TABOO 2: INVENTIONS THAT MAKE COMPANIES UNCOMFORTABLE
Imagine that you have invented a new kind of engine that runs on hydrogen with no emissions, and it would render conventional car engines obsolete. Some people might want to prevent your invention from ever coming to market. Perhaps it could disappear without a trace? Perhaps you could disappear, too? And that would be the end of it…
This was the case with Tom Ogle. In 1977 Ogle had filed a patent for a “fuel economy system for an internal combustion engine” that promised “gas mileage in excess of 100 miles per gallon.” There was one drawback: His invention would pose a threat to the international oil industry, which had a number of defensive tools at its disposal. The industry first offered Ogle a substantial sum of money for his patent, which would likely have then disappeared into a bank vault. According to journalist Ron Laytner, all of the potential backers sought a
controlling interest in Ogle’s patent and then wanted to put him away in a lab somewhere while they saw to it his fuel-efficient engine system went nowhere. But Ogle wanted to market his invention himself. He connected with a backer who’d let him work on the device while a partner took over the distribution. But that backer soon sold out to a fuel-system company, which halted the payments to Ogle, claiming it was working on a similar device that was not of his invention. Ogle’s success began a downward spiral. After his wife left him in 1981, he was shot and injured on the street by an unidentified assailant. Months later he collapsed at the apartment of a friend and died of a combination of alcohol and painkillers. The death was determined to be either an accident or suicide, but some believed it was murder. His fuel system died with him.
Another example is Jan Sloot, who in 1995 claimed he developed a way to compress data (the Sloot Digital Coding System) that was far superior to anything available at the time, or even today. A number of international companies, among them Computer Associates and Sun Microsystems, as well as big investors like the Dutch bank ABN AMRO reportedly offered him money for the patent rights.
Instead, Sloot was said to have accepted the offer of an unknown buyer. But at the last second the deal fell through: On July 11, 1999, a day before he was to sign the contract, Sloot died in his garden of a heart attack. The invention’s source code, supposedly stored in the safe deposit box of a bank, was never found.
Some inventors die under mysterious circumstances.