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450 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
through various jobs to electrical engineering and positions such as design
engineer for the largest oil-cooled electrical switch yard in the world.
An industrial accident at a power substation in late 1920 burned the
retina of his eyes and propelled him into legal battles for compensation.
In a way, losing much of his eyesight for years turned out to be a blessing.
Although it meant an empty bank account at the time because he was
unable to work at his usual profession, being forced away from the drawing
table led him back into Radiant Energy research.
SENATOR PROTECTED UTILITIES
Far from being the stereotype of a reclusive basement inventor, Moray
was known in his community and was listed in a 1925 Who's Who in
Engineering. On July 24 of that year, Senator Reed Smoot invited the
young inventor to meet with him in the senator's office in the Hotel Utah.
Henry Moray made an offer which, if accepted, could perhaps have dramatically
changed events in this century. Oil wars, nuclear plant accidents,
acid rain were yet to come.
Henry offered his Radiant Energy discovery to the United States government.
Free of cost. According to The Sea of Energy, the senator
thanked Moray but replied that the government would decline such an
offer. Why "On the grounds that the government was not competing with
public utilities."
Undeterred, Henry spent countless hours in his basement working on
solid state physics with what he called the Moray Valve as a detector for
radio frequencies. According to his records, early in the 1930s he made a
radio which was no bigger than a wristwatch.
Part of Henry's invention was his pioneering use of semi-conductors.
Moray's first germanium solid-state device (a transistor) was sent to the
U.S. Patent Office in 1927, and was rejected on the basis that it would not
work without a heated cathode. Heated cathodes were commonly used in
vacuum tubes of that time. This means that Henry Moray was so far ahead
of his time in semi-conductor technology that the patent office had not
heard of it, and so the bureaucrats decreed that what he had was impossible.
Of course society later learned that cold cathodes are most definitely
possible. But when the transistor was officially invented twenty years
later, no credit was given to Henry Moray.
The second generation of Moray's radio valve not only picked up radio
waves, it also detected a small amount of power. Launched by these
experiments with semi-conductors, he followed a trail of discovery which
led to his powerful energy converter. By 1939, a unit weighing less than
55 pounds, including its wooden case, converted 50,000 watts of power—
enough to run a small factory. He tested it 90 miles from the nearest radio