article
Water-power car silenced
17 August 1985
Water-power car silenced
The water-powered automobiie that was featured in The Daily Advocate fair section will not appear in Thursday’s junior fair parade as planned.
According to partners in the car’s development, the car will not clear the U.S. patent board in time for the car to be introduced to the public.
A display will be used to demonstrate the theory behind the water-powered car as in years past.
The three fairs
This short notice closes the story the Advocate began in May. On 1 May 1985 Meyer showed the Darke County Agricultural Society a videotape of the car and asked for an hour in front of the grandstand, saying he had been at the fair the two previous years “with just the cell”: Fair program to include water-powered vehicle. The fair section of 14 August billed the car as a new attraction: Water-power car is a new attraction. By the fair’s second day it had been withdrawn.
So by the papers’ account, at all three fairs, 1983, 1984 and 1985, what the public saw was the display: the cell and the theory behind it, not the car. “Thursday’s junior fair parade” was on 22 August 1985. The partners are not named.
The reason given, the patent, is the one Meyer gave all that summer: the 14 August article has him waiting on the “mother” patent from the patent board of appeals. Seven weeks after the fair, on 11 October 1985, the buggy had its first road test in Grove City: the Grove City Record.
As printed
“Automobiie” is the paper’s, and is kept.
The original
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- The newspaper page is copyright its publisher and is reproduced here as a record of what was printed at the time; the archive claims nothing in it. The watermark marks the archive’s copy, not its ownership. The citation is what a reader needs to find the original.
- Caption
- The Daily Advocate, Greenville, Ohio, Saturday 17 August 1985, page 1, the second day of the Great Darke County Fair.
- Citation
- The Daily Advocate, Greenville, Ohio, August 1985
- Publication
- The Daily Advocate, Greenville, Ohio
- Transcription
- A page image from the newspapers.com archive of The Daily Advocate, supplied by the archive’s editor.