10 Inventions That Were Erased From History — And Why They Disappeared — Transcript

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1. 0:00There is a lightbulb in a fire station in  Livermore, California. It has been burning
2. 0:04continuously since the year 1901. That is one  hundred and twenty five years and counting. No
3. 0:10one can fully explain why it still works. But  in 1924, a group of executives met in Geneva.
4. 0:17They made certain no one would ever build another  bulb like it. That lightbulb is one of ten stories
5. 0:23I am going to tell you today. And by the end, you  will understand that they are all the same story.
6. 0:28Today's video is a little different from what we  usually do on this channel. Instead of one deep
7. 0:33investigation, I am walking through ten inventions  that worked. Ten inventions that were verified,
8. 0:39demonstrated, patented, or sold. And ten  inventions that were destroyed, classified,
9. 0:45or erased. Not by accident, but by design. I  have numbered them from ten to one. Number ten
10. 0:52is strange enough to stop you cold. Number one  will change how you see everything you own.
11. 0:57Number ten. In 1985, a fire broke out on a plane  at Manchester Airport. Fifty five people died
12. 1:03in forty seconds. Not from the flames. From  the toxic smoke. A hairdresser in Hartlepool,
13. 1:09England, named Maurice Ward, watched the news and  decided to do something about it. He had no formal
14. 1:14training in chemistry. He made his own hair dyes  and shampoos. But over months of mixing compounds
15. 1:20in his kitchen, sometimes twenty formulations in  a single day, he created something impossible. He
16. 1:26called it Starlite. In March 1990, the BBC program  Tomorrow's World coated a raw egg in Starlite and
17. 1:34held a blowtorch to it for several minutes. When  they cracked the egg open, it was still raw and
18. 2:02cold inside. The material had blocked thousands  of degrees of direct heat. Senior British defense
19. 2:07officials, including the Chief Scientific Adviser  to the Ministry of Defence, publicly confirmed
20. 2:12the material's extraordinary thermal properties.  Ward claimed it could withstand temperatures up to
21. 2:18ten thousand degrees Celsius. NASA was interested.  Boeing was interested. ICI, the British Ministry
22. 2:25of Defence, multiple defense contractors, all  of them came knocking. Ward refused every deal.
23. 2:31He demanded fifty one percent ownership. He  never filed a patent because he feared reverse
24. 2:36engineering. He died in 2011 at the age of seventy  eight. The formula, as far as the public knows,
25. 2:42died with him. A material that could have  protected aircraft, buildings, and spacecraft
26. 2:46from fire and nuclear heat. Gone. Not because it  failed. Because one man would not let go of it,
27. 2:53and no institution was willing to meet his terms. Number nine. In 1996, General Motors built the
28. 3:00EV1. It was the first modern mass produced  electric car from a major automaker. It had
29. 3:05regenerative braking, a sleek aerodynamic frame,  and customers who described it as the best car
30. 3:11they had ever driven. GM built one thousand one  hundred and seventeen of them. But here is what
31. 3:16made the EV1 different from every other car  GM ever produced. You could not buy one. The
32. 3:22contract explicitly prohibited purchase. Lease  only. When GM decided to end the program in 1999,
33. 3:29they did not sell the remaining cars. They did  not donate them. They did not store them. They
34. 3:34repossessed every single one, loaded them onto  trucks, drove them to Mesa, Arizona, and crushed
35. 3:40them. Customers protested. Some chained themselves  to the cars. Others sent checks to GM begging to
36. 3:46buy them outright. GM returned the checks and sent  the cars to the crusher. About forty survived,
37. 3:52donated to museums and universities. Every one of  them had its drivetrain permanently disabled. You
38. 3:58could look at it. You could never drive it again.  GM spent over one billion dollars developing
39. 4:03electric vehicle technology. Then chose to  physically destroy the result. In 2026, GM is
40. 4:10now helping restore the only privately owned EV1  in existence. The same company that crushed them
41. 4:16is rebuilding one for its thirtieth anniversary. Number eight. In February 1938, Popular Mechanics
42. 4:23ran a cover story calling hemp the new billion  dollar crop. A single plant that could produce
43. 4:29paper, textiles, rope, biofuel, and over twenty  five thousand commercial products. That same year,
44. 4:35the Marijuana Tax Act effectively criminalized  all hemp cultivation in the United States. The
45. 4:41timing was not coincidental. Historians have  identified several powerful figures who stood
46. 4:46to benefit enormously from hemp's elimination.  William Randolph Hearst owned vast timber and
47. 4:52paper interests. DuPont had just patented nylon  and other synthetic fibers. Andrew Mellon,
48. 4:58the Secretary of the Treasury and DuPont's  primary banker, appointed his own nephew in law,
49. 5:03Harry Anslinger, to run the Federal Bureau of  Narcotics. A billion dollar crop destroyed in
50. 5:08months. Not because the plant was dangerous.  Because a machine called the hemp decorticator
51. 5:14had just made it cheap enough to threaten three  of the most powerful industries in America. And
52. 5:18during World War Two, when the government suddenly  needed hemp again, the USDA produced a propaganda
53. 5:24film called Hemp for Victory. It urged farmers to  grow the very plant they had just criminalized.
54. 5:31Number seven. Nikola Tesla designed a tower  on Long Island to transmit electrical energy
55. 5:36wirelessly across the globe. No wires.  No meters. No bills. JP Morgan funded the
56. 5:42project with approximately one hundred and fifty  thousand dollars, believing it was for wireless
57. 5:47communication to compete with Marconi. When Morgan  understood Tesla's actual goal was free wireless
58. 5:52power, the funding vanished. Morgan could not see  how to monetize electricity if anyone could draw
59. 5:58it from the air. The tower was never completed.  It was demolished in 1917 to pay Tesla's debts.
60. 6:04Tesla died on January 7, 1943, in room three  three two seven of the New Yorker Hotel. He
61. 6:11was eighty six years old. He died alone. Within  hours, the Office of Alien Property Custodian
62. 6:16seized his papers and personal belongings. Tesla  was a naturalized United States citizen. Some
63. 6:22of those materials remain classified. The  man who gave the world alternating current,
64. 6:27the foundations of radio, and remote  control technology died with almost nothing.
65. 6:31He died because he tried to give electricity  away for free. I spent three days sitting
66. 6:37with this section before I could write it.  Not because the facts are unclear. Because
67. 6:41every way I tried to frame it sounded like I was  exaggerating. I was not. That is what happened.
68. 6:48Number six. Everything I have told you so far  involves inventions that reached the public
69. 6:54before they were killed. Starlite was demonstrated  on television. The EV1 was driven on public roads.
70. 7:00Tesla's tower was physically built. But what about  the inventions that never made it that far? The
71. 7:05Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 is an active federal  law. It is codified at title thirty five of the
72. 7:12United States Code, sections one eighty one  through one eighty eight. Under this law,
73. 7:17every patent application filed in the United  States can be reviewed by defense agencies. If
74. 7:22any agency determines that publication of the  invention would be detrimental to the national
75. 7:26security, a secrecy order is imposed. The inventor  cannot talk about it, develop it, sell it, or
76. 7:32acknowledge it exists. Violation carries up to two  years in federal prison. As of fiscal year 2025,
77. 7:40there are six thousand five hundred and forty  three patents under active secrecy orders. That
78. 7:45number comes directly from the United States  Patent and Trademark Office via a Freedom of
79. 7:50Information Act response. Between 2013 and 2017,  an average of one hundred and seventeen new
80. 7:56inventions were classified per year. Only twenty  five were declassified. The backlog grows every
81. 8:02year. A leaked 1971 category list revealed that  solar photovoltaic generators were classified as
82. 8:08a restricted technology. Solar panels, suppressed  for national security, over fifty years ago. One
83. 8:15patent filed in 1936 was not declassified  until 2000. Sixty four years. It was a
84. 8:21manual code machine. Completely obsolete by the  time they released it. This is not speculation.
85. 8:26The law is public. The statistics are public.  The FOIA letters are public. Every invention
86. 8:32I have discussed before this one got far  enough for you to hear about it. Six thousand
87. 8:38five hundred and forty three others did not. Number five. December 23, 1924. Two days before
88. 8:44Christmas. Geneva, Switzerland. Executives  from Osram, Philips, Compagnie des Lampes,
89. 8:50and General Electric gathered in a hotel room.  They called themselves the Phoebus cartel,
90. 8:55named after the Greek god of light. By 1924,  lightbulbs lasted between fifteen hundred and
91. 9:01twenty five hundred hours. The cartel agreed  to reduce that to exactly one thousand hours.
92. 9:07They did not simply make worse bulbs. They spent  years engineering a bulb that reliably failed at
93. 9:12one thousand hours. That is harder than building  a better one. Manufacturers were fined if their
94. 9:17bulbs lasted too long. Samples were shipped to  a central testing laboratory in Switzerland for
95. 9:22verification. A graph from the Berlin Municipal  Archive shows the results. Average bulb lifespan
96. 9:28dropped from eighteen hundred hours in 1926 to  twelve hundred and five hours by 1934. In 1949,
97. 9:35a United States district court found General  Electric had violated the Sherman Anti Trust Act
98. 9:40through its role in the cartel. And that lightbulb  in Livermore, California? The one I mentioned at
99. 9:45the start? It was installed in 1901. Before the  cartel existed. It is still burning. They did not
100. 9:51just shorten a product's life. They invented a  philosophy. Make it worse on purpose. Sell more.
101. 9:57Every industry that followed learned the lesson. Number four. Royal Raymond Rife was an American
102. 10:04inventor who built instruments he claimed  could observe and target microorganisms at
103. 10:09magnifications beyond conventional optical  limits. In 1934, he claimed to have treated
104. 10:15fourteen terminal cancer patients using specific  electromagnetic frequencies. Morris Fishbein,
105. 10:21head of the American Medical Association,  reportedly tried to acquire a share of the
106. 10:25technology. Rife refused. What followed was  systematic. His laboratory was vandalized. His
107. 10:32key research partner, Dr. Milbank Johnson, died  under unclear circumstances. A 1953 report to
108. 10:39the United States Senate Interstate Commerce  Committee, known as the Fitzgerald Report,
109. 10:43investigated the suppression of alternative cancer  treatments. It found documented evidence that the
110. 10:48AMA had obstructed competing therapies. I want  to be honest about something. I cannot tell you
111. 10:54Rife's device worked as he claimed. No independent  replication has confirmed it. The scientific
112. 11:00establishment's skepticism may be justified. But  the Senate did not investigate whether Rife was
113. 11:05right. They investigated whether the system gave  him a fair chance to prove it. And the answer,
114. 11:10according to their own report, was no. Number three. Stanley Allen Meyer built
115. 11:15a dune buggy in Columbus, Ohio, that he said ran  on water. He called his device a water fuel cell.
116. 11:22He held multiple United States patents, including  patent number four nine three six nine six one. He
117. 11:29demonstrated the car on local television.  In 1996, two investors sued him. The court
118. 11:35examined the device, found it was performing  conventional electrolysis, and ordered Meyer
119. 11:40to refund twenty five thousand dollars. I am not  going to tell you the water car worked. The court
120. 11:45said it did not. But on March 20, 1998, Meyer sat  down at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Grove City,
121. 11:52Ohio, with his brother Stephen and two Belgian  investors. He took a sip of cranberry juice.
122. 11:57Then he grabbed his neck, ran outside,  fell to his knees in the parking lot, and
123. 12:00vomited violently. His brother ran to him. Meyer  looked up and said, "They poisoned me." He was
124. 12:06fifty seven years old. The Franklin County coroner  ruled his death a cerebral aneurysm. No poison was
125. 12:13found. Meyer had high blood pressure. That is the  official record. Whether you believe it or not,
126. 12:18a man who challenged the energy industry died in  a parking lot at fifty seven, and his last words
127. 12:23accused someone of killing him. That sentence  sits in the air whether the car worked or not.
128. 12:29Number two. At one time, approximately seventeen  thousand named apple varieties existed in the
129. 12:36United States. Today, only about four thousand  five hundred are known to survive. Just fifteen
130. 12:42varieties account for ninety percent of what you  see in grocery stores. Across all vegetable crops,
131. 12:47the USDA cataloged seven thousand two hundred  and sixty two varieties in 1903. By 1983,
132. 12:55ninety four percent of those specific varieties  had disappeared from commercial catalogs. They
133. 13:00were not lost to drought or disease. They  were replaced. Replaced by patented hybrid
134. 13:05seeds engineered so that harvested seeds do not  produce viable new plants. If you are a farmer,
135. 13:10you must buy new seed every year. The Plant  Patent Act of 1930 made it legal to own a
136. 13:16living organism. For ten thousand years, farmers  saved seed and shared freely. That cycle broke in
137. 13:23a single century. Three corporations now  control over half the world's commercial
138. 13:28seed supply. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in  Norway, a bunker carved into an Arctic mountain,
139. 13:34stores backup seeds from around the world.  Its existence is an admission. What remains is
140. 13:40fragile enough to need a doomsday backup. Former  FBI agent David Benscoter now searches abandoned
141. 13:46orchards in the Pacific Northwest looking for  apple varieties thought to be extinct. Since 2014,
142. 13:52his Lost Apple Project has rediscovered  over twenty nine varieties. He is not
143. 13:56solving a crime. He is undoing an erasure  that most people do not even know happened.
144. 14:02Number one. In 1932, a New York real estate broker  named Bernard London published a twenty page
145. 14:10pamphlet. It was called Ending the Depression  Through Planned Obsolescence. His proposal
146. 14:15was simple. The government would assign an  official expiration date to every manufactured
147. 14:20product. Shoes, cars, buildings, furniture,  clothing, machinery. After the expiration date,
148. 14:26the product would be declared legally dead. The  owner would be required by law to surrender it
149. 14:30for government supervised destruction. Then  purchase a replacement. Forced consumption to
150. 14:36restart the economy. The pamphlet is real. It  is twenty pages. It is publicly available. You
151. 14:42can read it on Wikimedia Commons today. It was  never made into law. But look around your house.
152. 14:47Your phone slows down after two years. Your  appliances fail just past the warranty. Your
153. 14:52printer stops working when a chip says the  ink is empty, even when it is not. In 2020,
154. 14:58Apple paid one hundred and thirteen million  dollars to settle claims that they deliberately
155. 15:02slowed older iPhones. The Phoebus cartel made  lightbulbs die at one thousand hours. GM crushed
156. 15:08cars that worked. Seeds were engineered so you  cannot replant them. Bernard London did not change
157. 15:13anything. He just wrote down what was already  happening. And what has not stopped since.
158. 15:18Every story in this video follows the same  pattern. Something worked. Someone profited
159. 15:23from its failure. And a system ensured that  failure was the only outcome. The law exists.
160. 15:28The statistics exist. The documents exist. The  pamphlet exists. You can read it tonight. The
161. 15:34question is not whether this happened.  The question is what else is sitting in
162. 15:37those six thousand five hundred and forty three  classified files that you are not allowed to see.
163. 15:42And whether the next invention that could change  your life is already locked inside one of them.