Top 10 Inventions That Were Suppressed Because They Worked Too Well

Transcript

Thousands of inventions have been locked away by the US government under secrecy orders. In the9s, GM rolled out a sleek electric car that customers loved, but then crushed every single one of them. And a waterpowered car was either a scam or something so disruptive the inventor didn't live to tell the full story. These are inventions that were suppressed because they worked too well. Here's something most people don't know.

There are thousands of inventions we're not even allowed to know about. Since 1951, the US has had something called the Invention Secrecy Act, which lets the government slap a secrecy order on any patent application if they think it could be a threat to national security. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a weapon. It just means it works a little too well. As of the most recent numbers, over 5,000 inventions are still under secrecy orders.

Stuff like radar and stealth technology have been kept under wraps. But there's also more out there stuff like people who claim they've invented machines that could make free energy or engines that could move spaceships without using fuel. Inventors like Robert Gold and James Constant both filed patents that were immediately locked down. They weren't allowed to talk about their inventions, publish papers, or commercialize them. In some cases, the orders last decades.

The government can even renew them indefinitely. There's no way to know what's in those hidden patents unless the order gets lifted. And even then, they often show up heavily redacted. Back in the late '9s, General Motors put out an electric car called the EV1. It was sleek, fast, totally electric, and people who drove them absolutely loved them.

Celebrities like Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson got in on it. And then GM pulled the plug. Not only did they stop making them, they were called every single car and crushed them. Officially, GM claimed the cars weren't profitable and there wasn't enough demand, but the people who had them strongly disagreed. The EV1 worked.

There were charging stations in California. The cars were reliable and they didn't rely on gas, and that might have been the problem. There's a whole documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car that dives into this. It talks about how oil companies weren't too thrilled about a car that needed no oil changes, no gas, barely any maintenance. Some say the car died not because it failed, but because it worked a little too well.

In the9s, an inventor named Stanley Meyer claimed he created a car that could run on water. He made what he called a water fuel cell, which supposedly split water into hydrogen and oxygen efficiently enough to power a car. He even got a patent for the technology. And there are videos of him demonstrating a working dune buggy using only water as fuel. Of course, this was a huge deal.

Real oil wouldn't be nearly as important anymore. Meyer turned down million-dollar offers and even the Pentagon reportedly showed interest. But then the story took a turn. Meyer was sued for fraud and the court ruled that he misrepresented his invention. Some say he just didn't play by the rules big corporations wanted.

And then in 1998, while having dinner at a restaurant in Ohio with two Belgian investors, Meyers suddenly ran outside clutching his throat and collapsed. His brother claimed that his last words were, "They poisoned me." The official cause of death was a brain aneurysm, but this obviously set off some conspiracy theories. To this day, no one successfully reproduced Meer's water fuel cell. Was it a scam? Yeah, probably. But it's a pretty strange story all the same.

Now, this one's wild cuz it actually worked and even made it to the prototype stage. In 2007, Indian automaker Tata Motors signed a huge deal with French engineer. Negra and his company Motor Development International to produce a car powered entirely by compressed air. Negra had been working on airpowered prototypes since 1997. And by 2004, the first AirPod models were rolling.

These tiny vehicles, nicknamed the AirPod, could reach around 43 to 60 mph and run up to 135 mi on a full 175 L tank filled in just 90 seconds. There were plans for commercial roll out in India by 2010 to 2011, but by 2009, Tata admitted the technology still had problems. The AirPod could only drive about 80 to 130 mi before needing to refill the air tanks. That's not terrible, but for regular drivers, it's a lot less than what gas cars can do. Plus, refilling stations for compressed air weren't set up anywhere, so practical use was a headache.

Guy passed away in June of 2016 and promises that AirPods would hit the market by 2020 never came to be. Back in the 1930s, a guy named Royal Raymond Refe claimed that he had built a machine that could kill cancer cells using electromagnetic frequencies, basically blasting tumors with specific radio waves without hurting the healthy cells. Refe actually demonstrated his machine to doctors and investors and some early reports were promising, but then his lab was conveniently destroyed by a fire. One theory is that pharmaceutical companies felt threatened by his technology because it could have wiped out cancer without expensive treatments and surgery. The official story was that there wasn't enough proof and the medical world dismissed Reife's work as quackery.

After that, research on his device pretty much stopped. To this day, no solid clinical trials have backed the machine. But there are still people out there who swear by rife machines for alternative cancer treatment. The idea of machines that give off more energy than they use, free energy has been around for over a century. Nicola Tesla had this giant tower in New York called the Warden Cliff that was supposed to beam wireless electricity across the world.

Then you've got Towns and Brown who claimed he figured out a way to reduce gravity using high voltage discs. And Henry Mor said he built a box that could pull electricity straight out of the environment. Even if one of these actually worked the way they claimed, it would have completely changed the world. But every time someone came up with one of these inventions, it either got shut down, buried, or was just laughed off as junk science. Tesla's tower was torn down.

Brown's work never made it past the lab. Mor's device vanished after endless legal trouble. Now, was all this stuff just bogus? I mean, most likely, yeah. But is there a slim chance that the technology actually worked and got quietly buried by big energy companies? Hey, you never know. In the 1920s, a Canadian mechanic and inventor named Charles Pogue reportedly invented a carburetor that let cars get 200 m per gallon.

Then in the 70s and 80s, inventor Tom Ogle claimed he had a system that vaporized fuel so efficiently his car got about 100 m per gallon. These were huge breakthroughs. Imagine slashing fuel costs and emissions overnight. But both men ran into problems. Ogle got offers from investors.

But then things got weird. Ole system was never mass-produced. People around him said he was being pressured to sell or shut up. And then in 1981 at just 26 years old, Ogle died suddenly from what was ruled an overdose. But people close to him, they weren't buying that.

And Pog's original designs also kind of disappeared. Clearly, these guys were on to some. The way both stories just kind of stop out of nowhere definitely makes you wonder. Joshua Silver, a physicist from the UK, invented a really clever pair of glasses that let wearers adjust the focus themselves. No more expensive visits to the optometrist or needing multiple pairs for reading and distance.

Just twist a dial and there you go. Crystal clear vision for everyone. This could have been a gamecher, especially in poorer parts of the world where there isn't much access to eye care. You'd think companies would be all over something like this. But no, the glasses were a hit in tests and charity programs, but they never really made it into stores.

Why is that? Well, the story goes that big eyewear companies weren't into it. These glasses basically made them unnecessary. Again, no high-priced exams, no need for different lenses. Silver pushed for wider distribution, especially in developing countries, but that didn't really happen. Glasses are still out there in small programs and they actually work, but they never took off the way they should have.

It's a super simple invention that could have helped millions of people see clearly and saved them hundreds of dollars, but instead it got quietly sidelined. In 1989, two chemists, Martin Fleshman and Stanley Ponds, claimed they'd pulled off cold fusion. Basically, a way to create tons of clean energy at room temperature without needing a reactor or tons of fuel. If it was real, it could have changed the world. cheap endless power without pollution or radiation.

But right after they announced it, things went south. Other labs tried to copy their experiment. They couldn't get the same results. The scientific community turned on them. A lot of them called it junk science.

The media also flipped and soon cold fusion was being mocked everywhere. Their funding disappeared and ponds and Flechman kind of faded from the spotlight. But not everyone thinks it was just a bad experiment. Some believe the whole thing got buried on purpose. After all, if you've got a breakthrough that could wipe out the need for oil, coal, and nuclear power, it's not exactly going to make energy companies happy.

Today, most people think the whole thing was a flop. But there's still a small group of scientists working on this, convinced that there's something there. In the 80s, a British guy named Maurice Ward, who, fun fact, was actually a hairdresser, came up with a plastic that could take insane amounts of heat. He called it starlight. And this stuff was pretty crazy.

He showed it off on a BBC show called Tomorrow's World where he coated a raw egg in it and blasted it with a blowtorrch for five full minutes. When they cracked it open afterward, the egg was still raw on the inside. The shell was warm, but it was intact. You could hold it in your hand right after. NASA, the military, and a bunch of companies were very interested in this cuz tests showed it could even protect against intense heat that kind of mimicked the energy of what you'd see in something like a nuclear blast.

But Ward didn't want to sell the formula unless he stayed in control and that wasn't going to fly. He was super secretive and he never patented it. When he died in 2011, he took the full recipe with him. There are rumors that his family has some of the formula, but nothing's ever been confirmed. To this day, no one's recreated anything exactly like it.

I've been your host, James, and I will catch you, yes, you specifically, in the next video. Heat. Heat. [Music]