Posted on 04/09/2003 1:08:01 PM PDT by Nov3
THE original blueprints for a device that could have revolutionised the motor car have been discovered in the secret compartment of a tool box.
A carburettor that would allow a car to travel 200 miles on a gallon of fuel caused oil stocks to crash when it was announced by its Canadian inventor Charles Nelson Pogue in the 1930s.
But the carburettor was never produced and, mysteriously, Pogue went overnight from impoverished inventor to the manager of a successful factory making oil filters for the motor industry. Ever since, suspicion has lingered that oil companies and car manufacturers colluded to bury Pogue’s invention.
Now a retired Cornish mechanic has enlisted the help of the University of Plymouth to rebuild Pogue’s revolutionary carburettor, known as the Winnipeg, from blueprints he found hidden beneath a sheet of plywood in the box.
The controversial plans once caused panic among oil companies and rocked the Toronto Stock Exchange when tests carried out on the carburettor in the 1930s proved that it worked.
Patrick Davies, 72, from St Austell, had owned the tool box for 40 years but only recently decided to clean it out. As well as drawings of the carburettor, the envelope contained two pages of plans, three test reports and six pages of notes written by Pogue.
They included a report of a test that Pogue had done on his lawnmower, which showed that he had managed to make the engine run for seven days on a quart (just under a litre) of petrol.
The documents also described how the machine worked by turning petrol into a vapour before it entered the cylinder chamber, reducing the amount of fuel needed for combustion.
Mr Davies has had the patent number on the plans authenticated, proving that they are genuine documents.
He said: “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I used to be a motor mechanic and I knew this was something else altogether. I was given the tool box by a friend after I helped to paint her house in 1964. Her husband had spent a lot of time in Canada.”
The announcement of Pogue’s invention caused enormous excitement in the American motor industry in 1933, when he drove 200 miles on one gallon of fuel in a Ford V8. However, the Winnipeg was never manufactured commercially and after 1936 it disappeared altogether amid allegations of a political cover-up.
Dr Murray Bell, of the University of Plymouth’s department of mechanical and marine engineering, said he would consider trying to build a model of the Pogue carburettor.
Engineers who have tried in the past to build a carburettor using Pogue’s theories have found the results less than satisfactory. Charles Friend, of Canada’s National Research Council, told Marketplace, a consumer affairs programme: “You can get fantastic mileage if you’re prepared to de-rate the vehicle to a point where, for example, it might take you ten minutes to accelerate from 0 to 30 miles an hour.”
Thus, the day that patent issued, is was no longer a supressible secret.
Funny how these things work, isn't it?
I think the publication date is a day early.
Yup. Mar 31 date.
Then why don't Chevrolets get better mileage???
Don't forget about the Carbon-14 present in just about everything you eat.
Something that decays to half its radioactivity in a billion years is incredibly non-harmful.
Maybe so, but as a matter of general principle I try not to ingest alpha emmiters. That is just a quirk I have.
Pogue? Must be the high performance variation of the Fish (phish? fiche? phiche?) carburator.
It is because so much of the gas which goes into the current gasoline engine is actually NOT burned in the energy-delivery combustion process that catalytic converters are currently required. The fuel NOT burned delivers no energy, and comes out of the engine as environmentally unfriendly chemical products.
Vapor, unlike the droplets of liquid currently ingested by the typical automotive engine cylinder, burns very efficiently, releasing much more of the energy "stored" in the petroleum, which is why increased fuel economy occurs. Additionally, the products of efficient combustion/burning are water and carbon dioxide, not all the "environmentally unfriendly" junk currently resulting from the INefficient burning of droplets of liquid.
This is actually not junk science; unlike that promulgated by enviro-terrorists, this can be demonstrated on a reliable, repetitive basis. Development of such engine fuel delivery systems is not allowed and individuals who do build such are bought out by (supossedly) the petroleum companies who have SO much to lose if vehicle fuel consumption were to drop to 20 - 25% of current levels!!
You have the problem of operation temp. as someone pointed out. Ford tried for several years to built a moter using glass to operate in the needed high temp range, but couldn't get it to live(operate for any serviceable lenghth of time), however they did get it to operate at over 12,000 rpm.
Every morning, when I walk past it, I laugh an evil laugh as I think of how sinister we are.
With gas prices being what they are today, I'd have no problem with that!
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