Put a Zokwendle in Your Tank!

Put a Zokwendle in Your Tank!

Alex Heard, Spy, December 1991, pages 42–49. The whole feature is in full view on Google Books. James Wight kept the Meyer section in his binder of magazine articles; his copy is typeset differently from Spy's own pages, so it is probably a reprint, and the archive has not yet found where it was reprinted.

The feature is a tour of what Heard calls “nutty physics”, from the Garabed flywheel of the 1920s to Joe Newman and Bruce DePalma. It closes on “the two men who seem destined to become the most famous free-energy seekers of our time — Stanley Meyer of Grove City, Ohio, and Yoshiro NakaMats of Tokyo”. Heard first heard of both on Bob and Zoh Hieronimus's radio series on energy alternatives in Baltimore, run before and during the Gulf War. The tone is mockery throughout. What makes it worth having is that Heard went to the seminar, sat through it, and had dinner afterwards with Meyer and his crew.

The seminar, April 1991

• How often, and where. “Once a month, Stanley Meyer holds an investor-seeking ‘Dealership Seminar’ in a meeting room in the vast, wood-paneled Deer Creek State Lodge, about 40 miles south of Columbus, Ohio. I attended one last April.” Since the issue is December 1991, that is April 1991. This is the only source that gives a frequency.
• Who came. “About 30 people — mostly men”, some of them regulars. One was an elderly woman who said she was a longtime investor and had heard of Stan through her nephew Basil, a missionary student. Jim Miller identifies him as Basil Plantz (or Plants), who ran the slides at the Deer Creek seminars. Heard describes several as “handyman types who understood home wiring”.
• What they saw. Meyer set up “a demo model of the Cell, a big, hollow plastic cylinder housing numerous metal rods and filled with water”, and lectured for four hours on the origins of the cell and his struggle. Early in the talk he said the work was Jesus-inspired: the Lord had given him the cell's secrets “in 1975, just after the Arab oil embargo”. The brief's cover cites Job 38:22.
• What was sold. “Right-to-do-business shares for $5,000 down, plus $45,000 to be paid off when the complete Water Fuel Cell product line is ready”. These gave the holder the right to sell auto, home or industrial retrofits in a territory. The buyer signed that he was “sophisticated in financial and business matters” and could afford to lose the first payment. After the lecture, “Meyer's chief mechanic, Charley Holbrook” told the group that if the products never came, the $5,000 “R&D” investments would not be refunded. Meyer put the cell's profits at $330 trillion.
• The stories. Meyer told of secret meetings with Pentagon and Patent Office officials, mostly unnamed. He called an invitation to take the dune buggy to an Australian desert race “a plot to steal my invention”. He spoke of a man who came to the Grove City workshop, asked to use his computer and destroyed files, and of a car chase in Egypt from which the Lord delivered him.
• Dinner. Afterwards Heard and his wife ate with Meyer, his crew and a couple from Richmond, Virginia, who were thinking of investing. Meyer spoke of his guardian angel.
• The next day. “The last time I saw Stanley Meyer, the day after his seminar”, Meyer said of NakaMats's water engine: “whatever it is, it's covered by my patents, and my lawyers will put a stop to it.”

What NIST said

Before the seminar, Heard took Meyer's technical brief to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose Office of Energy-Related Inventions evaluated inventions for prospective investors free of charge. He quotes the report: “We do not believe the machine can be made to operate as described.” Meyer's use of current to split water was electrolysis. The NIST thermodynamics expert Richard Bartholomew said the battery was the real power source, and in the report's words the cell “would be a net consumer of energy, not an energy producer”. This is an official evaluation of 1991 that the archive did not know of. The report itself has not been found.

How it fits

The seminars are on record in Meyer's own words three years earlier: “Water Fuel Cell is also holding dealership seminars for those who will be interested to install the Water Fuel Cell technology in homes, on cars, trucks, or even boats” (the Lab Talk tape, 1988). A Grove City neighbour remembered going to one, “at Deer Creek Lake Park. They have a big meeting room” (Charles Hughes, 2012). Two dealership investors sued in 1993 (the Fayette County docket). Heard's “once a month” is the only frequency anywhere in the record, and it is the writer's word for spring 1991, not a schedule. The archive's tape from the lodge is Deer Creek State Park, transcribed.

The same seminar, in Air & Space

Heard had already written the seminar up once, for the Smithsonian's aviation magazine: “Parting the Water”, Air & Space/Smithsonian, October/November 1991. That version opens on the jet Meyer said would refuel by scooping up seawater, mentions his videotape of the car and the Jet Commander retrofit, and puts the audience at about 20.

Afterwards in Spy

Spy did not come back to Meyer. Its only follow-up was a correction in the February 1992 issue, page 16, restoring a quotation from Dan Davidson that had been cut: “all these people that came up with fantastic free-energy devices were killed off or disappeared.” The other Stanley Meyer in Spy, in September 1987, is a Brooklyn lawyer.

Still open

• The NIST Office of Energy-Related Inventions evaluation of the Water Fuel Cell brief, 1990 or 1991. A records request to NIST might find it.
• The Hieronimus radio interviews of 1990–91. The Hieronimuses ran a long-running Baltimore programme, and the Meyer episode may survive.
• Notices of the seminars in local papers. If they were monthly from about 1988, some were probably advertised.

The original