I can’t get over this Lonnie Johnson story. It’s actually old news from a few years ago.
I’m speechless reading his amazing journey. I’m excited with his invention, backed up by the scientific community as something that has enough potential to dramatically change the world (yeah, I’m into this shit these days).
And yet Lonnie struggles to finance his research. I can’t get over this either.
When I read about his perfect career at the Air Force and NASA (received multiple achievement awards), his perfect life (helps children in Georgia and created jobs around his hometown), I don’t understand. There’s something deeply wrong in this country well known as Entrepreneur Land when a man like Lonnie is in difficulty to do research on his JTEC engine prototype and maybe start a worldwide revolution.
I mean the effing PARC said about the invention “ it’s a very clever way to extract energy from a heat engine … It’s incredibly elegant.” But the defense about why Lonnie’s concept and prototype are not heavily funded is basically this (comment from ycombinator):
Investing in this is a huge risk since even though the concept might actually work it may turn out that there’s no economical sane way to enter mass production. In addition there’s still the doubt of "too good to be true" because it usually is.
A huge risk to invest a couple million dollars in order to change the entire energy economy, opening new markets? We have games, websites, failing with hundreds of million $ of funding, how come investing even half of that in the potential of the JTEC is crazy?? And if there’s still a doubt how the fuck are you going to make it disappear if you don’t help? It’s the kind of argument you could use for any invention Humanity discovered. It’s almost nonsense to stop at “it’s a risk” in R&D. R&D is about taking risks and minimizing or at least manage them.
Like another comment said, “if an electric sports car for the rich can get funded, so can this guy.”
Well apparently not.
Yeah, he’s a minority. In his skin. In his way and fields he’s doing research –from working on spacecrafts for the government to create squirt guns on its own to building an engine with both private and public interest-, he’s different, not academic, too cool. Probably a bad seller too.
But the man’s definitely got something, how come he be pretty much left alone in his little town in Georgia with no or very little funding available? Lonnie wants to stay independent and that doesn’t make it easy to get funding I guess. Still, how come?? MIT? Jay Z? Bill Gates? Fucking somebody??
He gave a keynote almost two years ago and the goal was to develop a 25 Kilowatts engine in less than three years with the help of PARC.
Nothing in the news.
During that time, here’s a scale of R&D investments in different types of energy compared to the cost of the war in Iraq. Scroll down and cry.
So my question is: should I start a Kickstarter project and help a brother out?