COMPRESSED AIR:

a conspiracy of silence successfully stupefies future generations of engineers about how air works

OTHER PAGE: COMPRESSED AIR DOESN'T EXIST IN A VACUUM

Compression as now practiced only serves the purpose of placing the natural power which we have in the air, into a condition which makes it possible for us to utilize it.  This points to an undeveloped science in the use of compressed air.  Inasmuch as we lose all the power expended in compression and yet have a capacity for useful work equal to from 30 to 50 per cent. of that power, it is plain that there are possibilities in the science which are now misunderstood and not realized.

 —William Lawrence Saunders

founder, creator and editor of Compressed Air Magazine, 1898, which was published monthly for 104 years

founding president, Ingersoll-Rand Co. Inc, 1905

Mayor of North Plainfield, New Jersey, two terms

leader of Men's League for Women Suffrage, 1910

president, American Institute of Mining Engineers, 1915

chairman of the Naval Consulting Board, World War I

offered $100,000 for a way to cure or prevent cancer, 1928

chairman-of-the-board, Ingersoll-Rand Co., till his death in 1931

president, United Engineering Society

president, American Manufacturers Export Association

assistant chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

“There is not a civic body of note in the United States of which [W. L. Saunders] is not a member.”

--New York Times, February 16, 1916

After his death in 1931 while vacationing in the Canary Islands, the compressed air textbooks were never the same.

His 1870s invention—the underwater drill—helped make the oil companies wealthy.

Toastmaster at the 1921 meeting of American Institute of Mining Engineers where Institute president Herbert Hoover (soon to be President of U.S.) hands over the Institute presidency to someone else,  Saunders is called by the reviewer "a poet, a prophet, an engineer and an inventor".

The oil companies are dirty people.  They’d break you before you crossed the street. 

—air car inventor Bill Truitt, interview with reporter John Hillkirk (1970s) who is now
Executive Editor of USA Today

Not Science Fiction: Bob Neal’s patent was denied three times.  A demonstration of a working model is ultimately what resulted in the acceptance of the third amended application on December 17, 1935.  U.S. Patent 2,030,759 was announced in the Patent Gazette dated February 11, 1936, and before long, the Neal family was sorry they’d ever had anything to do with this controversial invention.  Facsimile (RIGHT) is from the final page of the patent file at the Patent Office in Washington.  This patent file was not easy to get out of them as they claimed twice that it was lost; an attorney finally succeeded somehow.

Conspiracy timeline:

In 1936, when the Neal family of Arkadelphia, Arkansas suffered a kidnapping at the hands of Nazi visitors to the U.S., America had not yet entered the war and perhaps had not even taken sides against “Chancellor Hitler”, whose exploits were front page news everywhere including in Arkadelphia’s little weekly paper.  You’d think Hitler was just annexing properties, the way the news media calmy tallied his advances.  And annexing properties he was, or soon would be.  It was one of his obsessions.  And the psychopath who invented the Volkswagen beetle was fond of mechanical marvels.  So fond of them that a whole mythology has grown up around supposed Nazi quests to every corner of the globe to unearth the treasures of Atlantis, etc.

NOT FOR HOLLYWOOD…

It’s 1936.  Let’s look into a little wooden house one night in Arkadelphia.  The house is full of hysterical people.  A man and his wife and their 12-year old son Floyd are crying and his mother Ruby is shouting, “It’s all because of that engine, that dad-blamed engine of yours, why can’t you just sit home nights and listen to the radio like other husbands do?  You spend all your family time out in your workshop, building God-knows-what for God-knows-who and…” (breaks down sobbing) “…who are these horrid men that took our baby?  Why can’t we just get the sheriff?”

Bob Neal silently stands and walks out to his workshop behind the house.  Here’s the part of the story Floyd Neal told me 50 years later that doesn’t quite ring true.  Floyd told me that his father scattered the contents of his compressed air engines to every corner of the countryside.  Then why did the Nazis give his daughter back?  Maybe instead, what really happened is that he unlocked the workshop door, turned on the light, and went back in the house, giving the visiting Germans till dawn to take anything they could get in their truck, and threatening them with the fires of hell should they ever be seen creeping around Arkadelphia again.

If that was what he did, he would not have admitted it, especially in light of the bloodbath that followed.  One of the weapons the Nazis later developed even bore a strange resemblance to the device that—according to the family story—Neal would not give them.  If it had been me, I would have given them my car, my dog, my house, even my stereo and CD collection, and been happy to be rid of it, to get a stolen child back.  And then I would have made up a story to save face, not wanting anyone to know that, however excusable, I might have accidentally contributed to the wrong side of what later became the war effort against the mad Chancellor of Germany.

Well what good is a conspiracy theory without facts to back it up?  That was a story.  Here are the facts…lightly seasoned with speculation and tied together with a good imagination.  For conspiracy buffs only; please email your additions and corrections, but don’t write to tell me there are no conspiracies among the monied to keep reconcentrating their wealth!  Capitalism is a perpetual motion machine and one day it will run out of fuel…but not before it becomes too expensive to bother going after petroleum.

It’s simple, really.  First there was plenty of wood to burn, but as warm houses influenced a population boom, forests were stripped bare.  Then there was coal, but as warm houses influenced a population boom, the air became toxic from the fumes produced by smoldering coal.  Then there was petroleum, but the concurrent surges of population and industrialization fed on each other to such an extent that the easily obtainable petroleum was used up in a century and what then?  Only the insane favor nuclear power anymore, and hydrogen costs more to produce than it puts out.  We can’t keep using combustion engines anyway because of the greenhouse effect.

What about air cars that go 30-60 miles between fillups?  We can build them with existing technology, and people can get used to refueling more often.  But what will power the compressor stations?

Face the facts: nothing on earth can support us at our current level of consumption.  The closest we can come is to develop engines that run on ambient heat: the most abundant, accessible, clean and safe source of energy on earth.  Compressed air engines with a new way to compress air is the only answer, or it’s back to the horse and buggy and massive population loss from starvation, lack of farms, lack of medicine, and dirty water.

Because I am convinced of these things, this website has a definite emphasis on self-fueling air cars, self-filling air tanks and the like.  Fueled by ambient heat, the compressed air in a constant pressure reserve is not a perpetual motion machine, as some accuse without giving evidence.  It is a machine part that doesn’t wear out, an air spring.  If you can stop a train with air brakes, you can use the air in a tank to force more air into the tank, but “force” is not the right approach.  Creative inventiveness has to be the approach.

Meanwhile, partly for your entertainment but mainly for my own, I present this “conspiracy timeline”.

Before 1900

• 1870: Scottish physicist and mathematical savant James Clerk Maxwell, who Albert Einstein called “the father of modern physics”, suggested in a poetic epilog to his thermodynamics textbook Theory of Heat that there certainly must be an easier way to compress air than beating it into a corner with a piston.  His symbolic division of tank air into molecule-sized portions was lost on his peers who, as he probably predicted mathematically, were compelled to complicate his notions to try to make themselves look brilliant.  Google “Maxwell’s Demon” for a large amount of ivy league blathering or see my website http://www.aircaraccess.com/ for the truth about compressed air and self-filling air tanks.

1870 was a big year for air cars.  The Eastern U.S. was covered with railroads.  Petroleum was being brought up from pools close to the surface.  Charles B. Hodges was born.  Maxwell's Demon was unleashed on the world.

1893: General Herman Haupt of Pennsylvania and others are convinced that air powered trolleys are the only way to go for metropolitan transit.  Air trolleys are used in many cities around the world.  Haupt was a civil engineer and ran Lincoln’s railroads during the war between the states.  He complains that no one will listen to new ideas, but that people prefer to operate from assumptions and refuse to educate themselves on the real possibilities.  Haupt published a book, Street Railway Motors, in which he reveals some of the secrets of compressed air and compares it to the alternatives.

1900

• June: Century Magazine publishes a now-famous article by Nikola Tesla, the inventor of AC motors, radio, fluorescent lights, etc., whose supporter was George Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake, a device that compresses air with air and has enough power to stop a train.  The article outlines Tesla’s plan to develop an air engine that runs on ambient heat.

RIGHT: Tesla’s oscillating air engine used no valves or seals.  It had a set resonant frequency at which it would always reciprocate.  He accidentally started an earthquake in New York City by using it to tap on a steel pole that went deep into the ground.  He was able to use it to run clocks and 60-hertz generators because its speed was so consistent.

But his reason for designing it was to run a self-fueling air engine.

1902

• An article is published by Edward A. Rix about a 3-stage air powered water pump that absorbs ambient heat from the water it pumps.  Rix called himself “He of the Compressed Wind” and owned many patents on air compressors.  He authored a compressed air textbook and founded Rix Industries in the San Francisco area.  He designed the air powered locomotives used in the famous North Star Mine of Grass Valley, California.  Since Rix Industries now designs booster compressors I asked them (2009) to take a look at my calculations for the equalization engine and they offered to do so for a $50,000 advance on their fee.

1904

• Charles Bowen Hodges of PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA files for a patent on his two-stage air engine which will become the most efficient air engine ever sold commercially, becoming the standard for haulage in coal mines all over the world.  The engine absorbs ambient heat from its surroundings, increasing its range between fill-ups up to 30% for free.  The patents are bought by steam engine manufacturer H. K. Porter Co. of PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA.  The company is still in existence and the compressed air locomotive catalogs it used to publish now sell for around $500 when a copy can be found.

1910-1912

• Europeans develop an improvement on Hodges’ engine, using three stages with ambient heat added before all three stages.  Range between fill-ups is increased up to 60% for free.  In one German coal field alone, there were 624 of these locomotives.

Mining Engineer Charles B. Hodges published this photo in an article he wrote about air locomotives.  This was the first mention of absorbing ambient heat as the main method of reheating air for locomotive engines.  The ribbed cylinders he recommends here were replaced by large shell-and-tube heat exchangers in his patents.  Hodges was a Pittsburgh college business manager later in his life.

1913

• Before he was an air car inventor, self-taught electrician Roy Jerome Meyers accidentally discovered how to generate electricity for free while serving a short prison sentence in Arizona.  The state prison commissioner gets the governor and state legislature to let him out of prison to take his patent application to Washington D.C. but he doesn’t take his working models with him and is refused.  He builds a working model in his hotel room and shows it to the Patent Office but nothing comes of it.  His patent for a self-fueling air tank (1928) was issued in Great Britain.

LEFT: Convict Roy J. Meyers impresses everyone with his free energy absorber except the Patent Office.

Meyers' partner in the UK air engine patent was Fritz Hiebert, an LA police officer who, like ex-con Meyers and his well-bred wife, registered to vote every two years.  Hiebert's family had emigrated from Russia and settled in Kansas with other families of German ancestry.

Meyers received several patents in the U.S. including one for auto brakes running in oil instead of utilizing replaceable brake liners.  His last patent, granted a few weeks after his death, was for a playground toy, a teeter-totter-powered merry-go-round.

1914

• June: Compressed Air Magazine publishes an article raving about the Hodges engine as improved by the Europeans.

• July: War breaks out in Europe.  William L. Saunders, founder and editor of Compressed Air Magazine, is on the Naval Consulting Board and will become its chairman.

• August: Compressed Air Magazine publishes a retraction about its June article, now stating that the American air engine as invented by an American was good enough, and there was no reason for the Europeans to try to improve on it.

1920

• Bill Truitt (born in Ohio 1903) and his father (born in Pennsylvania 1872) build their first air car (in drawing he holds, photograph above) in Huntington, West Virginia.  The family is in the fuel business and young Willard is asked to keep it quiet.  He will later work as a race car builder and designer and he will have a career in radio broadcasting.

1925

• Louis Cass Kiser of Decatur, Illinois (born in Ohio 1848) gets publicity for his air engine which he has been working on for many years.  He is an air brakes technician, inventor of the New York Air Brake, and has been a contractor of house carpentry for many years.  BELOW: Cass City Chronicle, Cass City Michigan, Christmas 1925.

• 1926: Lee Barton Williams had been a traveling salesman who worked for Ohio Oil and Grease Co. and also worked in the radio business as a salesman.  He could have known Bill Truitt personally.  Popular Science, July 1926.

1930

• Robert Peele’s book Compressed Air Plant (5^th edition) is published containing information about the compound air engines that increase their range up to 30% for free, by absorbing ambient heat.  This is the last textbook ever published that teaches the engineering of real air engines.

1931

• June 25: W. L. Saunders, founding president and chairman-of-the-board at Ingersoll-Rand Co., dies suddenly while on vacation in the Canary Islands.  The reins of the largest compressor company in the world are passed to the ultra-secretive and conservative George Doubleday, who doesn’t allow his picture to be circulated and turns in the annual financial report for his corporate empire printed on one sheet of paper folded in half.

• German 1200 h.p. diesel-compressed air locomotive is a great success, saving 26% fuel cost over straight diesel engines. (above)

• In California, Robert Cady Burt PhD builds an air car by converting a Stanley Steamer engine and a Plymouth body.  His car is both closed-cycle and hybrid.  He receives a patent in which he is bold enough to publish the math needed to design such a car.

• November 2: The Washington (D.C.) Herald announces that air car inventor James Anania will drive his air car from his home to Washington D.C.   James Albert Anania is an Italian immigrant, a family man with six children who lived in the same suburb of Newark, New Jersey his whole life after coming to the U.S. as a child.  This is a few miles from the hometown of air engine inventor Charles B. Hodges.

George Doubleday's home "Westmoreland".  W. L. Saunders' secretive successor to the Ingersoll-Rand empire didn't like his picture to be used.  This house in Ridgefield, Connecticut is now used as a church.

1931-1932

• January: Roy J. Meyers gets media coverage on his air car, which he says goes 500 miles between fill-ups.  The car is demonstrated in Los Angeles where Meyers lives.  An article is published in Modern Mechanix Magazine showing Meyers’ air car. 

• On the same page is shown another car built by Joseph M. Custer from garbage at a total cost of sixty cents.  There is an internet rumor that the two inventors worked together, but I haven't seen any evidence.

LEFT: The famed Lindsay of Lindsay Publications borrowed this photo of Roy Meyers and his air car to make a political comment.  I suspect that Roy would have approved.

1934

• January: ARKANSAS shoemaker Bob Neal files for a patent for his air engine and is denied.  (He filed and refiled for two years, then demonstrated a working model, to get this patent.)

RIGHT: August 31, 1934: Bob Neal's patent attorney informs the patent office that they are wasting their time trying to refuse Neal's patent application; he has a working engine.  The nature of the outside energy supplied to the engine is not mentioned in the patent of the correspondence file.

 Dutch air engine inventor Johannes Wardenier.

• November: 21-year-old Johannes Wardenier of the Netherlands announces that he has built an air engine that he claims will not require fuel to be added more than a few times a year.  Plans are underway for a factory to put his hometown of Wolvega to work producing the engine, when everything falls apart.  Jo is spirited off for a supposed visit to a mental institution while his supporters—the mayor and a city alderman—change their stories.  What really happened is still a mystery and it’s a long story supposedly involving the wealthy philanthropist Netherlander Frits Philips, CEO of one of the largest electronics companies in the world.  Frits also worked hard to develop the Stirling hot air engine.  Jo only lived 47 years, never enjoying good health.  Investigations are underway to determine what can be truthfully said about the Wardenier affair.

above: from Het Mysterie Wardenier by Henk Ymker and Han Wielick, self-published, 1984.

The whole book is about Johannes Wardenier and his mystery air engine.  The two pages above show some notes he made about the engine.

1935

• When his patent application is rejected again, Bob Neal travels to the patent office in Washington D.C. with a working model of his air engine and its self-filling air tank.  The “reasons” for the denial evaporate and on December 17 his patent is accepted. 

• October and November: Scientist Vannevar Bush files patents for air engine/compressor combinations that are supposed to move air from a low pressure state into a high pressure zone without doing the conventional amount of work.  In the text of his patent he claimed to be the first to do this.  Dr. Bush was later the chairman of the Manhattan Project that made the big push to design and build the nuclear bombs that ended World War II.  He was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  His ideas also influenced the development of hypertext.

 LEFT: From the introduction to his patent #2,127,286, which he first filed on October 18, 1935, Vannevar Bush claims, “I believe myself to be the first to provide an apparatus for thus transferring more heat than it receives without the intermediary conversion of the supplied heat energy into mechanical power.”  The other patent excerpt (BELOW) is from his patent 2,175,376 which he filed on November 21, 1935.

1936

• February: Bob Neal’s patent is published and Nazis or someone posing as Nazis kidnap his daughter to get his secret out of him, when he refuses to sell his patent rights to them.  Neal dismantles his engine and either never touches compressed air again or keeps his activities to himself from that point on.  He did have an improvement in mind based on a suction or vacuum principle of some kind, but there’s no indication that he finished it.

1937

• August: Modern Mechanix Magazine publishes an article and photograph of George W. Johnston of Tulsa, Oklahoma with his suction-powered self-fueling air machine.  Johnston had received several patents for compressed air engine and compressor combinations when he lived in St. Joseph, Missouri for many years.

• October: Walt Disney Comics publishes a satire offering the possible interpretation that anyone who expects to design a “mickey mouse” self-filling air tank is “goofy”.  This cartoon might have been inspired by Frank Beck's daily ongoing serial satire Gas Buggies (1926-1927) which was about fanatical but unsuccessful air car inventor Hem and his wife Amy.

LITTLE MORE IS HEARD FROM AIR CAR INVENTORS
OUTSIDE THE USUAL STREAM OF PATENTS
UNTIL THE OIL CRISIS OF 1972.

1938

• October: Hitler invades Austria and annexes it the next day.

1939

• Germany invades Poland. 

1939

• Canada, Australia, and New Zealand declare war on Germany.

1942

• January: US enters World War II.  End of the Great Depression.

• October 8: Bill Truitt enlists in the army.  During his tour of duty he will invent a flamethrower and a windage indicator and assign the patents to the army.

1943

• July: US starts taking money out of everybody’s paycheck as a “temporary” aid to the war effort.  This is still going on 66 years later.

BELOW: from U.S.Patent No. 2,030,759

1944

• Germany starts dropping buzz bombs on Britain.  This flying bomb-carrying tube, started with compressed air and fueled by atmosphere and gasoline, strongly resembles Bob Neal’s “equalizer” which the Germans were so interested in back in 1936.  While it’s true that the pulse jet was patented in 1908, it wasn’t perfected until about 1943 by the Germans.  The French simultaneously developed a pulse jet called the Escopette which did the same thing but with the check valves removed.

1945

• May: Germany surrenders.

• September: Japan surrenders.  U.S. soldiers with the most “points” come home now.  This probably included Bill Truitt.

1946

• U.S. soldiers with less “points” come home.

1949

• George Heaton, a native of Madison, Ohio, builds air powered motorcycles and later, some self-fueling air cars, with a friend whose name he did not tell me. 

1960

• July 17: Johannes Wardenier dies at age 47.  They say he was financially cared for his whole life by Frits Phillips, the inventor of a version of the Stirling hot air engine.  Nothing can be proven, and everyone denies everything.  Philips died December 5, 2005 at the age of 100.  He was the only son of Anton Philips, the founder of Philips Electronics.

1969

• George Heaton is Vice-President of the California Fuel Dealers’ Association.  In this capacity he is called to testify before a legislative committee about possible toxic dust that might accumulate in catalytic converters if unleaded fuel is used.

1970s

• August 1972: Air car inventor Russell Brown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania files for a patent.  He says his engine, a conversion from an internal combustion engine, can keep its own tanks full.  His wife left him because he spent too much time in his workshop.

• before 1974: Bill Truitt’s modest royalties run out from the army for the inventions he made during the war.

Truitt (LEFT) told me he made an air car from a Rolls Royce because he thought if you want to build a good air car, you should use a good car to make it with.  I didn't realize he was joking.  The car on the left was really a Buick Skylark with a Rolls hood grill and ornament installed for fun.

1973-1980: Bill Truitt of McKEES ROCKS, PENNSYLVANIA perfects his self-fueling air car with its “secret leakproof valve that works like a heart” and a MAKO three-stage electric compressor that “is the heart of the system” and several pairs of “worm-type hydraulic air pumps” that run off the car’s motion, and a “turbine clutch” for smooth starting.  Because of harassment from oil companies and car companies, he will later give his design to the government and never build another air car.  He tried to give the car to the government for free sometime before February 1974, but see “1982” below. The local congressman who is said to be protecting his interests and seeing to it that the air car will actually be developed is H. John Heinz III of PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, an environmentalist.  There is a photo in the Heinz archives entitled “JH with the air car” which shows the congressman in a campaign publicity shot (1972) holding two model cars which must be models of the interchangable fiberglass bodies Truitt had for his air car.

1980

• June: Leroy K. Rogers of Ft. Myers, Florida (BELOW) files for a patent on an air engine converted from an internal combustion engine and soon becomes the most famous self-fueling air car inventor in history.  The big automakers offer him a billion dollars for his invention.  He refuses.  He says the publicity he got from the air car ruined his family life.  He was forced by a lawsuit to stop making claims "without admitting any guilt".  Silence ever since.  He now owns a trucking firm.

This photo of Bill Truitt in his air car was published with an article by the Pennsylvania reporter who is now Executive Editor of USA Today.

October 31: When I met George Heaton, he was about 54 but had a young family and owned a Cadillac which he used as a taxicab.  After our first conversation about air cars he refused to be interviewed again.  His wife had warned me that he would only say so much.

 Halloween 1980 at the home of air car builder George Heaton.

1982

• June 1: Bill Truitt signs a document saying that he has given his air car to the U.S. Army and NASA.  Filled out and signed by Truitt, it is a pre-printed “Memorandum of Understanding” and not an acknowledgment of anything by any branch of the government.  The form itself was a version dated March 1, 1974 by the government printing office.  He had tried giving his air car to the government during the early 1970s for free, but they apparently weren’t interested.  This time they promise him a royalty but it never gets developed.  They tell him they have built a jeep using his concept and a helicopter that’s able to fly 50 feet off the ground.  But Bill’s hope is not realized of seeing every fifth car coming off the Detroit assembly lines an air car.

1984

• George Miller, living just past the western suburbs of PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, has suffered eight heart attacks in ten years and lives on a social security check at the age of 58.  No longer working as a coal miner and a bricklayer has given him plenty of time to work on his air engine for the past eight years before publicizing it in USA Today and other newspapers, but not enough money to perfect it.

1987

• Air car inventor Ricardo Perez Pomar of Miami, Florida, builds an air car (LEFT), but his backer backs out and he can’t finish it.  He died in 2007. 

1988

• The equalization engine is invented by Scott Robertson in Grass Valley, California (right).  It took 21 years to do the math to figure out why it wouldn't work.