by Jon E. Lewis
Harley Copp, a former Ford engineer and executive in charge of the crash testing program, testified that the highest level of Ford’s management made the decision to go forward with the production of the Pinto, knowing that the gas tank was vulnerable to puncture and rupture at low rear impact speeds creating a significant risk of death or injury from fire and knowing that “fixes” were feasible at nominal cost. He testified that management’s decision was based on the cost savings which would inure from omitting or delaying the “fixes.”
Mr. Copp’s testimony concerning management’s awareness of the crash tests results and the vulnerability of the Pinto fuel system was corroborated by other evidence. At an April 1971 product review meeting chaired by Mr. MacDonald, those present received and discussed a report (exhibit 125) prepared by Ford engineers pertaining to the financial impact of a proposed federal standard on fuel system integrity and the cost savings which would accrue from deferring even minimal “fixes.” The report refers to crash tests of the integrity of the fuel system of Ford vehicles and design changes needed to meet anticipated federal standards. Also in evidence was a September 23, 1970, report (exhibit 124) by Ford’s “Chassis Design Office” concerning a program “to establish a corporate [Ford] position and reply to the government” on the proposed federal fuel system integrity standard which included zero fuel spillage at 20 miles per hour fixed barrier crash by January 1, 1972, and 30 miles per hour by January 1, 1973. The report states in part: “The 20 and 30 mph rear fixed barrier crashes will probably require repackaging the fuel tanks in a protected area such as above the rear axle. This is based on moving barrier crash tests of a Chevelle and a Ford at 30 mph and other Ford products at 20 mph. Currently there are no plans for forward models to repackage the fuel tanks. Tests must be conducted to prove that repackaged tanks will live without significantly strengthening rear structure for added protection.” The report also notes that the Pinto was the “[smallest] car line with most difficulty in achieving compliance.” It is reasonable to infer that the report was prepared for and known to Ford officials in policy-making positions.
The fact that two of the crash tests were run at the request of the Ford chassis and vehicle engineering department for the specific purpose of demonstrating the advisability of moving the fuel tank over the axle as a possible “f x” further corroborated Mr. Copp’s testimony that management knew the results of the crash tests. Mr. Kennedy, who succeeded Mr. Copp as the engineer in charge of Ford’s crash testing program, admitted that the test results had been forwarded up the chain of command to his superiors.
Finally, Mr. Copp testified to conversations in late 1968 or early 1969 with the chief assistant research engineer in charge of cost-weight evaluation of the Pinto, and to a later conversation with the chief chassis engineer who was then in charge of crash testing the early prototype. In these conversations, both men expressed concern about the integrity of the Pinto’s fuel system and complained about management’s unwillingness to deviate from the design if the change would cost money.
FREE ELECTRICITY
Born in Croatia in 1856, Nikola Tesla was a scientific genius, some of whose inventions have entered everyday life (he developed AC electrical current), some of which were madcap.
Or were they? One of Tesla’s most infamous ideas concerned electricity that could be transmitted through the air without the need for wires. To this end, he developed the Tesla Coil, a device to create bursts of high-voltage electricity which could be beamed to receivers without the need for wires. His biggest coil, the Magnifying Transmitter, was built at his lab in Colorado Springs, and when tested sent electricity arcing 50 metres into the air. The surge created a static discharge that lit up the earth. But the Magnifying Transmitter worked: it illuminated light bulbs twenty five miles away, without wires.
Tesla believed that the earth is a natural conductor, and that a strategically placed grid of Magnifying Transmitters could send free electricity over the world (see Document, p.167). To receive a supply, all people would need to do was stick a metal rod into their backyard, then relay the current to antennae on their electrical devices.
According to conspiracy lore, Tesla’s wireless electricity scheme did not catch on because it was suppressed by big electricity manufacturers, notably J. P. Morgan, who had hitherto been financing Tesla’s projects. “Where do I put the meter?” he famously asked Tesla about the latter’s “free power” scheme. The scientific jury is out on whether Tesla’s coils are a possible global power source, but Morgan certainly pulled the plug on free power in Tesla’s lifetime. And suppression of customer-friendly electrical goods was hardly unknown in the USA. Time magazine reported in 1945 that Philips, Osram and GE had engaged in a conspiracy to suppress light bulb technology that would have produced cheaper and longer lasting bulbs.
Inadvertently though, Morgan may have done the world a favour by stopping the flow of dollars to the inventive Tesla. On Long Island, Tesla began construction of the monstrous Wardenclyffe Tower to run a “World System”, combining wireless transmission of free energy and a global broadcasting system. There was intense press speculation – not helped by Tesla’s boast that the tower’s beam was so powerful it could destroy a ship in seconds – that Tesla’s invention was behind the mysterious sinking of the Iena in 1907. More recently, it has been suggested that the 1908 explosion that wiped out half a million acres of Siberian forest was not, as officially claimed, caused by a piece of Enke’s comet hitting Earth, but a misfiring from Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower in which a colossal, trillion-watt beam of power went to the wrong place. The tower was pulled down in 1917 because German U-boats were using it as a navigational beacon
Lack of money also put paid to Tesla’s 1934 plan for a particle beam weapon, which could knock aircraft out of the sky 250 miles away. Tesla christened his new invention the “Peace Ray”, because he considered it so terrible a deterrent that all wars would stop. The ray gun was never built in Tesla’s lifetime (he died in poverty in 1943) but the concept was revived in the 1980s by Texan physicist Dr Bernard Eastlund – and, say conspiracists, by the mysterious Project HAARP of the US government in remotest Alaska.
Further Reading
Nikola Tesla and David Hatcher Childress, The Tesla Papers: Nikola Tesla on Free Energy and Wireless Transmission of Power, 2000
DOCUMENT: NIKOLA TESLA, MY INVENTIONS, 1919 [EXTRACT]
One day, as I was roaming in the mountains, I sought shelter from an approaching storm. The sky became overhung with heavy clouds but somehow the rain was delayed until, all of a sudden, there was a lightning flash and a few moments after a deluge. This observation set me thinking.
It was manifest that the two phenomena were closely related, as cause and effect, and a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy involved in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of lightning being much like that of a sensitive trigger.
Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed.
The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man. The consummation depended on our ability to develop electric forces of the order of those in nature. It seemed a hopeless undertaking, but I made up my mind to try it and immediately on my return to the United States, in the summer of 1892, work was begun which was to me all the more attractive, because a means of the same kind was necessary for the successful transmission of energy without wires.
The first gratifying result was obtained in the spring of the succeeding year when I reached tensions
of about 1,000,000 volts with my conical coil. That was not much in the light of the present art, but it was then considered a feat. Steady progress was made until the destruction of my laboratory by fire in 1895, as may be judged from an article by T. C. Martin which appeared in the April number of the Century Magazine. This calamity set me back in many ways and most of that year had to be devoted to planning and reconstruction. However, as soon as circumstances permitted, I returned to the task.
Although I knew that higher electro-motive forces were attainable with apparatus of larger dimensions, I had an instinctive perception that the object could be accomplished by the proper design of a comparatively small and compact transformer. In carrying on tests with a secondary in the form of a flat spiral, as illustrated in my patents, the absence of streamers surprised me, and it was not long before I discovered that this was due to the position of the turns and their mutual action. Profiting from this observation I resorted to the use of a high tension conductor with turns of considerable diameter sufficiently separated to keep down the distributed capacity, while at the same time preventing undue accumulation of the charge at any point. The application of this principle enabled me to produce pressures of 4,000,000 volts, which was about the limit obtainable in my new laboratory at Houston Street, as the discharges extended through a distance of 16 feet. A photograph of this transmitter was published in the Electrical Review of November 1898.
In order to advance further along this line I had to go into the open, and in the spring of 1899, having completed preparations for the erection of a wireless plant, I went to Colorado where I remained for more than one year. Here I introduced other improvements and refinements which made it possible to generate currents of any tension that may be desired. Those who are interested will find some information in regard to the experiments I conducted there in my article, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” in the Century Magazine of June 1900, to which I have referred on a previous occasion.
I have been asked by the ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER to be quite explicit on this subject so that my young friends among the readers of the magazine will clearly understand the construction and operation of my “Magnifying Transmitter” and the purposes for which it is intended. Well, then, in the first place, it is a resonant transformer with a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, are of considerable area and arranged in space along ideal enveloping surfaces of very large radii of curvature, and at proper distances from one another thereby insuring a small electric surface density everywhere so that no leak can occur even if the conductor is bare. It is suitable for any frequency, from a few to many thousands of cycles per second, and can be used in the production of currents of tremendous volume and moderate pressure, or of smaller amperage and immense electromotive force. The maximum electric tension is merely dependent on the curvature of the surfaces on which the charged elements are situated and the area of the latter.
Judging from my past experience, as much as 100,000,000 volts are perfectly practicable. On the other hand currents of many thousands of amperes may be obtained in the antenna. A plant of but very moderate dimensions is required for such performances. Theoretically, a terminal of less than 90 feet in diameter is sufficient to develop an electromotive force of that magnitude while for antenna currents of from 2,000–4,000 amperes at the usual frequencies it need not be larger than 30 feet in diameter.
In a more restricted meaning this wireless transmitter is one in which the Hertz-wave radiation is an entirely negligible quantity as compared with the whole energy, under which condition the damping factor is extremely small and an enormous charge is stored in the elevated capacity.
Such a circuit may then be excited with impulses of any kind, even of low frequency and it will yield sinusoidal and continuous oscillations like those of an alternator.
Taken in the narrowest significance of the term, however, it is a resonant transformer which, besides possessing these qualities, is accurately proportioned to fit the globe and its electrical constants and properties, by virtue of which design it becomes highly efficient and effective in the wireless transmission of energy. Distance is then absolutely eliminated, there being no diminution in the intensity of the transmitted impulses. It is even possible to make the actions increase with the distance from the plant according to an exact mathematical law.
This invention was one of a number comprised in my “World-System” of wireless transmission which I undertook to commercialize on my return to New York in 1900. As to the immediate purposes of my enterprise, they were clearly outlined in a technical statement of that period from which I quote:
The “World-System” has resulted from a combination of several original discoveries made by the inventor in the course of long continued research and experimentation. It makes possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the interconnection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment. By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Globe. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant.
These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated thru one or more wires (at a distance obviously restricted) can likewise be actuated, without artificial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the Globe. Thus, not only will entirely new fields for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission but the old ones vastly extended.
The “World-System” is based on the application of the following important inventions and discoveries:
1) The “Tesla Transformer.” This apparatus is in the production of electrical vibrations as revolutionary as gunpowder was in warfare. Currents many times stronger than any ever generated in the usual ways, and sparks over one hundred feet long, have been produced by the inventor with an instrument of this kind.
2) The “Magnifying Transmitter.” This is Tesla’s best invention, a peculiar transformer specially adapted to excite the Earth, which is in the transmission of electrical energy what the telescope is in astronomical observation. By the use of this marvelous device he has already set up electrical movements of greater intensity than those of lightning and passed a current, sufficient to light more than two hundred incandescent lamps, around the Globe.
3) The “Tesla Wireless System.” This system comprises a number of improvements and is the only means known for transmitting economically electrical energy to a distance without wires. Careful tests and measurements in connection with an experimental station of great activity, erected by the inventor in Colorado, have demonstrated that power in any desired amount can be conveyed, clear across the Globe if necessary, with a loss not exceeding a few per cent.
4) The “Art of Individualization.” This invention of Tesla’s is to primitive ‘tuning’ what refined language is to unarticulated expression. It makes possible the transmission of signals or messages absolutely secret and exclusive both in the active and passive aspect, that is, non-interfering as well as non-interferable. Each signal is like an individual of unmistakable identity and there is virtually no limit to the number of stations or instruments which can be simultaneously operated without the slightest mutual disturbance.
5) “The Terrestrial Stationary Waves.” This wonderful discovery, popularly explained, means that the Earth is responsive to electrical vibrations of definite pitch just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound. These
particular electrical vibrations, capable of powerfully exciting the Globe, lend themselves to innumerable uses of great importance commercially and in many other respects.
The first “World-System” power plant can be put in operation in nine months. With this power plant it will be practicable to attain electrical activities up to ten million horsepower and it is designed to serve for as many technical achievements as are possible without due expense.
Among these the following may be mentioned:
1) The inter-connection of the existing telegraph exchanges or offices all over the world;
