Azure sky, calm air, crisp sunlight--it’s a gorgeous day in Newbury Park, California. Jack Bitterly, the 77-year-old chief scientist of U.S. Flywheel Systems, sits by a window in his cheery office. Somehow the scene is not reassuring. For one thing, he resembles Vincent van Gogh; his eyes pierce the space between us like a pair of rivets. Against one wall, his masterpiece rests on a shelf--a colored mechanical drawing, simple and yet cryptic. As Bitterly paces and talks, he moves a sheet of blank white cardboard away from the drawing, points out details, and then casually leans the cardboard in front of it again. When I ask, he confirms my suspicion: he wants to ensure that the glance of a passing industrial spy shall not linger near that spot.
He’s been called a classic paranoid inventor. Also a genius. By most accounts he’s a brilliant, all-American engineer. During World War II, Bitterly was part of a top-secret Lockheed team that designed, built, and delivered the xp-80, an experimental jet fighter, in just 143 days--37 ahead of schedule. During the glory years of nasa, in the fifties and sixties, he pushed the envelope again, working on life-support systems for spacecraft that could travel to Mars. In the seventies, troubled by life- support lapses on spaceship Earth, Bitterly took up a homier challenge: the automobile. He envisioned vehicles with motors more powerful than gasoline engines, yet with zero emissions and no toxic wastes. Twenty-two years later--longer than expected, but still ahead of competitors--Bitterly has finished his engine prototype. He has not yet announced this fact. Almost no one outside the company has seen it. I am the first journalist to be granted permission even to play peekaboo with the plans.
At the heart of Bitterly’s new engine, taking up a quarter of the space in his drawing, sits what appears to be a ludicrously simple device. When Bitterly invites me to inspect the genuine item, partly disassembled and resting on a lab bench, I can see that the drawing is accurate. The wonderful secret is a flywheel--a plain disk, semitranslucent like milky glass, with a hole in the middle for an axle. True, it’s only a wheel, a gadget that in one form or another has been around since the Stone Age. But the man who made this wheel stands beside me convinced that it’s capable of snuffing internal combustion.
Twelve inches in diameter, three inches thick, Bitterly’s magnum opus rotates inside a tubby aluminum canister that looks thick enough to stop bullets. The complete flywheel system, including container, weighs 90 pounds. The wheel alone--a hefty platter--weighs 50. It’s made of densely packed carbon fibers similar to the high-strength graphite used nowadays in everything from golf clubs to Stealth bombers. Bitterly’s wheel needs that strength. The idea is to spin it fast enough to run a car. For that purpose, fast enough turns out to be 100,000 revolutions per minute. Every second, in other words, this wheel turns 1,700 circles. Matter on the rim screams around at 3,700 miles per hour--roughly the speed of a bullet. But the screaming is only virtual, because the flywheel spins in a vacuum. There’s no air to slow it, and no other friction to speak of. The wheel floats gracefully in empty space, collared in magnetic bearings that never quite touch its whirling axle.
U.S. Flywheel Systems is now testing a flywheel system prototype for automobiles, which the company plans to demonstrate in an actual car by year’s end. It puts out a steady 25 horsepower and can kick up to 50 in short bursts. Four flywheels would have the oomph to run a standard-size car, but not for long distances. You would need 16, Bitterly says, to travel 300 miles, the distance many drivers now cover on a tank of gas. Don’t worry about finding room in a car for that many flywheels. Bitterly would clear out everything from under the hood--engine, battery, and radiator--as well as transmission, gas tank, muffler, and tailpipe. Floor a 16-flywheeler and you’d get a rush of 800 horsepower. Bitterly taps out some numbers on his pocket calculator, then looks up at me and grins. It could peel the rubber, he says, right off the tires.
