9 Lost Inventions That Could Have Changed The World

2. The Vapor Carburetor

Thomas Ogle's Vapour Carburetor has been the subject of much speculation and controversy since it was developed in the 1970s. According to some reports, Ogle managed to develop a new type of carburetor that would allow an ordinary car to run on over 100 miles to the gallon. It apparently worked by pressurising petrol into a vapour and injecting it into the firing chambers with drastically improved efficiency. The fuel system was patented and widely reported at the time, so why aren't we all driving around in super-efficient vapour-powered cars now? For a start, Ogle died in 1981 and took the design with him. The autopsy reports that he died of an overdose, but there are some who believe he was poisoned. Whatever the cause, his invention died too. There are those who believe the Vapour Carburetor was a hoax, an illusion created using hidden fuel tanks. This is largely to do with the fact that no one seems to have been able to reproduce the effect on a large scale since then. However, many contemporaries of Ogle were pretty convinced of the engine's authenticity, some of them emphatically stating that "it no hoax". Who knows, perhaps it was a hoax, or perhaps the answer to the current fuel crisis was lost forever.