Those of you who watched last week's top five might remember I made a passing reference
to Henry Ford's hemp car as an invention that was years ahead of its time.
It was.
But exactly what happened to it?
Why are we all not driving around in plastic cars if the technology has existed since the
early 1940s?
That's just one of the questions we set out to answer in this week's show - the top five
technological conspiracies of all time.
Some of these stories are well documented as having happened, some are works of the
imagination woven around a germ of truth.
All are astonishing.
FLEXIBLE GLASS
Four of the items on our list this week are from 20th Century North America.
This one is not.
For flexible glass, we have to go all the way back to ancient Rome.
The story goes that a craftsman came before the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the first century
AD.
He had with him a drinking bowl made of glass.
But not just any glass.
He had the emperor throw the bowl to the floor as hard as he could.
But instead of smashing, the bowl merely dented, like a soft metal.
The craftsman then took out a small hammer and repaired the glass.
The technology was recounted by two roughly contemporary writers - Petronius and Pliny
the Elder, who himself doubted the story but acknolwedged that it was widely talked about.
Later writers picked up on the story as well and it passed into folklore through the centuries,
to the extent that in the 13th century, 1200 years after the story supposedly happened,
the "recipe" for flexible glass was included in a treatise on Roman technology.
So why, if it existed, did the technology not come into widespread use?
Well, the story goes that Tiberius, curious as to how the glass worked, asked the unnamed
craftsmen if anyone else knew how to make it.
The craftsman said that he alone had invented the so-called vitrum flexile, and that no-one
else knew his secret.
Tiberius quickly had him put to death, covering up the technology for fear that it would become
more fashionable and desirable than gold or silver, ruining the Roman economy.
FORD'S HEMP CAR
This is supposedly one of the greatest surpressed inventions of all time.
In 1941, Ford debuted a car with a steel frame, on which sat body panels made of soybean and
hemp.
The car ran off biofuel made from hemp.
It was an answer to the world's material problems - instead of processing steel and transporting
it all the way across the country, why not grow a car from fields near the factory instead?
It seemed like an incredible idea.
The car promised to be cheap, strong, and easy to repair in case of an accident.
It weighed 25-30% less than a car with steel panels, making it quicker and more efficient.
A video released at the time of Ford himself hitting a panel with an axe proved how resilient
the mixture was.
But then the war came along.
Ford's plant, like so many others, switched to wartime mass production, and the plastic
car vanished.
So much so that even the recipe for the body panel plastic was lost.
The prototype car itself was reportedly destroyed, for no obvious reason.
But why?
Some claim that the technology simply wasn't ready for mass production.
Others that Ford's bioplastic had never actually worked at all, so he'd had to make the prototype
from polluting coal tar.
Newspapers even reported he couldn't even make the plastic set solid, ending up with
something akin to a hemp-based whipped cream.
But the most common belief, if the internet is anything to go by, is that in the confusion
of wartime production, oil and steel companies, alongside other automobile manufacturer's
worried about Ford's dominance, had the prototype and research destroyed.
It's also commonly suggested that major timber producers of the time, namely William Randolph
Hurst, who also ran a series of newspapers, and the Du Pont Family, major investors in
nylon, ran campaigns smearing hemp as a suitable industrial product in order to promote their
own materials.
Negative publicity at the time helped the passing of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937,
which made hemp-based products extremely expensive to sell, and could have affected Ford's ability
to mass produce the car.
Either way, Ford's car never made it to the production line, and it's only in the last
few years that we've begun to reasses fibreglass as a mass market material, and the myriad
uses of hemp.
MASS PUBLIC TRANSPORT
The world's cities SHOULD have a mass, effective public transport system.
Cars SHOULDN'T be clogging up our cities.
That's not an opinion, it's a fact.
And that's very nearly the way it happened.
It's hard to believe these days but in the 1920s and 30s the US was a world leader in
public transport.
Almost every city with a population of more than 10,000 had a streetcar network, most
small and privately owned.
Only 10% of the population owned cars - because they didn't need them.
And this was a problem for auto companies and supporting manufacturers, who had banked
on an explosion in automobile use after the war.
So what to do?
Accept defeat?
Scale back?
Nah.
They formed two holding companies called National City Lines and Pacific City Lines with investment
from General Motors, the firestone tyre company, Standard Oil, Mack Trucks and others.
They then used these companies to buy up countless streetcar companies, smaller at first and
then larger and more profitable entities.
Once the companies were under their control, the lines were ripped up and fleets of shiny
new busses rolled out to replace them - or indeed they were closed down completely, forcing
the people of affected areas and new urban sprawl to buy their own vehicles.
The companies involved the conspiracy were taken to court in 1947, accused of trying
to create a huge transport monopoly and monopolising the supply of busses to the new system.
They were found innocent on the first count and guilty on the second, fined a rather pathetic
$5,000.
The damage was done, though.
Public transport had died a death in most US cities by the 1960s and the automobile
became king.
And there it stays.
THE WATER POWERED CAR
Stanley Allen Meyer was a man whose invention promised the world.
He developed an engine that could run off nothing but water.
The theory was that his cell split water back into Oxygen and hydrogen.
The hydrogen was burnt, reforming water.
According to Meyer himself, the electrolysis technique he invented required less energy
to input than he got out of it - that is, it violated the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
THAT IS - it was a perpetual motion machine.
Meyer outfitted a dune buggy with his device and went on a massive publicity tour.
He reckoned that just 83 litres of water could get the vehicle from LA to New York.
He even claimed to have developed special spark plugs with used electrical resonance
to break water into it's composite elements, allowing water to be used to fuel a standard
car engine.
Scientific journals laughed the technology off as they tend to do with most perpetual
motion or cold fusion devices, an din 1996 he was sued, successfully, by two investors
and accused of fraud by the court.
But it recieved cult satus in the mainstream media and, latterly, on the internet.
Not least because Meyer died suddenly on March 20 1998.
Allegedly, he was poisoned after having dinner with two Belgian investors.
Perhaps the oil industry wasn't ready for a water powered car, and bumped him off?
It's a popular opinion.
What's more likely though is that Meyer died of a brain aneurysm having never made a real,
working water engine.
He left no detailed blueprints that have been recreated, nor was his invention ever put
up for peer review.
The legend of it persists though.
And it probably always will.
Interestingly, though, the US Navy has worked out a way of turning sea water into jet fuel
on an industrial scale.
There's a link in the description so check it out.
TESLA'S 'FREE ENERGY'
Perhpaps the greatest conspiracy of all time - that the great inventor Nikola Tesla had
the secret to free energy for all, and the power to wirelessly transmit it into people's
homes, but was the victim of a huge industrial cover up - that the booming electricity industry
in the early 20th century, couldn't handle his secret, and his one-time backers, led
by JP Morgan, deliberately ruined him to keep it from ever being discovered, the evidence
being siezed by the FBI after his death.
Now this is a complicated story.
Because, strictly speaking, it's true.
At least, technologically.
And the FBI did raid his apartment for research papers after his death.
But of course they would, he claimed to be working on laser guns that could bring down
an entire air force from a thousand miles away.
Tesla's supposed idea was simple.
He would harness the power of radiant energy - that is, the electromagnetic spectrum, to
both generate electrical power from the natural energy flows in the atmosphere, and to transmit
electricity.
And the centre of this emergent technology that would revolutionise the world was the
Wardenclyffe tower, built in Shoreham, New York, in 1901.
Unfortunately, the tower, which was built to convey the first wireless transatlantic
message, never opened.
Marconi began transmitting signals far more efficiently than Tesla could in 1903, sapping
interest in Wardenclyffe, which Tesla was eventually forced to abandon and was demolished
in 1917.
His attempts to get extra money out of his major backer JP Morgan failed, not least because
Tesla resorted to insulting him to try and get more cash, but also because his costs
were spiralling out of control.
And here's where the conspiracy, and the confusion, starts.
See, Tesla's wireless power transmission system worked.
There were loads of demonstrations of him lighting household lamps wirelessly, but the
system was inefficient and expensive compared to mass produced copper cables, and it was
very hard to meter who was using what.
In that respect, wireless power was probably surpressed by the electric companies and cable
manufacturers of the time who weren't interested in it.
So let's say that bit's plausible on balance.
But his radiant energy device?
Well that is what's known today as a radio reciever.
YES it worked.
But the power levels it generated were miniscule - most of the systems you can now buy today
claiming to use Tesla's tech to harness free energy for life need antenna several hundred
feet long to do anything more than slowly recharge a smartphone.
And it's not free energy either, because most of it comes from socking great radio transmitters
which require, you guessed it, electricity.
In fact Wardenclyffe was to have been powered by a vast, steam driven generator.
It would have worked as a power distributor, but it certainly wouldn't have been free.
In theory, with a big enough string of antennas, you could produce a commercial power station
harnessing electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere.
But it would be enormous.
And enormously inefficient.
And THAT's the real reason why we don't have unlimited free, wireless power transmission
today.
Because the fact is, we do.
It's just not actually free.
And it's not very much power.
Tesla was an incredible inventor.
But this story?
Like some of his more outlandish claims, it's a little bit exaggerated.