Reviving a Suppressed Technology – Part 6
The challenges after Seattle
Jimmy Carter’s energy tax credit expired at the end of 1985, and Dennis Lee’s financial-engineering play went with it. Dennis sold about two thousand of his heat pumps with it. To my knowledge, there has not been a program to sell that heating system to homeowners in the USA since then. As I stated before, even without the organized suppression, breaking into the marketplace with a new technology is extremely difficult, and the 100+ companies that came and went around the LamCo-style heat pump could not solve enough of the problems to make it.
For starters, having half of the buyers install it themselves was a prescription for failure. Those companies also never sold enough to reach the economies of scale to be successful. Only Dennis really knew how to sell them. Dennis’s marketing plan was sheer genius, and almost nobody ever understood. I was mentored by a world-class genius while young, and I was slowly amazed at how few people could recognize genius and how it worked. Much of it was simple, in that the genius approached the subject with fresh eyes that relinquished the assumptions that people normally operate from. Einstein’s questioning of absolute time and absolute space is a classic case of challenging orthodox assumptions.
People stuck in conventional thinking not only could not think like geniuses, they could not recognize it, either. Every time that Dennis’s companies were stolen, the first thing that the thieves did was discard Dennis’s “crazy” marketing plans, even though they were what made it all work. That kind of golden-goose-killing stupidity was initially stunning to witness, and I have seen it countless times in my lifetime. All of my mentor’s inventions were stolen, suppressed, or both.
In this series of posts, I have discussed quite a few of the technical issues around that heat pump. Any successful effort to revive that heat pump in North America will have to address them. I did not know any of that, or even how the heat pump worked, when I chased Dennis to Boston. The day after I arrived in Boston, Dennis began thinking in terms of free energy, when we visited a company that made electricity from a 200-degree Fahrenheit heat source, which happened to be the exhaust temperature of Dennis’s heat pump. Dennis began thinking of hooking up his heat pump to a heat engine to produce, in his words, “free electricity.” In my initial post in this series, I noted the theoretical impossibility of such an idea, but I should also note that when that panel directly absorbed sunlight, that energy was a “bonus” to the Carnot equations, which theoretically could make “free electricity” perhaps possible.
When I lived with Dennis and his family in Boston, and especially after I became his partner, I got a crash course in that heat pump. We immediately heard from scientists who declared Dennis’s idea “impossible,” but we also began hearing from scientists who did not dismiss the idea. Over the years, I have heard from people such as Eugene Mallove, my mentor, Victor Fischer, and even one of Dennis’s libelers in the free-energy field, who thought that the idea had merit. It beats me if it would work. Fischer said that Carnot assumed an ideal gas, which helped make hydraulic heat engines such as his and my mentor’s unthinkable.
If Dennis’s idea will not work according to classical thermodynamic theory, then why did some non-descript businessmen offer us $10 million for the idea a few months after Dennis thought of it? Why did Dennis get anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night of encouragement? It would take another decade before I realized that those were approaches by the global elite. What I discovered among my fellow travelers is that none of them woke up on Day One day with a clear picture of what happened. There could be moments of awakening and epiphany, but the process was generally protracted, usually over many years, as new information, combined with deep thought, eventually made the picture clearer. Nobody suddenly got some all-knowing revelation that I ever saw. It came in fits and starts, and we all knew that we only saw parts of the whole picture.
All these years later, my opinion is that what turned our operation in Ventura into a five-alarm fire that needed to be quickly quenched was not Dennis’s heat pump, my mentor’s engine, or a seemingly improbable marrying of them. Even though Carter’s tax credit was gone, Dennis still had the world’s best heating system, and I had tied into talent and other resources in my home town that helped launch a national network around Dennis’s heating system, while we also pursued so-called free energy. But the scariest thing to the global elite was Dennis’s unparalleled ability to build businesses from scratch and break into the marketplace. Just down from the road from us was Sparky Sweet with the free-energy goods, and the combination of somebody such as Sparky and Dennis was their worst nightmare. They had to deal with the threat, and quickly. That led to the CIA’s billion-dollar offer to make us go away, followed by a wipeout when Dennis refused the offer.
A decade later, we were subjected to a sting operation, as the global elite took their game to a new level. I could go on and on with the challenges posed by the global elite and their minions, our thieving business associates, lying “skeptics,” the lying media, corrupt officials, and so on. Our system is corrupt, from top-to-bottom and end-to-end. Personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity, and learning that was my journey’s primary lesson.
I’ll make one more post to summarize the issues and what effort could have a chance to revive Dennis’s heat pump in the USA.