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.