SAWSmemo.html

If you think government
will ever allow alternative energy,
you haven't seen the SAWS Memo.

"SAWS" means Sensitive Application Warning System. In the U.S. Patent Office, certain ideas innocently submitted in patent applications by American inventors are considered so "sensitive" that they get routed from line examiners into special upper-management screening. Do these inventions land in oblivion?

A xerox of the SAWS memo was handed to me a few years ago over lunch by a retired patent attorney who many years before had been a patent examiner. He said the document had just come to him "over the transom" from an unidentified source inside the patent office. (Attached were two other SAWS memoranda dated 2006, which I have found on the web and which I discuss and link below.) Here is the 1989 SAWS memo:

MEMORANDUM United States Department of Commerce
Patent and Trademark Office
ASSISTANT SECRETARY AND COMMICIONER
OF PATENTS AND TRADEMARKS
Washington, DC 20231

DATE June 5, 1989
TO All Group Directors
FROM Kenneth Cage, Director
Group 220
SUBJECT Cold Fusion Applications

Although the media attention relating to cold fusion has diminished, we are just now beginning to see a large number of applications relating to this subject. Although we are attempting to identify all of these applications in the pre-examination screening process, there is a possibility that a few applications may slip through without being identified. Please have your examiners be on the look out for any application that may relate to cold fusion. Some of the areas where a cold fusion application might be filed are:

Fuel Cells class 429
Electrochemistry class 204
Power plant class 60
Radiant energy class 250
Helium production class 423

If one of your examiners should receive an application relating to cold fusion, he or she should check to make sure the words “COLD FUSION” are stamped on the file wrapper. If not, the application should be referred to Licensing and Review CP4-10C23 for marking. Also, any action on one of these applications should be routed through the Group 220 Director's Office and the Office of the Assistant Commissioner for patents prior to mailing.

________________________________________________________

This internal memo, never intended for public eyes, says that certain technologies are too threatening to be processed in the normal way. Rigorous bureaucratic routines must be fastidiously instituted against the perceived threat.

Is technology a political construct administrated by high orthocrats in the patent office? SAWS woulkd suggest that this is so.

Consider the desperation that would prompt an official to circulate such incriminating candor. One can sense a panic, a palpable fear that one of these taboo inventions might fall through the cracks into patent.

Actually this has happened, and it has happened so many times, especially prior to WW II, that one could make a well-illustrated case for electric free energy using only citations from the patent archives. In this endeavor, one would have to cleverly manipulate the patent-office search engine. (The class numbers given in the SAWS memos will be helpful.)

A SAWS-like censorship has been systematically institutionalized all over the mass media (liberal-progressive media included) and all over academe. Free-energy is a large, diverse and busy field of research and inventing, but this creative community has been rendered invisible and has been systematically excluded from the national energy conversation. In this repressive climate, the only free-energy technology you may have heard about is "cold fusion," and chances are you have heard of that mostly in invidious contexts. Free-energy generally gets a press like UFO's.

over-unity
The term "cold fusion" itself is a misnomer for what might more appropriately be called an over-unity electric heat cell. "Heat your house for free with cold fusion" makes lousy ad copy. Research into over-unity technology has a lot of coy vocabulary, much of it devised by inventors gaming the patent office, but also by theorists who like to bewilder the public with buzz words like "zero-point."

free energy
"Electric energy is everywhere present in unlimited quantities,

and can drive the world's machinery without the need of coal, oil, or any other fuel," said Nikola Tesla in an article published in 1933.

In 1901 Tesla quietly patented a space-energy receiver. Patent No. 685,957 is an "Apparatus for the Utilization of Radiant Energy." Tesla's patent became seminal for subsequent inventors of the radiant-energy receiver. Of course, radiant energy is one of the five taboo invention classes in SAWS '89.

Your everyday solar-electric panel is an example of a primative radiant-energy receiver and, if applied for today, might fail to get a patent under SAWS.

SAWS 2006
The 1989 memo above cites five classes of patent application that define "some of the areas" of concern. If you think this criteria casts a wide net for a memo with a cold-fusion focus, consider the "subject matter of special interest" warned about in the other SAWS memo of 2006:

Perpetual Motion Machines
Anti-gravity devices
Room-temperature superconductivity
Free energy -- Tachyons, etc.
Gain-assisted Superluminal Light Propagation
Matters that violate the laws of physics
Matters which would generate unfavorable publicity
Applications with pioneering scope

It is so comforting to know that a vigilant patent office is protecting us from all these techno-terrorist threats.