The Battery Dope

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The Flowers Appeared

0:31The flowers appeared one spring morning in 1953. A guard at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. found them affixed to an iron gate. Two dozen carnations in a white bow. Was it somebody's birthday? A thoughtful spouse remembering an anniversary? No. A card attached to the carnations announced a death of sorts. It read, To be clear, Alan Astin was alive.

1:05Instead, the card was mourning the loss of Alan's job. He had been fired. And more than that, it mourned the sudden death of scientific independence at the Bureau, especially independence from political meddling. This independence had died in a duel between Astin and a flashy con man named Jess Ritchie. At the time, Astin was a bureaucrat, a functionary. Probably not even 1% of American scientists could have named him. But that was about to change.

1:35Astin's firing would soon have every scientist in the nation fuming, terrified that the very future of American science was in peril. This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy-turvy, sciency history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

Jess Ritchie

2:07Jess Ritchie was born in Arkansas in 1909. He dropped out of school at age 12, but he later bragged about that, about how he, like Thomas Edison, had just a grade school education. Ritchie later took correspondence courses in engineering. He ended up working in Oakland, a pudgy, pompadoured bulldozer operator. Although oddly, when advertising his services, he also listed himself as a psychologist who specialized in alcoholism. He would indeed prove psychologically savvy later.

2:38After setting out World War II, he ended up in the Philippines, supervising construction projects. That's where he first learned all about batteries. The batteries in Ritchie's construction vehicles faced constant trouble in the Philippines. They conked out left and right. Ritchie soon hit upon a trick to restore them, squeezing wild lime juice into the electrical solution inside. This bought each battery a few extra days of life. But after that, they went kaput. To his immense frustration.

3:11Ritchie returned to Oakland in 1947, convinced that the battery business was ripe for disruption. Batteries back then had positive plates of lead peroxide and negative plates of plain lead. These were immersed inside a case in dilute sulfuric acid. When the battery was running, the sulfuric acid molecules split and produced electricity. Meanwhile, the lead reacted to form lead sulfate. Recharging a battery reversed these reactions, at least for a while.

3:41Crystals of lead sulfate tended to build up and coat the lead plates. This choked the reaction off. Eventually, the battery would not take a charge. At that point, it was dead. In addition, in the 1940s, there were lingering wartime shortages of lead that made batteries expensive. A post-war boom in demand for cars drove the price of batteries even higher. People were desperate to extend battery lifetimes. Here's where Ritchie sensed a business opportunity.

4:13Various companies sold so-called battery dopes, chemicals that supposedly extended battery life. Ritchie purchased a stake in a company that sold a battery dope called ProtectoCharge. It consisted of sodium and magnesium salts. Ritchie was excited, but he did some preliminary testing and found that ProtectoCharge was a dud. It just didn't work. So Ritchie got to work himself. He ran tests on 1,100 potential battery dopes before hitting on something promising.

4:45According to lore, he prepared a batch of salts one night and forgot about it for days. He figured it was ruined, but tested it anyway, only to realize it was sensational. Still, it took 500 more tests to perfect the chemical formula. Ritchie eventually gave his final compound the futuristic name of ADX2. He declined to patent it, preferring to keep its chemical makeup a trade secret. Packets of ADX2 sold for $3.

5:15The instructions outlined a few steps. First, you cleaned the battery contacts. Then you unscrewed the top, took off the lid, and sprinkled crystals of ADX2 into the acid solution. They dissolved like sugar in coffee. Then the instructions recommended charging the battery slowly, over 30 minutes. And voila, a practically new battery. Ritchie advertised ADX2 heavily. He claimed it would double or even triple a battery's lifespan.

5:47Overall, he promised to save the American public $360 million per year. Yet, despite these big claims, ADX2 flopped. Ritchie sold barely 1,000 packets a month. In talking to mechanics and engineers, he soon realized why. The National Bureau of Standards in Washington. In short, the Bureau's job was to measure things. What's the boiling point of alcohol? What's the density of mercury? The Bureau knew. During both world wars, the Bureau tested weapons for the military.

6:20It also tested products at the request of other government agencies to ensure that they worked as advertised. One product the Bureau tested was battery dopes. It found them worthless. So it issued a circular in 1931, warning consumers to avoid them. That was the problem that Ritchie ran into. But he argued that ADX2 was different, that it worked. He wanted the Bureau to test it and prove him right. The Bureau refused. It tested products only at the request of other agencies.

6:52Plus, it felt squeamish about endorsing a specific product. This was a sensible rule. Scientific agencies should not wade into commerce. But you can understand Ritchie's frustration. The Bureau had essentially declared his product worthless 16 years before he invented it. Hardly seems fair. And Ritchie shrewdly took advantage of this perception. Look at me, he said, a scrappy inventor. And the government won't even test my product. It's bureaucracy run amok.

7:23That message always plays well in America. Armed with that story, Ritchie convinced a U.S. senator from Oakland to pressure the National Bureau of Standards. Eventually, a second California senator got involved, Richard Nixon. Ritchie also offered free packets of ADX2 to five military bases in California. He let mechanics test it on vehicles. Three bases deemed it useless, but two said it worked. Kinda. These tests had no controls and had small sample sizes.

7:53But Ritchie crowed about the mildly positive results anyway. Now again, the Bureau was not allowed to comment publicly on ADX2. But privately, one chemist there decided to test it. And what he found alarmed him. First, the compound did not extend battery life. More troubling, analysis revealed that ADX2 was nothing more than sodium and magnesium salts. Those were the same ingredients as the protecto-charge substance that Ritchie had already proved did not work.

8:25It was hard to avoid the conclusion that he was running a scam. And that chemist was not the only one who was worried. The Federal Trade Commission, which governs advertising, grew suspicious of Ritchie. So it officially asked the Bureau to test ADX2. This gave the Bureau the cover it needed. And in August 1950, the Bureau broke its own policy and publicly condemned a consumer product. It declared that ADX2 did not work. Now, another man might have backed down at this point.

8:57Not just Ritchie. Although rough around the edges, he was pretty charming. And he convinced Newsweek magazine to run a gushing story on ADX2. In the story, the writer cited the military tests as well as scores of happy customers. He declared, It's one of those materials that shows up once in a lifetime. Sales of ADX2 boomed. Only to crater a month later. After the Newsweek story, the Bureau of Standards issued an updated circular emphasizing that battery dopes do not work.

9:30The post office also announced an investigation into Ritchie for false advertising. If he was found guilty, any flyers he mailed out would be returned to him stamped fraudulent. In response, Ritchie trumpeted his story even louder. There goes the government again, squashing a maverick inventor. He vowed to fight. Ritchie later claimed that he had defended himself at 103 hearings in 11 states, costing him half a million dollars. Eventually, 28 U.S. Senators would defy the Bureau and throw their weight behind Ritchie.

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11:05That's omahasteaks.com with promo code YUM at checkout. Terms apply. See site for details. I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor. Hey, good morning. Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most. Yep, they sure are. We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, all in one place. With coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down. It's alright. We're so far up here. Look at me. Take a deep breath. No, I'm good.

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Alan Astin

12:11In the early 1950s, the head of the National Bureau of Standards got hauled before Congress and smeared as a Soviet spy. He soon resigned. His replacement was 47-year-old Alan Astin. Astin was a quiet, lanky physicist. Like Jess Ritchie, he grew up poor and worked during school to support his family, picking berries, digging ditches, delivering newspapers. But while Ritchie had dropped out in sixth grade, Astin saved enough money to attend college and earn a Ph.D.

12:46Astin joined the Bureau of Standards in 1930 and began working his way up the ranks. When Astin took over the Bureau in 1951, he inherited responsibility for the brawl over ADX2. By this time, something had dawned on Bureau scientists. They realized why Ritchie had so many happy customers. Remember those instructions on packets of ADX2? You clean the battery leads, pour in the crystals, and slowly charge it. Well, cleaning the leads improves battery life all by itself.

13:19Plus, for technical reasons, slow charging leads to better battery performance. So Ritchie was not wrong in saying that following the instructions on packets of ADX2 would extend battery life. You just didn't need the actual ADX2. His customers were being ripped off. Nevertheless, Ritchie used his political support to demand that the Bureau test ADX2 again. Against his better judgment, Astin agreed. He even asked Ritchie to help design a rigorous experiment with controls.

13:50Unsurprisingly, the Bureau once again found that ADX2 was worthless. And just as unsurprisingly, Ritchie found reasons to reject the result. He claimed that the Bureau had deviated from the agreed-upon protocol. To save face, Ritchie convinced an MIT professor to run more tests. But these MIT tests were screwy. The professor used low concentrations of acid, nothing like the level in actual batteries. No wonder, then, that his results differed from the Bureau results in a few ways.

14:22For instance, the battery remained cooler during charging. Now, the professor stressed that these differences were probably immaterial and might not improve battery life. But to a slick salesman like Ritchie, that didn't matter. He leaked the MIT results to allies in Congress, who released a public statement. They magnified the tiny differences into massive discrepancies, arguing that the Bureau had botched its tests. They also claimed that the Bureau was, quote, psychologically incapable of giving ADX2 a fair trial.

14:55The MIT results blindsided Alan Astin. His staff scrambled to analyze the experiments and noted its many flaws. But good science takes time. And before the Bureau could respond properly, Ritchie's political allies had a field day. Ritchie gained even more support with the election of Dwight Eisenhower as president in 1952. Eisenhower ran on a pro-business platform, vowing to hack away at the red tape strangling the little guy. Ritchie's supposed mistreatment at the hands of the Bureau fit this narrative perfectly.

15:27When the Eisenhower administration took over, Astin sought out his new boss, Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks. Astin wanted assurances that Weeks would back him up and shield the Bureau from political pressure. But Weeks refused to meet with Astin. Instead, Weeks kept pushing him off on an underling, who tried to get Astin to admit his Bureau was biased. Astin refused to do this. His people had done good work. And he knew that public faith in science was built on trust and integrity.

15:57Scientists needed to be impartial and apolitical. Finally, in March 1953, Commerce Secretary Weeks got in touch with Astin. He had a short message for him. You're fired. Astin was given a few weeks to get his affairs in order. Then he was getting the boot. This blow crushed Astin. He had dedicated his whole career, his whole professional life to the Bureau. And a battery dope ruined him? The news stunned Washington as well. Scientific bureaucrats had never been subject to political loyalty tests before.

16:32Dozens of reporters clamored for comments from Astin. But he would not talk. He holed up at his home, which, ironically, sat on battery lane. Then he let his phone ring and ring without answering. This moment marked a low point for the Bureau. A beloved manager had been fired for not changing experimental results to conform to desired political outcomes. It was around this time that the Carnations arrived at Bureau headquarters with the card mourning the death of scientific independence. But those reports of death were greatly exaggerated.

17:05At this time, American scientists overall were feeling politically impotent. Just eight years earlier, they had built an atomic bomb, a stunning technical achievement that elevated science to unaccustomed political importance. But the government had refused to listen to scientists about when, how, and even whether to use atomic bombs. Politicians simply did not care what scientists thought. In addition, scientists were being persecuted and run out of government for supposedly communist beliefs.

17:36It had already happened to the previous head of the Bureau. Even more famously, this would happen to Robert Oppenheimer the next year. Now, Alan Astin had been dismissed for not conforming to politics. This was a gross violation of scientists' integrity, almost personally offensive to them. So, scientists decided to do something. Dozens of scientific organizations rallied behind Astin. They whipped their thousands of members into a frenzy and began bombarding the Eisenhower administration with letters. Even normally apolitical scientists like Enrico Fermi jumped into the fray.

18:10Historians have called it no less than the political awakening of American science. This action shifted the media narrative, too. Before, the story was framed as a little inventor taking on the big bad government. Now, it was the noble truth-teller standing up to political pressure. Another story that Americans love. More dramatically, 400 Bureau scientists threatened to quit if Astin was not reinstated. Over 10% of the lab workforce. And remember, the Bureau tested lots of military equipment.

18:43Losing 10% of the staff would gut military research. And when push came to shove, the military proved stronger than Sinclair Weeks and the Department of Commerce. After all, Eisenhower himself was a former general. He ordered Weeks to back off. Twelve hours before Astin was scheduled to leave, Weeks came crawling back and asked him to stay. This vindicated him and everything the Bureau had said about ADX2. A furious Jess Ritchie later sued the government for $2.4 million,

19:15claiming that it had irreparably harmed his business. The suit was quickly dismissed. The scam artist Ritchie then transitioned into his true calling, politics. He ran for Congress in Oakland, championing himself as the little guy who had stood up to Washington. He won the Republican nomination, but lost the general election. A few years later, he helped found the right-wing Constitution Party and ran for Senate. But he lost again. And after that, his shtick was played out.

19:46He died of a heart attack in 1962 at age 55. Meanwhile, Alan Astin would go on to serve as director of the National Bureau of Standards for 16 more years. As one historian noted, to this day, he remains an icon of scientific integrity. Although it's obscure now, the ADX2 affair marked a turning point for American science. The National Bureau of Standards emerged stronger than ever, and scientists themselves came into their own as a potent force in Washington.

20:17Throughout the scandal, scientists had stressed the importance of rising above politics, of staying apolitical. But being apolitical is sometimes a very shrewd political move. This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon.

20:51It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening. This year, experience the NHL playoffs your way.

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