Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (76 page)

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 station, at a desolate area now known as the U.S. Army Dugway proving ground, and the device still worked.

Witnesses to his experiments included engineers and curiosity-seekers from other countries as well as local visitors from Utah Power and Light, the Secretary of State's office in Utah and other officials. As far as this author can discover, no one refuted Henry Moray's claim that his Radiant Energy device did run motors, light bulbs and a radio.

The invention had unusual characteristics. Photographers exclaimed over the intensity of the light from the bulbs—remarkably brighter than 100- or 150-watt bulbs normally shone.

While the invention converted energy from the cosmos into light and attracted well-known officials, some people entered Moray's life without leaving a calling card. For example, in 1939 he refused an offer to take his work to Russia. Soon the anonymous threatening phone calls began, telling Henry there was a contract out on his life.

Despite death threats, Henry Moray repeatedly worked on his strange electric generator in front of creditable witnesses. The only threat which stopped him from demonstrations came in the form of advice from his patent attorneys in Washington, D.C.—under patent laws he could have lost his rights to a patent if he showed his invention to just anyone.

The U.S. Patent Office itself was not much help either. That agency rejected seven patent applications for his Radiant Energy Device because the device did not fit the physics known at the time. "Where is the source of energy?" the examiners asked. One rejection notice from the patent office wrongly assumed that the energy was originally electromagnetic. Moray, however, only said it is electrical after it hit his semi-conductors.

BULLETS PIERCE WINDSHIELDS

Henry carried on multiple battles at the same time. Instead of being helped to research the Radiant Energy device, he was hindered. In time-wasting letters he fought the patent office, treachery from business partners, and scientists who witnessed Radiant Energy and later denied it when their employers changed. And he had to be strong to keep his family's morale up in the face of unknown enemies.

John Moray remembers an incident in Salt Lake City when he and the other children were in the family car, with his mother driving. Sitting in the back seat, the boy felt his heart lurch with shock as a bullet crashed through the car and lodged in the windshield in front of his mother. "A classic black sedan with all the shades down almost forced her off the street, then sped away up 21st South."

W i t h i n a few weeks, an unknown assailant had also fired shots at Henry's friend S. E. Bringhurst, the first president of his research institute. Bringhurst did not have bullet-proof glass in his car, and the bullet zipped past his head and out the rear of the car.

Henry bought a 32.20 revolver and a Colt .32 handgun to protect his family, in addition to the bullet-proof glass installed in the windows of his automobiles. The whole Moray family suffered as a result of the mysterious opposition to Henry's work. Mrs. Ella Moray lived in fear that something would happen to one of the children, and the children paid the price of losing a normal childhood. They were forbidden to go anywhere by themselves. Even when the boys were almost teenagers, they could not go out without an escort because of the threat of a kidnapping.

R.E.A. MAN SABOTAGES DEVICE

Violence in Henry's laboratory also shocked the family. A man named Felix Frazer who had been sent by the Rural Electrical Administration to work in Moray's lab went crazy with a sledge hammer (or as some reports say, an axe) one day, and destroyed the Radiant Energy machine. He had not broken into the lab; he had been hired to work there!

What type of person would hammer an important invention into useless pieces—destroy a device which took years to perfect and which contained expensive and almost irreplaceable parts? John Moray describes the saboteur as "a double agent trying to force Dr. Moray to co-operate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Electrical Administration and a communist government."

John was 12 years old at the time, and as a grown man he chronicled a related episode in the book Sea of Energy:

As a result of the constant threat to his life, my father carried a gun with him at all times. He carried a .32 in his pocket, and whenever he walked from the house to the laboratory at night he would wear a 32.20 revolver. He was an excellent shot in the old Western sense . . .

On three different occasions, he was attacked at his laboratory and shot his way out of the situation.
The incident of March 2, 1940, particularly stands out. . . Late that afternoon a friend of mine and I were playing on the front lawn of our home. My cousin was just starting up his car, which was parked beside my father's car in the garage—the two cars side by side, from the street one could not tell which car was being cranked or who was driving.
Suddenly several men in a sedan turned into the driveway and pulled guns as if they intended to fire on the car that was starting up in the driveway. When my cousin backed out, the men could see that it was not my father, and they quickly drove away.
I told my father about the incident and he laughed, trying to minimize it to prevent my worrying. . . .

Henry Moray later drove John and his two sisters to the Centre Theatre. After the movie, the youngsters phoned home as instructed. They were told to wait there; mother would pick them up.

However, no one came, and we waited for several hours. Finally my cousin Chester picked us up. When we arrived home we discovered that my father had been shot in the leg and the doctor was there ... the president of the company was also there.

Henry Moray had gone to his laboratory that evening. When he was ready to leave and had the front door open, he remembered to pick up some materials from a locked inner office. As he fumbled with keys in the dark, he had the impression someone was coming up behind him. As he turned to look, a heavy object hit his right shoulder, leaving the arm halfparalysed. With his left arm, he grabbed the assailant's head. While Moray pinned the assailant to his left side, the man's gun became entangled in his overcoat.

As the first man struggled, a second man carrying a gun ran up. Henry Moray kicked the second man, knocking his gun free at the same time as the first man's gun discharged. The bullet travelled downward, grazing the side of Moray's leg, and ricocheted off the concrete floor. Moray's right arm came back to life enough to get his own gun out. He pointed it at the two men and waved them out the front door.

"He was immediately fired upon again by someone at a distance," John Moray writes.

He returned the fire, knocking the third gunman down. A fourth man rushed up to help the wounded gunman. Henry recognized this man as Felix Fraser (Rural Electrification Administration Engineer).

The second man said to the first assailant, "Well, you weren't as quick on the draw as you thought you were," and Henry Moray recognized the voice of a FBI man he had known at one time as a security guard.

At that point, Henry realized he was all alone in a very difficult and dangerous situation.

Bleeding severely, Henry knew he would faint at any moment. If he fainted while the men were there, he would be at their mercy. "So in panic he told them to get out, pretending that he had not recognized any of them, and the men promptly left."

Henry Moray was an excellent shot and could have killed his assailant in his laboratory, but Moray was not a violent man.

WOUNDED AND HARASSED

He believed the harassments were intended to force him to turn over his laboratory notes to Felix Fraser and associates. He tested his theory the next workday. His family helped him to hobble to the laboratory before anyone arrived. Julius Noyes, his assistant at the time, arrived at 8
A
.
M
., greeted Henry, and went to work in the back room, while Henry did not move from behind his own desk. John Moray describes the incident:

Later, Felix Fraser came in and rushed back to Julius Noyes. Shortly after, Fraser returned to the office and fussed around for a few minutes, looking at the floor. Then he came into my father's office and said, "Henry, why didn't you tell me you were shot?" Immediately Dad asked him how he knew that he had been shot. Fraser said, "Oh, Julius told me." But my father had deliberately prevented Julius from knowing of the shooting.

From then on, trouble multiplied. Henry Moray refused to cooperate further with the REA. John recalls that people attacked his father's credibility. His family later discovered that more than a dozen of Henry's original patent applications had disappeared from the U.S. Patent Office, although the file jackets remained there. "The contents and applications themselves are gone ... Watergate was not the first great coverup and act of duplicity," John Moray wrote. Who stole the more-than-a-dozen patent applications? John Moray says the question will probably remain unanswered.

Over half a century after Henry Moray's discovery, his sons are still waiting for an investor who will fund the expensive development of the Moray device; engineering problems still have to be solved.

Some researchers believe that T. Henry Moray's secrets died with him and that the family and associates would not be able to replicate his device even if they had funding. After all, a saboteur had destroyed the priceless parts of the Moray device. Moray's sons, however, reply that Henry had built another working model which he later took apart, and that they inherited all his laboratory notes.

John remembers the later model, and he describes a 1942 trip to the mountains of Colorado with his father and the device. Since it was during World War II, Henry had to scrape up enough gas rations for the round trip. He set up the experiment in a park and the unit performed smoothly.

"Well," said their host, "If you leave it here and if my engineers like it, we'll decide if we want to buy it or not."
This is what Moray ran into all the time, John maintained, "My dad said 'thanks but no thanks.'"
The second generation of the Moray family of Utah has lived with the Radiant Energy project close to their hearts for decades. But their experiences make it difficult to trust all too many of the people who seek him out, even today. John tells about a friend of 30 years, with whom Henry left a piece of equipment. It was not even a power component; it was a measuring piece. His friend tore the equipment apart looking for its supposed secret.

WHO WILL HELP INDEPENDENT INVENTOR?

The financial cost of developing the Radiant Energy device was high, considering how difficult it was in the 1920s for even an upper-middle-class family to scrape together $400,000 for materials and equipment, John said. Translating to circa-1995 dollars, the Moray family spent millions on the Radiant Energy Device. Their longtime goal was the development of Radiant Energy, which Henry described in 1958 (letter to Colin Gardner of California) as a source of energy "greater than that coming from the Atom, more unlimited and of no danger to the user whatsoever from radiations, residue, etc."

Gardner was one of countless people who contacted the Moray family after reading Henry's book Beyond the Light Rays or the later book. In 1958 Gardner conveyed his enthusiasm to fellow U.S. Navy officers at Point Mugu, California. In a letter to Moray, Gardner offered to connect his superior officers with Moray. Moray's reply illustrates his weariness at that point: "The government has a funny way of going at investigating and/or accepting new ideas . . . That is why we are not first into space . . . Just sending me a form to fill out, treating RE as every other minor discovery, is of no interest to me. That is what all the government branches ever do . . ."

Moray left his laboratory door partly open to the Navy, however; and replied to a second letter from Gardner by saying that he would be delighted to meet Gardner's very top supervisors and discuss his "discoveries which are greater than nuclear fission." However, added Moray, "we have so many hundreds asking for information who take up our time needlessly that we cannot spend the time unless it is with those qualified (to understand Radiant Energy) and with high enough authority to deal."

Moray's office sent his confidential papers to Gardner's boss. After two weeks of silence from the Navy, the message relayed back to Moray was "it is felt that you do not have a commercial product for us to buy and use at our discretion."

This incident is only one example of difficulties facing independent inventors of unorthodox energy devices. Although Moray spent the family's bank account on experiments which produced a laboratory proofof-concept device, he was expected to somehow without funding take it beyond that stage through the very expensive stage to a commercial product. A final product must be engineered and fine-tuned until it works consistently enough to be mass-produced. Today, the Moray brothers estimate it would take more than $14 million just to build the parts used in a Radiant Energy laboratory model (which is not as refined as a production model); they say that high-priced personnel, expensive test equipment and huge capital outlay would be needed.