Word: kellers
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Smith grew excited. An engineer and refrigeration expert who had installed systems for factories and ice-skating rinks, he had the engineering skills to produce such a clean fuel on an operating scale. "Let's get a patent," Keller suggested. "Start a company...
...lines at gas stations and an unnerving sense that the industrial Western world could no longer count on endless supplies of cheap oil. Meanwhile, under American soil lay a quarter of the world's coal supply -- easily enough to power the nation into the 22nd century. If Smith and Keller -- two smart, practical fellows who cared about the environment -- could develop a process to burn coal cleaner and at a price that was competitive with Middle East oil, they could help fill a national need and win themselves a place alongside great American inventor-entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford...
Smith and Keller adopted the Iroquois word otisca, meaning "water that has gone away," as a name for their process and their company. They worked nights in a garage on a back road southeast of town, won the patent rights and sold the idea to local investors who shared their conviction that a clean-burning, coal-based fuel was potentially an economic gold mine. They interested possible customers -- big customers like Florida Power & Light, American Electric Power, General Electric, General Motors -- and they raised nearly $8 million through a sale of preferred stock...
...more than 20 years later, Otisca is essentially broke. Keller, in need of money to feed and educate his family, has returned to teaching at Syracuse. Smith still toils stoically in the all but abandoned laboratory the pair converted from an idle brewery on Butternut Street in Syracuse -- producing occasional fuel samples, testing equipment and working the phones in search of a big utility or any company that could offer him the chance to demonstrate Otisca Fuel. There is hope yet, but friends have begun to joke that Smith has raised tenacity to the height of insanity...
...Clay kicked in a couple of hundred dollars, I kicked in a couple of hundred dollars, and we rented a garage down in Lafayette for 30 bucks a month that we could use after 7 o'clock at night," recalls Keller. After the auto mechanics left, the pair would hook up the pipes and tubes and tinker into the night. Their coal came courtesy of Keller's brother-in-law Fletcher, who got it from a Union Carbide plant south of Charleston, W. Va., and shipped it up in feed bags to Syracuse on the Greyhound...