feedback on MOTHER'S METHANE MAKER

Since military service is hazardous — at least mine sure is — -not only to one's health but to his head as well, I want to say a special thanks for your spark of sanity in what seems to me to be an otherwise irrational universe. Your various articles turn my head back on to ideas and dreams that have been smoldering for years and now I know that they're not just fantasies . . . things can be done!

For instance, in reading past issues I got into the one containing information about building digesters and storage tanks for converting garbage into methane (MOTHER NO. 3) and, by correlating that material with a later article on propane conversions in vehicles (MOTHER NO. 15), I came up with a light bulb.

The latter piece mentioned that running a car on methane wasn't practical due to lack of sufficient pressure in the storage tanks. How about a compressor run on methane that cuts into the system when pressure in the storage tank reaches a certain level? Collected gas could be pumped into another tank — preferably a conventional propane storage tank — from which the hot water heater, stove, etc. could be run and vehicle tanks filled. Don't know if this'll work but someone might like to try it.

James Glenn
Combat Camera Group
NAS North Island, Calif.

Yep, James, that's how it's done all right . . . at least that's one way to do it. —MOTHER.

I just received MOTHER NO. 18 and am delighted by the interview with Ram Box Singh . . , the only objection I have is that the article gives the impression that Singh is the one and only experimenter with methane.

For your information, it was 75 years ago when I first got a whiff of that gray haze coming from our manure pile and my pa said it was methane gas.

Then, when I was a locomotive engineer on the railroad at Prescott, Arizona in 1917, I was assigned to a work train on a branch leading to the Jerome and Clarkdale copper mine. While staying the night at the Clark Hotel, I noticed that they had gas lights and asked where the fuel came from. "Why, the sewage plant!" was the reply, and I thought they were kidding.

They weren't, though. In 1945 I met William R. Palmer, the man who had designed the Clarkdale plant, and he gave my engineering firm the original blueprint.

As you can see, methane has interested me for a long time . . . so much so that on March 6, 1933 my associate engineer Russell P. Howard and I proposed a system for the use of sewage gas to the City of San Francisco. Again, on October 3, 1942, we spent three and a half hours with the Board of Public Works of Los Angeles, proposing an $18-million recycling plant capable of processing 250 million gallons of the city's degradable garbage a day. And on May 1, 1945 we offered to recycle a daily 16 million gallons of sewage at Glendale, California in a plant costing only $1.65 million.