Four Inventions That Could Have Changed The World

Nowadays, there are lots of problems in the world and most of the people know that, but not many of us are willing to change something. Well, I know that there are lots of inventors, scientists or researchers who are trying to develop new technologies that could change the world for the better. This is not an easy thing to do, but it’s always worth trying. However, there are certain inventions that could have changed the world, but didn’t happen and I’m not sure if it will ever happen. Here are four of them:

#1 Time Travel

Time travel means moving people, objects or information between different instants of time, either past or future. Since the beginning of the modern age, people wanted to travel back or forward in time for various reasons.

Some scientists say that traveling into the past would require going to a parallel universe which would result in a change of history from the time the traveler went backwards in time, however, for the moment we don’t really know if traveling backwards in time is possible as the laws of physics do not allow it.

The story is a little different when it comes to traveling into the future as it would be possible thanks to the time dilation, a phenomenon which can be found in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Time dilation can be explained using two physically identical watches and if one of them appears to be ticking at a slower rate when it should be ticking at the same rate then you got yourself a time dilation.

Any device or means of transportation that would make possible time traveling is best known as a time machine, but for the moment we could only see these in movies. One claim about a time machine was revealed by Francois Brune who said that Italian priest, Pellegrino Maria Ernetti invented a so-called “time viewer.” This time machine named Chronovisor gave the Father Pellegrino the possibility of viewing a scene of the lost tragedy, Thyestes, in Rome in 169 BC, and he also said that he saw Jesus Christ dying. Well, the Chronovisor was never confirmed as there were no hard evidence.

During the last century there were claims of some mysterious experiments in which time travel happened and the most popular is the Philadelphia Experiment that was intended to make invisible a US destroyer ship. The ship was called USS Eldridge and on July 22nd, 1943, the destroyer escort became almost invisible and some people at the scene claimed that a “greenish fog” appeared instead. These claims were strengthened by the fact that some crew members experienced serious nausea after the experiment.

Well, the US Navy didn’t stop here with the experiments and on October 23rd, the USS Eldridge totally disappeared from the surface of the sea. Afterwards, the ship was spotted at US naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, then after a few moments it was spotted once again in Philadelphia and it appeared to be an accidental case of teleportation.

As if this wasn’t strange enough, Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, claimed that they leapt into “hyperspace” from Philadelphia to Norfolk and they “woke up” at a US Air Force Station in Montauk Point, Long Island in the year of 1983. The two members of the crew also said that they met with John von Neumann there, however, von Neumann died in 1957. We don’t know what to say about that, but people at the scene said that the crew members who were part of the experiment suffered from severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia.

In order to make it a little more weird, a member of the crew called Jacob L. Murray disappeared. Other bad things happened with the Philadelphia Experiment as five members of the crew were fused to the metal deck or on the bulkhead as some “special spots” caught fire. Although, the US Navy stopped the tests immediately, it seems like the Philadelphia Experiment was continued with the Montauk Project which consisted of a series paranormal experiments led by the US Government.

Allegedly, there were many experiments conducted at the Montauk Air Force Station that were destined to provide the US Navy and Army with “psychological warfare” technologies which also included time travel. Although it was regarded as a conspiracy theory, the first reports of the Montauk Project appeared in the early 1980s.

These rumors were based on Carl Allen’s testimony who said that the Philadelphia Experiment did happen. It seems like Carl Allen was mentally unstable therefore some people believed him and some didn’t. His story was nourished by others who claimed that the Philadelphia Experiment aka Project Rainbow was continued by researchers from the original experiment.

They started the work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York, and they called it the Phoenix Project. After a while, they moved to another place in Montauk, New York, as the researchers needed more space and a more advanced radar dish. Although they didn’t try to replicate the Philadelphia Experiment, their main goal was to develop a gun that would cause severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Well, we don’t know very much about the results of the Montauk Project, but some reports say that it was finished in 1987 and that the Montauk Point is not opened for public due to environmental contamination.

Here are some people who claimed that they experienced time travel – Darren Daulton, a former catcher in the Major League Baseball said that the he “skipped through time” and that he experienced “astral travel.” Another well known time slip case is the Moberly-Jourdain incident which took place on August 10th, 1901. Two women, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, said that they slipped through time and they spotted Marie Antoinette who lived between November 2nd, 1755 and October 16th, 1793.

Another time travel controversy was raised by John Titor who claimed that he is a time traveler from 2036 and he also told us some facts about the future – he claims that the USA will be broken in five smaller regions and that the environment will be damaged due to nuclear attacks. He also made some other minor predictions, but until now none of them became true. There only one single thing that makes us to believe him as he stated that “the breakthrough that will allow time travel technology will occur within a year or so (2001 then) when CERN brings their larger facility online.” Well, CERN brought online the LHC after several years, but for now the Large Hadron Collider was shut down until 2009 due to severe problems with the magnets that overheated.

I don’t know if it would be that great to have a time machine that would take us back or forward in time. It’s just the way of the nature to let things happen therefore there are good thing and bad things in our lives. You can’t always get it right and instead of trying to build a time machine to “fix” our errors, people should try and be a little more loving with each other.

#2 100% Efficient Solar Cells

As far as we know, the climate is changing (and not in the good way) as the global warming is affecting most of our planet. Global warming is mainly caused by pollution with CO2-emissions as the main pollutant. CO2-emissions are coming from fossil fuels like coal and oil therefore we need to find other sources of power called renewable energies.

The list of renewable energies includes solar power, wind power, tidal power, wave power, hydro power, geothermal power, biomass and biofuels. Currently solar and wind power are the most used of them all thanks to solar cells and respectively, wind turbines.

Probably, solar power is the most important as the sun is an enormous source of power. For the moment there are several drawbacks that hinder the deployment of solar power plants at global stage – the first would be that the solar cells are not very efficient and they only convert in energy only a small amount of power coming from the sun. The second is that they are not cost-effective, they are very expensive so nobody wants to lose a lot of money.

Another negative aspect is that the sun doesn’t shine all day long so we need advanced solar power storage system that would provide electricity when the night comes. We shouldn’t forget that the climate itself frustrates solar power usage as the rain could fall several days or maybe weeks in a row depending on regions from across Earth. And this is not all as when winter comes, the sun isn’t shining with a high intensity so the solar cells cannot do their “job” properly.

Solar cells are AKA photovoltaic cells as they convert solar power into electricity thanks to the photovoltaic effect which was discovered by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, a renowned German physicist. The solar cells are linked together to form solar modules which also link together to form photovoltaic arrays that provide us with electricity. The photovoltaic arrays are also used for satellites and space probes, and remote radiotelephones among others.

What we really need to completely remove our dependence on fossil fuels, are 100% efficient solar cells with a very high storage capacity that would provide electricity when the sun doesn’t shine. Well, as there isn’t such thing as 100% percent efficiency, we would be satisfied with 99% and if somebody will be able to develop such technology, then fossil fuels are gone, then most of the pollution is gone, then global warming is gone which results in a cleaner and better environment where people and animals could live in complete harmony.

#3 Water-Fueled Car

As aforementioned, the world as we know it today will change due to global warming and pollution therefore we have to cut-down carbon-dioxide emissions. A big “contribution” to the CO2-emissions is made by gasoline-powered cars therefore car manufacturers started to develop and sell hybrid/electric cars. These cars didn’t make such an impact on customers but was a good start. Drivers know that the cars pollute less, however, hybrid cars are very expensive and they are not easy to maintain therefore we need something cheaper to power our cars of the future.

A fuel alternative might be water as during history there were some attempts to build water-fueled cars, however these were not so successful and these were considered investment frauds. But what makes people and scientists believe that? Well, the answer is simple as water-fueled vehicles are based on extracting energy directly from water and this is not possible as it violates the first and second law of thermodynamics.

Water-fueled cars are perpetual motion machines that violate the first law of thermodynamics which says that “the increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings” which means that the energy output from an engine can’t exceed the energy input. In the second law of thermodynamics, a brilliant guy called Kelvin said that “it is impossible to convert heat completely into work” which means that an engine or a process cannot have an efficiency of 100% therefore it cannot convert all its energy into work therefore a perpetual motion machine is impossible to exist.

I’m no genius, but I understand the laws of thermodynamics and probably the inventors and scientists know more about it than me, then why are they trying to build water-fueled cars? Well, maybe because they are trying to change something in this world by designing new and cleaner technologies to power our cars.

In order to develop engines that run on water, scientists tried to improve the electrolysis of water which is a process that splits water in hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. The problem is that you cannot do electrolysis and to have enough energy to power the car and then to do more electrolysis as it violates the rules of thermodynamics.

During recent history, there were several attempts of building water-fueled cars like the one of Stanley Allen Meyer who claimed that he came up with a water fuel cell. The American inventor said that his fuel cell was able to split water in hydrogen and oxygen, and after this, the water’s elements were burned in order to generate power in a process that reconstituted the molecules of water. Allegedly, this device would produce an improved water electrolysis as it required less energy than regular electrolysis.

I guess there is no point in reminding you that this would violate the laws of thermodynamics and an Ohio court decided that Meyer’s invention was a fraud as expert scientists and witnesses in the court decided that there “was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis.” The Ohio court ordered the inventor to pay pack the $25,000 that he got from two investors.

A couple of years after Meyer was forced to pay back the money, an unknown patent application from Canada introduced another miniature water fuel cell which was smaller than a regular spark plug and it seems like it could mix the gases from the electrolysis with ionized air and non-combustible gases. These were mixed in the combustion chamber at the pre-ignition phase and it would result in hydrogen and oxygen in free radical form. Well, this patent never made it as it didn’t specify where the energy for the ionized air was coming from and because it lacked other important evidence.

Probably the first ever claim of a water-fueled car was the electrolytic carburetor developed by Charles H. Garrett. The inventor showed and demonstrated his patent on September 8th, 1935 in the Dallas Morning News. Allegedly, his machine was producing hydrogen thanks to electrolysis that was generated in the lower portion of a regular carburetor. Then again, Charles H. Garrett didn’t manage to find a way of generating energy to power the engine so his invention was ignored.

Another electrolysis breakthrough was announced by a company called Hydrogen Technology Applications which claims that their system could make a car run only on “Aguygen” which is a hydrogen-oxygen mixture generated by an electrolyser design. It seems like their gas is actually a state of matter called “magnegases” which is unproven for the moment. In order to explain its Aguygen, the company used the so called Theory of Magnecules, but this one was discredited by scientists as there are many misinterpretations and misunderstandings regarding the theory. However, Dennis Klein the founder of the company says that he is in negotiations with a car manufacturer from the US and that the US Government will build Hummers that run on Aguygen so we’ll have to wait and see if he says the truth.

The water-fueled car claims continue with Genepax’s invention which uses water and air to power a vehicle. According to the Japanese company, the Water Energy System consists of an on-board energy generator which extracts hydrogen based on a “mechanism which is similar to the method in which hydrogen is produced by a reaction of metal hydride and water,” and then the hydrogen will produce energy to run the car. Genepax didn’t say anything about the “core part of this invention” and along with the fact that the system uses hydrogen to run the car, makes everybody to think that this is only a hybrid-fueled car, not a water-fueled car. Well, Genepax’s Energy System was unveiled in June 2008 so we are still waiting for the Japanese company and the scientists to clarify this once and for all.

The last alleged water-fueled car comes from Sri Lanka where Thushara Priyamal Edirisinghe developed a vehicle which ran 300 kilometers using three liters of water. The Sri Lankan inventor claims that his water-fueled car is burning the gases which result after water’s electrolysis in order to power the engine. “The specialty of my invention is its ability to produce this energy from water with a minimal electric current of barely 0.5 amperes, which was not possible earlier,” said Thushara Priyamal Edirisinghe, but once again we have to remind you that this would violate the laws of thermodynamics so nobody understands how the engine gets the energy when all of water’s energy is used in the process of electrolysis. Well, we are still waiting for the inventor to explain it to us and only then we will call his invention a water-fueled car.

I am pretty skeptical about this and I think that we will never see a water-fueled car, but if we did, then it would be a great invention and probably nobody will use gasoline-powered cars or even those expensive hybrid cars.

#4 Teleportation

Have you ever been in a hurry or you are too lazy? Well, teleportation could be the perfect “means of transportation” as it you or an object could move instantaneously from one place to another. In theory, teleportation would happen through paranormal means or with the help of some state-of-the-art technology. However, the term of teleportation is mostly used in science fiction books, movies and games among others.

Teleportation would require sending data from one place to another and it would recreate at the destination point an identical object or organism just like the one at the initial point. Although it didn’t happen yet, teleportation is regarded by many people as a crime as “destroying” a human and his soul, and recreating him in other place would not be a continuity of his existence. However, creating an exact copy of an object or organism is impossible and we have the No-Cloning Theorem and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to prove it.

Whatever people might think about teleportation, scientists like Albert Einstein demonstrated in his theory of relativity that it’s impossible to instantaneously move from one place to another because this would mean that you have to move faster than light.

Also, in the special relativity theory we can find a relationship between cause and effect called causality and we learned from there that the theory would be violated if objects, organisms or information would travel faster than the speed of light. The causality says that it’s impossible to observe the effect before the cause as you cannot see something before it happens and you cannot receive the information before it had been sent and so far such thing never happened.

Allegedly there is one case of teleportation and we talked about it earlier – the Philadelphia Experiment aka Project Rainbow. We remind you that the US Navy was trying to make the USS Eldridge invisible and as a result of the experiment, the ship was spotted miles away in a case of accidental teleportation. Later claims suggested that the Philadelphia Experiment was a case of time travel, but the US Navy denied such experiment and nobody came with hard evidence so the story is considered a hoax.

Even if information or any type of matter cannot travel faster than speed of light, there are specific situations where we will encounter faster than light speeds like wave velocities, closing speeds and proper speeds.

Well, I think that I won’t live the day when teleportation will be just another means of transportation as it’s hard to cheat on physics laws and Einstein and other scientists were smarter than all of us so I guess that we will have say goodbye forever to this easy means of transportation.

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