dennis@beesvax.UUCP (10/25/83)
I would like to throw out something on the net that I have been
wondering about for some time. A while back (my journal records
show April 6, 1979, to be precise) I was browsing thru some technical
paper or magazine and an article entitled "New mysterious fuel developed
in Florida" caught my eye. It went on to say that some company in Florida
had perfected a process which "combines hydrogen, chlorine, and light to
produce incredible amounts of energy" and went on to say that the
inventors did not fully understand the physics behind why it works. They
apparently understood it enough to power a small 3.5 horsepower engine
and claimed that they would have engines of a much higher power rating
working with this new fuel in "about 2 or 3 years". According to their
tests, they are creating 5 or 6 times the amount of energy that they are
putting into it. The only other process that does this is a nuclear
reaction, I believe. The company was called Solar Reactor Corp. of Miami
and I have not heard anything about it since. My question is whatever
happened to this new process, the company, and has anyone figured out
why it works (if indeed it does) and where could one read about it?
I am not a real physics whiz (else what would I be doing programming
computers?) but I really enjoy reading about it in books and in the
discussions on the net. If anyone has any information, please mail it
to me or if you feel it would be applicable to share it with everyone
else, please post it. If it is as truly an inovation as this article
suggests, it might be interesting to hash it around a bit.
Thanks for your time,
Dennis McCurdy
Beehive International
(..utah-cs|beesvax|dennis)gwyn%brl-vld@sri-unix.UUCP (11/10/83)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@brl-vld> H + Cl => HCl + energy Not so mysterious.
rgt@hpfclj.UUCP (11/12/83)
#R:beesvax:-23300:hpfclj:14500003:000:842
hpfclj!rgt Nov 10 08:30:00 1983
I have never heard of this company or its product.
I have however talked to someone who seriously believed that he could
take the energy produced by a steam turbine connected to a electric
generator and use part to drive an automobile and part to produce the
steam necessary to drive the turbine. I have also heard of someone
who, amazed at the strength of paper products, suggested that automobiles
be made out of paper or cardboard.
There are some hear-say examples also; one of a man who invested a large
amount of money in a new technology to crush even the toughest ores for
metalurgical extraction. You must have hear of kings who granted wealth
and power to alchemists whom they saw actually produce gold out of lead
(or coal or some other base material).
How do you spell FRAUD.
Ron Tolley
{decvax!hplabs!hpfcla!rgt}rgt@hpfclj.UUCP (11/13/83)
#R:beesvax:-23300:hpfclj:14500004:000:1187
hpfclj!rgt Nov 11 08:38:00 1983
This is an unsolicited retraction of the word FRAUD which I used in
a previous response to this note. In further contemplating the
phenomenon of "amazing discoveries", I suppose that someone can
sincerely fool oneself into believing that some physical event really
occured. I remember when I was in high school, a serious report of
"poly-water" in which water was added to a certain compound of known
mass, then heat to about 105 degrees C for a sufficient time for all of
the water to have been driven off. Still the mass was greater than the
original. The researchers hypothesized that the water formed a
polymeric chain with previously unknown boiling point above 105 C.
Some time later it was concluded that the water actually formed hydrates
with the original compound, so that the water was retained.
Thus I propose that the case of the hydrogen, chlorine, and sunlight is
a similar event which will fit well into the known physical laws. After
all in my college course in freshman chemistry, we saw an hydrogen-
chlorine demonstration; we are not talking about unusual compounds.
Ron Tolley
Hewlett-Packard/Fort Collins Systems
{decvax!hplabs!hpfcla!rgt}