You’ve probably heard of the 200 mpg carburetor, which was bought up and buried by a conspiracy of “powerful interests”. It’s a great story, but it’s not true.
That doesn’t mean Detroit has no secrets. This recently unearthed and seemingly incomprehensible Chrysler training film reveals what may have been the greatest secret in Motor City history, a real breakthrough technology. Others have since dug up the background and details. Chrysler bet big on it, jealously keeping it secret, investing hundreds of millions, going way out on a limb. Production cars were ready for release, but at the last minute, the limb broke.
Let’s start with this incredible technology by looking at its predecessor. Hybrid cars have emerged by the millions since the year 2000. They combine an electric motor/generator/battery system with the internal combustion engine in a complimentary system, to keep the engine running at its most efficient power and speed, while the electric system working as a motor takes care of extreme loads in acceleration, and working as a generator recovers energy in deceleration. Electric motor/generators are the key. This principle has been known for over a century, since Ferdinand Porsche developed the Lohner-Porsche Mixte Hybrid in 1901.
As Michael Faraday showed in 1831, the relative motion of electric conductors and magnetic fluxes will induce an electric current, that’s a generator. The same machine works the other way as well, electric current and magnetic fluxes will produce relative motion, that’s a motor. You can clearly see this illustrated above. The catch is, at any given time it must be either a motor or a generator, not both. Many have realized through the ages, that when an electric motor drives an electric generator through a common shaft, if the generator’s output could power that motor, it would be an energy breakthrough. Unfortunately as many have found, in theory and practice, it’s impossible to combine motor and generator functions at the same time, due to the nature of magnetic induction and electric conductance. But, in the mid-20th century, another way was discovered, the turbo-encabulator.
Basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive duractance. This principle was first discovered in the heat of World War II, by J. H. Quick, a well-known electrical engineer, who named it turbo-encabulation. For security reasons, it was published in 1944 by the British Institution of Electrical Engineers Students’ Quarterly Journal, where it would go unnoticed by Nazi spies. Soon after discovery the war ended and turboencabulation fell into obscurity.
Here is a dynamic grid showing the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive duractance at the heart of turboencabulator technology. Note how the inverse reactive current cycling back and forth automatically synchronizes each of the cardinal grammeters in the array.
You can clearly see how turboencabulation works in a real system, in this instructive chart, prepared as part of Rockwell’s 1980s-era project (which we’ll see later). It shows power generation in a vehicle transmission, and mechanical details of the malleable logarithmic casing, hydrocoptic marselvanes, and especially the lotus-o-delta main winding. Follow along in this flow chart as you listen to turboencabulator principles being explained in the film, and all soon becomes clear.
GE picked up the technology in the 1950s, and by 1962 offered the first turboencabulator product, for applications in the electric power industry. Conservative utility companies had little interest in such a radical technology, so it never became well-known. But GE locked up turboencabulation technology with patents that didn’t expire until the 1980s.
After laying dormant several decades, Chrysler quietly came onto the turboencabulator scene, having been primed by their earlier work with turbines. We’re all familiar with Chrysler’s Turbine Car of 1963. Less well-known is that Chrysler had been developing and running turbine cars ever since the early 1950s. After the successful customer trials of the ’63 car, Chrysler developed a new coupe body for what was to be the first production turbine car. However, by the late ’60s the turbine’s fuel economy and NOx pollution issues stalled the program, and that new body became the Dodge Charger. Allpar has all the details. Chrysler persevered and eventually solved the pollution problems, but fuel crises in the 1970s put an end to the program. So much had been spent and lost from their dedication to turbine technology, Chrysler was forced to abandon their turbine engine as a precondition of the U.S. government loan guarantees that saved the company in 1979.
Prohibited from turbine development, Chrysler engineers took their Turbo experience into the Turboencabulator field in the early 1980s. GE’s patents had all expired and the technology again lay forgotten. Chrysler Engineering invested heavily in a secret experimental research program. Shown here is the CRM-114, Chrysler’s first operating research turboencabulator capable of vehicle power levels. At center in yellow is the base-plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a C-shaped malleable logarithmic casing. The two spurving bearings to its right are in a direct line with the pentametric fan, in green to the left. The early attempts to construct a sufficiently robust spiral decommutator failed largely because of a lack of appreciation of the large quasi-piestic stresses in the gremlin studs; the latter were specially designed to hold the roffit bars to the spamshaft. When, however, it was discovered that wending could be prevented by a simple addition to the living sockets, almost perfect running was secured.
Chrysler also worked with Rockwell to get federal funding on turboencabulator hybrid development for tanks and trucks. The US Defense Dept. badly needed much higher fuel economy to tame the massive diesel fuel supply line required by all the new mobile weaponry. This is an early Rockwell report to their funding agencies, with more details on their turboencabulator technology.
Encouraged by success in the research lab, engineers worked to develop a practical turboencabulator that would fit into a car, and into a car’s manufacturing budget. After several years they had succeeded with a compact circular form, illustrated above. Magneto reluctance (blue) and capacitive duractance (red) are in continuous dynamic modial interaction. Six hydrocoptic marzul vanes (green) are fitted to the ambaphascient lunar wainshaft. The main winding was of the normal lotus-odeltoid type placed in panendurmic semi-bulloid slots of the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremmy pipe to the differential girdle spring on the up-end of the grammeters. Turboencabulation was finally ready for the American road.
Chrysler geared up towards production in 1988. They developed it as a hybrid system, by packaging the turboencabulator into a transmission unit, seen in the training film, between the conventional combustion engine and the driveshafts of a Dodge Dynasty. 200 prototypes were built and thoroughly tested by a large Chrysler staff, before a consumer rollout planned for 1990. Ten million vehicle miles were logged on test tracks an local highways. Performance was excellent, with high reliability and lifetime, while delivering 50 to 75 mpg on the city/highway cycle.
But, all this mileage revealed a faint but persistent effect. Turboencabulator’s fundamental operating principle, the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive duractance, turned out to affect water vapor in the surrounding air. At a rate of one per one billion molecules per kilowatt per second, a nearby water molecule was transmuted into a molecule of dihydrogen monoxide. Known as DHMO, it’s a potentially dangerous chemical compound with well-known human health effects, and is regulated by federal, state and local authorities.
This graphic illustrates how the magneto reluctance and capacitive duractance fields impact on the water molecule, converting it into DHMO. The original machine had a base plate of pre-famulated amulite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing. But the casing’s steel, like the steel car body, which is completely effective in shielding electromagnetic fields, is transparent to magneto reluctance and capacitive duractance. Aluminum and all known plastics are transparent as well.
A million turboencabulated hybrid cars, each running 100,000 miles, would create a significant level of DHMO in the atmosphere. Here is one of the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) available for DHMO. As you see, DHMO aspiration has been proven to cause serious injury, even sudden death.
Chrysler engineers went on a frantic search for an effective shielding material. The only effective material found was a 2 inch (5 cm) thick casing of iron pyrite, almost as heavy as gold and nearly as valuable too. Unfortunately a big enough casing to shield a car or truck-sized turboencabulator weighs 2000 pounds (4400 kg), and costs three times the cost of the turboencabulator itself. After years of effort to find a practical shielding material for automotive turboencabulators, it was deemed fundamentally flawed technology. As with turbine cars before, Chrysler’s program to build turboencabulator hybrid passenger cars, even after millions of successful prototype miles, was frozen.
In the meantime, as seen in this marketing film, Rockwell Automation went on to deploy turboencabulator technology to electric power automation industry. In high-power stationary equipment, the heavy pyrite shielding required to prevent DHMO formation was acceptable. But as GE found before, the electric power industry was cautious and Rockwell’s turboencabulators never found wide adoption.
Chrysler Engineering still wouldn’t give up. They kept their turboencabulator hybrid alive in a secret racing program. Race car power trains weren’t subject to environmental standards, since a race car logs so few vehicle-miles compared with production cars, so a little DHMO wasn’t a problem. Racing an unshielded turboencabulator kept the program alive while they continued to find a solution to the shielding problem. Spy photos like this one appeared in the press, which the company at first denied.
Then they showed the Chrysler Patriot at the Detroit Auto Show in January 1994, and announced their intent to win the Le Mans 24 Hour Race. Patriot was a brilliant combination of Chrysler’s two revolutionary technologies: a gas turbine engine with a turboencabulator hybrid transmission. Wired magazine said, “Chrysler is convinced it can dazzle both the ecology movement and the tire-smoke-sniffing gearheads of the world using once supersecret technology suddenly available and cheap following the collapse of the defense industry.”
Chrysler called the turboencabulator a “flywheel” to keep the secret. Even though any school child can tell you a big flywheel is a gyroscope, and a car with a big gyroscope will flip on the first corner. But the press never called them on it.
Patriot was an exciting car of the future. If only they could make it practical in volume. Unfortunately after several more years of development with no progress on the DHMO shielding problem, Chrysler’s accountants finally shut down the whole program in 1996. Chrysler’s Patriot with its secret turoboencabulator hybrid system never raced. They put out a face-saving diagram of the Patriot, with the “Flywheel” marked as “Shelved for the near-term.” and Patriot faded away. Turboencabulation at Chrysler was never heard from again.
Chrysler’s failure turned out to have unfortunate timing. In 1997, Toyota’s electromagnetic hybrid system came to market in Japan with the first Prius. After their painful turbine / turboencabulator double-whammy, Chrysler execs were certain hybrid technology was a dead end. This accounts for the fact that, unlike Ford and GM, Chrysler’s hybrid product offerings have been nil. Huge losses, due in part to the failed turboencabulator hybrid project, helped drive Chrysler into its 1998 merger with Daimler-Benz.
Of course today there’s little that can hide from the Wikipedia. Go there to learn more about the Turboencabulator story, and the truth about DHMO.
I seek to learn more about this incredible technology once I know that my father, who has a PhD in Electrical Engineering, both understands it & can teach me about how it works. Anyway, nice engineering-related April Fools prank!
Good article. I remember reading something about this some years ago in a paper published by one of Chryslers engineers. I think his name was La Forge.
‘Moreover, whenever a fluorescent score motion is required, it may also be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocation Dingle-arm… to reduce sinusoidal deplenaration.’
Brilliant.
+! 😀
Its always that darn dingle arm that gives you problems…..
On this fine, sunny first day of April, I understand that Fisker is working on a new model with this technology.
Great article. Yet another example of Robert Eaton’s shortsighted management at Chrysler. There are many who are convinced that the turbo encapsulator is not the dead-end technology that conventional wisdom says that it is. In particular, there are some people at a small lab in England who are working on the DHMO problem. As I understand the theory, it is more feasible to create personal DHMO shielding devices than it is to arrest the substance at the source of each turbo encapsulator-equipped vehicle. It is hoped that this lab will become a sort of umbrella group to coordinate this research in other parts of the world.
“Lohner-Porsche Mixte Hybrid”…hahahahaha, fantastic made-up name, I almost believed it for a moment! *googles and wikipedias*…oh…my bad…
I also thought that I.P. Rumpelvertstein’s “Zeitschrift fur Elektrotechnistatische-Donnerblitze” was made up because its name reminds me of reindeer, but I daren’t google it for fear of more embarrassment… 😉
Anyway, Mike, I salute you good sir, superb article!
Thank you very much one and all!
In my research I found some foolish-sounding things that are actually true. Porsche’s hybrid is not the only one…..
That was great…and somuch better than the old loosen the top on the salt shaker bit… It must of been tricky to keep all the facts straight in writing this article.
And a happy April Fools Day to one and all.
PS Great writeup. Thanks!!
Almost had me until the part about “prefabulated amulite,” “malleable logarithmic casing,” “spurving bearings,” “quasi-piestic stresses,” “gremlin studs,” “roffit bars” and “living sockets.”
Kinda reminds me of my Navy days when we’d have green-horn sailors and officers (or Marines) searching the ship high and low for “relative bearing grease,” a “gallon of prop wash,” a “yard of shoreline” or to go man the “mail buoy watch.”
Damn good effort, though! Happy AFD!
PS
Agree with you about that dangerous “dihydrogen oxide”… that stuff should be banned!
But what kind of additional efficiencies can be gained by adding Mr. Fusion and a Flux Capacitor?
Absolutely fascinating! My father worked at Yoyodyne’s San Narcisco facility for a few years in the early 70s when they were developing an Encabulator controller for North American Aviation. There was a brief attempt to re-launch the XB-70 Valkyrie project at that time implementing Turbo Encabulator propulsion before the difficulty of supressing DHMO emissions were fully understood. The NAA system used a sequential thrust vector bypass stator in closed-loop operation, which was notoriously unstable under variable anhydrous deflamination conditions, so once it was realized that the Encabulator would only function effectively under protosemphardic pulse-width flagellation the project was slowly scaled-back and eventually quietly dropped.
There have always been rumors that the real reason North American abandoned their Turbo Encabulator was that the feds discovered it’s DHMO emission characteristics and wanted to weaponize it as a weather manipulating device. I’ve heard that test pilots actually did report strange cloud formations and ball lightning when opening the Croyden valve on the Encabulator’s semaphore reduxor in the upper atmosphere, but personally I think it’s all hogwash. There are a small group of conspiracy theorists, however, who insist that the North American Encabulator prototypes were later developed into a revised version of Wilhelm Reich’s “cloudbusting machine” under the HAARP program and used secretly by the CIA in Nicaragua, powered by orgone accumulators in some versions of the story or by a strange, mythical beast native to the lost city of Atlantis (that had the body of a donkey and a head that looked vaguely like actor Peter Lorre) in other versions.
Indeed as hope for success ebbed, the team resorted to “pulse-width flagellation” more and more frequently. They try not to talk about it.
This may have also been used in the assasination of Fidel Castro in 1980, when the CIA replaced him with paid actor as a double…..
I didn’t understand it. But then, I don’t durnamic in a walage.
This reads like the last time I was sold health insurance.
Seems legit…
Brilliant!
You obviously didn’t vet this with me. You haven’t properly explained the functioning of of the ambaphascient lunar wainshaft. Otherwise, pretty good.
Somebody was trying to sell one of those old prototype Chrysler turbo-encabulators at Carlisle last year. I never thought much of it, since it was installed in a FWD transaxle, I didn’t know much about it, and the vendor’s claims sounded pretty far-fetched at the time.
I wonder if the unit could be retrofitted into a RWD Torqueflite case? I would run it — the DHMO emissions from a single unit would be negligible. Might work even better than my other idea of converting a big old Chrysler to diesel.
I prefer this version:
You guys seem to think this is all a big fat joke.
They laughed at the Wright Brothers too.
Bunch of cowering luddites give no respect to science.
Dr. Ing. Herr Uberr Professar Borsch
Velikovsky Institutt, gestalt staffen
Chrysler’s prototype turbo encabulator was known internally as the B5-2.The CRM-114 designation actually refers to digital discriminator built by Chrysler engineers to finely control the purity of the essential reluctance and duractance harmonic interaction. It was a hybrid analog/digital device, programmed an unusual way using “recall codes.” It’s documented in a oral history project at the Association for Computing Machinery.
The CRM-114 was prone to interference from electromagnetic pulses from the encabulator and would occasionally not correctly recognize the recall codes, resulting in asymmetric harmonic interactions, a rapid cascade of larger electromagnetic pulses, and a bright coronal flash. One of the engineers on the project called it a “strange but lovely” effect.
Some claim the control problem would have killed the idea, even if proper shielding for the DHMO had been found. Others, like chief engineer Jack Ripper, think the problem was not the control problem, nor the DHMO, but fluoride contamination.of the DHMO. We may never know.
Yes, thank you for clearing that up. I’ve found an image of the CRM-114 discriminator, which has been set for essential purity. Unfortunately the CRM-114, like its manufacturer, is also prone to self-destruction.
You almost had me (I know what day today is) but this sentence cinched it:
The early attempts to construct a sufficiently robust spiral decommutator failed largely because of a lack of appreciation of the large quasi-piestic stresses in the gremlin studs; the latter were specially designed to hold the roffit bars to the spamshaft.
What a marvelous sentence! I can picture John Cleese narrating this on BBC 🙂
Indeed! That sentence appears in the original 1944 British publication up near the beginning.
John Cleese doing one of these training videos would be sublime. Like this one.
While the turbo encabulator itself may have been a failed project, some of the mechanicals used to keep them together lived on. For example, I’m pretty sure that the first generation Ford Explorer used twin unequal length roffit bar front suspension, no doubt influenced by their ability to survive all kinds of piestic stress on the spamshaft of Chrysler’s encabulator. Although those of us that have experience with them know that they too are known for separating from the gremlin studs over time, and can eventually fly off the spamshaft entirely; which is an ugly scene when it happens. This is probably why Ford went to the tried and true torsion bar suspension in the 95 redesign.
I’d love to stay and chat more about it, but I need to change the air in my tires and grease my muffler bearings before midnight…
Very well done, by the way. Going to be sending the link to this one to my engineer friends tomorrow. 🙂
Oh, good gawd. Another big industry trying to pollute the air and soil with DHMO.
True fact: DHMO is THE most potent “greenhouse gas” – far more effective than CO2.
And…the DHMO lobby can try to deny it…but in the case of EVERY SINGLE DEATH of respiratory disease, DHMO was found in significant quantities in the patient’s body.
BAN IT!