881214-3

12-8-23
Susan

MEETING TRANSCRIPT:  G. C. HATONN

STORY ON BILL THOMPSON ENGINE CONTINUES

00:01
[other speaker] Figures the point the .4 the lower the figure, that means the greater efficiency because using less fuel per horsepower. 
[other speaker] Oh, that it's worth .4 pounds per horsepower? Is that what you’re saying? 
[other speaker] That's what I should have said. But I didn't say it. So my figures came to about point three nine point four. You know, an automotive engine per se, just by itself, if you got the wind with you, that's got about a 17 percent efficiency. Here we're talking in the order of 80 or 90 percent efficiency with that .4. So we're talking a tremendous incremental improvement in the efficiency of an engine. He was enamored in two areas. He perceived it because he knew fine cars. He had a big old-time Cadillac. He had a big old-time Rolls Royce. Because he was of that 20s era, you see, when he was in his prime. He was now retired and doing all these things for his retirement. 
[other speaker]  Bill Thompson worked for Cubic at one time. 
[other speaker] For whom? 
[other speaker] Cubic Corporation. 
[other speaker] No, I don't think so. 
[other speaker] He didn't? Was he a great big man? 
[other speaker] No, he was not. He was a rather slight man. 
[other speaker] I knew one. 
[other speaker] Did you?  The actual thing is that the engine could be very modular. You could have this two-cylinder one on one side one on the other.  Again you can have it four you can have a six you can have an eight or change the size and do it on the same basis so it had tremendous flexibility theoretically it had tremendous flexibility from the point of view of its applications so the other dream he had because he was a non-at-on steam locomotive which now were being operated by diesel. His other dream was, boy, this engine is ideal for the big steam locomotives. He felt, in all honesty, the glamour of the car was secondary to the reality of what he felt this engine was designed for. Big earth moving equipment, like the, what's the name of that Christian guy that built earthquake equipment in Texas? 
[other speaker] Letourneau. 
[other speaker] Yeah, Letourneau. And big locomotives. That was his, where he really felt this thing had its application. I'm probably the only living person that has all the drawings, all the write-ups, my own engineering calculations for what they're worth. I still have them in my file. He died and he was, unfortunately, he was a man who, like a lot of us, we decide we're going to lie. And he gave the impression that he had, not only that he had put a lot of the patents, he defined the areas where the patents would be applicable. And there were about 12 if I remember correctly. And such as I would be able to judge, I confirmed that they seemed to be patentable areas. But knowing of his background in Detroit, I figured if he said they were, by heavens they probably were. When he died, he said he took them all to Lyons and Lyons. 
[other speaker] That's the three I used. Los Angeles.
[other speaker] Right, Los Angeles, exactly. So after he passed away, his son, who is the name I'm trying to think of, inquired of Lyons and Lyons and they said, well, we know Mr. Thompson because there was some early patents. He showed me a patent he had on an entirely different thing, which he sold to an aerospace company, but it wasn't in this area. It was an entirely different thing, because he was an engineer. Lyons and Lyons said, we know Mr. Thompson because he has done some patent work with us, but none of these that you speak of do we have. So, vanity, vanity, or what we also discovered was that he was supposed to own a lot of apartments, but his wife was managing. And of course, he never said this in her presence, but she was seldom present. I guess she knew more about him than we realized. She was a real estate agent and was doing quite well on her own, and that's what sustained that family, I realized. He had no money, and for some reason or other, whatever these things were he was supposed to have gotten from his parents, who had this big ranch in Wyoming never matured on it. And neither did these patents. So that's kind of a sad finale to a man who had a lot of interesting background and was a great storyteller. He use to tell some stories about Wyoming when he was a boy and his father or somebody would take him into a saloon briefly and then there would be some Western spat that went on there that he had a chance to observe as a kid. There were a lot of wonderful stories, he was a great storyteller. Okay, the reason I'm bringing this up is because the steam reciprocator, you might say why mix the steam reciprocator with the combustion engine. A steam reciprocator, once you crack the valve, you have what amounts to your highest and flat torque curve.
[other speaker] Steam is real powerful stuff. 
[other speaker] A steam reciprocator has torque right from the start. Actually, to talk in terms of RPMs and horsepower in a combustion engine was something that we got into. I can't, I can't, I don't remember what it was. 
[other speaker] You don't need a clutch on the steam job.
[other speaker]  That's right, you don't need a clutch, you just crack the throttle
06:36 
[At this point the tape repeats back to the beginning and that repetition runs until the 13:13 mark. Skip to 13:13 mark for the rest of the tape until the end of meeting.]
13:13
[tape continues from here to end of meeting.] 
and open it and you've got torque right now. 
[other speaker] You see a steam car, a steam powered car, would accelerate faster than any gasoline job. 
[other speaker] Oh absolutely, that's right. 
[other speaker] Now it perfected the reciprocating internal combustion.
[other speaker] Right, with the splendid hydrodynamics and so forth.
[other speaker] I think you could do a lot better with high pressure steam if you wanted to. 
[other speaker] That's right. The point is that he envisaged this. I've got an automobile. I'm driving down the street. I've got my Thompson Sterling engine in operation. I come to the stoplight. I put my foot on the brake, take my foot off the accelerator concurrently. The steam reciprocator, the combustion engine immediately has no more fuel in it. But that engine is still idling. You have to declutch because you're cutting under the drive line. But that engine is still idling because you've still got residual steam in the boiler. And that engine is idling. There comes a point then when you seal that off so that you retain steam in the boiler while you're sitting there. The light goes green. You open up the throttle. Your steam reciprocator has got power right now. Off you go. In the meantime, your combustion engine is picking up and joining, if you will, on the on the on the 
[other speaker] Fuel input. 
[other speaker] That's right. Another. I see there was another aspect of this that I'm trying to remember because of the efficiencies. Oh, we could use we could use some of that exhaust steam heat. We could use some of that exhaust steam heat to run the to run the generators for air conditioning and and lights and so forth. And of course, at that time, I wasn't talking Jake Purcell's but it's ideal.
[other speaker] It says right here.
[other speaker] Draw off some of the residual exhaust heat and thereby remove that heat energy which you have to do anyhow and use it in a little Jake Purcell steam generator for lights and or air conditioning etc. or heating. Well I guess that's the sum and substance of my story, as long as you know about it. 
[other speaker] That's an interesting concept. Never built one. I don't know whether it ever proved to be very feasible because eventually we would have much greatly simplified systems. The argument described here, but take for example, this whole cell turbine, or what we want to call it. 
[other speaker] Yeah, right.
[other speaker] It apparently is very silent and very efficient. 
[other speaker] Yes, it is. However, just like any basic turbine, a turbine has a very narrow line of efficiency. In other words, you want to keep a turbine running. 
[other speaker] Has to run at a constant speed. 
[other speaker] Say again?
[other speaker] Has to run at a constant speed. 
[other speaker] Exactly. A turbine at its appropriate speed range. [other speaker] That's right. Its efficiency is a very sharp, narrow curve that goes up in peaks, and that's the peak you want to run it at, at constant speed. Well, obviously, in an automotive situation, you've got to have a means for breaking the rotation from the wheels while a turbine continues to operate at that efficient speed. You don't rise and fall with a turbine. 
[other speaker] Is that the reason why Chrysler never did get along with their turbine car? I do not know. How did you know that we had played with... Oh, you mean with... Chrysler's turbine.
[other speaker] Huh? 
[other speaker] You know, Chrysler put out a turbine car. 
[other speaker] Yeah, I know that. I... what my mind was shifting into gear on some memories. Because Bill Thompson and myself and others, we had a long session with Chrysler. They really looked into this engine and gave us.  They were very much interested, but it was at the time when they were beginning to collapse. I forget the name of the president, but he was an accountant, not a guy like Iacocca. And they were beginning to face some real problems, which we didn't know, of course, at the time. But they became very much interested, and we thought, here's a goal. And suddenly they backed off. So that's why I responded as I did. Again, when you talk about Chrysler’s turbine car, I would say I'm sure that was one of the great problems, the fact that a constant speed is required. 
[other speaker] Well, you know, there was one in San Diego that disappeared. 
[other speaker] Oh, yeah.
[other speaker] And I saw one in, one time when I was in New York City, when they first brought it out, their first demonstrator, I got a chance to look at it. They surveyed the engineers and the people going in there. It was quite a car. Very inefficient though, even miles to gallon.
18:36 
[other speaker] Well, you may remember the government of California put out a big allotment of money for people to build steam cars. And what's the name of this aircraft manufacturer that died? 
[other speaker] Bill Lear? 
[other speaker] Bill Lear built a bus. Well, we all knew that, and as they did, that the reason the state of California did it was because they were trying to reduce the exhaust emissions, which of course a steam engine is very clean, but costly to be all, everything you can think of because they are not an efficient engine. So, Bill Lear built a beautiful bus and several other people built cars and buses and the state of California approved because the emissions were all so clean. And this was something that under my learning from Bill Thompson, we said, hey, this is what's going to happen. And then after it was all through and they spent their money, you never heard another word about it. Because there wasn't anybody who was going to buy one of those because they couldn't afford it from the point of view of operation. They were inefficient. 
[other speaker] You see, the reason I think we want to study some of these things like your experience has brought forth is that when we get into the ultimate propulsion system of free energy, we're going to have our own little cars. They'll probably be electrostatically propelled somehow. I don't know how.
[other speaker] Yeah, right. 
[other speaker] I've worked a lot on that, but I've seen these, well, these air type of, push type of aircraft. You know, at Orion they had one of those things there. 
[other speaker] Yes, I know they did. But there's another deal somewhere. It's in the background. I can't pull it out right now. 
[other speaker] I thought there was another steam engine. 
[other speaker] Didn't somebody have a... 
[other speaker] Yeah, well, please don't interrupt her. 
[other speaker] Isn't there... doesn't somebody have a connect contact or a connection or something with an aircraft manufacturer who has a new type of propulsion? This came up yesterday, didn't it? [other speaker] I said, I told you yesterday about my friend Bill Mooney in Long Beach. 
[other speaker] Yeah, that was it. 
[other speaker] Who has a four poster. 
[other speaker] Yeah, yeah, that was it. 
[other speaker] Right, and he was having trouble getting an engine, you remember? You said, was it the people in Phoenix? 
[other speaker] Yeah, Air Research. 
[other speaker] Air Research, and I said yes. But he has since discovered... Let me put it this way. This is interesting. First place, I should tell you all that Jake Purcell designed a turbine engine for that plane. And they tested it in a wind tunnel. They got wind tunnel time. And with great success up to a point. But the trouble is, to go ahead and get that engine certified through all the governmental processes, they did not have the money or the time. But Jake's engines, turbine engines, probably, ultimately will appear in that kind of aircraft. But let me put that aside for a minute. They discovered, this is kind of interesting. Jake made a proposal to the Army, some kind of an application, and he didn't try to describe it, but he said, I'll give you a copy of the proposal. It went down and Jake said, I knew that this was what they're going to want because it fits their need to the T. Spent a lot of time and effort on it. He got it returned, the whole package returned with a letter saying, in effect, we don't understand. So he was kind of furious and he called whoever it was, doctor so and so. He got the most, the strangest gobbledygook you ever heard. 
[other speaker] They didn't want him to grow up, did they? 
[other speaker] They did not want him to develop. But somehow or other, through another channel, and this is in Huntsville, they had this completely changed, not the same application that he did on it, but in other senses, they had a remarkable engine for some kind of a weapon system. And Jake said, I know where that could be used. And he was thinking of Bill Moody. Mind you, there's a lot of gaps in what I'm telling you because I don't know. And they said, all right, we'll take a chance on it, we'll go through certain channels, but we're going to... They'd already had a lot of Army interest in Bill Moody's plane. He calls it the Dragon, by the way. And they finally said, we'll let you have four of these engines. And nobody else had those engines, and they were classified. So Bill expects to get those. Now, I haven't talked to Bill for a month, so I don't know where that stands. But that's one source that may take care of his problem initially. But in the long run, he needs certified engines. 
[other speaker] Well that takes quite a bit to certify. Time and money. Anything having to do with FAA certification. 
[other speaker] It's probably hours or something like that. 
[other speaker] FAA certification really takes a lot. 
[other speaker] Did you know, I didn't know this, did you know that military engines will have a duplicate, the same engine basically, for commercial purposes. The military engine will be an absolutely inefficient fuel gobbler, whereas the commercial use is an engine that's been carefully designed for efficiency. And I wondered about that for a long time and finally something came up and the answer came out. That highly inefficient semi-duplicate engine that the military is using has to be able to go into, in effect, overdrive, or the highest RPMs or whatever under certain wartime conditions. 
[other speaker] Takeoff. 
[other speaker]Takeoff or whatever. To go in and bomb or I can't tell you exactly. And that is not compatible with the efficiency design changes in the regular commercial engine. 
[other speaker] Commercial engine they don't run as hot. That's the whole point I guess. 
[other speaker] You take and drop a lot of horsepower in one of these, climb it out on a deal, you know, past high altitude and such, it will strain and stress the engine a lot more. That's why they have an inefficient thing. Run it with lots of fuel to keep it cool. 
[other speaker] There you go. That may well be the answer. I didn't know that.
[other speaker] That's... I worked in this. 
[other speaker] Yeah, well, you know the answer. 
[other speaker] Power plants. 
[other speaker] Well, that's my story on the Thompson Sterling engine. 
[other speaker] You've got a lot of stories. Do we have anything to get back here? A man full of stories with nothing in them.
[other speaker] I keep trying to get you to help put the figures together. What's the deal? You mean the year?
[other speaker] Oh, the year. It just popped into my mind a while ago. Well. It just popped into my mind a while ago, doesn't it? Yeah, well 
[other speaker] I know what they're trying to do. No, no, no, no, no, no. 
[Group leaving turmoil undecipherable] You're taking a picture of one of these post-sale rotors or what? Well, I'm talking, you know what the old... I should have brought one of the discs. I have one at home. You have? Yeah. You know what the old radio... I do almost as well as you. All right. My goodness. Oh boy, you're going to bed, kid. Well, let me meet him first. Meet my naked bird. Yeah, yeah, go to bed. Capacitor to me. Yeah. Just take a seat. It's noisy, but Albert comes and bides you when he's ready. Doing the same thing, that's a push-up pump basically. Alright, now, you think you can do any push-ups with that?
28:28