Joseph Papp: Noble Gas Engine (US Patent 4,428,193, etc)

![](0logo.gif)  
**[rexresearch.com](../index.htm)**

---

 **Josef
PAPP**

**Noble Gas Engine**

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**[Bob Said: *Private Pilot*
(December 1968); "No-Fuel Engine"](#privpilot)**  **[E. Mallove: *Infinite Energy* 9 (51),
2003: "The Mystery & Legacy of Papp's Noble Gas Engine"](#infen51)**
 **[E. Mallove: *Infinite Energy* 9 (52),
2003: "The Papp Saga Continues"](#rosen)**  **[R. Feynman: *LASER* (Journal of the
Southern Californian Skeptics): "Papp Perpetual Motion
Engine"](#feynman)**  **[David Ansley: San Jose *Mercury News (*August
27,
1989), p. 8; "The Dream Machine"](#ansly)**  **[Email Notes](#email)**  **[Josef Papp: US Patent #
3,670,494; "Method & Means of Converting Atomic Energy
Into Utilizable Kinetic Energy"](2pappats.htm#3670494)**  **[Josef Papp: US Patent #
3,680,431; "Method & Means For Generating Explosive
Forces"](2pappats.htm#3680431)**  **[Joseph Papp: US Patent #
4,428,193; "Inert Gas Fuel, Fuel Preparation Apparatus,
& System..."](2pappats.htm#4428193)**

---

***Private Pilot* (December 1968)**

**"No-Fuel Engine"**

**By Bob Said**

A Revolutionary Engine That Operates For 15 Cents per Hour
Without Gasoline, Air, Combustion Or Exhaust May Be Near

Revolutionary developments have a way of creeping up on you in
a technologically advanced society. This is the most
technologically advanced society there ever was, and it may be
that we have just been crept up on.

How would you like an airplane engine of, say, 300-hp, weighing
half as much as existing ones? What if it used no consumable
fuel, and therefore required no fuel tanks, lines, pumps,
carburetor or injection pump, intake valves, spark plugs, or
exhaust system? What if it did not use air, and could operate at
30,000 feet --- or 300 feet underwater --- as efficiently as it
did at sea level? What if it generated no heat, and therefore
needed neither a water-cooling jacket nor air-cooling fins?

Such an engine may exist. I have seen it, and talked to the
people who are developing it. The unit is in the earliest stages
of prototype test, but if it turns out to do all the things
their patent application says it will, it is bound to join the
Wright Brothers and the turbine as one of the three greatest
things to happen to aviation.

Consider this: with such an engine, every Aeronca, Cherokee,
and Skyhawk in the land would have the range to fly non-stop to
Europe, Hawaii or Japan. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Military patrol planes could stay aloft as long as the crew
could hold out. You could "gas up" the family lightplane once
every 4 or 5 years. On a Skyhawk, for example, your takeoff
weight might be as much as 500 pounds less than it is now,
because yould be lifting about half as much engine weight, no
gasoline supply, no tanks, fuel accessories, etc. That would
leave weight allowance for a couple of more passengers, and
yould still have unlimited range. Nobody would ever "run out of
gas" again. The astonishing possibilities go on and on.

Lets take a hard, skeptical look at this engine. It was
designed by a Hungarian-born inventor name Joseph Papp. He and
financial backer Don Rosen, who have set up a firm called
Environetics, Inc., to develop the engine, are saying mighty
little about the details of what makes it work until their
patent applications have been granted. But this much they will
say:

The engine operates on a charge of gas blends, hermetically
sealed inside each cylinder above the piston. A charge of
low-voltage electricity, which can come from either a 12-V or
24-V source common to light aircraft, is used to create an
electrical field in or around the cylinder. This causes the gas
to change from its original form to a new form which requires
more space. As it expands it does two things: pushes the piston
down and creates --- they arent saying how --- the conditions
for returning to its original form. The heat generated by its
expansion is absorbed by its contraction. When it is contracted,
another charge of electricity causes it to repeat the
expansion-contraction cycle, and so on ad infinitum. When this
sequence of events occurs in an orderly phase among 4, 6 or any
convenient number of cylinders, suitably connected to a
crankshaft, you get useful work.

How much work? Its pretty much a paper solution at present,
but the developers say any amount you want, from the amount
necessary to drive a lawnmower on up through automobiles and
airplanes to the amount needed to power a locomotive or a
battleship.

Inventor Papp has been working on the concept for years when he
immigrated to the US by way of Canada not long ago, and was
hired by Rosens firm, which manufactures refrigeration
equipment and store fixtures. A few days after he went on the
payroll Rosen decided to put him to work on a "crash" basis to
develop an engine that would actually run, to prove the concept.
And he did, in six weeks.

A 4-cylinder, 90-hp Volvo automobile engine was chosen as the
basis of the rig. Only the "short block" was used --- the
cylinder head, intake and exhaust valve assembly and accessories
were discarded. On top of the Volvo short block Papp set an
aluminum block bored to match the Volvo cylinders. It contains
the sleeved, hermetically sealed cylinders and pistons which are
the heart of his engine. He bolted the bottom of his pistons to
the top of the Volve pistons, injected the charge of his
mysterious gas, hooked up all manner of wires and gauges to his
test board and fired her up. Under optimum conditions,
incidentally, he says, no starter is required: just turn on the
juice.

Among other things, he operated the engine for 35 minutes at
4000 rpm in a closed conference room full of interested
potential customers. Any ordinary engine would have knocked them
all out with monoxide poisoning. This one didnt. What it did
do, according to the test board, was generate "between 50 and 75
horsepower per cylinder" at 4000 rpm, which speaks well for the
strength of the Volvo connecting rods and crankshaft. They were
never intended to take this kind of knocking around. Rosen said
the little 4-banger was generating "better than 300-hp", based
on known displacement and measured pressure. Under normal
operation, he said, an engine designed from the ground up on the
Papp principle would generate about 800 pounds psi in each
cylinder.

Rosen stressed that what Papp has done is design a fuel, not an
engine. The secret blend of gases is the key. Using a power
source to move pistons and a crankshaft is old hat to
reciprocating engine technology. And Papps "key" can be applied
to turbine technology as well.

One big market area Rosen is eyeing is the automotive field, in
which a smog-free engine that exhausts nothing into the
atmosphere would be bound to make many friends.

It might make many enemies, too, and this brings up an aspect
of the story about the Papp engine which has troubled this
reporter since he first heard about it. Clearly, an engine with
these revolutionary characteristics, and with so many obvious
military applications, would confer an enormous technical
advantage on the nation which possessed it. Not only militarily,
but commercially as well: it would be mighty hard to compete in
the worlds marketplace against such an engine, if all you had
to offer were conventional gasoline and diesel power plants.
This being the case, why invite the attention of the bad guys
before you have iron-clad patent protection and a going, proven
product? If the Soviets dont already have such a fuel concept,
they are likely to be mightily interested in this one. The world
petroleum industry, and the financial community itself, might be
a little uneasy about a concept which could conceivably put a
permanent end to the use of petroleum fuels in all of the
non-nuclear engines of the world. The auto and aircraft engine
people ought to love the idea, because if it will do what its
developers claim, the Papp power concept would result in better
engines for these applications than any other in sight. But
engine builders are as susceptible as anybody else to financial
pressure, and the imminent end of gasoline sales throughout the
world would be bound to generate a trifle more than a modest
twinge on Wall Street.

Moreover, any reasonably sophisticated reader will wonder about
safe, tidy little scientific ideas like entropy, conservation of
energy and one or two others. Because they are unwilling to
divulge hard details on the concept until patent protection is
complete, Papp and his associates leave us nibbling at these
annoying problems.

But then, the scientific community thought Edison, Marconi, the
Wright Brothers and Robert Goddard were out of their minds, too.
And look what they did for us. So dont scoff too soon. After
more than two decades as reporter and editor for newspapers and
magazines from coast to coast I have been exposed to more than
my fair share of perpetual motion machines, miracle cancer
cures, devices for communicating with poltergeists, methods of
extracting gold from carrots and similar schemes. I do not
recall one which caused my reporters instinct for a good story
to resonate more strongly than Papps engine does. But then, I
figured Dewey was a shoo-in over Truman, too, so it all comes
out in the wash.

It must be stressed that, at the time of this writing, the Papp
engine was an unproven engine. It had started some 50 times, run
a total of "several" hours, and operated continuously for 35
minutes on its longest run. It had never been connected to a
dynamometer to actually measure its power output. Rosen pointed
out that there was little point in this because the block,
connecting rods and crankshaft of the existing engine were Volvo
components, not Papp components, and there was little point in
testing them. The companys desire is to associate itself with a
major engine manufacturer and allow it to do the development
work and market the product under license. As Rosen notes, "A
firm like that is equipped to so such work. Were not, and it
isnt the business my company is in. But we have the product,
and nobody else does".

Developed as inventor Papp envisions, it would be quite a
product indeed. It would have a one-to-one horsepower to weight
ratio. Only a quarter-inch of metal is needed to surround the
cylinders --- no water jacket or cooling fins. Theyld be so
much useless weight. The engine would be mounted inverted or
vertically to power a rotor. In an auto application Papp says an
rpm range comparable to those of diesels would be used, but the
optimum for the system is 2500-3000 rpm, which is right in the
aircraft range. And Rosen says the acceleration and deceleration
characteristics are "practically instantaneous --- much better
than existing engines. We have instant rpm". At the time of
manufacturing each cylinder would be charged with the special
gas, and Papps calculations indicate 60,000 automobile miles or
1000 operating hours for aircraft engines before a recharge
would be needed. There is no abrupt fall-off in power output
when a gas charge "gets old", so fuel exhaustion in flight
becomes a thing of the past. When recharging time comes around,
Papp says a supply of fresh gas would cost "about $25 per
cylinder". Compare that with your current gas bill! Can you
operate your 6-cylinder engine for roughly 15 cents per hour
now, even in economy cruise?

Because the engine is not aspirated, it would retain full power
up as high as the wing could lif tit. That would result in
tremendous boosts in true airspeed for any lightplane on the
market; better even than supercharging, without the expense or
weight of a supercharger. In fact, the engine would continue to
function perfectly in space, and Cal Techs Jet Propulsion Lab
is looking at it with that in mind. It would never suffer from
carburetor ice, clogged fuel lines or spark plug failure --- no
spark in introduced inside the cylinder. O-rings were used to
achieve a hermetic seal in the Volvo prototype, and pressure
lubrication was emplyed, but other techniques would be used on a
production engine, according to Rosen.

The absence of gasoline removes all fire hazard, and the
operating gas itself is not combustible, Rosen says. The closest
he will come to identifying it is to say that "it is like, but
is not, hydrogen, helium, etc. The components are readily
available and not expensive".

All of this tends to make the mouth water, but it is predicated
on two of the largest letters in the English language: I and F.
Until Environetics --- or somebody else --- builds one of these
engines and submits it to exhaustive performance tests, nobody
will really know if it develops as much power for as long as
Papp and Rosen say it will. IF somebody does, and IF the engine
performs as advertised, a giant revolution is about to happen in
engine technology and to light aircraft design as a spin-off.
More space and weight allowance for people, less for hardware,
and major improvements in performance and economy inevitably
would follow for the fly-for-fun set. And IF all this comes
about, Standard Oil had better consider a vigorous
diversification program.

IF, on the other hand, there is a fly in the ointment and the
Papp fuel concept craps out at the showdown, somebody else
probably will take a new slant and keep on trying. After all,
your heart just sits there expanding and contracting, and it,
too, requires only periodic refueling. If somebody can figure
out a way to make a couple of handfuls of gas behave the same
way inside a cylinder, without suffering unpredictable coronary
attacks, well get a simple, cheap, reliable engine some day...

---

***Infinite Energy* 9 (51), 2003  
<http://www.infinite-energy.com>**

**"The Mystery and Legacy of Joseph Papp's
Noble Gas Engine"**

**by Eugene F. Mallove**   
Copyright (c) 2003

If you thought that the saga of cold fusion was bizarre,
labyrinthian, and astonishing with its mother-lode of unexpected
findings --- from nuclear-scale excess heat to the rebirth of
alchemy in low-energy nuclear transmutation, discoveries
alternately persecuted or ignored by the scientific
establishment --- the cold fusion adventure doesn't hold a
nuclear candle to the story of Joseph Papp and his noble gas
engine. The Papp engine saga seems to have had its roots in the
1950s, but it only came into public view in 1968. And, strangely
enough, there may well be an underlying physics that links
elements of the two stories and their profoundly heretical
science. Pathological skeptics of cold fusion --- and perhaps
some cold fusion researchers --- may laugh at or recoil from
this synthesis, but they will be treading on thin ice.

One of the best overviews of the Papp story appeared in
California's San Jose *Mercury News* newspaper on August
27, 1989. We have reprinted David Ansley's exemplary account,
which was triggered by the cold fusion announcement some four
months earlier (p. 14). Read Ansley's piece to get the gist of
what had happened up to mid-1989 with the Papp engine. We also
reprint a well done story that ran much earlier in Private
Pilot, in December 1968 (p. 49). But the Papp saga has
progressed far beyond those days, hence we are devoting a
substantial portion of this issue of Infinite Energy just to
begin to recount the tale of the Papp engine as it has never
been done before. There is very likely to be more to come... so
stay tuned. (We are looking into the possibility of preparing a
DVD made from video tapes of Papp's demonstrations already in
our possession and from present day experiments, if permissions
can be obtained.) This editor has been aware of claims about the
Papp engine since about 1992, but it has only been within the
past three years that sufficient information has emerged to
change my view from curious onlooker to acceptance of the
engine's validity.

The basic "problem" with cold fusion is, of course, that water
in contact with metals with a bit of low voltage electrical
excitation is not supposed to make nuclear reactions and release
huge thermal excess energy per atom of presumed reactant. The
problem with Papp's noble gas engine is that the noble gases
employed --- argon, helium, krypton, neon, and xenon --- are
essentially non-reactive chemical elements (except in certain
exotic combinations known to modern chemists); that's why they
are called noble. How can such gases, "pre-treated" or
otherwise, explode with unusual violence and drive a
reciprocating single-cycle engine --- a retrofit device from an
ordinary gasoline engine (lubricated with oil to be sure), but
one with no cooling system, no fuel system, and no exhaust? On
its face, Papp's engine appears inconceivable --- until the
evidence is weighed very carefully. Once the battery-driven
electric starter revved up the Papp engine (according to dozens
of initially skeptical witnesses), the engine --- equipped with
an alternator --- ran with no outside electrical input. And,
even if such "miracle" reactions of noble gases should produce
interminable explosions from a tiny volume of gas, pushing
pistons and driving a large flywheel, why didn't such an engine
run very hot? It didn't. What about the supposed need for a much
lower temperature reservoir to make this "heat" engine work at
all? If the engine is a monumental "fraud," it is a very, very
challenging one to try to pull off.

**In the Beginning ~**

How to begin? Let's try this synopsis: A technically schooled
draftsman and ex-pilot, Josef Papp (pronounced "Pop" in proper
Hungarian), emigrated from Hungary to Canada in 1957 after the
ill-fated anti-Communist revolt and Soviet invasion of his
country. Perhaps he may have made paper or microfiche copies of
documents relating to some sensitive R&D projects in Hungary
and he took them with him to the New World? That's only educated
speculation. Otherwise, if his independently developed ideas
really worked, as they seem to have, he was either extremely
lucky in finding a hidden secret of Nature, or he was an
unfathomable genius. He did not seem like the latter. From all
accounts, he was an extremely paranoid, very unstable, selfish,
and unpredictable man, who was probably one of his own worst
enemies. There is little evidence that he understood the physics
of what he had, but however the process was developed --- it
seemed to have worked in a way that seems "too good to be true"
--- it was an almost fully formed new energy technology that
came very close to coming under the wings of some of the world's
largest technology corporations.

The story entered its second phase with what seems like a
preposterous diversion: In Canada in the early 1960s, Papp
worked secretively to develop a mysterious, sleek "submarine"
that looks like something out of a "Star Wars" movie. He claimed
that he would cross the Atlantic with it in much less than a day
--- that's what he told Canadian television (It was a big media
story in Canada in the summer of 1966, but most of you probably
missed it, though Papp wrote a now hard-to find book about the
episode, entitled *The Fastest Submarine*, Ballantine
Books U7080, 1967). Then he disappeared. Within days, Papp was
found by authorities bloodied and floating on a rubber raft off
the coast of France. Papp claims to have made the ocean crossing
in only thirteen hours after he left North America. Where was
the wondrous submarine? "Lost at sea," of course, according to
Papp. The fantastic claim was soon debunked in a very
embarrassing way --- but, in truth, no one has ever found the
submarine either in Canada or in the Atlantic. Why Papp thought
he could get away with this stunt and how this episode seems to
clash with what comes next --- the scientifically interesting
part of the Papp saga --- is a mystery and may forever be. Papp
is dead --- cancer took him on April 13, 1989, three weeks after
Fleischmann and Pons announced cold fusion.

But apart from this embarrassing, bizarre episode with the
submarine, Papp left behind one of the most tantalizing legacies
in the history of free energy: There exists nearly rock-solid
evidence now that Papp really had managed to build a robust
engine of over 100 horsepower (75 kilowatts) that was "fueled"
by a mixture of, we believe, "pre-treated" noble gases (probably
mixed with some air). Though it had no exhaust and no cooling
system, it had huge torque even at low RPM (776 foot-pounds at
only 726 RPM, the result of one certified test --- see Exhibit
A.) [Exhibits from this Introduction to the Issue 51 cover story
are not available on the website.] Dozens of astonished
engineers, scientists, and investors --- even a Federal judge
with an engineering background was blown away by it --- have
seen the engine working in closed rooms for hours, which would
have killed its occupants with toxic gases had it been a
hydrocarbon-fuel engine. There was absolutely no exhaust, no
visible provision for any exhaust! The engine ran cool --- only
about 60 degC (140 degF) on its surface, it has been reported by
several reliable observers. All these people, who had years to
try to debunk it, became convinced of the engine's reality. They
all failed to discover a hoax. But here is the ultimate triumph
of the Papp engine: Today, ongoing research in the United States
--- totally independent of Papp and his former financial
interests --- has proved conclusively that noble gases,
electrically triggered in various ways, can indeed explode with
fantastic violence and energy release --- melting metal parts
and pushing pistons with large pressure pulses. Some of the
people performing this work, or who have evaluated it, are from
the cold fusion field, others are experienced plasma physicists.
Some will allow their names to be revealed, while others in
senior positions at major research institutions must remain
anonymous for now. I am confident, however, that these
scientists will eventually "go public." They should, when
circumstances permit.

**Two Explosions, One Death ~**

Apart from the intense contemporary work to resurrect the Papp
engine in its full cycling functionality and the independent
certification test in 1983 (see p. 9), what other proof is there
that Papp's engine was for real? Sad to say, this evidence is
the death of one person and the severe injury of three others at
a public demonstration of the engine on November 18, 1968 in
Gardena, California. At that event, the engine exploded with an
evident energy release that no internal combustion engine could
touch. Read the eyewitness testimony of engineer Cecil
Baumgartner (p. 31) in my interview with him this year. He was
representing the top management of the TRW aerospace corporation
that day. The previous month (on October 27, 1968) Baumgartner
and others had observed one of the detonation cylinders of the
engine test fired in the California desert. In full public view,
just a few cubic centimeters of noble gas had been admitted with
a hypodermic needle to the sparking chamber, and this made the
thick steel-walled chamber peel back like a banana when the
device was electrically triggered. The collaborating observers
from the Naval Underseas Warfare Laboratory (as the Pasadena,
California lab was then called), who attended the desert test,
had earlier sealed the chamber so that Papp or others could not
insert illicit explosives as part of a hoax. Their names,
according to Baumgartner, were: William White, Edmund Karig, and
James Green.

**Feynman's Mistakes and the Recovery ~**

But at the public meeting the next month at which the fatality
occurred (see the local newspaper account of the fatality and
injuries-p. 30) was Caltech physicist Richard P. Feynman
(1918-1988), who had worked on the Manhattan atomic bomb project
in World War II. Before even arriving at the demonstration,
Feynman assumed that the Papp engine, whose operation he was
about to witness, had to be part of an elaborate hoax. We know
this because he recounted his reactions during the episode in
his widely circulated internet account touted by the "skeptic"
community (see "Mr. Papf's (sic) Perpetual Motion Machine," p.
29).

But here is the central problem with Feynman's analysis (which
has many other errors of fact and logic embedded in it): There
was a court action against Feynman by Papp and his backer, Don
Roser of Environetics, Inc., as a result of Feynman's inept
attempt to disprove the Papp engine with his unauthorized
pulling of an electric control-circuit wire that Feynman
egregiously imagined had to be powering the engine. It was
unfortunate for Feynman that the wire's gauge was far too thin
even had there been a secret electric motor within the retrofit
Volvo engine. Furthermore, as you will read, the engine kept
running even after the flimsy wire was removed. Feynman asserted
that Papp most likely had deliberately planned to blow up his
own engine to avoid subsequent discovery of the "fraud"! And,
Feynman acknowledges that there was an out-of-court settlement
with Caltech. Surely, had there ever been the slightest piece of
evidence that conventional explosives blew up the Papp engine
that day, Caltech would most certainly not have had to settle.
Papp would soon have been charged with manslaughter, no doubt,
and Feynman would surely have cited this evidence publicly. He
was not one to shrink from dramatic gestures. Caltech also had
the motive and the means to skewer Papp with the kind of
evidence that is routinely gathered by police departments and
crime labs following explosion accidents.

However, all records of the investigation into the accident
appear to have vanished down some kind of a memory hole. I
believe they exist somewhere, but we have not been able --- yet
--- to obtain them. On June 29, 1998, Caltech's very helpful
Associate Archivist, Shelley Erwin, faxed me: "Well, the
mysterious affair with Mr. Papp/Papf continues to remain
mysterious. I have found nothing in the Feynman papers that
refers to it. Nor is there any obvious reference to Mr. Papp or
the lawsuit in administrative or publicity papers from the time.
We do not have a clippings file for the 1960s, so that is one
type of resource I did not investigate... I think I have done
all I can here, without any useful result. We would be
interested to know how your search comes out --- if indeed this
is a true account. I wish I knew."

I made more recent contact with various Caltech offices, which
could not provide me with any records --- not even its public
information office had newsclips, and efforts to locate official
accident reports in California have come up dry. Some of these
may have been destroyed, according to some police departments
contacted. After all, this is an accident that happened
thirty-five years ago. But the point is that nowhere, so far, do
we have any evidence that the explosion was a result of illicit
explosives. Failing such direct evidence of hoax, the proved
violence of the explosions --- the November 1968 and the October
1968 ones --- strongly point to the reality of the Papp process.
But we also have the contemporary laboratory work that
establishes convincing evidence --- visual and by
instrumentation --- that noble gases can be made to explode and
achieve over-unity. Heroic work on a shoestring budget over the
past few years is recounted in broad scope by researchers Mark
Hugo and Blair Jenness in Minnesota (p. 51). We hope to feature
their work in greater depth in future issues. Heinz Klostermann
of California, whom I met two years ago, has been of great
assistance in assembling some of the information that went into
this issue of Infinite Energy. On p. 55, he discusses his broad
knowledge of many of the groups working in the U.S. in the past
and today in the effort to recover the Papp engine technology.
He has begun his own independent initiative.

Two anonymous Ph.D. investigators circa 2000, with prominent
positions in the cold fusion field, certainly estimated
over-unity factors beyond 10 and perhaps even 100 --- for what
may well be a suboptimal version of the Papp noble gas process.
To run a cyclic 100 HP engine as Papp did would require
detonation energies possibly far beyond these preliminary
factors, but remember: no one who is attempting to recover the
technology knows the exact pre-treatment process and gas mixture
that Papp employed. The patents, so far, have not been adequate
to learn exactly what was done. Finally, the eyewitness
accounts, as well as the dynamometer test of 1983, give further
support for the validity of the Papp technology.

Feynman is widely known today for his aid in helping to resolve
the space shuttle Challenger accident of 1986. The brilliant,
entertaining, passionate, and often self-effacing physicist with
the Far Rockaway, New York accent won the Nobel Prize for
physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomanaga in 1965,
three years before the explosion of the Papp engine in Gardena.
He is rightly considered to be a very great scientist, whose
quest to expand the frontiers of physics and to convey the
excitement of science to the public was legendary and noble. In
fact, I had often thought that if Feynman had lived into the
cold fusion era, he might have set some of the anti-cold fusion
bigots straight. Several years before Feynman's Nobel Prize
award, in April 1963 in several wonderful lectures that have
been reprinted in a book, The Meaning of It All (Addison-Wesley,
1998), Feynman made these wise observations

"The exception tests the rule." Or, put it another way. "The
exception proves that the rule is wrong." That is the principle
of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can
be proved by observation, that rule is wrong. (p. 16)

The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which
you make observations alone, but more important, the rate at
which you create new things to test. (p. 27)

There is no authority who decides what is a good idea. We have
lost the need to go to an authority to find out whether an idea
is true or not. We can read an authority and let him suggest
something; we can try it out and find out if it is true or not.
If it is not true, so much the worse --- so the "authorities"
lose some of their "authority." (p. 21)

Indeed, the "authorities" of modern physics seem to have lost
their authority completely. If one of its most dynamic and
iconoclastic members, Feynman --- a hero to physicists as well
as to the general populace --- can have made such a horrible
error in judgment in the matter of his observation and actions
at the Papp engine demonstration in 1968, then there is real
trouble, and this is now proved. Feynman's tragic mistake would
be just that, by the way --- a mistake whether or not the Papp
engine is real. If it is real, so much the worse for Feynman's
legacy, for science, and for civilization. The inadequate
methods by which Feynman rendered a snap judgment on the Papp
engine that day reflected poorly on him; his methods were
incapable of discovering the truth about this device. And then
there are the questions about what did Feynman know and when did
he know it, concerning any accident reports that may have been
available to him.

In retrospect, this 1968 event seems like a foreshadowing of
many other horrors that were to come in the 1980s, through the
1990s and beyond --- vicious persecution of the cold
fusion/low-energy nuclear reaction field by "authorities" and
their followers. The so-called "skeptics" of CSICOP and
elsewhere, who chose to use Feynman's reflections on the Papp
demonstration as an example of how science should be done,
should hide their heads in shame, but they won't. They will be
outraged that one of their icons and their belief in the
impossibility of new energy sources are found wanting. They will
not admit this, of course.

**The Patents ~**

Joseph Papp was issued three United States patents for his
process and engines, one of which is reprinted in full and the
others are briefly discussed and the introductory parts
reprinted (p. 21):

"Method and Means for Generating Explosive Forces," applied for
on November 1, 1968, granted as U.S. #3,680,431, August 1, 1972,
assigned to Environetics, Inc. of Gardena, California; Papp
declares the general nature of the noble gas mixture necessary
to produce explosive release of energy. He also suggests several
of the triggering sources that may be involved. There is little
doubt that Papp is not offering full disclosure here, but there
is no doubt that others who have examined this patent and
followed its outline have already been able to obtain explosive
detonations in noble gases. Caution: Anyone who undertakes to
try to duplicate this process must be very careful about safety
issues.

"Method and Means of Converting Atomic Energy into Utilizable
Kinetic Energy," applied for on October 31, 1968, granted as
U.S. #3,670,494, June 20, 1972, and assigned to Environetics,
Inc.

"Inert Gas Fuel, Fuel Preparation Apparatus and System for
Extracting Useful Work from the Fuel," applied for September 4,
1980, granted as U.S. #4,428,193, January 31, 1984, and assigned
to Papp International, Inc. of Lincoln, Nebraska. This is a very
lengthy patent, filled with many insights about how his sealed,
non-cooled engine process may have worked.

One of the high points of subsequent activity by Papp and his
colleagues was the independent certification testing in 1983.
Thanks to the late Dr. Paul Brown and to Jack Kneifl, I have had
in my files for several years photocopies of the actual
documentation of the certification test, which was done in
Oklahoma. It has been circulating among those who have been
interested in reviving the Papp technology, and includes
Chemistry Professor Nolan's impressive C.V. The affidavit is
reprinted in Appendix A.

**In Search of an Explanation ~**

Assuming that the Papp engine phenomena that have been observed
are valid, no one can claim to have a satisfactory and
comprehensive explanation for what is going on. In my view, the
physics associated with the detonation, light emission, and
other phenomena in these noble gas explosions is quite beyond
contemporary understanding. It is of interest that Dr. Randell
Mills and his colleagues at BlackLight Power Corporation have
observed excess heat phenomena associated with microwave
stimulation of helium and hydrogen mixtures, but not krypton and
argon mixtures. I'm not sure that this has any direct bearing on
the Papp conditions, but I mention it for completeness.

Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa of Canada were kind enough to
abstract for inclusion in this issue of Infinite Energy (p. 61)
a report that they prepared in the mid-1990s concerning the Papp
technology --- or at least a crude copy of it. This was based on
a limited view; they were given only a video tape, the
performance claims, and the patents. They discuss the
differences between the plasma and energy phenomena they have
pioneered in their PAGDTM excess energy technology, and what
they could gather from the Papp technology experimenters'
claims.

It is my view that to explain the Papp engine, a very radical
departure from conventional understanding of nuclear physics,
atomic structure, electricity, and the vacuum state will be
required. The general class of models will be those that explain
subatomic "particles" and how they interact as manifestations of
an aether physics.

**The Scandal of Official Inaction ~**

There can be no greater indictment of our energy and science
advisory bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. than in the host of
letters that made urgent pleas that something be done about the
Papp engine. On the positive side, there were letters asking for
information about it, such as the one from the U.S. Army shown
in Exhibit B, but the other responses evidence the kind of grave
science and technology policy problems in government that would
emerge in the cold fusion era. Some letters show that the same
people in DOE who obstructed cold fusion acted earlier to
obstruct a resolution of Papp's claims! Exhibits A-I are our
collection of the text of annotated letters; copies of the
originals are in our possession. We thank those who divulged
these letters on behalf of the search for truth.

The letter in Exhibit C was evidently written by one of the
associates of Navy people who supervised the sealing of the Papp
"cannon" so that no illicit explosives could have been inserted
in the Papp device that was fired in the California desert.

The letter in Exhibit D shows the sincere interest of another
aerospace corporation, other than TRW, which had dropped the
Papp engine after the explosion in November 1968. It also proves
that the litigation with Caltech was still ongoing in the fall
of 1970.

A do-nothing letter from DOE's legal staff, in response to one
of several letters that were sent to President Jimmy Carter is
shown in Exhibit E.

John Deutch, an MIT Professor who was serving in DOE during the
Carter Administration, dismisses the Papp engine in his thinly
disguised negative letter to Senator Hatch of Utah (Exhibit F).
Ironically, Deutch would later play a two-faced role in the cold
fusion saga as it unfolded at MIT when he was Provost there in
1989 (see IE #24). He later became Director of the CIA, but was
caught in an egregious computer security lapse, which could have
landed him in jail.

In the letter in Exhibit G, a sincere U.S. Navy Rear Admiral
writes to President Carter in an effort to focus his attention
on the Papp engine. It appears that Papp may have misguided
McMillian about his credentials (Papp had no doctorate) and the
date of his arrival in the U.S.

An insulting letter from the DOE (just months before cold
fusion was announced) to one of the witnesses to the Papp engine
testing is shown in Exhibit H. George Lewnes, who had an
engineering background, had seen the engine run in Florida. Here
DOE touts its hot fusion program as the only possible route to
fusion! Always the same excuse for not investigating new
processes.

A very late letter --- 1992 --- from Jack Kneifl in Nebraska,
who was part of a team that was attempting to recover the Papp
technology, is shown in Exhibit I. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was a
well respected and famous Naval officer. This letter shows that
anti-cold fusion DOE people --- Drs. Polansky and Ianniello ---
were also obstructing the Papp engine recovery.

**Summary and Looking Forward ~**

There is now a staggering amount of good information available,
which at a bare minimum would justify a thorough review of the
Papp engine matter by official agencies such as the U.S.
Department of Energy and military research organizations such as
DARPA. There is significant evidence for the release of
heretofore unknown explosive energy from noble gas mixtures. The
energetic level of these reactions on their face, if confirmed
by independent review, may have serious national security and
global security consequences (especially in this age of
terrorist threat --- use your imagination). But the cat is out
of the bag, and it cannot be put back. One hopes that the
civilian uses of this potential technology will far outweigh the
military hazards.

Joseph Papp was a "hero" to have brought this technology to the
New World, but his outrageous behavior at many turns helped
prevent scientific truth from emerging. Yet at long last, the
truth is coming out. There needs to be a wide and deep review of
the evidence. Unfortunately, the experience of the cold
fusion/low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) field over the past
fourteen years, in trying to get an impartial DOE review of now
proved and replicated LENR experiments, does not inspire much
confidence that DOE or other official groups will do anything
about this --- even if the evidence is shoved in their faces.
The John Huizengas, William Happers, Richard Garwins, and Steve
Koonins (Caltech) of this world wield enormous influence within
government. They know a priori that cold fusion, and now the
Papp engine, are nonsense. Therefore, it will fall to the
private sector and to individual scientific researchers to deal
with or not deal with the Papp engine enigma. We hope that this
beginning of Infinite Energy's coverage of the Papp engine, and
the science that may underlie it, will contribute to the search
for scientific truth. Perhaps the Papp saga, and particularly
Richard Feynman's negative role in it, will yet help to catalyze
a long overdue review by mainstream science of what it thinks it
knows and what it thinks it knows cannot be.

---

***Infinite Energy* 52: 57-58 (2003)**

**"The Papp Energy System"**

**By Don Rosen, CEO, Environetics, Inc.**

The Papp engine will undoubtedly be recorded as one of the most
significant breakthroughs of this century. With scientists now
alerted to the inexorable forces of air pollution, irreversible
atmospheric free oxygen despoliation and the toxic effects of
carbon oxides, a frantic quest is underway to find an abundant,
cheap substitute for fossil fuels. Billions of dollars have been
spent to research and develop solutions to these pressing
worldwide problems. It is now widely held that the potential
toll in human life and suffering, resulting from these crises,
rivals and indeed surpasses the imminent problems of
overpopulation facing the sociologists.

It is providential that the Papp energy system concepts were
conceived and developed by an individual rather than by the team
effort of a government or industrial giant whose unlimited funds
and personnel have begun to conquer space.

Team efforts in many fields of technology, working together in
synergical concept for a common goal, have advanced the "state
of the art" in the fastest possible time. However, the "goal"
must first be defined and the sphere of activity uniformly
investigated with proper deployment of the investigative effort.
This manifests a logical process of deductive reasoning. It has
proved a most efficient system of inquiring into known fields of
endeavor.

It is fact that most radical discoveries of significant
magnitude are the result of individual encounter, acting
independently of the group effort. It may be an accidental
confrontation of an individual with a phenomenon of nature, or a
true meeting expectant of psychological receptiveness and a
truth exposed. The occurrence of these exigencies are too
infrequent to ponder. When revolutionary discoveries such as the
Papp engine are reviewed with pragmatic acceptance by
visionaries, then the groundwork is laid for the development of
a new tool, potentially useful to mankind in his unending quest
to master his environment. E=MC2 is an equation familiar to most
schoolboys. It was one of the mathematical concepts which led to
the birth of a new awesome force in nature, which if unleashed
could have tragic effects on civilization. This is atomic
fission energy, an energy that is difficult to control and make
available in small quantities. It creates dangerous
radioactivity.

Scientists now theorize that thermonuclear fusion is much more
powerful and yields much less toxic radiation that the fission
process (e.g., the "clean" H-bomb).

Joseph Papp has developed a practical, workable system to blend
fusion energy in small quantum, with laser principals of light
forces and thus harness the energy resultant in an engine device
wherein the power pulses are cycled with the precision required
to transform the power of the atom to direct mechanical energy
bypassing the parameters of the thermodynamic cycle governing
the function of the heat engine now extant. This is plasma
physics. Papp reaches beyond abstract theory to the reality of
an engine 100 years in advance of its time --- yet it is not too
soon.

A principle of the Papp engine is basic and simple: A hermetic
gas chamber is created by the telescopic fitting of two
cylindrical units each open at one end, when fitted one over the
other to permit extension and retraction of the unit under the
cycling pulses of a varying gas pressure confined within the
chamber. The gases are estimated to have a life cycle of 6,000
hours operation time, with Papp guaranteeing 1,000 hours. The
gases, which are relatively inexpensive, abundant and harmless,
are charged into the piston chambers and subjected to controlled
electrical pulse and radiation effects, thereby expanding with
great force, then contracting, on signal, ready to repeat the
cycle for the life of the system.

Since the atomic engine is not aspirated and yields no exhaust
it may be operated submerged in water, or in the far reaches of
space uniquely unaffected by its extraneous environment. Because
the atomic energy released is limitless, the horsepower
attainable is boundless. For example, a 4-cylinder 2-cylce
engine so constructed with a total of 20 cubic inches
displacement will yield 400 hp and up, as desired.

We suggest the Papp engine does presage a new era of work
performance capability and ushers in a new field for scientific
investigation.

---

***LASER* (Journal of the Southern Californian
Skeptics) ~**

**"R. Feynman on Papp Perpetual Motion
Engine"**

One time [in 1966] some students came over to my house with one
of those magazines about automobiles --- Roadrunner, or
something like that. In it there was an article about a
marvelous new engine which works on a new principle for getting
power, and it's really quite remarkable. You don't have to buy
fuel for the car; the fuel is injected into the cylinders when
the engine is manufactured and lasts about six months. Then you
have to bring it back to have it recharged. The engine is
air-cooled and can make a car run 60 miles per hour on the
freeway.

There was a picture of the engine and its inventor, Mr. Joseph
Papp, who had come to the United States from Hungary. He's
standing next to the engine, making measurements on it with a
panel full of dials. Various people had looked at the engine and
made various remarks about it in the article. Mr. Papp was going
to demonstrate his engine in Los Angeles, and the students
wanted me to go along with them to see it.

I told them nothing has enough power to go for six months like
that, unless it's a nuclear reactor, which it surely is not.
'Fakes are always coming out,' I said, 'and the guy's probably
trying to get investors to invest in his engine.'

Then I told them some stories about perpetual motion machines,
such as the one in a London museum which was in a glass case.It
had no wires connected to it, yet it turned around and around.
'You have to ask yourself, 'Where is the power supply?' I said.
In that case, it was some air coming up through a little tube
installed in one of the wooden legs holding up the glass case.

The students talked me into going along with them to see the
demonstration. It was held in a refrigerator company's parking
lot, an L-shaped area. The engine was down at one end of the
lot, while the people, about 30 or so, were at the bend of the
L, some distance away.

Mr. Papp talked about how the motor worked, using vague and
complicated phrases about radiation, atoms, different levels of
energy, quanta, and this and that, all of which made no sense
whatsoever, and would never work.

But the rest of what he said was important, for every fraud has
to have the right characteristics: Mr. Papp explained that he
had tried to sell his engine to the big automobile companies,
but they wouldn't buy it because they were afraid it would put
all the big oil companies out of business.

So there was obviously a conspiracy working against Mr. Papp's
marvelous new engine. Then there was a reference to the magazine
articles, and an announcement that in a few days the engine was
going to be sent to the Stanford Research Laboratory for
validation. This proved, of course, that the engine was real.
There was also an invitation to prospective investors to get in
on this great opportunity to make large amounts of money,
because it was very powerful. And there was a certain danger!

There were quite a few wires running from the engine down to
where Mr. Papp and the spectators were standing, into a set of
instruments used for measurement; these included a variac, a
variable transformer with a dial which could put out different
voltages. The instruments were, in turn, connected by a cord to
an electrical outlet in the side of the building. So it was
pretty obvious where the power supply was.

The engine started to go around, and there was a bit of
disappointment: the propeller of the fan went around quietly
without the noise of an ordinary engine with powerful explosions
in the cylinders, and everything --- it looked very much like an
electric motor.

Mr. Papp pulled the plug from the wall, and the fan propeller
continued to turn. 'You see, this cord has nothing to do with
the engine; it's only supplying power to the instruments,' he
said. Well, that was easy. He's got a storage battery inside the
engine. 'Do you mind if I hold the plug?' I asked? 'Not at all,'
replied Mr. Papp, and he handed it to me.

It wasn't very long before he asked me to give me back the
plug. 'I'd like to hold it a little longer,' I said, figuring
that if I stalled around enough, the damn thing would stop.

Pretty soon Mr. Papp was frantic, so I (Richard Feynman) gave
him back the plug and he plugged it back into the wall. A few
moments later there was a big explosion:

A cone of silvery uniform stuff shot out and turned to smoke.
The ruined engine fell over on its side. The man standing next
to me said, 'I've been hit!' I looked at him, the whole side of
his arm was torn open, you could see all the muscle fibers,
tendons --- everything. I helped him over to a chair to sit
down. The youngest student in the group knew what to do. 'Make a
tourniquet out of a tie for that man!' he told me. He gave
orders to everybody, and began to give artificial respiration to
another man who was lying on the ground. It was really quite
wonderful to see this young student take over with all those
grown men around. By the time the paramedics came, we realized
that there were three men injured, the one lying on the ground
most seriously: he had a hole in his chest (so the artificial
respiration wasn't effective) and he ultimately died. The other
two men survived.

We were all shaking.

I turned to the young man who had been so capable in coping
with the unexpected tragedy.

'I don't usually drink.' I said, 'but let's go over to a bar
and have a drink to calm our nerves.'

We went into a bar and ordered a drink, I was surprised to
discover that the young man who had been the most mature of all
of us was underage-he couldn't get a drink. We started to talk
about the engine. One man, an investor who had brought an
engineer with him to see the demonstration, said, 'My engineer
advised me to stand mainly behind the corner of the building and
just peer out during the demonstration, because these new
engines are sometimes dangerous. Somebody else pointed out that
Mr. Papp had previously done some work with rockets, and the
explosion looked like fuel when it goes off.

My idea was that had Mr. Papp sent his engine to the Stanford
Research Institute as announced, the game would be up in a few
days. Therefore an explosion just big enough to destroy the
engine would keep the game going a little longer; it would show
the tremendous power of the engine, and, most importantly, it
would provide a reason for investors to put more money into the
project, now the engine had to be rebuilt. We all agreed that
the explosion was much larger than Mr. Papf probably intended.

After such an explosion with the resulting fatality and
injuries, there was, of course, a lawsuit. Mr. Papp sued me for
ruining his engine, charging that my stalling around with the
cord caused him to lose control of it. Caltech has a legal
department to protect its errant professors, so they talked to
me. I told them I thought he didn't have much of a case: he
would have to prove how the engine worked, and he'd have to
demonstrate that in fact, taking the cord off caused the
explosion.

The case was settled out of court, and Mr. Papp was paid
something. I guess there's a certain amount of wisdom in not
going to court, even when you're right, but I cost Caltech a
certain amount of money by going to that demonstration.

I still think I correctly diagnosed what was happening with a
reasonable probability.

And, of course, nothing has been heard of Mr. Papp's new engine
since.

(Richard Feynman, PHD)

---

**San Jose *Mercury News (*August 27, 1989), p. 8 ~**

**"The Dream Machine"**

**By David Ansley**

**One Man Took Its Secret To The GRAVE. But The Little Engine
That Could Change The World Continues To Fascinate --- Or To
Fool**

This is going to sound loony, but: Sitting in the garage of a
house in Daytona Beach, Fla., is an engine that just might be
the closest the world has ever come to the miracle of cheap,
clean energy. Its inventor died in April. His followers
fervently hope someone can figure out how to start the engine.

For the past 20 years they'd been trying to get him to reveal
the formula for the mysterious fuel that made his engine run, or
at least to give the machine a proper independent test. If he
didn't leave his secret with someone, they can kiss goodbye the
millions of dollars they spent nurturing this odd man and the
engine they thought could change the world.

At first glance, this has all the elements of a perpetual-
motion gimmick: Brilliant but quirky inventor Joseph Papp, a
Hungarian immigrant with a mean case of paranoia. A wondrous
dream machine that could run for thousands of hours on a few
cents of fuel and produce no pollution. An apparently impossible
power source in the fusion of helium atoms. Scores of devoted
followers who elbowed each other aside in their eagerness to
give him money, cars, houses. But it's not so easy to prove this
engine a scam. Too many sensible people helped him build it and
run it. Too many engineers say they couldn't find a hamster
inside. The U.S. government gave it two patents. Even famed
physicist Richard Feynmann couldn't debunk it --- the best he
could do was blow the engine up, which killed a man.

More than one person has suggested that if Joseph Papp doesn't
deserve the Nobel Prize for physics, they should create for him
a Nobel Prize for legerdemain.

I first crossed Joe Papp's trail in March, when the Utah cold
fusion story had just broken. A couple of chemists had stunned
the world by claiming to have fused hydrogen atoms in a jar of
water. Next day there were a couple of phone messages on my
machine. One was from a guy who said he'd invented the same
thing in 1986. He'd entered it in the Santa Clara County Fair
and won honorable mention. I tried to call him back, but the
phone number he left had eight digits.

The next call was from a Jimmy Sabori. "Forget those guys in
Utah," he said. "All they have is a glass of water. We have an
engine." I found Jimmy Sabori and his brother Jake in a gray
warehouse in a corner of downtown San Jose. Tacked to the wall
was a detailed blueprint labeled "Joseph Papp Thermonuclear
Plasma Engine."

Over lunch they tried to explain the engine's principle and
spun a tangled tale of intrigues, kidnapping, Navy tests, greedy
partners and lawsuits. So could I see this engine run? Well, it
was in Florida. It was out of fuel right now, and that's why
they'd called me: They needed someone to put up $50,000 or so to
make the fuel for a proper demonstration. But I could take a
videotape home and watch it.

I was caught up in their fascination. There on my TV was a
large, quiet man standing in his garage as a 3-foot-tall black
engine beside him quietly chugged away, its flywheel spinning.
He disconnected the starter batteries. It chugged on. He
unbolted its frame from the wood floor and let it slide sideways
--- no wires coming up through the floor. He hooked it to a
machine measuring RPM and horsepower and torque, and I guessed
the readings were impressive. Could this possibly be real? If
so, how could it stay under wraps for so long? In my search,
which included two conversations with Papp before he died, I
found that the Saboris were just the latest generation of
investors and promoters strung across the country for 20 years.

Many of these people scarcely knew that the others existed. But
they had spookily similar stories to tell, of seduction and
disappointment, of investments forgotten but dreams that just
wouldn't go away. Don Roser, 62, is a building contractor. In
1968, one of his employees at a Gardena refrigeration company,
Hungarian immigrant George Haley, invited Roser to dinner to
meet fellow Hungarian Joseph Papp.

Papp was fascinating, spinning a tale of how he discovered an
odd nuclear phenomenon. In Montreal he'd built a one-man
submarine--he showed the book he'd written, *The Fastest
Submarine* --- that used his novel atomic power principle.
And --- he had the newspaper clippings --- he'd disappeared one
day in 1966 only to show up a couple of days later in a rubber
raft off France, having raced his sub across the ocean at 300
mph. Where was the craft? It sank before he was rescued.

It took only three days for Papp to talk Roser into backing a
new application of the mysterious power, a car engine modified
so it could run for thousands of hours on a sealed charge of his
fuel.

In a conventional engine, a few drops of fuel are mixed with
air inside a cylinder and ignited with a spark. The explosion
pushes down the floor of the cylinder --- a piston --- causing a
shaft to turn. The remains of the burned gasoline are pumped out
as exhaust.

Papp said his cylinders would need neither to breathe in any
air nor to vent any exhaust. A load of fuel --- enough for a
year or so --- would cost a few cents, and there'd be no
pollution.

The fuel was an airy soup of inert gases --- helium, neon,
argon, krypton, xenon. Inside the cylinders, Papp said, the
combination of a magnetic field, pinches of radioactive
substances and a well-timed spark would push the helium atoms so
close together that a few would fuse together, releasing great
energy, forcing the gases to violently expand and then contract
again, over and over for thousands of hours.

Chemists and physicists reading this are shaking their heads.
Atoms fuse only under the most intense duress. All the fuss
about fusion this spring concerned hydrogen, the lightest of
atoms. Even nuclear bombs cause hydrogen fusion for only a
fraction of a second. Papp said he was fusing helium atoms. Even
the center of the sun doesn't have the wherewithal to do that.
But Roser took a gamble, and he pushed Papp hard. The man was a
good machinist, he worked incessantly, and "it was like he had
done it before. He wasn't groping."

Papp began with an old four-cylinder Volvo engine. In six
weeks, he had it running.

(The skeptic asks: What about the car battery that he used to
start it? Couldn't that be turning the engine? No, Roser says,
because the battery was wired through the starter, which wasn't
turning. Besides, Papp often would disconnect the battery and
let the engine run alone for a few minutes.) In short order,
Roser formed a joint company with Papp, hired armed guards and
patent attorneys and called in the press.

Roser's idea was to find a major engine manufacturer to develop
and market the thing. He and Papp would own equal shares in the
technology. Big companies were interested: TRW, Lockheed,
Rockwell. The Army and the Navy made inquiries.

Then came the clash. Roser wanted to put on a public
demonstration. Papp was opposed. The old Volvo engine was
rusted, he said. It might be dangerous. Instead, he suggested a
more impressive demonstration. One Sunday in October 1968 they
trooped out to the desert with six or eight engineers and a
homemade cannon, to be powered by Papp's invention.

The barrel was four feet long, four inches in diameter, made of
1/4-inch stainless steel and anchored in a concrete block. For
the breech they used a spare cylinder head from Papp's engine;
for a projectile they machined a piece of steel.

Papp filled the cylinder with his gases and hooked up the
power. "We heard this tremendous explosion. It was a low rumble,
like a bass sound," Roser says. The projectile had jammed
halfway up the barrel and ripped the cannon in half. The back of
the gun flared open like a tulip.

The observers were impressed. But if Roser was going to sell
the engine to anyone, he needed to have it thoroughly examined.
And he still wanted a public show. Papp objected again, but
Roser was firm. He had seen Papp and his family standing next to
the engine while it purred away; he doubted there was much
danger.

The crowd that showed up one Monday in November 1968 included
engineers, reporters and, Roser says, an attorney from TRW with
a $3.5 million contract in his pocket. It also included a few
students from Caltech and their professor: Richard Feynmann,
skeptic.

Feynmann, who died of cancer last year, was a Nobel laureate
physicist known to most Americans as the member of the
Challenger investigation commission who used a glass of ice
water, a C clamp and a piece of rubber O-ring to cut through all
the NASA double talk and dramatize what caused the shuttle
explosion.

Feynmann left a manuscript describing his encounter with Papp.
He was convinced the engine was a fake before he'd even arrived.
Once there, he took one look and charged that the cord
delivering power to a control panel was running the engine. Papp
pulled the plug, and the engine kept running. Feynmann then
figured there was a battery hidden inside the engine, so he held
on to the plug a little longer, hoping the engine would run
down.

Papp became frantic; the engine was running without any
controls, he said. Feynmann relented and gave up the plug. Papp
put it back in the socket right away and the engine blew apart.

''My back was to it," Roser says. "I knew what happened
immediately because I heard that same rumble as when the cannon
exploded. The guy I was talking to dropped in front of me. He
had a piece of shrapnel go into the flesh around his skull."

A Mattel engineer died --- a piston blasted through his gut.
Eight others were badly wounded. The man from TRW nearly lost a
leg; the contract was forgotten. Papp's and Roser's partnership
quickly fell apart; Papp wanted nothing more to do with Roser or
the engine. Roser sued to get him back to work, but the case
dragged on for years. Papp insisted Roser had been greedy, had
tried to push the engine too far, had tried to steal the secret.

In the end, the judge gave Roser half the rights to the energy
source. The engine, in the meantime, had won a U.S. patent. But
none of that was much use to Roser, who had no idea how to make
the fuel.

Roser now figures he spent half a million dollars on Papp, most
of it in legal fees. For that, he got to watch the engine run
maybe 30 hours altogether; the longest stretch was 35 minutes.
Despite his low opinion of Papp, Roser still thinks the inventor
had something.

Feynmann figured, after the engine blew up, that Papp had
loaded a cylinder with an explosive that would damage the engine
and delay the formal test but that he miscalculated the charge.

Roser says the engine and the cannon were inspected by police
and Stanford Research Institute for signs of a chemical
explosion and that none was found. "They were perplexed by it."

Geza Szabo, 64, is Chief Engineer for a metal tube company in
the Los Angeles area. Like many people I spoke with, Szabo
assured me he was Papp's right-hand man during the years they
were together. Unlike most of the others, he actually got grease
on his hands, helping build a six-cylinder engine.

''For six years I worked with him every day, eight to 10
hours... I know exactly how it's hooked up. I know how it
works," Szabo says.

Does he believe in Papp's engine? No doubt. "I know it sounds
incredible," he says. "Believe me, I'm no dummy. I have two
engineering degrees and a truckful of common sense."

All this doesn't mean Szabo knew how to mix the fuel. With a
dense thicket of pipes and hoses, vacuum pumps and ionizers, all
flashing and hissing like a mad scientist's lab, Papp would
produce a cylinder full of his gaseous mixture --- as long as no
one was watching closely. "I was so decent," Szabo says. "When
he did mixing and ionizing, I walked out."

Papp's expatriate Hungarian friends also didn't know much about
his background. Where he came from seems to have depended on
when you asked.

The most likely reliable source I could find was Ohio car
mechanic Joseph Tatrai, a friend from Papp's home town who
decades later visited him in Florida.

Joseph Papp was born in 1933 in Tatabanya, Hungary, where his
father was an electrician for a coal mining company, Tatrai
says.

After school, Papp joined a "civilian" flying club, the first
step toward being a military pilot. "He was a young chap then, a
skinny little nothing. He had ideals and dreams but had no
resources to develop these things," Tatrai recalls. "He was
always a tinkering person." He went on to an elite air force
academy, where he flew bombers and studied mechanical
engineering.

Later he worked at a research institute that had something to
do with atomic power. That's where, Papp later said, he first
thought about trying to make a "mini-fusion" engine.

Then came the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Papp made his way in
1957 to Canada, where he met and married Helen Maczko, another
Hungarian   immigrant. They had their only child,
Susan, in 1967, and a year later moved to California. Papp's
family life looked uncomfortable to friends. "He lived in a
very, very bad area, a small, tiny house... His wife was
miserable," one says.

''An absolute loner, in spite of the family," Haley calls him.
"He was an obsessed scientist, even a mad scientist --- you can
say that."

''He was, with all respect, a little flipped," Szabo says.
Papp's emotions were intense and varied, to put it politely ---
"friction all over the place," Szabo recalls.

Depression, too: "He would talk about his misery, how he was so
badly treated," says John Phillips, an attorney who spent years
trying to repair Papp's and Roser's old partnership.

And paranoia, especially: "He was scared from his shadow,"
Szabo says. He feared the oil companies or the Mafia would come
after him. "Nobody could explain that nobody wanted to shoot
him."

In one of the depositions he gave during his suit with Roser,
Papp left a glimpse of this. "I am a scientist and I try to
fight for United States and I am willing to work with United
States, you understand, because I lost my country... But you
have to think who is the troublemaker and who tried to cut my
throat."

His pride seemed on the line, too.

''He believed fervently that if he ever gave up the secrets, he
would be totally out," Phillips says. "... If he lost that,
nobody would ever be interested in Joe Papp."

Why did he work so hard at an engine he could never give up?

''He felt it was valuable. He knew it worked," Szabo says. "But
he worked by this foggy belief that the trap, the danger,
somehow, someday, would disappear. He kept on working, improving
--- oh, boy, working like a dog --- filing, drilling, melting...
But his mind said there always is a trap."

Working with Papp was exhausting, but the potential seemed to
make it all worthwhile.

''If he'd trusted me," Szabo says, "I could have worked out the
technical details and we would have been trillionaires."

Papp added them to his list of people who had tried to screw
him. Jim Adamson, 71, is an old hand at getting projects off the
ground. For 40 years he worked in San Diego for Convair, helping
build airplanes and missiles. He heard about Joe Papp through a
friend who was Papp's latest lawyer. In June 1973 he invited
Papp, Szabo and Haley down from Los Angeles. He got his boss's
OK to bring the engine down and test it.

Papp's new engine was a Leyland six-cylinder truck engine,
heavily modified, with elaborate wires and gauges and gizmos.

Papp and friends had given it an unusual setting: inside an old
school bus. Not under the hood --- it was too big for that. The
immense, gleaming engine sat on a gaudy carpet several feet
behind the driver.

Papp's friends had concocted a plan where, with great flourish,
they would fire up the engine (it had never actually propelled
the bus) and drive the bus to the White House to show the world
that the energy shortage was over.

Adamson persuaded them to quietly drive it down to San Diego
for tests instead. In August 1973, on the night before he was to
make the drive, Papp disappeared. Two days later he was found
wandering miles away, with a .22-caliber slug in his left
shoulder, telling a story of being abducted, escaping and being
shot by someone who was after his secrets. No one was ever
caught, and several people have always suspected Papp shot
himself. If so, he did more harm than he intended. The nerve
damage crippled his left hand.

It was almost a year and a half before Adamson could get Papp
and the bus to San Diego. It was towed, not driven.

Adamson put the engine in an isolated building. To salve Papp's
paranoia, he added a 24-hour plainclothes detail to Convair's
already strong security. He assigned a confidential team of
engineers and technicians to help Papp. Adamson recalls that the
inventor impressed the engineers who were watching him; most
figured he was no fraud.

The engine was ringed with monitors, to capture whatever
emanations --- pressure, temperature, sound --- it might
produce. They even planned to weigh it before and after.

But Papp beat the system. Late on Easter Sunday he went into
the lab alone, turned on a camera and started the engine about
half a dozen times. People who have seen the videotape say the
flywheel ran for several seconds each time. "Go, baby, go," Papp
whispered.

It stalled. A piece of metal had slipped loose and gouged the
inside of one cylinder.

After Adamson's crew fixed the engine, someone sabotaged Papp's
fuel mixer. Papp and Haley blamed the same mysterious forces
behind the abduction, but Adamson said it was impossible for
anyone but those two men to have gotten to the lab undetected.

About a month later, Papp's wife, feeling abandoned and fearful
up in Torrance, tried to kill herself and 7-year-old Susan by
cutting their wrists. Papp dropped all his work and went back to
his family.

Despite the inventor's blatant reluctance to run his engine
under any scrutiny, Adamson is convinced he had something real.

''We took the engine apart" after it jammed. "There were no
little mice running around in the treadmill. There was nothing
in there, no external connections to anything we could find."

Besides, "when you got inside there and saw the damage that had
been done in that cylinder, you would almost have to believe
there was significant power there," Adamson says.

In fact, Adamson invested in the engine in its next
incarnation. Papp's recollection of the work at Convair? Someone
tried to steal his secret from him.

Ernie Engel, 66, of North Platte, Neb., is "semi-retired"
today. In the mid-1970s, Engel had just given up a lucrative
career selling life insurance in the upper Plains and invested
in a three-wheel automobile. At an auto show in Los Angeles in
1976, Joe Papp walked up. "He said, 'You've got a new type of
car, and I've got a new source of power.' "

Papp showed his movies and told his stories.

Engel was impressed. He put down $100,000 for a license to put
Papp's engines in his cars. It was to be the first of many
$100,000 checks he wrote, on the behalf of himself and other
Nebraska investors, who called themselves Energy Executives.

Energy Executives was given shares in a new corporation called
Papp International, or rights to use the company's future engine
in some application --- irrigation pumps, trucks, cars. But
because Papp owned 82 percent of the corporation, owning a share
usually meant you had sent a check to him, to do with as he
pleased.

Papp used the first Energy Executives check to buy a fine house
in Santa Ana: two stories, four bedrooms, a swimming pool.

Then he left for six months in South Africa. His translator
said Papp signed a corporation's $500 million contract --- but
then reneged, complaining that he didn't want to be under its
control.

When Papp returned, the investors started shelling out more
cash: for the parts to build six new, two-cylinder engines; for
a secure fuel lab in a separate town under a different name; for
a house-hunting trip to Florida when Papp decided to move; for
the $350,000 Daytona Beach home itself; for a new Cadillac; for
vacations to China and Hungary; for the patent lawyers' bills.
People noticed that Papp was collecting a lot of money from them
and not doing much in return, but they don't seem to have
questioned his engine, just his responsibility.

Finally the two-cylinder engine ran, on June 18, 1981.

A videotape of that demonstration was sent to the patent office
to shore up the new engine's patent application, which was
granted. (The office would nominate his engine as one of the
year's best patents, but Papp refused to participate in the
ceremony.)

Somehow Papp could never be persuaded to give the engine up for
an independent test.

Engel finally got fed up, he says, when Papp accused him of
breaking into his lab and snooping through his papers. Someone
did break in, Engel says, but it wasn't him. He knew Papp would
never leave his engine's secret where anyone could find it.

''I had it up to the eyebrows. I drove back to Nebraska and
never went back down there."

Altogether, he figures $1.5 million went to Papp from him and
his friends in Oklahoma. Roughly another $750,000 came from the
investors in Nebraska. Wasn't it a scam? "No, because the engine
ran, no doubt about it. There were no secret valves. The engine
was picked up and there were no hidden tubes going in, giving it
fuel.

''I know Joe. Joe really had it."

Next up: Ken Dollar, of Tulsa, had been following Papp's
progress since 1968, when a friend in California told him about
the engine.

In late 1982, sensing that relations were strained between the
inventor and the Papp International investors, he introduced
Papp to Universal Power Concepts, a company that said it would
market the engine.

The effort lasted for about five years before winding up in
court. In the meantime, a new slate of investors wrote checks
--by one estimate a million dollars worth, most of which Papp
said he never received. No new engines were built. The one in
Papp's garage ran countless times for would-be investors and for
the experts they brought. But it never ran anywhere else, though
it spent a couple years in a Tulsa testing lab waiting for the
squabbling to settle down. Dollar still is convinced. He ended
up as president of UPC, which still stands to gain if the engine
ever runs.

''He was the best con artist I ever met in my life," he says,
but adds, "The engine wasn't a con. To have something that was
real and still do the con game, that I never figured out."

One of his partners, Ralph Keen, an assistant U.S. attorney in
Oklahoma, concurs: "I think I'm a reasonably intelligent person;
I understand these types of things could very easily be fraud. I
did everything within my power to assure it was not a fraud."

Jimmy Sabori, 59, and his brother Jake, 56, heard about Papp
about seven years ago, when Jimmy was building wind-power
turbines.

The Saboris sent half a million dollars to UPC, they say, for
what they thought would be franchises to use Papp's engine to
generate electricity.

When no engine materialized --- it was stuck in the Tulsa lab
waiting for the tests that never came --- they sued UPC to get
their money back. But in July 1988, the judge instead ordered
them to work with Papp to bring his engine to market. Jake
hauled the engine back to Florida, rebuilt it with Papp and
watched it run. Then the Saboris went hunting for more
investors, preferably people who would plunk down a few hundred
thousand.

But the Saboris quickly discovered Papp's fundamental dilemma:
He was reluctant to reveal his secret. He said he was tired of
skeptics. He was especially unwilling to spell it all out for
anyone, like a physicist, who could understand the concept and
steal it.

Then things got worse: In January, Papp had to open the engine
to repair it, venting the last of his fuel. The elaborate mixer,
unused in several years, was worn out. Without $50,000 or so to
build a new one, the engine could not run again.

In early April, I talked with Papp about this state of affairs
by telephone. ''I now feel like giving it up. Forget it. It's
like pushing the big wall," he said. "I spend 80 percent of my
life to convince people it's true." But if he gave up, he said,
he couldn't face his family.

''Every time anybody sees my engine they get all crazy and like
to have the whole thing and think how they can get it."

He wanted to keep the secret of his fuel to himself, he said,
and just sell the engines.

That wouldn't happen. A long-ignored pain in Papp's belly
turned out to be colon cancer. Within two weeks, he was dead.

Bruce Crouse, 32, a plant manager for a company that makes
wheel trim for General Motors and Nissan, married Papp's
daughter, Susan, last November. When Papp died, his penniless
widow turned to her new son-in-law. Papp was barely in the
ground before the phone and doorbell started ringing. Past
investors, present partners, people who had always wanted to
invest offered to help get the engine started.

Many people seem to figure that with Papp out of the way, there
was a chance to get the engine running in public --- assuming he
left his secret with someone. But did he?

Crouse wasn't talking. He wanted to sort through the applicants
and cut a quick deal with somebody, and he was holding his cards
close to his chest. The remains of Papp International --- an
Oklahoma dentist and a Nebraska farm-machinery manufacturer ---
insisted they had a backer and a plan, and that if Papp had left
the answer anywhere, they owned it.

A former assistant, Mike Studley, hinted that he had learned
the secret years ago. He had a six-month plan to get the engine
running, which he would share with me if I held off on this
story until he needed the publicity.

Another former investor, from Utah, showed up on Bakersfield
television last month, with an endorsement from a California
state senator, saying that Papp had sold the rights to him.

The Saboris, desperately short of money, say Papp entrusted
them with copies of his papers. They don't understand the
details themselves, but are reluctant to reveal the papers to
anyone who could. They haven't resolved this dilemma any better
than Papp did.

As I listen to the true believers wrangle over the relics, I
get a strong suspicion that none of them will make the engine
run --- and that this will shake the faith of none of them.

What do I think? Well, I tracked down one more chapter in the
Joseph Papp saga: his infamous atomic submarine.

For six years in Montreal, Joseph Papp's Hungarian friends
watched as he spent all his time and money building his dream
machine: a 28-foot, torpedo-shaped submarine that would use a
secret atomic fuel to propel itself at high speeds. Papp built
the sub, of steel and aluminum, in a friend's garage under
strict secrecy. "Joseph didn't trust anybody, not even his
wife," a friend said. In August 1966 it was completed; he showed
it off to television reporters. A few days later, Helen Papp
called the police to report that her husband and his submarine
were missing.

French military authorities found Papp bobbing in a rubber raft
off Brest, babbling about having crossed the ocean in eight
hours.

Papp was the toast of two continents --- until his story
started falling apart. A man looking like Joseph Papp, and using
his passport, had flown from Montreal to Paris the night Papp
had disappeared. A Paris-to-Brest train ticket was in Papp's
pocket when he was found.

The *London Daily Mirror* said Papp admitted it was a
stunt, that he couldn't bear to admit to his friends that the
submarine wouldn't work.

Less than two years later, he left for Los Angeles, with the
idea of building his fusion-powered engine. In the interim, he
obviously figured out what went wrong the first time. Either he
perfected his engine --- or he perfected his sleight-of-hand.

Caption: PHOTO: Inventor Joseph Papp with his fabulous fusion
machine in the '60s. Over the next 20 years, investors would
spend millions on what is either a miraculous breakthrough or an
ingenious hoax.

DIAGRAM: Blueprints of Papp's engine exist. In fact, the engine
itself exists. But the investors don't have the secret of the
fuel that made it run. That died with Papp last April.

PHOTO: In the '70s, Papp modified a Leyland six-cylinder truck
engine and mounted it in an old school bus. Papp claimed that
the engine could run for a year or so on a few cents worth of
his secret fuel. There were plans to demonstrate Papp's solution
to the energy crisis by driving the bus to the White House. But
the engine never actually propelled the school bus.

PHOTO: In the '80s, Papp was still tinkering with the engine.
But he vented the remaining fuel three months before his death.

---



**Email Notes**

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com   
Cecil Baumgartner   
Wednesday, July 30, 2003 9:59 PM

In personal conversations with Joe Papp, he said that he
scuttled the submarine off the coast of France to keep it out of
the hands of the Russians - which he detested. If the submarine
story is a hoax, why couldn't the Canadians find it off their
coast? Have the French made a search in the vicinity where they
picked him up? I was a witness to his homemade cannon
demonstration in which he substantially demolished a three foot
length of 3-inch schedule 50 stainless steel pipe (0.6 inch wall
thickness) which was totally encased in one-foot thick
reinforced concrete with 10cc of "inert" noble gases. The
concrete encasement was mostly blasted into the air and reduced
to rubble. It also made a crater about 3-foot diameter and about
3-foot deep and the 1-foot thick platform of plywood and 2x8
planks on which the "concrete coffin" was mounted was reduced to
splinters. With that kind of power, it would not take more than
a 55-gallon drum to propel him across the Atlantic!

---

  
Heinz Klostermann   
Friday, June 20, 2003 9:31 PM

Dear Alex {Llera], I like that you place a note in the
guestbook about: "Joseph Papp the inventor of Hungary who died
in April 1989. He received 3 US Patents on his "Pulsed Plasma
Explosion Engine and the Bomb Patent". He raised more than $10
Million for his research and development of the engine. After
his death another $25 Million Dollars have been spent to find
the secret of the Papp Technology. I am involved for tree years
now and we believe we are close to reinventing the Papp
Technology. We are going public with the total Joseph Papp story
in September 2003. Anyone who has info on Joseph Papp in
particular his growing-up years in Hungary and his 10 years in
Canada should feel free to contact me. Thank you, Heinz
Klostermann, 650 5716140 email: AHK2@rcn.com."

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