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Patent people snub electricity invention Mail Tribune / Jim Craven John Herring of Union Creek says he has designed a machine that will produce electricity using gravity, but no one seems to be interested - including the U.S. Patent Office. Union Creek man's idea uses gravity to generate power from falling water By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune On the top of a pool table at the Union Creek store, John Herring spreads out what he says is the key to cheap, abundant electricity: multi-colored schematics of a device to make electricity from gravity. You might think the world would beat a path to the door of the former machinist who says he started working on the concept 20 years ago. Hasn't happened. Herring, 57, of Union Creek, says he's tried to interest government officials and big business in his gravity machine, which he calls ELSA (Earth's Life-Saving Answer), to no avail. This week he presented it to science students in Prospect schools. "I'm just gonna say, hey, here it is," he says. "Gravity is free." Herring says the U.S. Patent Office would not grant a patent, saying ELSA was a perpetual motion machine, which he says it isn't, although it would run 24/seven. If there's a conspiracy to keep such a godsend from mankind, it must go to the highest levels. Herring shows a reporter a letter from C. Boyden Gray, a counselor to then-Vice President George Bush, telling him to take his invention elsewhere. He's had the cold shoulder from U.S. senators and representatives, the governors of all 50 states and a power company in Nevada. He says he sold more than 500 sets of drawings over the Internet for prices of $4.99 to $11.99. Herring, who is originally from Rhode Island, says he worked as a machinist until a serious head injury a few years ago and now receives disability payments. He claims as many as 200 inventions over the years, including one for a dripless soda can with a built-in straw. He holds at least one patent - number 4,688,824 - for a school bus safety device, a space-age plastic shield designed to fit the front end of a bus like a locomotive's cow-catcher. The Boston Herald even did a story on it in 1986. But nobody's biting on ELSA. "I definitely think it's a conspiracy," he says. The short version of ELSA goes like this: A piston in a cylinder travels 33 feet down, pumping more than 60 cubic feet of water uphill, then uses the water's weight to re-compress the piston, which was expanded at the bottom of the tank (using compressed air) by a slip valve. The falling water runs a miniature turbine, generating electricity. "I know they think I'm a wacko," Herring says. "I don't care. I just don't want to die and take it with me." Asked about ELSA, Prospect science teacher Jim Smith says, "What do you think? You can make electricity with falling water. But how do you keep it falling?" Smith says ELSA makes a great presentation - and discussion afterward. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.