Eddie Sturman wants to kill the electric car.
Electric cars were all the buzz this week at the latest auto show in Frankfurt, Germany, but Sturman says they waste too much energy.
Like a mad scientist, Sturman operates from a sprawling mountain compound thousands of feet above sea level, near Colorado Springs. Only he is not mad.
He just happens to think the internal combustion engine is one of the greatest inventions of all time. It need not be abandoned to stop global warming or reduce America's reliance on foreign oil, he says. It just needs to be redesigned with modern digital controls.
Sturman's name graces more than 90 patents.
In the 1960s, he designed a digitally controlled valve for the Apollo Space Program.
Were it not for this little energy-saver, the nearly doomed Apollo 13 astronauts may not have made it home from the moon. That's one reason why the Space Foundation inducted Sturman into its Hall of Fame in 2003.
In a larger contribution to humanity, Sturman, with one of his associates, also invented a dispenser that keeps draft beer carbonated in home refrigerators.
Sturman is an "engineering genius," says notable scientist Amory Lovins, chairman of Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo.
"Eddie Sturman has a strikingly original, practical, and exciting approach to the internal combustion engine," Lovins said. "It holds great promise of radical gains in efficiency, cleanliness, and economy."
Sturman was born in 1941 in what was then Palestine. He spent his early years in Tel Aviv and a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee before his parents sent him to the U.S. for an education.
In 1972, when he went back to visit the kibbutz, he saw Israeli soldiers driving tanks out to irrigated fields just to turn on the water. Sometimes when they'd get out of the tanks to turn the valves, snipers from the Golan Heights would pelt them with bullets.
Needless deaths led Sturman to invent wireless irrigation systems, powered by solar energy, in wide use around the world today.
Sturman's philosophy is an inverse of Murphy's law: "If anything can go right it will, and at the best possible moment."
I asked him to take me to his remote, gated lair.
It is a 60,000 square-foot lodge on hundreds of acres, about 8,700 feet in the sky. It has high-vaulted ceilings, enormous windows with sweeping views of Pikes Peak, and looks more like a ski resort than a machine shop and office building.
He and his wife, Carol, cofounded this company in 1989 in Camarillo, Calif., and moved it here in 1996.
Sturman, a soft-spoken man, took me into a test room to show me one of the engines he'd modified.
"We can tell what's happening for every 1,000th of a second in every one of the cylinders," he explained.
An internal combustion engine like this usually has a mechanical camshaft that opens and closes valves that control air, fuel and exhaust.
Sturman took out the camshaft, and he added valves that open at the precise millisecond a computer commands. This can make engines 50% more fuel efficient, and a lot cleaner burning, too. But this is only a beginning.
"What Eddie has done is built a piano," says his wife Carol. "What we need to do now is learn how to play the piano."
Carol serves as the privately held company's president and chairman, and last year won SAE International's J. Cordell Breed Award for Women Leaders.
Digitally controlled valves, she says, can adapt to any fuel, from natural gas and ethanol to spent fryer grease from a fast-food joint.
This eliminates the need for engine conversions. It also means alternative fuels need not be so heavily refined, saving refining costs up the pipeline.
Sturman Industries has made money licensing technology, performing demonstration programs, and supplying companies around the globe.
Its customer list has included General Motors Corp., Navistar International Corp. (NAV) and the Department of Defense, which constantly needs more powerful and more efficient equipment.
So it appears Sturman has built a better mousetrap, but the world has yet to beat a path to his door.
Most improvements to the internal combustion engine over the past 100 years have been add-ons like the catalytic converter. That's because it's easier to slap something onto an engine already in production than to rethink something as fundamental as a camshaft.
Sturman's company is now recovering from the hard knocks of the auto industry. It is down to about 40 employees from a peak of 160. And the Sturmans have had to pare their once 600-acre mountain campus to 443 acres to raise cash.
Meantime, most talk of stimulus funds for alternative energy is about electric cars, hybrids, wind and solar. And who really cares with gasoline below $2.50 a gallon?
Sturman is not deterred. Everything is moving from analog to digital, he says, so why not engines? Why use 1900s-vintage camshafts when we've got computers?
"Nobody can stop us," Sturman said. "If you look the other way, you are only delaying the inevitable.
"We can do whatever we want because we didn't borrow money from the bank," he said. "We don't have investors. We are not part of a big corporation. So we can keep going. .. It's going to happen. The only question is how fast it's going to happen."
(Al's Emporium, written by Dow Jones Newswires columnist Al Lewis, offers commentary and analysis on a wide range of business subjects through an unconventional perspective. The column is published each Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. ET. Contact Al at al.lewis@dowjones.com or tellittoal.com)
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