It Runs on Water, 1995, transcribed

It Runs on Water, 1995

Transcribed by the archive from the tape as posted to YouTube. The film. Many voices: the narrator, the film's other subjects and its scientists as well as Stan. The transcript does not tell them apart; the timestamps do, against the film.

---

A turning point

[0:00] If Stan Meyer's device works like he advertises, you would make energy available universally almost free.

[0:12] That is a major, major, major impact. What I would be concerned about is the people that sell energy would be essentially bankrupted, would be essentially bankrupted, would be essentially bankrupted. It's what happened to the Conestoga wagons when trains came, or to the Pony Express when the telegraph came in. They're going to wipe out an entrenched power base, and they may not go easily.

[1:12] I think there's a strong possibility that we're at a turning point in history, a complete revolution in human affairs with the discovery of totally new energy sources. Many people are skeptical of this, but I think we may be going through the four stages involved in any revolutionary development. One, it's nonsense. Don't waste my time. Two, oh, it's interesting but not important. Three, I always said it was a good idea. And four, I thought of it first.

[1:59] Can you imagine what it would be like if you could split water and run it into your engines? You could put water in your fuel tank to fly airplanes, power power stations.

[2:14] Ordinarily, we look at water to drink and wash our clothes. Today, you have to look at water as a fantastic new fuel source.

[2:27] A world powered by water might seem like a dream, a pure fantasy. But 100 years ago, that is exactly what the men of steam would have thought about a world powered by oil.

Jim Griggs and the hydrosonic pump

[2:45] Back in the mid-1980s, I was working on a system, putting in some control. when a boiler feed line like this began to have a water hammer, a vibrational problem, and I noticed the pipe change temperature. And I thought, well, what would happen if we could harness this energy in a noncombustible source? That led to the invention of the hydrosonic pump. Turned out to be my first invention. I'd never invented anything before.

[3:17] Jim Griggs' first invention was to bring him into direct confrontation with the world of science.

[3:24] The first year or so, it was kind of just a project that was piddled with, kind of like a hobby on the weekends in spare time with friends.

[3:35] And that was the first time that we noticed the excess energy. It was back in the late 1980s.

[3:43] And I knew that you couldn't get more energy out than you put in. It violated the laws of physics. So I just set the pump to the side for a few months and just left it alone, didn't mess with it, trying to figure out where I was making my mistake.

[3:59] Jim Griggs is bang in the middle of the American tradition, but has spawned such men as the Wright Brothers and Edison. Inquisitive, good with machines, working away in their garages and back sheds to turn an idea into a device that works. In Griggs' case, the mistake in the calculations that he was so concerned about has not gone away. In fact, it seems to have turned into a major scientific heresy. The machine appears to produce more energy than it consumes, and Griggs is now convinced that that is no mistake.

[4:33] He has struggled for four years to turn his spare-time enthusiasm into a serious business.

[4:44] What he has tried to do is to capture the intriguing effect he'd noticed in that vibrating boiler pipe and use it to create a totally new water heater, one that works without any heat source. His company now produces what amounts to a well-engineered water hammer. It thumps and smashes the water fed into it and raises the temperature to boiling point or to steam in a matter of seconds to replace household or industrial boilers. Now they happen to call these machines pumps. What we have is a hydrasonic pump that has a rotor located inside. It's a cylinder that has holes bored in it at specific angles and depths, ranging from a few hundred holes up to a few thousand, depending on whether we're going to make hot water or steam. The key to the machine seems to be the number and the design of the holes in the rotor. Briggs has experimented with many different combinations to get the best results.

[5:37] The rotor fits tightly into a steel chamber with only a very small gap between the two. Water is fed into the gap and the rotor is spun rapidly by a small electric motor.

[5:49] As it spins the water is pummeled and hammered through the holes. In seconds it flows out of the cylinder as hot water or steam. What's so extraordinary about such an ordinary looking machine is the claim that it is more than 100% efficient. More energy has been measured coming out in the form of heat or steam than the electrical energy needed to turn the rotor. The term for this is over-unity. Scientifically, this is supposed to be impossible because it overturns the fundamental law of conservation of energy, and yet external observers claim to have measured here up to 70% more energy out than in. continues to bother me is something every day you get up and you look to say, well maybe today I'll find where I made my mistake in my calculations and this will be explained. Or a scientist will come up with a theory that will fit what we're doing and explain it.

Tom Droege's visit

[6:45] Tom Groge has had a distinguished career at one of the leading scientific centers in America, Fermilab. He also has a nationwide reputation as an investigator into the unusual. He's far too experienced to worry about the impact on his career of working on the fringes of science. When news about Jim Griggs' invention began to spread, Droege was contacted hundreds of miles away in his home city of Chicago. I came to Georgia out of an internet group, just happened to put up a note that says, why don't we send Tom Droege to Georgia to investigate this device? What I said to the group is that I can't go and prove that it's right or wrong. What I can do is go and look and see if the way he approaches the problem makes sense to me and if he's doing all the right kinds of things.

[7:37] Tom Droege was on his way to meet Jim Griggs and his business partner Kelly Hudson.

[7:44] I believe that

[7:46] Most of the scientific community is just close-minded about this, and they'll always be looking, or not always, hopefully not always, but are basically looking for anything to discredit or disprove what we're doing. And, you know, you're going up against some pretty smart people that are saying that.

[8:07] Well, I really don't expect to find anything positive here. None of these devices have panned out in the past, so I really don't expect this one, too. Hi, I'm Tom Grooky. Jim Griggs. Hi, Jim. Good to meet you.

[8:28] What kind of efficiencies are you seeing out of this on like hot water run? The normal hot water run efficiencies run anywhere from around 108% efficient up to about 115% efficient. I was shown that it was putting out, I don't know, 8 or 10% more energy than it was put in. But these are just numbers on a computer, and what you're looking for is something that's convincing. Now, what I did do is try to look at the experimental technique and ask very specific questions about how they made measurements. Then we have generally six J-type thermocouples that feed back to the data acquisition system. And then you've got a thermometer here just to check that the thermocouples are reading correctly. The company has invested probably in excess of $50,000 over the last year, year and a half, to buy instrumentation and take the time to perform some of these measurements. They've invested a fair amount of money and effort, and it was actually good enough to design to take the measurements they needed to take.

[9:32] What was missing was sophistication in the analysis of the measurements that they were taking. Tom's comments to us were that we were not a scientific laboratory, that we did not keep consistent log books, things that would be just acceptable, you know, a nice acceptable laboratory procedure in the scientific community. But our answer to that has been we're the first ones to tell you we are not scientists. That is not our job. One either plays the inventor game or you play the science game. If you're playing the inventor game, then you keep everything completely secret and you just sell your excess energy. If you're playing the science game, then there are specific rules that are in effect. And the key part of the science game is replication. There were not even the most fundamental scientific processes applied to the way of making the measurements and the way to analyze them. And so I don't think there's any particular reason to believe them as true.

[10:41] Most inventions don't start in a university or a big city. They start in someone's garage or in someone's brain as an idea. The fact that we started out in a little town in Powder Springs, Georgia, and grew into a bigger plant in the thriving metropolis of Rome, Georgia, no, it's not surprising to me.

[11:03] The visit was inconclusive. Tom Droege found no proof of over-unity, but nor could he disprove it. Griggs has installed nine machines so far. In each case, it's caused some surprise. 250 miles away, for example, a Griggs machine has been heating the water for Albany Fire Station for over a year.

[11:27] Right after our initial installation, We measured the output with Jim's team, representatives from a local university, one of our local power companies, and we were all astounded with the output.

[11:42] Our measurements indicated that the system was more than 100% efficient, which is very hard to believe. The average engineer would say baloney. But our measuring devices were certified and You know, until someone comes along and proves us different, we will say that it is more than 100% efficient.

[12:10] The scientific jury is still out on the Griggs machine, and the debate rumbles on across the internet. But the idea of a challenge to physics coming from such a direction is one that is rejected by leading particle physicist Frank Close. What would be revolutionary would be if you summed up all of the energy released and you found that the sum total was greater than you put in at the start. Then you'd be generating energy for free. And this would overthrow 300 years of experience, which has become embodied in what we call the principle of the conservation of energy. You can change energy from one form to another, but the sum total always balances.

Tesla

[12:52] Science guys don't like non-science guys inventing things. It's discredited almost immediately. Whether you talk about the high priest in Egypt or you talk about the monks that had the monasteries in the Black Plague, they were the caretakers of knowledge. And I think the caretakers of knowledge look with disdain on commoners who think they have knowledge.

[13:25] The fact is that Jim Griggs and his machine are by no means alone. Not only in America, but in both Russia and Japan, for example, there are reports of machines that seem to tap an unexplained source of energy. They don't all involve water, but they do all seem to produce more energy than they use. What's more, this is by no means a modern phenomenon. The debate goes back at least to the turn of the century.

[13:50] Today, Nikola Tesla is almost unknown. A hundred years ago, he was regarded as one of the most prolific and inventive engineers the world has ever known. At a time when Edison was persuading great cities like New York and London to install costly and inefficient direct current generating stations, Tesla, backed only by Westinghouse and defying all critics, invented the system for the vastly more efficient alternating current, which now powers the entire modern world.

[14:20] The famous Tesla coil was able to produce hitherto undreamed of voltages. Tesla had a vision of what he called a universal energy field, which he believed would eventually be tapped. He wrote, throughout space there is energy. It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheel work of nature. Unfortunately, his extreme love of showmanship demonstrated in these photographs didn't help his cause. But he persuaded the power company Westinghouse to build him a power station diverted entirely to his laboratory. Here he built the biggest coil he'd ever constructed and set to work to tap the universal energy field. He experimented with power levels and frequencies that had never been approached before. Several million volts pulsing at 50,000 cycles per second. This was big science, difficult to reproduce even today. But Tesla was working in uncharted territories.

[15:18] As he wound the voltage and the frequencies up, there was a great and still unexplained surge of excess power created at the very heart of the machine. So powerful, it flowed back up the cables, overriding the safety circuits. The entire power station was burned out.

[15:36] And it turned out to be the beginning of the end for Tesla. His reputation never recovered. He spent the last 20 years of his life in relative obscurity. Even today, his experiments remain only vaguely understood and largely ignored.

Chinetsky in Moscow

[15:52] The story leaps on to Moscow in 1980. A physicist named Alexander Chinetsky was working along similar lines to Tesla, although on a laboratory scale. In addition to his measurements, he had a crude system of light bulbs to indicate power output. Under certain conditions, with high voltages and high pulse rates, he stumbled upon a startling effect. He writes of a surge of power at the heart of the apparatus and a sharp increase in power output. Over a period of four years, his research indicated this apparatus could generate five times the power it consumed. Few of the scientific establishment in Russia or elsewhere took his claim seriously. But one top physicist from the West, interested in fringe science, did go to Sichenetsky in 1991.

[16:40] We went to see his device. It was a very sort of dramatic demonstration. I was impressed. I went home the first night in Moscow and didn't sleep very much trying to figure out how this thing could be working, whether it was a trick, what principles could truly be involved. Genescus papers talk of tapping the energy of the vacuum, a language very reminiscent of Tesla. The report published by the Russian news agency Novosti describes some of the extraordinary potential implications of his research, not least a new and non-polluting power generating industry. Stimulated by what he'd seen, Putov finalized arrangements for Chinetsky to continue his work in the US. The Russian died suddenly in 1992, and no one has taken up his research.

[17:31] The work of Tesla, Chinetsky, Jim Griggs and others has been largely ignored by the scientific establishment, almost certainly because it poses too big a threat to reputations and research grants to dabble with such revolutionary stuff. But that is now changing. The freedom of the internet has begun to break the strangled hold of an establishment dominated by peer review. And as more of these devices have come to light, one or two mainstream scientists have begun to tackle the issues. One possible explanation for these starting results does lie within the current laws of science. It's a concept known as zero-point energy.

[18:08] Physicists know that we're immersed in something called zero-point energy. It has the name zero-point. We give it that name because even if we were to cool this entire room down to absolute zero in terms of its temperature, that energy would still remain. It might be surprising to think that at absolute zero everything would freeze out and there would be any energy left, but in fact that's the case.

Sakharov, Feynman and the vacuum

[18:32] Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist, argued that we should regard all matter as floating in a universal sea of energy. Modern physics tells us that the space between the stars and the space between the particles, which make up matter, are filled with vast amounts of fluctuating energy. fluctuations which are fundamental to our view of the fabric of nature.

[18:57] So if we think of an atom with its nucleus and its orbiting electrons, modern physics tells us that there is a basic fuzziness about the energy levels of the electrons, rather like an out-of-focus photograph. We cannot tell both the position and the speed at the same time. Moreover, the random fluctuations in energy levels can be intense enough to spring pairs of particles spontaneously from the vacuum, only to disappear again, energy into matter and back into energy again, as Einstein taught us. This is one of the most extraordinary manifestations of zero-point energy. But just how much of this energy is there? Can it ever be tapped?

[19:41] It turns out this energy is quite intense. Nobel laureate Feynman, one of Einstein's protégés, Wheeler, loved to comment on how intense this energy is. The way Wheeler puts it is there's enough energy in the volume of a coffee cup, in fact more than enough, to evaporate all the world's oceans. The potential of this is vast. You could go all the way from having a replacement never-say-die battery for your electric toothbrush all the way up to powering aircraft carriers and spaceships. if there is such a thing as zero point energy and if you can tap it it's like living next to grand coulee dam if you know how to drill a hole through the dam and use the water pressure that comes out it's there for you to use could tesla or chernitsky or even big jim griggs from georgia have a chance to cross the key that unlocks not only this unfathomable sea of energy but also some of the mysteries of the universe.

[20:43] Zero-point energy has been called the possible Rosetta Stone of physics. What the Rosetta Stone allowed you to do was translate from one language to another language that you've never seen before because one of them you recognized. We have several different laws that attempt to describe the universe. There is no unified theory. There's three separate theories.

[21:11] If indeed the Rosetta Stone existed, then you would allow these theories to merge into one and you would understand the source and origin of the universe and how it's put together.

[21:45] Well, it was during the oil embargo of the United States, it alarmed me that a little country over in the Far East could actually cripple the United States. And realizing that the entire industrial base of the United States and the world is based on the supply and utilization of energy, it became imperative that we must try to bring in an alternate fuel source and do it very quickly. Of course, I thought originally with the right type of funding, we could possibly get it in within six months.

[22:13] reality shows that the 12 to 15 years was more correct in this projection.

[22:21] Back in the 70s, Stan Meyer set out single-handedly to solve America's energy problems. He decided to do it using water, the world's most abundant storehouse of hydrogen, which is a far more powerful fuel than oil. For 15 years, Meyer has been fighting to get his inventions taken seriously.

Stan Meyer

[22:41] Most inventors have to be a loner. You have to be somewhat thick-skinned and don't rely on other people to support you because they will not. More times than not, invention is really stolen from the inventors. Even in my prior development of high technology, I've had patents taken from me. I learned from the school of hard knocks to be very cautious. Maher has always stood out against the crowd. He has no formal qualifications as a scientist because he didn't wait to graduate from high school, leaving early to go straight into research at the high-powered Battelle Institute in his native Ohio. Now he works full-time as a private inventor. He's got a device with potentially revolutionary implications.

[23:23] There is nothing startling about a machine that can extract the hydrogen from water. What is highly unusual is that it should do so with ordinary tap water. A conventional method is called electrolysis. Meyer has termed that process on its head. Unlike electrolysis, his device doesn't use up large amounts of electric current, nor does it produce an enormous amount of waste heat.

[23:48] For 20 years, he has been refining a method to fracture water, which produces vast amounts of hydrogen on demand. This is not his latest apparatus. He was unwilling to let us point a camera at that. This is the simple device he used to convince a reluctant patent office that his revolutionary concept actually works.

[24:13] Alloy rods, acting as electrodes, are housed in a perspex container that's filled with water. Normal mains voltage is fed in through a transformer, but critically, there is virtually no current consumed, less than half an amp. The result is dramatic. Hydrogen pours off with the flick of a switch.

[24:34] Meyer claims the key is his electronics, which pulses electricity rapidly across the rods at up to 20,000 cycles per second. In a way that's not readily apparent, this process transforms the equation. Whereas in conventional electrolysis, three times as much energy is consumed as is produced in the form of hydrogen fuel, in Meyer's apparatus, the reverse is true. It appears to produce several hundred percent more energy than it consumes.

[25:03] Stan has something that's characteristic of the people that sound like they've done something to tap zero-point energy. It has high frequency, high voltage, and there's a combination of the two at which something occurs.

[25:20] With Chinetsky in Russia, it was what he called a self-sustaining discharge. The tube would run by itself. When Stan gets this effect, the amount of hydrogen and oxygen that are emitted off these two electrodes is a step function. It almost boils the water. If I did this with standard electrochemicals, I need current, and the water should rise a degree every couple of seconds. With stands, it'll run for a half hour, and the water temperature hasn't changed. Something's different. Meyer demonstrates this repeatedly without any difficulty, and yet on the face of it, it represents an extraordinary revolution. His measurements over the years suggest 1700% greater efficiency than conventional electrolysis. And if he's to be believed, he's getting much better results from his latest, still secret invention.

[26:20] Well, I first got involved with Stan Meyer when I went over there with a couple of colleagues to look at his water-splitting device. And so we arrived at Stanley Mayer. He had a demonstration cell. We filled it with tap water. In fact, I did that myself. And he switched it on, and almost instantly, the three jaws dropped because of the rate at which the gas poured off. It was quite spectacular. Whatever energy source Stan Meyer had tapped, it was not explicable by the electric power that was going into it. So something was powering it outside of conventional wisdom.

[26:55] There is no question that the gas coming off in such abundance is hydrogen. Maher ignites it to produce a high temperature flame able to cut through metal.

[27:06] Stanley Mayer has faced a lot of difficulties. He's three times tried to launch the device and produced press conferences at the technical press round, but he's been almost universally slated. In the early days, very much so. They just ridiculed the whole idea. He's getting a little more notice now because some scientists are getting interested. But by and large, science is very intolerant, particularly modern science.

Outside the received wisdom

[27:29] As with Tesla, Griggs and others, Maier's claims are so far outside the received scientific wisdom that they've been ignored by the majority of the scientific establishment. But then, Meyer has ignored them too. He has poured his energies over the last 10 years into establishing recognition for his claims by getting international patents.

[27:50] In the processing, there was a great deal of difficulty in trying to process the legal paperwork in such a way as to allow the patent office to fully understand what was actually occurring. And one incident, we brought the water fuel cell to Washington DC and of course I had tweaked it in such a way to produce an enormous amount of hydrogen, oxygen and gas and the patent examiner said no it will not work based on the electrolysis process and when we turned it on and produced an enormous amount of hydrogen and gas the examiner finally realized that we were doing exactly that and went out in the hallway and started screaming and hollering to everybody on the floor put out all your cigarettes and hydrogens in the building So we started laughing and said, well, we certainly convinced everybody in the patent office that we can do what we said we can do.

[28:39] Even so, the U.S. Patent Office dragged their feet for three years before granting patents on the hydrogen-producing device. Since then, against massive resistance, he's managed to get patents established throughout Europe and Japan.

[28:56] But the hydrogen machine was only the first step towards Meyer's ultimate dream. If he gets it right, this application of his technology would change the 21st century in the same way that the Wright brothers and Carl Benz transformed the 20th. He is currently modifying a beach buggy to run on nothing but water.

The car

[29:15] It doesn't have a petrol tank or even a hydrogen container. It has just a tank of water. He's invented a device called a water splitter to replace the spark plug. As the water is injected into the engine, Meyer claims it's fractured into hydrogen and oxygen and then burned as fuel. Meyer is working on a kit to modify any engine. He hopes to demonstrate it on this car within 12 months.

[29:43] And of course the blessing to the use of the water as a fuel source, that on combustion the byproduct is water mist. So we're even solving the environmental pollution problem at the same time that we're using water to maintain the industrial basis of the world.

[29:58] Ma is protective about his inventions to the point of self-confessed paranoia. Most observers describe him as a crank and his car as an aberration. But then madness and genius often go hand in hand. Ma shares with many inventors a problem that goes well beyond paranoia. As an engineer with no scientific background, he faces a giant hurdle when he tries to communicate with scientists.

[30:25] One problem is that the language that people use when they're trying to describe their inventions is not the language that I as a scientist am used to. And so I have to translate it, if you like, into a way that I can begin to understand what they're trying to say. It might as well be written in Swahili for all of the sense that it initially makes. And so I'm not particularly inspired to put a lot more effort in, in the hope that the pearl of wisdom will reveal itself to me. At a certain point, you hit a law of diminishing returns.

Paranoia and threats

[30:59] It isn't just a question of the difficulties of communication. There is a profound barrier between scientists and inventors, and a strong reluctance on the part of most scientists to risk their reputations grappling with issues that don't have a clear scientific pedigree. Reluctance to look foolish inhibits a lot of people from looking at things. This is looked at as a pariah. You touch it and it creates an image of you that you don't want your colleagues to see. At one extreme, you might have things that are guaranteed to work but are not very interesting if they do. And at the other extreme, things that are a real long shot but would be revolutionary. And so you have to try and weigh the balance and decide which side is more likely to be profitable for you. Then having made some choices, you then have to ask yourself, how do I actually go about doing this? Do I have to apply for funds to do it? And if I do, who will I be competing with?

[31:57] And what is the better chance that this will be supported or that? Because at least in the big science area that I work, you can't just sort of come up with an idea on a Friday and expect to start the experiment on a Saturday. It takes many months, many years even of preparation.

[32:13] Though the scientific establishment may have ignored the likes of Meyer, the powerful military industrial complex certainly hasn't. Over the past 10 years, Meyer says he's been quietly approached by many influential organizations who would never admit publicly to their involvement with him.

[32:31] It is involved in deep space exploration and it's also being developed quite highly in the military. Basically what occurred with Water Fuel Cell was in the fact that once they understood was actually occurring, then under the US national security mandate, I have no decision of power whether or not the military or NASA or the federal government will utilize the technology. They can utilize it in any way they so desire.

NASA

[33:00] NASA is using every method it can to regain some of its now fading glory. In the face of strong congressional resistance, the days of limitless budgets for space exploration have long since gone. The champion of a new, environmentally friendly energy source, NASA would gain immense support. Do you have your identification, please?

[33:19] Do you have your identification? As a former top scientist of the NASA space plane project, Professor Paul Ziss has an inside track on the workings of the agency. NASA has large centers. The center that's in charge of propulsion is NASA Lewis in Cleveland, Ohio. Can you imagine, instead of having a...

[33:41] A million pound rocket has 900,000 pounds of fuel on board and oxidizer. Can you imagine what it would be like if you could put a device on there that would split water and run it into your engines? No explosive compounds.

[34:01] Public confirmation of a contract from NASA would provide a resounding boost for Mars technology. Paul Zist says it's only in a closed meeting they confirm such an agreement.

[34:13] They're looking for new energy sources. I understand from the people that I've talked with that they have worked with Stan and tried to understand what he's done and given him a contract. I also understand with the bureaucracy in Washington and the congressional oversight as to why they would never admit it. Anyone that does that will be suspect, will be challenged, will be considered a threat.

[34:45] But if only a fraction of what Meyer claims for his technology can be achieved, it would represent a vindication for NASA's involvement. It would also be a powerful threat to many entrenched vested interests. If Stan Meyer's device works like he advertises, you would make energy available universally almost free.

[35:09] That is a major, major, major impact. When new technology comes into existence, there's a great resistance to it because it can affect a lot of economic factors. In this particular case in the United States, we pay out roughly about $200 billion a year for foreign oil. It's quite obvious that the Arabs would pay $200 billion to try to keep this type of technology out of the economy.

[35:38] Many times over the last decade, I have been offered enormous amounts of money simply to sell out or to sit on it. The Arabs offered me well over a billion dollars cold case simply to sit on and do absolutely nothing with it.

My life has been threatened

[35:52] My life has been threatened many times. Of course, I happen to believe in the power of angels. And if I don't believe in the power of angels, I don't believe I'll be around here too long.

[36:04] If the thing like Stan Mayer has works, Every piston engine, every gas turbine in the world today, if it had its converter, could run on it. With a little invention, we could get standalone devices to run all over the world.

[36:24] What I would be concerned about is the people that sell energy would be essentially bankrupted. It's what happened to the Conestoga wagons when trains came. are to the Pony Express when the Telegraph came in. They're going to wipe out an entrenched power base, and they may not go easily.

[37:04] Florida. America's rich come for the endless sunshine. 13 years ago, they were joined by an industrial chemist who had built a distinguished career with the American chemicals giant Dow.

Patterson's cell

[37:18] When I moved from California, I brought all of my laboratory with me. I bought my building and moved everything and set it up permanently so that I could do independent research on the hydrogen energy.

[37:35] I'd made enough money to retire and I felt that the Silicon Valley was getting too crowded and I wanted to move to Florida for the water. I'm trying to hold back the excitement because I don't want to lose my objectivity but it is exciting to know where this might take us because it'll be a whole new area of theory There's things we don't understand because there's something unique about it.

[38:10] When I was in school, we had to learn glassblowing and we had to learn welding because we had to make our own equipment. A typical scientist would, if they can't buy it out of a catalog, they won't use it, or they can't use it.

[38:27] I think there's some scientists that just will not go to the bench and try to verify or disprove of what is proposed, they're too bullheaded to change.

[38:40] Dennis Cravens is a scientist who was prepared to advise on the problems of accurate measurement. I was basically skeptical before I saw the device. This area has been known of false claims and when I first came to Patterson's lab, It was not exactly the state of the art measurements. The electric meters only had a few digits to it. So there was some question of whether or not they were measuring what we thought they were measuring. I was finding an increased yield of energy. However, it was so low that it was questionable and it could be my equipment, my instruments that were actually giving me this increased energy output instead of a true reaction.

[39:35] With figures so low and so hard to verify, Patterson had actually abandoned his research for over six years. There was a lot of controversy about 1989 in alternative energies, and I went back and decided to take a look at my findings that I'd previously discovered. I have a continuous record of scientific development since 1949. When I went back to my records with a fresh eye, I found that I was producing excess energy, but at a very low level.

[40:18] Working on a small scale, Patterson set to work to see if he could improve the performance of the heat generating cell he'd recorded in his notebooks six years earlier. His key component is the catalyst in the form of hundreds of tiny beads. The most crucial element is the thin metal coated beads made up of nickel palladium nickel.

[40:42] Patterson holds the patent for the unique structure of the beads. Microscopic corrugations in the surface provide the largest possible reactive area. There are 1,300 of these beads in the prototype cell. Like so many inventors, Patterson works entirely by trial and error. He modifies one variable after another to achieve better results. but he's not entirely sure which aspects of the design have the greatest effects. The beads are packed into a narrow cylinder, and the electrolyte, distilled water plus 1% lithium sulphate, is pumped into the chamber, while a low voltage is pulsed across the metal beads. As oxygen and hydrogen are given off, a reaction that's not visible to the naked eye seems to take place on or near the surface of the beads. It produces totally unexpected amounts of heat. Their calculations indicate that the cell is producing many times the energy it consumes. No one can yet explain this anomaly.

[41:38] Well, the interesting thing about the Patterson device is that it involves water, but it doesn't split the water in the same way that Stanley Mayer's device does. It simply uses it as a medium, and it generates a lot of excess heat. In his case, a lot of excess heat. The figures he's now quoting are really very, very high indeed. Exactly what is going on isn't clear but recently they've begun pulsing the water medium inside the device and this is why they're getting much better results. And throughout a lot of these devices you have this high pulse voltage as a kind of theme running through it. The Patterson cell has had several public demonstrations. There is of course a very considerable controversy over the figures. At present, the only thing that all scientists agree on is that there isn't a current scientific theory that explains the extraordinary amount of excess energy. We wanted a more conservative interpretation of the numbers, the most conservative we could, and see if there's still something there.

[42:33] Before, we were seeing measurements of just 30% more heat out than electrical energy in. After we improved it and tightened up things, we have gotten tens of time out as in this is an area of physics that especially seems to draw amateurs to and or low-tech labs and so therefore they don't have a lot of money to spend on the apparatus but the first things put together by some maverick in his garage are probably going to be pretty low-tech and pretty crude That's okay. I mean, the first observations of radioactivity or whatever were really quite crude. Actually, if you look at the history of invention, most often breakthroughs were found by mavericks working outside their field.

Inventors and scientists

[43:27] But however innovative they are, the inventors don't have either the knowledge or the resources to validate their results. That's the role that science is best equipped to fill. But an essential problem is how to get the scientific community involved in an area that challenges the received wisdom and which poses a real threat to reputations.

[43:47] Most of the inventors of this kind of device cannot get their devices to work in a reproducible way, largely because they don't know how they operate. So each time they run their device, it produces different figures. They're all, in many cases, well over unity, and so they're pretty crazy anyway. And scientists coming along and looking at them will say, oh dear, this is a device, it's different every time it runs, there's no control over it. You can't do some work on this. And this is a shame, because scientists should be curious. If I draw an analogy with research being like trying to beat a path through the jungle, and what we're trying to do is to make the path bigger so we can get to the truth, more easily and then along comes some guru who says no no the true path is over there somewhere now in that circumstance what do you do you've got this huge undergrowth all around you can see nothing you just have the word of the guru to follow it's a judgment that you have to make if the guru is right and you follow through the jungle and find this huge highway then it's the nobel prize in revolutionary discoveries on the other hand if the guru is wrong

[44:55] then you're as good as dead, maybe literally in that particular example.

[45:00] At the heart of the problem lies the issue of measurement, getting the figures right. Dr. Hal Puthoff has taken the greatest risk in trying to establish a dialogue with the inventors. His institute, lost in Texas, occupies an uneasy no-man's land between the scientific community, which is largely scornful, and the inventors, who are deeply suspicious.

[45:24] There is a tension between the scientific knowledge on the one hand and those who are understandably reluctant to tell all their secrets. On the other hand, until we actually get a device in our own laboratory and make careful measurements, there's no way of evaluating in the dark as to whether they're actually working.

[45:44] Now in this case, this setup is so precise and so accurate that even if a device generates energy that would raise the temperature in here by only a thousandth of a degree, we could still determine that and therefore get an estimate of exactly how much energy was being created. Now to reach this kind of accuracy, it took us months of putting this equipment together, writing special computer programs to keep track of all this stuff. This is a very unique one-of-a-kind workstation for us to carry out these kind of experiments.

[46:19] So this entire facility puts us in a position where if someone has a device that indeed does work, we will know it.

[46:30] Given the huge increase in activity in this field, what are the odds of finding a device that does tap zero-point energy? In this field there's good news and bad news, and we find ourselves in kind of a paradoxical position. On the one hand, there's good theoretical reason to believe that it is possible to extract zero-point energy. In fact, there's actual laboratory evidence at the microscopy level. The bad news is that so far, the devices that we, at least we've had a chance to examine, have not demonstrated an engineering principle by which this can be done in some effective way. Well, there are people who are inventing and trying to develop new ways of producing energy with greater or less success. And some of these may well turn out to be interesting devices that one day you can buy and use. As an engineering or marketing and development project, that's fine as far as I'm concerned, but it doesn't have anything to do with the scientific interest as to whether or not these devices are producing more energy than you put in.

[47:34] On that, I'm prepared to bet my mortgage that they're not. Our expectation is that probably within two or three years,

[47:43] We'll see a demonstration of the device, a robust demonstration, which shows that there is some excess energy being generated by a process that's like extraction of zero-point energy. Whether zero-point energy or something else is the explanation, major revolutions seem to have a habit of arising from the most unexpected quarters.

Garden sheds and bicycle shops

[48:08] Carl Benz invented the car in his garden shed. The Wright brothers were bicycle makers from Ohio. They transformed the 20th century. Is it possible that one of these men could do something similar?

[48:22] Not only transform our way of life, but split the world of physics wide open.

[48:31] I think we're at a similar cusp point today as has occurred a number of times in physics. where you have a certain period in which things kind of come together and you think you've got the answers. And then there's just a little crack here and there, but you don't think it's going to bother you. But then pretty soon you realize there's a whole new thing here we've got to deal with. And once again, people are suddenly going off in new directions. String theory, zero-point energy theory. I think we're at a cusp point again where the physics that develop out of the next 20 years is going to be very revolutionary. And it's difficult to say what to expect. But on the other hand, it makes it a very exciting time in physics.

[49:15] Revolutions, of course, take many decades to be established. But those who believe that we are on the cusp of a major revolution, both in energy production and in scientific thinking, are already considering some of the key implications, positive and negative.

[49:32] There's an interesting philosophical question, is that When we had bows and arrows, the impact we could do on the rest of the world was rather limited. With nuclear energy, we have a source of energy that can destroy us. Zero-point energy could annihilate us. I think it's increasingly dependent that we understand how to control ourselves and the energy.

[49:57] If we don't, it's too late.

If they are for real

[50:05] If these new and limitless energy sources are for real, this is going to change every aspect of human life. It will be the end of the fossil fuel age. No more pollution, no more smog, no more oil spills because we won't be shipping millions of tons of oil around the world. In fact, it's hard to see any disadvantage. But I can think of one. If we have unlimited amounts of free energy, Where is that going to go? Energy always degrades eventually into heat. So if we all have thousands of kilowatts to play with, the Earth may heat up and eventually become as hot as Venus.

[51:04] Thank you.