Trust me—you really don’t know what you’re missing.
Bill Wattenburg’s Simple Solutions to Expensive Problems
The items below reference articles and papers that have appeared in major scientific journals
about methods and technology that Dr. Bill Wattenburg has devised to quickly and
cheaply solve what others have shown in the past to be difficult, expensive problems. If you think that
whatever his latest scheme is sounds like it couldn’t possibly work, then please
read the original stories below as evidence that he has solved similarly difficult problems in the past, and
just might be able to help with whatever the latest sticky wicket is.
- Urgent
Efforts to Prevent Thefts of Trucks for Use as Bombs
- Dr. Wattenburg came up with a new device that is designed to allow pursuing police officers to stop a fleeing
tractor trailer or tanker truck in its tracks—with a bumper-to-bumper tap from behind. The system, being
tested by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, activates the truck’s air brakes when
a horizontal metal bar running across the rear end of the vehicle is nudged by a pursuing vehicle.
- How to Feed Refugees Quickly, Cheaply, and Safely, Even in War-Torn Areas
- October 2001 & March 1993
“Dropping food packages to refugees without using parachutes”, Science,
2 April 1993, page 27.
San Francisco Chronicle, 23 March 1993, front page.
Also used in the war against the Taliban starting October 2001, as reported in the
SF
Chronicle and on the
ABC
News web sites.
-
Simple, cheap solution to sanitation problems at refugee camps
- April 1999
How to provide bathroom facilities for tens or hundreds of thousands of refugees
crammed into a small area, using 5-gallon buckets.
“Plastic Buckets for Refugee Sanitation” Science, v 284, p 409, 16 April 1999.
- Terrorist Vehicle Barrier Successfully Tested by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- October 1998
The San Jose Mercury News, 8 October 1998, front page.
SF Chronicle article,
LLNL press release,
Las Vegas Review
This invention recently sailed through tests by
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;
destroying the vehicles that were launched into it. It is an outgrowth of his
much earlier invention of a traffic barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge, and also appeared
on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News on 8 October 1998.
-
LLNL’s Mine Clearing Robot
- 1995 & 1997
LLNL
engineers and technicians collaborated with Wattenburg to produce a new mechanical minesweeper
called Called STAR (Spiral Track Autonomous Robot) that was nominated for an award from
Discover Magazine, which both
LLNL
and the DOE were
proud enough to report.
“Robot Mine Detector” Science, v270, p 1929, 22 December 1995.
“The Spiral Tube Robot” Discover Magazine, July 1997, p 56, finalist,
Inventions of the Year Award
- Clearing land mines by Helicopter
- San Francisco Chronicle, 8 March 1991, front page.
- Scientists Present New Ways to Snuff Kuwait Oil Fires
- Wall Street Journal Europe, 5–6 April 1991, page 8.
- Bill’s Flatcar
Bridge Spans I-5
- April, 1995
A good article on how Wattenburg used railroad flatcars to build a modular highway
bridge that can be assembled in just a few days. (Complete with pictures.)
“A Temporary Freeway Bridge”, Science, v268, pp. 261–262,
279–281, 14 April 1995; and Science, v 264, p 27, 1 April 1994.
-
Dust ‘Tag’ Proposed for Borders
- December 1994
How to use harmless, fluorescent dust sprinkled along our borders along with airborne sensors
to help identify people crossing our borders illegally.
“Fluorescent Barriers to Infiltration”, Science, v 265, pp. 1184–1185, 26 August 1994
Science, v 266, p. 1461, 2 December 1994 (letter).
- Stopping the Waste of Blood from Blood Banks
- 1965
How Wattenburg used remote data terminals hooked up to timesharing mainframes over telephone lines
to greatly reduce the amount of donated blood that had to be thrown out because it wasn’t at
the hospital where it was needed.
Journal of the American Medical Association November 8, 1965, v194 n6, pp583–586.
This page was last modified on Monday, 11-Oct-2004 20:06:53 PDT.
