Sullivan Generators has fascinated and confounded me for the past week and a half. Ever since the press release for this week’s Shark Tank was released, I have been trying to find something about this company/inventor/product online. I am not having any luck.
The press release for this entrepreneur states: “a versatile inventor from San Antonio, TX must prove to the Sharks the waste products created by his 100-foot tall generator can be transformed into gold.” If that doesn’t pique your interest, I don’t know what will! What the heck is this all about?
I went searching online and found- nothing. There is no news out of San Antonio about a local inventor going on the Shark Tank. There is no news about any kind of generator that is 100 feet tall. There is no one named Sullivan screaming from the proverbial rooftops about being on Shark Tank this week. I searched for hours online and found no evidence of any kind of product fitting this description. The closest I came was a guy in Ireland who burned his apartment down trying to turn his own feces into gold.
I must say, if a guy comes into the Shark Tank and can literally turn waste into gold, we may see Kevin O’Leary sell his soul to the devil on TV! My guess is this is a very technical invention that takes some sort of by product and creates energy from it. There are many such products in development ranging from trapping methane gas from landfills to using heat from compost piles to capturing energy from warm waste water discharge from nuclear energy plants to power some sort of generator. I couldn’t find a Sullivan Generator in the bunch.
There are two possibilities here. Either this invention really works and was somehow funded, resulting in secret, undisclosed production, or the inventor is a complete crack pot like the guy from Ireland. Whichever it is, this is the first time I have found nothing on an entrepreneur in the week prior to the show.
If I find anything about this, I will most certainly post it. If any readers have any information on the Sullivan Generator that appears on this week’s Shark Tank, please let us know.
http://marksullivanresearch.com/sullivan-generator-2/
I don’t think this Sullivan Generator guy is a crackpot, although he certainly acts the part. That’s the point. He’s either a comedian or a put-on artist whose real object is to get attention which he certainly did. Maybe he wanted to show the sharks they’re not as smart as they think they are if one or more of them were to be taken in by his spiel. Then he would’ve jumped up and down saying “Ha ha I fooled you!”
No one in his right mind, shark or otherwise, is going to give this character a million dollars, or even ten dollars and he must know this. But, you have to admit it makes great TV viewing!
Anyone interested in this might be interested to know that very many people have attempted to extract gold from seawater and failed (just google “Haber + gold in seawater”). The main problems are that there’s so little of it (approximately 5 parts per trillion by weight), it’s actually hard to do (chemically), and it’s not economical. Extracting the salt is both simple and economical, and the large amount of salt extracted would actually be worth about ten times more than the gold for any given quantity of seawater.
The other problem is that the Coriolis effect is very weak. In layman’s terms, Mr Sullivan is in effect attempting to use this natural phenomenon create a tornado inside a very large bottle and harness it to drive a turbine. The problem is that it would probably have to be between ten to 100 times larger than Mr. Sullivan has indicated, which would make it around a mile high.
Constructing something that size would be an engineering challenge, to say the least, and even then there’s still a very good chance that it wouldn’t work. While tornadoes may to some extent owe their origins to the Coriolis effect, they also rely on pressure differentials between natural weather systems to power them. Bottling them up would effectively starve them of energy. The bottom line is that while there may be some glitter in Mr Sullivan’s unlikely (and unworkable) proposal, there’s not much gold. There are much better ways to invest your time and money.
The patent for this Sullivan Generator is laid out here: http://marksullivanresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/US6532740.pdf
The strange part is that it doesn’t mention the gold byproduct as stated in the show.
or at US Patent
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,532,740.PN.&OS=PN/6,532,740&RS=PN/6,532,740
This has more potential,
http://www.power-eng.com/news/2012/06/06/brownie-s-marine-group-s-test-platform-for-steam-generation-technology-for-the-marine-industry-achie.html
Correct me if I’m wrong, in the show he also states he is currently making 1billion dollars a year on his other 1000 inventions. If he was making 1billion dollars a year off royalties, why does he need $1million? Nonetheless this guy sounds like he had an alternative motive, perhaps media attention for his project or something else.
He didn’t say he was making the billion dollars, he said his inventions were worth that much, meaning he most likely just collects a small royalties check for them. He is clearly an inventor and not a business man. Hence the suggestion for a mile high device constructed for only $1 million. Great idea, but also seems to be very impractical.