The Mystery of Cars That Ran on Air, Water w/Jonathan Ward | Joe Rogan

Do you remember the bloom boxes? No. Really? What is it? I've been thinking about them lately. I remember seeing them on 60 Minutes years ago and I think Google headquarters was powered by one. There were these funky little black boxes that had some chemical process of creating energy and they were like early on massive news promising tech and they were super groovy little simple boxes. They originally did it for like campuses and military like large installations for you know multiple complexes and stuff. How did they work? Then they were also making them for automotive and they had a prototype. I was so excited. I don't remember it's been years but it was some sort of I think it was a ionic transfer process that went through a series of elements within the shielded box to create the energy but they were like self-sustaining and super groovy. It's called a bloom box. Anything? It literally is just a big black box. What's in there? I don't know what happened with them. They went belly up or someone there. So that 60 Minutes. So that was powering Google at one point? Those things and what's inside? And I think Stanford was getting into it. I don't know major mental flashback for me even that I'm remembering it. It's just one of those things that seems so promising that then went bye-bye. Same with like toroidal engines. There was a great engineer up in Lodi that was revisiting toroidal and he had a Ford Focus that would do is like his daughter's old car with a blown up motor. He had his own toroidal motor that he had developed that could run from the energy in the charged particles in the air. What? This thing did like 15 miles an hour on a flat test track running on air. Charged particles in the air. Yes. I honestly charged particles in the air. So it repeatedly as the technology improved that 15 miles an hour could be a real speed. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And in that same guy I saw him once at a trade show and I was exhibiting at the show as well. So I was there on setup day. I was bored out of my gourd. I was already set up in the Ford booth. So I was walking around sort of sniffing around and see this trippy scientist guy in his lab coat and this shitty little booth. It was like six by 10 foot booth and at a show where people have like 200 by 60 foot booth. And he's got this odd little toroidal thing and then a bigger toroidal thing and literally like a chalkboard. So I'm like, dude, what's going on? So I started talking about it. He starts explaining the technology and what he was doing and like the smaller one at 300 foot pounds of torque, the larger one had 2000 and he was looking to develop it for rail cars, for semis, for cars like an on and on and on. He's like, yeah, the biggest problem is stopping it once it gets going because the toroidal structure meant that the compression cycle from, you know, 12 to 2 of that first cylinder was such that when the combustion occurred and it propelled the next piston into the next combustion cycle and kept going. So getting that power out of the central crank was a challenge and then how to stop the damn thing was like the bigger challenge. But they'd run on like horse piss, ionic charged particles, diesel, gas, like they didn't even need spark plugs. So I'm like blown away by this. I go back the next day. Where'd he go? Booth gone, empty, done. And I have the guys in for line to try to reach out to him. Website gone. What did I look at the night before? Gone. Got gobbled up. Five years later, I see him again at another trade show with another kick ass design and man was he a bitter man. He's like, yeah, never again because they bought it and they shelved it. I'm never selling anything again. Fuck them. I'm licensing to specific channels of applications and that's it. His new product. So what do you think happened if you're a conspiracy theorist? Do you think someone bought him out and just wanted to? I'm a small independent business owner real realist in that hell yes, someone didn't like that and they shelved that shit. So they bought it and then just shelved it. So his next product. Who bought it? Who did that? I don't know. And he was very cagey about it. Then he had another product where you would replace the alternator in your car with a generator and you had a small battery in the vehicle. So this is a retrofit system. The retail model was brilliant because you'd have like a pretty cheesy inexpensive three axis mill, a shit ton of CAD files and one product on the shelf. So in a lightweight car it was like an electric supercharger. So you'd replace your alternator and it had a toothed cog for the pulley and then your crank pulley would add a toothed cog to it and then toothed belt. So the idea was it would assist the internal combustion engine through its compression cycle. It would negate the parasitic load of all the Fiat, all the front engine accessory drive mounted things, you know your alternator, small pump or whatever by pushing the engine through the cycle with the captured electrical energy from the deceleration. And then in bigger cars it gave you like pass assist and range increase and did great things for MPG. And then the story I got on that one was BMW put them under a big contract for it to license it and use it and then the guy disappeared off the face planet again. Jesus Christ this guy. Shit happens. Do you remember there was a video that was circulating many years ago about a guy who created a car to run on air? No, excuse me, water. He created a car that runs on water and then this car that ran on water, I mean he apparently had a viable engine and it was really working and then he had a hard tack and as he was dying he was saying they killed me, they killed me and then he died. Nobody heard from the water engine again but... He's from Columbus. He's from Columbus too? See that shit happens and I don't even like the term conspiracy theory because I think that's something created by the machine to negate things that are disruptive and innovative so we can put them in a little box and call it a conspiracy theory or whatever and therefore it never happened. Well anyone who doesn't believe in conspiracy theories I say look at Jeffrey Epstein. It's real clear. Meyers said that his invention could do what physicists say is impossible, turn water into hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to drive his dune buggy cross country on 20 gallons straight from the tap. He took a sip of cranberry juice then he grabbed his neck bolted out the door dropped to his knees and vomited violently. I ran outside and asked him what's wrong. His brother Stephen Meyer recalled he said they poisoned me. That was his dying declaration. That's fucked up. That's fucked up. I don't know if it's true. He might have been nuts. Or both. Or both. I mean that's another thing. We like to just call people nuts and write them off. Some of the greatest innovators throughout the history of mankind have been a little off the rocker and that's part of it. Nicholas Tesla was in love with the pigeon. Totally. He was in love with the pigeon. I love that story. His final days man in that hotel. Well there's also a story that I read that I've tried to substantiate that apparently he was so frustrated by sexual desires and a love affair that he had and the distraction that it presented that he in quotes destroyed his sexuality. I do not know what that means. You know what I'd like to look into it because I got to say man I'm kind of tired of my penis still ruling my brain. You know at 50 it's like I wouldn't mind to be able to take it off and leave it at home. Jesus. Well normally just like enough already. Like enough already. I get it. I mean like turn it on turn it off as needed and when appropriate. I don't want to be walking around like. Maybe have a hip switch. It's like something you could just like set it aside and become a eunuch for a little bit. Or at least make it useful make it like a GoPro mount or something. I don't know. Yeah. I see what you're saying. There's there's a lot of innovation that does sort of get swept aside that you wonder like there's a documentary who killed the electric car. Yeah. And that's been really interesting. Kat the guy who produced and developed. Yeah. Lovely guy. Yeah I don't know who he is but that is another example of you know that was an innovation that was a little bit ahead of its time and the powers that be were like fuck you. Yeah. They were not ready for it. Yeah. And that goes way back. I mean you know this have you ever heard of the Selden patent. Very interesting piece of American transportation history. This prick named Selden was one of the richest people in the country because he was like one of your early patent trolls who like sat back one day went you know we got these horse carriages and we got these new motor things and you know at some point it could be a horseless carriage. So he like literally did like a chicken scratch bullshit drawing and filed it and got awarded the patent. So Henry Ford and his first two companies as well as the Dodge brothers all the early pioneers in the transportation sector in the U.S. had to pay this prick a massive royalty to even produce the vehicle. And it was Henry when he after he went down and under and he was reborn and came back out with Ford Motor Company the second time that he said you know what fuck him fuck that I'm not paying this shit. And it was like eight years of court battles to overrule it and the National Automotive Dealers Association originally didn't want any trouble and everyone was paying and Henry was the one who had the gall and the balls and say no no you should not pay this prick and they finally got it kicked out. But they say that hindered innovation and transportation for a good decade. Wow no I didn't know about that. And it was only the electric starter the magneto starter that Henry Ford integrated into his cars that really made the massive shift away from predominance of electric cars to internal combustion. So when you flash forward and you look at Mr. Payne's film who killed the electric car and you look at Firestone and who was it Pacific Oil but it was an oil company a tire company and they created that bus company and then they did all the lobbying to privatize municipal transport so that then they could slowly buy them all up and you know California had an incredibly successful electric trolley system through the west side. It was brilliant it was pioneering it was they had everyone. They're the ones that ended up stacked in the desert. There's some of that footage in the film. Because they were not going to sell tires or oil if this shit goes down so let's tank it. Yeah they do that. They will buy a company that's doing amazing. Happens every day. Yeah and then just put it on the shelf.