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The Changing Times: General Education and the Vocational Training System in Sri Lanka

Dr. Upali M. Sedere, Director General, National Institute of Education, Sri Lanka · 16 November 2010

The Changing Times

Dr. Upali M. Sedere, convocation address at the Bandaranayake Memorial International Conference Hall, Colombo, 16 November 2010, for the Sri Lanka Institute of Advanced Technological Studies. Filed in ERIC as ED514041; the full text is free to read.

What it says about Meyer

The address is about vocational training in Sri Lanka. To urge the graduates to trust their own ideas, it tells two inventor stories: Francisco Pacheco's hydrogen generator, turned away by the oil companies, and Meyer's water car. Meyer is described as no professor, "just a technician", whose cell was demonstrated to Michael Laughton, Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin and Keith Hindley, made more gas than electrolysis could explain, and stayed cold. It adds that his patents were granted under Section 101 after a demonstration to a Patent Review Board, that he had secured funding for a $50 million research centre near Grove City, and that he died after jumping up from a restaurant table crying that he had been poisoned. It closes by telling the graduates that one of them could become "a Mayer or a Francisco".

Against the record

  • The demonstration paragraph is Frank Ogden's, from Electronics World, January 1991, nearly word for word; somewhere on the way "Queen Mary College" lost its "Queen".
  • "Section 101 … a Patent Review Board." Also Ogden's. Section 101 of the US patent law is about what can be patented and whether it is useful; there is no review board that watches demonstrations. Meyer himself spoke of having to show operability under Section 101, which is where the idea began.
  • The $50 million research centre. The campus was real: Grove City's planning commission approved it on 56 acres along Seeds Road. The figure is from later retellings, and nobody has confirmed it; see Mallove's notice.
  • The death. He ran out of the Cracker Barrel on the evening of 20 March 1998, but died the next day at Mt. Carmel West; see The Day Stan Died.
  • "300 automobiles including busses" running on water on both coasts of the United States, and a "more efficient" water car "produced on Mayer's formula" in January 2010. No source is given for the first; the second cites a blog page (fuel-efficient-vehicles.org). The archive knows of no such fleet or car.

Why it is kept

A public address by a national education official, filed in a US government research database, repeating the 1991 account to a graduating class twelve years after Meyer's death. It shows how far that paragraph travelled, and with it the errors it carried.

Provenance

Shelf
Press coverage
Page
5–6
Byline
Dr. Upali M. Sedere, Director General, National Institute of Education, Sri Lanka
Rights
The address is its author's. The archive summarises it, quotes a few words, and links to the free full text in ERIC.
Citation
Convocation address, Sri Lanka Institute of Advanced Technological Studies, Colombo; ERIC document ED514041, November 2010, pp. 5–6, by Dr. Upali M. Sedere, Director General, National Institute of Education, Sri Lanka
Publication
Convocation address, Sri Lanka Institute of Advanced Technological Studies, Colombo; ERIC document ED514041
Transcription
Read from the ERIC full-text PDF (ED514041).