Thursday, March 11, 2010

Fascination

I would have loved to have seen this car on the road and even more, to have been able to drive it. The style seems to borrow from Buckminster Fullers Dymaxion Car, but perhaps they both shared an art deco streamlined vision of the future.

The fascination car was the brainchild of Paul M. Lewis, of the Highway Aircraft Corporation. It was developed with a standard engine, but he wanted to power it with ANYTHING that didn't burn gasoline. He was in negotiations with Ed Gray for a while to use the EMA Engine, but that fell through. He then approached Joseph Papp for his plasma engine. Ultimately, neither the car or the engines were ever produced.

If you are interested in the Fascination Car and it's history and the very interesting and tragic story of Ed Gray, the inventor of the EMA engine and developer of causal positron energy check out this link. Another genius who seems to have been destroyed by the industries his inventions would have threatened.

3 comments:

mud_rake said...

When I was a kid in the 50's, a man on a nearby street used to drive by in either a Hudson or Nash that looked like there was no 'front' or 'back.' Both ends were the same and we would stare, point and laugh as he drove by.

The amalgamation in the photo brought that old memory back!

steve said...

This positron energy, are they talking about the casimir force / zero point energy?

microdot said...

You made me look up the definition of the casimir force...becaue of the dates of the Casimir theory, we can rule it out.
Though, the theories might be variations of the concept.
It is more interesting to look at the web references to the to the EMA engine...
In the long run, I think Ed Gray was a visionary con artist who worked for years to develop a dream and in the end was destroyed by it.