Great Moments In American History

One of the first victims of America's concentration camps was Benjamin Franklin Bache. He was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and inherited his printing presses. He was arrested for allegedly publishing seditious material and never returned to freedom. He died of yellow fever in prison at the age of 29.

If you ask most Americans who the United Empire Loyalists were, you will get a blank stare. The United Empire Loyalists were some of the first victims of ethnic cleansing in the United States. They were American citizens who had either sympathized with Britain or had failed to declare loyalty to the breakaway Colonialists.

Another person you usually won't read about in American history books is William Walker. William Walker was an American who decided it was his destiny to turn Latin America into a slave-holding empire with himself as emperor, and created a private army backed by American corporations to conquer a number of Central American nations. He is something of an Adolf Hitler figure in Central America, but you hardly hear a peep about him in the U.S. He first conquered and declared the Republic of Baja California. He tried to take over the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and when he failed, he declared Baja California to be part of the greater Republic of Sinaloa, planning to return and complete his conquest. He then conquered Nicaragua and sentenced an American journalist to death for reporting that he was setting up a slave-holding empire there; the journalist escaped disguised as a woman. Walker was turned back in Costa Rica by fierce fighters fighting with rudimentary weapons; some only had pickaxes and hoes. He was then executed in Honduras.

And, finally, an unsung American hero you probably won't hear much about: Tom Ogle. Ogle invented a carburetor in the 1970s that would make a clunky big American car (a Ford Galaxy) get over 100 miles to the gallon. His device burned gasoline vapors instead of a fuel-air mixture.

He first got the idea for such a device when he was mowing his lawn and ran over a rock that punctured the fuel tank. The fuel all ran out, but the mower kept running for a very long time afterwards, running on just the fumes.

Ogle's device burned the fuel so efficiently that there was almost no exhaust; the output was almost completely condensed water vapor. Engineers pored over his altered Ford Galaxy and other cars in which he had installed his device, suspicious that he had hidden fuel sources, but all of them appeared to find that Ogle's claims were true. There is some controversy about how much efficiency you can get from vapors, though.

What happened to Ogle? He started marketing his device. Then shortly thereafter, he was sued by the oil companies. He was hit with investigations by the IRS and the SEC. He was driven into bankruptcy, and several death threats were made on his life. He was shot once by an unknown assailant. And then, after he told his lawyer that he had received threats that someone was going to poison his drinks, he died of an overdose of Darvon and alcohol. His death was ruled a suicide.