Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
discontinue production, which would have made it hard to continue to
guarantee and repair those EV1s remaining on the road after the end
of production. However, the saga has now come full circle, with a film
sequel planned, named
The Revenge of the Electric Car
, now that GM is
planning to mass-produce the Volt electric vehicle from 2010.
Perpetual motion
Stanley Meyer was a US inventor who claimed
to be able to power a car indefinitely on a finite amount of water. His
idea appeared to be a fuel cell that would break water up into hydrogen
and oxygen. The hydrogen would provide the energy to power the car,
and to reconstitute hydrogen and oxygen molecules back into water
- thus starting the whole process again. Meyer died suddenly after at
the age of 58, after a restaurant meal that led some to suggest he had
been poisoned to suppress his invention. His fuel cell had, however,
already been discredited in a court case brought against Meyer by one
of his investors, in which expert witnesses claimed it was simply using
conventional electrolysis.
A more genuinely mysterious death in the realm of energy was that
of Rudolf Diesel, the German inventor of the generic engine that
bears his name. He fell overboard in 1913 on a ferry from Antwerp to
Harwich. Diesel had used biofuel in his first engines in the late 1880s,
and it has been suggested by conspiracy theorists that he might have
been murdered in order to squash biofuel's chances as a rival to oil-
based diesel - the theory would have more plausibility had he actually
persisted with biofuel. Other suggestions of suicide, or assassination
by the German secret-service (lest Diesel tell the British about his
technology) are equally unconvincing.
“Perpetual” light bulb
The light bulb that doesn't wear out is
something that many people intuitively imagine ought to be easily
achievable, leading to conspiracy theories that it must have been
invented, only to be suppressed by the makers of bulbs which tend to
go pop after a mere 1000 hours. Certainly, there have been restrictive
practices in the light bulb industry. Between World War I and World
War II, lightbulb manufacture was run as one big anti-competitive cartel
that fixed prices, set output quotas and divided markets in a way that
almost certainly also stifled innovation.
But regulators are now forcing the pace. In the European Union, for
instance, the phasing out of the old-style incandescent light bulbs
invented by Thomas Edison, which produce a lot of heat as well as light,
