Have oil companies suppressed technology? | CLASSIC
Transcript
[Music] This is the day of the automobile. Tomorrow, perhaps the day of atomic vehicles. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Here are the facts. During 2010, the United States consumed 6.99 billion barrels of oil.
Over the course of 2011, the Energy Information Administration estimates the average US household will spend about 3,235 on gasoline. The three largest publicly traded oil companies cleared 58.3 billion in profits in 2010. The world runs on fossil fuels, and oil is a booming business. But for how long? Oil is a dwindling resource, and political instability around the world translates to unpredictable cuts in supply. World governments, auto manufacturers, and inventors continuously search for new technology that will break our addiction to oil.
Oil companies are doing their part, too, by investing in new methods of recovering conventional fuel and new ways of making alternative energy. At least, that's the idea. But according to some conspiracy theorists, oil companies have an entirely different agenda. One they're willing to kill to protect. Here's where it gets crazy.
Tom Ogle claimed he was only 19 when he began making radical improvements in the conventional combustion engine, the vapor fuel system. This system did away with the car's carburetor system entirely, instead using water to vaporize fuel and, he claimed, drastically increase the amount of energy derived from gas, resulting in fuel efficiency of up to 100 m per gallon. The newspapers of the time flocked to hear his story, and in 1978, he famously took a car full of scientists on a ride from El Paso to Los Crusades with two gallons of gas in the tank of his souped-up 1970 Ford Galaxy. They returned with gas still in the tank. In interviews, Tom Ogle appeared confident and self- assured.
He patented his invention and had the vehicle investigated twice by experts Frank Haynes Jr. and Richard Hearn. But things started to go wrong and very quickly. The first hint came when the patent office notified Tom that a very similar patent to his device already existed. General Motors had this patent and more, but they weren't bringing them to market.
Instead of making billions off his invention, Tom Ogle found himself beset by numerous lawsuits, as well as pressure from alleged representatives of Shell Oil. And he wasn't the only inventor who claimed an oil company had pressured him out of success. Frank Reed, an inventor from Fort Worth, claimed that he went through numerous court battles with oil firms and that they tried to buy his invention with the understanding that he would never build another. After the death of his business partner, Tom closed the doors of his shop and fell into gambling. He died at the age of 26 and the coroners ruled his death a suicide.
His vapor fuel system, once an issue of national news, slipped through the cracks of history and now exists as an oddity and nothing more than a conspiracy theory. According to skeptics, that's where it should remain. Today, mainstream science largely dismisses the claims Ogle and his supporters made. The second law of thermodynamics makes Ogle's claims highly unlikely. And there's another elephant in the room.
If the system really works and the patent is public, then why aren't more people building their own? In the 2008 documentary Gas Hole, a retired mechanic named Ernie Pierce recalls how he built a similar device and was intimidated by thugs he claims were from the oil companies. He abandoned the project. At the present day, Ogle's invention remains controversial. Is it an overblown, largely useless contraption based on pseudocience? Or did Ogle figure out something startling and new about the combustion engine? Something the oil companies don't want you to know. A half century later, these early vintage autos recall an age of bustles, boulder hats, and high button shoes.
They were the trailblazers in the transportation revolution that changed the course of our nation and brought a new way of life to our people. They helped put America on wheels. [Music]