article
The Wight Stuff
James Wight, in a letter to the editor · 22 March 1990
The Wight Stuff
Dear Trixie: Thank you for giving the latest “car runs on water” scam top-billing [Angry Poodle Barbecue, Feb. 8]. The public needs to be warned. You are to be congratulated, I think.
Would you please, however, allow some clarification. First, the fellow in town telling you these things is Jim Wight, not Wright. The errata is common between his name and that of the two brothers, also crackpots, who were already harassing pigeons at Kitty Hawk while the patent office still believed that “heavier than air flight is impossible.”
Secondly, you will not be buying a car that runs on the world’s most prevalent resource. You will be able to lease a Fuel Cell retrofit system that will convert your existing device that can convert one form of energy into another. In this case H20 into hydrogen and oxygen gases. In the space shuttle, fuel cells convert hydrogen into electricity. On good old Earth, light is converted by solar cells. Fortunately for us all, the “Water Fuel Cell” is drought-resistant, as you will be able to drive miles even on a poodle puddle. Then, by the way, save that exhaust. You can drink it.
James Wight
About this letter
James Wight filmed Meyer's laboratory and demonstrations from the mid-1980s, invested, and promoted the technology; he is in People who knew Stan. The column he is answering, "Angry Poodle Barbecue" of 8 February 1990, is not yet in the archive. The second paragraph of his letter appears to have lost some words in setting — "convert your existing device that can convert one form of energy into another" reads as two sentences run together — and is transcribed as printed.
The original
Provenance
- Shelf
- Press coverage
- Page
- 7
- Byline
- James Wight, in a letter to the editor
- Rights
- 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 Santa Barbara Independent, Thursday 22 March 1990, page 7.
- Citation
- The Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara, California, March 1990, pp. 7, by James Wight, in a letter to the editor
- Publication
- The Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara, California
- Transcription
- A clipping from the printed page, supplied by the archive’s editor.