Category: Energy

• The Atomic Energy Free Power

  The Atomic Energy Free Power theory holds that by the early 1960s atomic research had approached or achieved a form of ultra-cheap, near-limitless civilian energy, but that the breakthrough was blocked or buried under pressure from entrenched fossil-fuel interests. In the most common version, 1963 is treated as the key year when the coal lobby moved to prevent the spread of genuinely disruptive atomic electricity.

• The Standard Oil Water-into-Fuel

  This theory claimed that Germany had developed a near-limitless fuel technology—described in rumor as making gasoline from water, from air and water, or from ordinary feedstock so abundant that oil power would be threatened—and that Standard Oil or Rockefeller-linked interests acquired, buried, or destroyed the breakthrough. The story drew strength from a real and complicated history: Germany did build a major synthetic-fuel industry based on coal hydrogenation and Fischer-Tropsch chemistry, Standard Oil and I.G. Farben did have cartel and patent relationships before the war, and the United States did capture German fuel science and recruit German specialists after 1945. The specifically miraculous “water-into-fuel” form of the theory was the conspiratorial exaggeration applied to that real synthetic-fuels history.

• The Empire State Building as a Tesla Tower

  This theory claimed that the Empire State Building was designed not solely as a commercial skyscraper and urban landmark but as a gigantic atmospheric-energy receiver in the spirit of Nikola Tesla’s wireless-power ambitions. In this telling, the building’s height, mast, and electrical prominence were said to reflect an intention to draw or conduct power from the ionosphere. The idea depended on connecting two separate real histories: Tesla’s earlier experiments and plans for wireless transmission at Wardenclyffe, and the 1930-31 construction of the Empire State Building. The theory belongs to the tradition of retrofitting later structures into Tesla’s unfinished technological mythology.