Inventor’s Suppressed Technology Could Eliminate Toxic Automobile Emissions

 

Why has the federal government actively worked to suppress and prevent the widespread marketing of engineering technology that increases engine efficiency and reduces noxious fuel emissions? This is a question that was addressed on the December 2 broadcast of Radio Free America, the weekly talk forum sponsored by American Free Press with host Tom Valentine. The guest was Charlie Brown, a retired U.S. military veteran and Foreign Service officer, who produced this technology. An edited transcription of Brown’s remarks follow.

The truth is that there is a lot of technology out there that would make the automobile obsolete as it exists, but much of our economy stems around transportation and the related oil business. Unfortunately, the whole structure would crash if the technology was introduced overnight. However, it can be introduced with planning and intelligence.

The changeover to new science can be done with minimal effect in terms of economic downturn, but, unfortunately, many of the people involved in the oil industry are shortsighted in terms of prolonging the use of petroleum products.

I retired from 30 years of government service, just over 22 years with the military and the last seven with the foreign service as a senior foreign service officer.

In retirement I was looking for something to become involved with that might become productive. I bought out another inventor who had a process of humidifying air. I had noticed in driving (as had others) that when you drive in a moist condition, the engine seems to perform better.

I had spoken to truck drivers who had driven in low ground fog in Louisiana and the engines just seemed to smooth out. They had more power and moved more quietly. I spent about two-and-a-half years working with this process. It was very expensive and quite intricate.

At about the two year point I realized it was not an economically viable process. It involved a lot of hand-tooling and work in making the units that were used. But there was a very noticeable improvement in the performance of whatever test vehicle I utilized. I stopped that and for about a year I put my head together with a lot of other inventors exploring different ideas.

Finally, I thought that maybe I could come up with a better process, which I actually designed and a friend built. Fortunately, the first prototype for that concept worked better than about my 32nd prototype for the original concept that I had started out with earlier. As I moved along in that, I was testing in a variety of automobiles.

I call my device a “thunderstorm in a bottle.” It creates what some of my extremely bright friends call combustion-stimulating molecules and radicals. The result of this activity totally changes the chemistry of combustion. It’s worked well in gas from 75 to 125 octane and on diesel. There’s been limited testing on propane. I truly believe that the best use of it can be on large engines, particularly diesel, and very possibly in power-generating plants where coal and petroleum products are used. I’ve just scratched the surface.

Despite all this, we ran into some difficulty. We had put my units on a van and on a small Chevrolet car at a large dealership in the Washington, D.C. area. In a two-week testing period, they had picked up five miles per gallon on the van and something like nine miles per gallon on the car. This unit had no moving parts.

It was more than humidification involved here. It evolved to the point that it had become obvious that I had become involved in some new type of science here because no engineers, particularly automotive engineers, could understand it. I went to physicists and chemists and they couldn’t understand it.

But the results were rather spectacular, to the point that the dealership offered one of my units free on every American car, truck and van sold. They ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post and The Washington Star and, I think, also in The Baltimore Sun.

The dealership had a fabulous weekend. On Monday morning the dealership was visited by 13 representatives of U.S. agencies. All of them were satisfied with the documentation presented, except for the representative of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He stated, “It’s been a while, but we don’t care whether it works or not. We do not want people buying these large American vehicles.” As a former American government employee, this statement really blew my mind.

I tried to respond and flew to Washington, but the folks at the FTC refused to meet with me and they put out, frankly, some false information. I went through the science and technology subcommittee of the Senate and met with the general counsel and presented my case and he reviewed it for one night. The chairman of the subcommittee at the time, then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), wrote a rather scathing letter to the chairman of the FTC, asking for a full explanation as to how and why I had been treated in this way. I sort of felt, then, that I had some support at high levels.

However, within three weeks one vehicle, which was fully loaded with some of my top data, including my prototype carburetor, was stolen. My unit was stolen from a race car from the Army race team. A third vehicle, which was going to be the subject of a feature story on NBC, was stolen. Within that three-week period, I was just about wiped out financially. Psychologically, I was really wiped out, too.

The American automobile suffered and as an economist, this bothered me to no end. The people who benefited from the elimination of my product were the Japanese. In simple terms, if you go back and look at history, you see that the Japanese made their major inroads after the 1979-1980 energy crunch and we went to smaller cars.

So I can only theorize at this point as to who might have benefited from the theft of my research and the attempt to destroy my work. Remember: This was in 1980. We were in an “energy crunch,” essentially a created energy crunch. Large American vehicles, particularly vans, were not selling. They could have used the technology that we were making available.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a police agency and not a research agency. They write laws, which Congress passes, mandating certain requirements as to what you can do regarding fuel economy and emissions. As a part of the legislation that existed at that time, if another agency of the government set itself up (as did the FTC) and had any objection to any device or concept, they were supposed to refer that to the EPA which would then test the device itself. But this was not done in my case.

This is a procedure at the EPA division in Ann Arbor, Mich., where you can request testing of a small fleet of vehicles. My estimate is that it would take between $300,000 and $500,000 for that test to be conducted, over a period of two to three months. The result would be a small notation in The Federal Register. It would not state that it worked. It would state the results of the tests.

As of a couple of years ago, I think there had been 106 tests of record and not one single concept or device ever tested met the full requirements of the EPA in terms of adding the fuel economy and simultaneously reducing all controlled or measured noxious emissions. However, my concept worked and it was never tested.

Our unit was economical. Going through a distribution system, we were putting the unit on vehicles for slightly over $100 and I think that the distributor offered it to the automobile dealer in Washington for some thing less than $100. So the dealer, in essence, was not investing a lot of money but it generated a tremendous amount of interest.

We also tested on diesel and proved, without any question, that we had good results on diesel. A friend in the Foreign Service, who was actually on the president’s staff at one point, made an appointment for me with the administrator of the EPA. I met with the EPA man, who was highly intelligent and motivated and I thought we had some success. But nothing happened as a direct consequence of the meeting.

After the problem with the FTC, I tried an EPA research laboratory and the head of the lab asked me to come by.

They ran several tests over two fall periods, using a Chevette diesel, the first ever made. He said, being rather amazed, that it was the “cleanest” diesel vehicle that he had ever tested in the lab. In fact, after the first test they even recalibrated their instruments to assure that they were getting correct readings. That was done in 1981 and 1982.

At the EPA research lab, my unit reduced every level of noxious emissions on the diesel engine and improved fuel economy by 23 percent. So far as I know, no one has ever done that in an EPA lab. So it is a new field of science.

For the last 10 years I’ve been trying to ascertain what the science is and have worked with bright people such as Dr. Tom Boyce in London, Dr. George Harvey, a chemist here in Miami.

We have the science pretty well down. But the fact is that I can take the device and put it on a vehicle and the results are evident.