Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 19, 1992 TAG: 9202190078
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RICK LINDQUIST CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: GALAX LENGTH: Long
GENIUS IN A MIRROR
Carl Cox has a message for the speaker of Japan's Parliament, who said recently the American worker is lazy and can't read.Cox says he can't read very well, and he's not well educated, either. But he's not lazy, and he managed to correct a chronic problem with his Japanese-made car after the dealer had pretty much given up on it.
His persistence paid off when he was awarded a U.S. patent in August for a gas-saving device.
Not too shabby for a guy whose reading skills suffer as a result of dyslexia, a learning disorder no one had heard of during his early schooling back in his native Baltimore.
Cox said they just called him a "dummy" and shuttled him into vocational school. There, he liked machine shop classes the best.
Cox didn't set out to be an inventor. Back in 1978, the Radford Army Ammunition Plant maintenance man just wanted the engine in his then-new Honda Civic to stop skipping.
He said the Blacksburg dealer was unable to fix it, and the engine still skipped after the warranty ran out. But, because he was commuting more than 31,000 miles each year between Galax and his job in Radford, gas mileage and reliability were important.
"It became a challenge to fix the old car," he said. In fact, Cox said, he told Hokie Honda service manager Ed Lovern that he would patent the invention if he could get the car straightened out himself.
Thirteen years and a lot of money later, Cox, 50, came up with a answer and got his patent. But aside from that and the car, which he still drives, he doesn't think he has much to show for his efforts.
"It's took me broke. So far, all it's got me is deep in debt," said Cox, sitting in his living room next to a pile of receipts and papers, among them a copy of his patent on a "carburetor preheater."
There's more to Cox than meets the eye. This reluctant inventor has a creative mind. He also does a lot of fascinating things with mirrors, which cover nearly every surface of his rural ranch home.
The mirrors, lights and infinity walls, impossible to ignore, create a world of illusion that has served both a practical and personal function for Cox.
"That's what dyslexia does for you," he tells first-time visitors. "Welcome to the world of dyslexia."
Confronting the multiple mirrors, he explained, gives people a glimpse of what the normal world looks like to him, its images and perspectives perversely reversed.
Cox said he's had problems with the written word all his life, and now he gets friends to handle his correspondence, including recent letters trying to interest major auto manufacturers in his invention.
Because of his dyslexia, he said, he was treated as retarded during his school years.
Above his head, a chain of progressive flashing lights travels the ceiling's perimeter, their effect magnified by the mirrors that give the place an air of unreality, like a carnival fun house or maybe a 1970s disco.
A decorative table sports rotating mirrored layers, tiered like a wedding cake, that catch and distribute the glint of blinking green and red lights below a TV set.
An illuminated bottle filled with tiny, glittering particles that swirl within liquid sets off an infinity box in a wall.
Cox also likes photography, especially taking panoramic pictures of rainbows.
He's even played the inventor with his mirrors, casting them in a more pragmatic role as a passive - and massive - energy-conservation system.
Mirrors cover both sides of his insulated window shutters, so he can open them to collect solar heat by day and close them to keep it in through reflection at night, "just like a Thermos bottle," he explained. His extremely modest heating bills prove his point.
Cox's automotive invention is as simple and straightforward as his solar-heat mirrors.
Along the road to becoming its inventor, he estimated he has spent upward of $25,000, a good chunk of that in repair costs. He said he lost nearly $5,000, plus one of his prototype devices, when he sent it to a company that claimed it would help him get a patent but never followed through.
He hopes his invention, designed to improve both engine performance and gas mileage, will one day help him recoup his losses. Indeed, the old Honda, on its second engine and with more than 500,000 miles on it, is equipped with his carburetor preheater and averages 33 miles per gallon.
Now he's looking for someone to evaluate the relatively simple device scientifically and quantify its effectiveness to improve its marketability.
The device uses a vehicle's cooling system to heat air entering the carburetor before the air mixes with the gasoline. This, he said, safely boils the fuel in the carburetor, which improves fuel efficiency and makes the engine run better.
He estimated that two-thirds of the kit needed to install his device consists of off-the-shelf parts.
Cox has a homemade video showing local mechanic Dewey Jennings installing a prototype of Cox's invention on Jennings' pickup truck. The whole job took less than 20 minutes.
"I think it works really good," said Jennings, who also installed a unit on one of Cox's cars, a 1986 Chevy Sprint that already got good mileage.
"It makes a lot of difference, especially in the wintertime," Jennings said, adding that the device gives "better performance all the way around."
Cox's friend, Robert Cox, helped him install the original unit on the balky Honda.
"He had it all in his mind as to how he wanted it and how he wanted to fix it," said Robert Cox, who is not related to Carl. "We put the thing on and . . . when we came back up the road, I was hanging onto the door handles and everything else on that thing."
The idea is not a new one, as Cox's patent document acknowledges. Today's vehicles typically are equipped with some means to divert warm air, usually from the engine's exhaust manifold, through the air intake. Such devices prevent carburetor icing in cold and humid weather.
The importance of Cox's device lies in three factors. It is relatively inexpensive and fairly efficient, and could easily be installed by the weekend mechanic. Cox estimates the complete kit, if it could be mass-produced, probably would cost less than $100.
Cox said he would like to see his invention offered as an option on new cars or as an after-market add-on. He said it can be adapted for use on fuel-injected engines.
Lately, he has been improving the insulation surrounding the device, which sits within an oversized air cleaner housing atop the engine.
"The insulation maintains the temperature inside and makes it safe to touch when you raise the hood," he explained. He did a lot of experimenting to optimize the number of air-intake holes to maintain engine performance.
Cox is convinced that his device is revolutionary and that further research could lead to cars that get hundreds of miles per gallon. In fact, he thinks it could "open up a new era" in automotive technology . . . without smoke or mirrors.
Others say, however, that car manufacturers' own advances have kept pace with Cox's efforts.
H.P. Marshall, retired Virginia Tech mechanical engineering professor, expressed mild surprise that Cox had received a patent on the device, because these days most cars come with some means of heating either the incoming air or the air and fuel mixture.
"I can't imagine a car on the road that doesn't have it now," he said.
Marshall said heating the air can improve the initial performance of a cold engine, but once it's warmed up, additional improvement would be negligible.
Marshall said boiling, or vaporizing, the gas in the carburetor by preheating does have an advantage. "It's easier to distribute vapor among the various cylinders than a liquid."
He said testing the device using a chassis dynamometer, a kind of treadmill for cars in a laboratory, would show scientifically whether Cox's invention was beneficial.
"I wish him luck," Marshall said.