Junto Boys

JOHN KANZIUS

I love the way science works. This guy was busy curing cancer when he accidentally discovered free energy. Well, not exactly, but there is considerable promise on both fronts. The great thing is that he is not on the public payroll, he is merely a retired tinkerer in Erie, PA.

A former radio engineer, Kanzius donned his cape and sprung into action when he got cancer a few years ago. He recalled from his radio days that his eyeglasses had a funny way of heating up whenever he stood too close to the broadcast tower. He came up with the idea of seeding a tumor with microscopic bits of gold and then blasting radio waves at the person. The waves of course go right through the person but the metal heats up and destroys the tumorous cells. It sounds simple and it is, and so far, so good in the clinical trials. All they have to figure out is how to get the metal particulates to adhere to only the bad guy cells and never the good guy cells and it is sayonara to many types of cancer.

So, while he was using high energy radio waves to desalinate saltwater the other day, he accidentally bumped the beaker of water and saw a spark. So, he took out his lighter and put the flame to the water and it burned like a roman candle. If he turns the radio waves off then the flame goes out, but so long as the radio waves bombard the saltwater, it burns. Thus, he has found a way to liberate heat energy from the most abundant resource on earth. The radio waves agitate the molecules within the water and some of the H2O bonds are broken. The hydrogen, being lighter than air, floats away and provides a constant source of fuel for a fire on the surface of the water. That's how I think it works anyways.

It's not exactly free energy, since the laws of thermodynamics prohibit such a thing - it takes more energy to produce the radio waves than you get back with the heat. But still, this will certainly become more than just a curiosity - getting energy from seawater is one of those holy grails of science. There's always that dream that we can thumb our nose at Saudi Arabia once we realize that California borders the biggest battery on planet earth.

I love the accidental nature of Kanzius' discovery. It reminds me of the stories of how we got penicillin and rubber - the first of which has saved millions of lives while the latter has prevented them. That was a joke, folks.