In the mid 1930s, Charles Pogue was said to have developed a revolutionary carburetor that could achieve incredible fuel efficiency allowing a car to travel 200 miles or more on a single gallon of gasoline.
According to the legend, this invention was suppressed or bought out by the oil industry and automobile manufacturers to prevent it from disrupting their profits. A wonderful conspiracy and cover-up story.
How did it work? How did it defy the laws of physics? We cannot know because it was what I like to refer to as a black box solution.
Basically, magic.
Now, most reasonable people would just smile at the story of the 200 mile-a-gallon carburetor story because it in fact defies the laws of physics. Whether we like it or not it takes X amount of energy to move X amount of mass X distance. As much as we would like we cannot get around facts.
Yet, we love to believe such miracles happen. Take our industry as an example. How many black box solutions have passed through the halls of high-end audio over the years? Fun products like the Bedini blocks, the magic resonating dots, the Tice Clock, and lately black box solutions to improve grounding.
What all these have in common is a lack of technical explanations. They just work. And, amazingly, some actually do seem to work.
Faith is defined as a spiritual belief or trust in something that cannot be proven through empirical evidence or logical reasoning alone. And that's just fine. We need plenty of faith just to make it in everyday life.
I just wonder about bundling things in black boxes.
If an actual technologically based theory of operation exists, or even a "here's how it works but I don't know why" is offered, I am in.
Otherwise, color me skeptical.
