moray took these associates to court. The costs bankrupted him, and the company broke apart.

To add to his distress, Henry's closest friend, W. H. Lovesy of Utah Oil Refining Company, died under mysterious circumstances in a one-car accident. A hitchhiker who was never identified walked away from the crash.

Hearing the family talk about so many troubling incidents for so many years, John Moray was bound to grow up with a grimly determined set to his jaw. From childhood John lived with the expectation that he would continue the work his father began. As a boy he would be rewarded for good behaviour by being allowed to go downstairs to the basement laboratory in the evening and watch his father experiment. (In 1939 Henry built a 50-foot by 60-foot laboratory with four rooms above it, and the workshop was moved outside of the house permanently).

Around 1950, Henry and his grown sons sat down to brainstorm a plan for financing Radiant Energy development. Richard volunteered to go to Canada and invest in land, and Henry and John stayed in Salt Lake City. Richard and his family found it more difficult than expected—battling bureaucracy in British Columbia in an attempt to develop a subdivision was not always successful. John had planned to go into electrical engineering, but found that the University of Utah physics department was more flexible in allowing him to choose courses.

Nearing the end of his lifetime, Henry Moray became "more and more amazed," wrote John, "for he had never believed he could really be stopped." Dr. T. Henry Moray passed on in l974.

Interviewed in 1994, John Moray was (in his sixties) a retired army colonel now working full-time as a substitute teacher in Salt Lake City, getting up before 5
A
.
M
. to work on correspondence, and thinking of selling the laboratory. The family had by no means abandoned Radiant Energy, he said; keeping within their budget they contract out work on the project. One time-waster, the family has discovered, is battling at rumours. The latest wild tale which John heard was that there was a Moray device in his basement.

"What a ridiculous statement; that is the last place we would keep one!" "If I had a machine, what good would it do to show people? If they don't believe the tests that have already been run, they're not going to believe what they see anyhow."
What part did secretiveness play in the fadeout of Moray's Radiant Energy technology? And is secretiveness a result of today's patent office/ attorney/competition-oriented setup? Admitting that his father refused to release specifics about his invention without first getting signed and legally-binding contracts, John Moray wrote in The Sea of Energy that "If this is carrying an invention as too tight a secret then why do patent laws require it?"
What factors most suppressed the Moray device? John replies, "Finances. And also personal animosity, ego, avariciousness . . ." The violence? "It was always over money."
The ego factor enters when a scientist values a reputation as an expert more than truthfulness. This was underlined when Richard Moray visited Harvey Fletcher Sr. before the eminent scientist died of old age. The man had publicly denied that he had seen a working model of Henry's invention. Now the scientist was well into his nineties and apparently making peace with his life.
"He admitted that, yes, the Radiant Energy device worked just like my father said," Richard said in an interview, with a look of deep frustration. "I asked him 'then why, why did you do what you did?'" Richard measured out his next words flatly. "He said 'because I couldn't admit that I didn't know . . .'"
Ego, greed, excessive pride and distrust. Will enough people rise above these motivations and see themselves connected with all others in a sea of energy? Perhaps then Radiant Energy units could light up this world.

REFERENCES
Burridge, Gaston. "Alchemist 1956?" Fate magazine, Sept. 16, 1956.

Davidson, Dan A. Energy: Breakthroughs to New Free Energy Systems. Greenville, TX: RIVAS, 1977, 1990.
Davidson, John. The Secret of the Creative Vacuum. Essex, England: C.W. Daniel Co. Ltd., 1989.

Kelly, D.A. The Manual of Free Energy Devices and Systems. Clayton, GA: Cadake Industries and Copple House, 1987.

King, Moray B. Tapping The Zero-Point Energy. Provo, UT: Paraclete Publishing, 1989.

Lindemann, Peter A. A History of Free Energy Discoveries. Garberville, CA: Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, 1986.

Moray, John E. and Kevin R. Non-Conventional Energy Symposium, Toronto, 1991.

Moray, John E. "Radiant Energy." 1981.

Moray, T. Henry. Radiant Energy. Garberville, CA: Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, 1945. Moray, T. Henry. Speech Northridge, CA.

given Jan. 23, 1962, Valley State College,

Moray, T. Henry and John E. "T. Henry to Colin Gardner, private letters." California: Walter Rosenthal collection, 1960, 1978.

The Sea of Energy. Salt Lake City: Cosray Research Institute, P.O. Box 651045, Salt Lake City, UT 84165.

"The Sea of Energy, A Means for the Preservation of the Environment By Drawing Kinetic Energy From Space." Boston: 26th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference. Copyright American Nuclear Society.

Valentine, Tom. "Free Electricity Generated from the Radiant 'Cosmos.'" NEWSREAL magazine. Date unknown.

Sunbeams From
Cucumbers

Richard Milton

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

No other scientific endeavor has consumed so much talent, so much cash and so many years of sustained effort as the race to harness the power that makes the sun shine. Billions of pounds (and dollars, rubles and yen), more than four decades of research and the careers of thousands of physicists have been expended on the search for a nuclear reactor that will generate limitless power from the fusion of hydrogen atoms. There are grayhaired professors with lined faces still poring intently over the equations they first looked at eagerly with bright young eyes in the 1940s and 1950s. They will go into retirement with their dreams of cheap, safe power from fusion still years in the future, for the obstacles in their paths are as formidable now as ever.

Fusion is the process taking place in the sun's core where, at temperatures of millions of degrees, hydrogen atoms are compressed together by elemental forces to form helium and a massive outpouring of energy in the thermonuclear reaction of the hydrogen bomb.

It is not difficult, then, to imagine how people who have invested their talent and their lives in the quest to tame such forces are likely to react when told that fusion is possible at room temperature, and in a jam jar.

Hydrogen atoms repel each other strongly—so strongly that no known chemical reaction can persuade them to fuse. There are, though, heavier isotopes* of hydrogen, such as deuterium, which together with oxygen makes heavy water and which under the right circumstances can be made to fuse in nuclear reactions. When they do so, they release energy. However,

*Atomsthathavethesamenumberofprotons-atomicnumber -butdifferentmassnumbers. the only circumstances so far under which hydrogen atoms have been persuaded to fuse have nothing in common with the measured calm of the laboratory bench but are more like a scene from Dante's Inferno. In the center of the sun and other stars, the atoms are squeezed by cataclysmic gravitational forces to form a plasma of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms at a temperature of millions of degrees. These high temperatures kindle a selfsustaining reaction in which hydrogen is "burnt" as the fuel.

The scientific world was thus astonished when, in March 1989, Professor Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University and his former student, Professor Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, held a press conference at which they jointly announced the discovery of "cold fusion"— the production of usable amounts of energy by what seemed to be a nuclear process occurring in a jar of water at room temperature.

Fleischmann and Pons told an incredulous press conference that they had passed an electric current through a pair of electrodes made of precious metals—one platinum, the other palladium—immersed in a glass jar of heavy water in which was dissolved some lithium salts. This very simple set-up (the Daily Telegraph later estimated its cost as around £90 [$144 U.S. currency]) was claimed to produce heat energy between four and ten times greater than the electrical energy they were putting in. No purely chemical reaction could produce a result of such magnitude so, said the scientists, it must be nuclear fusion. Further details would be revealed soon in a scientific paper.

Both scientists are distinguished in their field, that of electrochemistry. But in making their press announcement they were breaking with the usual tradition of announcing major scientific discoveries of this sort. The usual process is one of submitting an article to Nature magazine which in turn would submit it to qualified referees. If the two chemists' scientific peers found the paper acceptable, Nature would publish it, they would be recognized as having priority in the discovery and—all being well— research cash would be forthcoming both to replicate their results and conduct further research.

But the two scientists perceived some difficulties. First, their paper would not be scrutinized by their exact peers because the discovery was unknown territory to electrochemists and indeed everyone else. It would probably be examined mainly by nuclear physicists—the men and women who had grown gray in the service of "hot" fusion. This would be like asking Swift's "Big Endians" to comment objectively on the work of "little Endians." It is not that "hot" fusion physicists could not be trusted to be impartial, or were incapable of accepting experimental facts, but rather that they would be coming from a research background that would naturally give them a quite different perspective.

Textbooks teach degrees Fahrenheit hydrogen nuclei can overcome their natural repulsion toward each other, since like charges repel—think of what happens if you attempt to bring the north poles of two magnets together. If the hydrogen nuclei do come close enough together, they form

process, tremendous something different—helium nuclei. In the amounts of energy are released.

Instead of using super-heated gas, cold based on the reaction of a metal such as large spaces between its nuclei, and a liquid form of hydrogen called deuterium. The deuterium seems to move into the spaces within the palladium in the same way that water moves into the open, absorbent surface of a
putes the fact that the metal absorbs
towel. While no one disthe deuterium, cold-fusion

follows the proponents cannot prove that the reaction which absorption is a nuclear reaction.

Cold fusion is not without problems. For example,

Fusion Hot and Cold

Fusion is the opposite of fission, although both processes start with atoms. Atoms are the tiny building blocks that make up all matter. An atom consists of a nucleus, which is made up of protons and neutrons, and electrons, which form a cloud around the nucleus. Different atoms contain different amounts of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and form different types of matter.

Fission is the splitting of an atom's nucleus, such as by bombarding it with neutrons. This releases a great amount of energy. An atomic bomb and a nuclear power plant both use fission.

Fusion is the joining together of atomic nuclei. Hot fusion, which is said by some scientists to be what energizes our sun, uses a form of the lightest element, hydrogen.

that temperatures reaching millions of are needed before the positively charged

fusion seems to be palladium, which has

byproducts of cold form of hydrogen. cold fusion introduces low level of radiation health problems.
one of the

fusion is the radioactive gas tritium, a rare As one new-energy organization has noted, concerns about radioactivity, and even a can eventually lead to environmental and

From The Coming Energy Revolution by Jeane Manning Avery Publishing Group, 1996).
(Garden City Park, NY:

There was also the problem of money. Whoever develops a working fusion reactor—hot or cold—will be providing the source of energy that mankind needs for the foreseeable future: perhaps for hundreds of years. The patents involved in the technology, and the head start the patent owners will have in setting up a new power industry, will be worth many billions of pounds in revenue. It is potentially the most lucrative invention ever made. With such big sums at stake, the scientists' university wanted no future ambiguity about who was claiming priority, and hence encouraged them to mount a very public announcement.

In the end, the two scientists agreed to a press conference that would stake Utah University's claim to priority in any future patent applications, followed by publication of a joint paper in their own professional journal, The Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry.

There followed a brief honeymoon of a week or two, during which newspaper libraries received more requests from the newsroom for cuttings on fusion than in the previous twenty years, and optimistic pieces about cheap energy from sea-water (where deuterium is common) were penned to keep features editors happy. All over the world, laboratories raced to confirm the existence of cold fusion, although many scientists were unhappy at the lack of scientific detail and at having to learn about such an important event from television news and the popular press. What these researchers were looking for, with their £90-worth of precious metals stuck in test tubes, were one or more of the key tell-tale signs that would confirm cold fusion. When two deuterium nuclei fuse they produce either helium and a neutron particle or tritium. So, if fusion really is taking place, it should be possible to find neutrons being emitted, or helium being formed or tritium being formed. It should also be possible to detect energy being released, probably as heat, that is greatly in excess of any electrical energy being put in. (Of course, if the cell does not do this it is of no use as a power source.)