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copyright © 2011 Scott Robertson

Air Cars are for People who Love Cars, Hate Cars...
...or don't even believe they exist!

There is no such thing as perpetual motion.  It is a fantasy.  But “free energy” is a textbook term referring to such things as windmills and hydro plants and solar panels that you just buy and maintain, sometimes at great expense, in hopes that the energy harvested from the environment will be more than the investment.  Depending on where you draw the line on this rather inadequate term “free energy”, it could even refer to coal or petroleum, which are also a form of solar energy, but the cost to the earth of harvesting and using these energy media keep us from having anything nice to say about them.

Who but the profiteers of the world are the best example of True Believers in perpetual motion?  To put in more than you take out is the life breath of every capitalist, and it is the realized dream behind many vast fortunes whose existence makes necessary the co-existence of abject poverty in every country in the world.  But empires must fall eventually, even if only to make room for the next conscienceless empire.  According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, it is the wealthy who are starry-eyed dreamers.  Last time I checked, when they leave this place they leave it without pockets, the same as poor people.

 The cleanest and maybe the best form of free energy media is compressed air, but no one knows it because there was some sort of cleanup campaign, planned or otherwise, in the textbook industry starting perhaps with the 1931 death of mega-industrialist William Lawrence Saunders.  I believe it’s possible that Saunders, who I’ll call “Bopo” for short, was a complex case.  A philanthropist trying to make people’s life better, yet born with a silver spoon and caught up in the mover-and-shaker business.  Like other industrialists such as his friend President Herbert Hoover, he probably had good intentions, and he must have had a certain amount of influence in the textbook industry.  His list of credentials is too long to list here, but among other things, he was founding editor of Compressed Air Magazine.  He wrote two compressed air textbooks.  He was president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, which no doubt morphed into the petroleum industry.  He was an assistant director of the Federal Reserve.  He put up $100,000 of his own money as a reward for finding a cure or prevention for cancer.  He campaigned for women’s right to vote.  He was twice mayor of North Plainfield, New Jersey.  During World War I, his personal friend President Woodrow Wilson put him in charge of the Naval Consulting Board, which consisted of civilian engineers and inventors who were active in the war effort.  He was founding president and chairman of the largest compressor manufacturer in the world, Ingersoll-Rand.

 Bopo’s sister was a lesbian and proud of it—this is 1920, 1930.  Their dad was an Episcopal minister, their ancestors had founded the first insane asylum in America.  Bopo’s brother was founder of a classy little textbook publishing company with very high standards that is still in business.  Bopo’s family was complicated and interesting, and Bopo was their shining light.  Because of his millions, his sister and her partner could call themselves ladies of means.  Until the death of this proclaimed “poet, prophet, and inventor” who gave us among other things the ability to drill for oil under water, compressed air textbooks were accessible and fairly well written, and gave many details on how to design efficient air engines.  Bopo’s own textbooks stated outright that all compression work is lost as heat, and that this fact points to the underdeveloped nature of our understanding of air’s potential.  Other textbooks, especially the one written by Theodore Simons, explained that compressing air is a 100% loss and that the air left in the tank is an incidental result of the heat of the sun that was already in the air before it was compressed.  Many textbooks offered this information back then, but between 1931 and the end of World War II, the textbooks were elevated from teaching status to something else.  Maybe their purpose now is to scare people away. 

 Back in the first decade of the 20th century, Bopo’s neighbor Charles Bowen Hodges invented an air engine that expanded its own energy supply by absorbing the heat of the surroundings via heat exchangers, with the result that a substantial portion of the air locomotive’s range was paid for by free ambient heat.  These locomotives became the industry standard and were used in coal mines all over the world.  In 1930 mining engineer Robert Peele published the 5th edition of his popular textbook Compressed Air Plant in which the facts were laid out about this revolutionary air engine.  But the next year Bopo died suddenly (cause of death is still under investigation), and compressed air textbooks were never the same.  No compressed air textbook published since 1930 has even mentioned the term “air engine”, much less tried to teach how to design one.

 A few years ago when I was writing Compressed Air Power Secrets I decided to buy a new compressed air textbook, and there only seemed to be one in common use.  It was available for nearly $500.  I found a partial copy of it on Google Books, and was happy to not buy it.  Today’s textbooks are built on a common assumption: anyone who doesn’t follow the prerequisite system of education is not worth teaching to.  Technical books are written tersely and without background explanation.  They are filled with “formulas” whose derivation is not considered worth mentioning, unnecessarily peppered with calculus and irrelevant detail, and organized like hash, without a thread to hold the imagination.  Propagandists are extremely knowledgable of human nature and psychology, and they know that free thinkers will toss these books down in disgust, the same way they fail to make the grade in school, because when things don’t make sense, free thinkers make tracks.  It is generally the numb-of-brain and clique-reliant robot-minded Typicals who “make the grade” and find themselves with letters after their name, which ever after make them automatically right about everything, including unprovables such as “this is impossible”.  Oddly enough, “BS” after your name makes you omniscient.

 Calculus is not needed to study statics in compressed air, but I’m studying it now with books like Calculus Made Easy in order to make it possible to tackle the study of dynamics such as compressible fluid flow.  The writers of these books should be enshrined for making easy stuff accessible to average joe.

 But for studying the revolutionary claims advanced by compressed air inventors, our best resource is unfortunately old newspapers.  Everything said in a newspaper has to be taken with a grain of salt.  So the need exists for technologists who have access to machine shops and are also free thinkers.  That’s a rare bird.  The species “Bopo”?

This website is loaded with unique and essential information.  Keep exploring if you are interested in air cars, compressed air vehicles, pneumatic automobiles, compressed air cars, exotic inventions, forgotten technology, hidden technology, new ideas, revolutionary inventions, covered-up inventions, saving the world from technology, air pollution, cars, etc.