Thomas Henry Moray (August 28, 1892 - May 18, 1974) was an inventor from

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

. He receive
US patent 2,460,707
"Electrotherapeutic Device", in February 1949, after a process of 17 years in discussions with the patent office. During the 1920s, Moray worked in the emerging field of radio. After hundreds of experiments designed to improve radio reception, Moray claimed to have discovered a source of energy transmission apparently available everywhere. Using advanced ideas in solid state detectors, he developed a power source which he claimed to produce 50,000 watts. By the early 1930s, dozens of people had reportedly witnessed demonstrations of this technology. In 1944 Moray was paid $25 a day by the

rural electrification administration The United States Rural Utilities Service (RUS) administers programs that provide infrastructure or infrastructure improvements to rural communities. These include water and waste treatment, electric power, and telecommunications services. It i ...

to perfect his system of drawing electrical energy out of the atmosphere. He claimed his invention produced electricity with no exterior input of energy. The primary component of the device was a non-heated

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It ...

. At the time most vacuum tubes had heaters built inside.

The patent office A patent office is a governmental or intergovernmental organization which controls the issue of patents. In other words, "patent offices are government bodies that may grant a patent or reject the patent application based on whether the applicati ...

refused to grant his patent, initially, because they claimed that any vacuum tube without a heater would not work. He was never granted a patent for his power supply device. He did have other inventions and was able to obtain a patent for one of those, the Electrotherapeutic device.

References

1892 births 1974 deaths Free energy conspiracy theories People from Salt Lake City 20th-century American inventors {{US-inventor-stub