A Comment of Portable Vaporizers

Portable vaporizers are the topic for today. Those who keep in touch with Flashevap.com know about my mahogany Tobacco Master, which has operated reliably for four or five years now -- until recently when I left it out in the rain for three days. The damage impelled me to rebuild it and rethink the control circuit. After I did that, I built a new 65-watt portable unit (the Tobacco Master draws 40 watts of battery power). The new unit (above -- click on the image to see details) inhales nice and easy; I would manufacture and sell these units -- except that my interests run towards heat transfer and materials science rather than towards money and capitalism and financial leverage. At least I enjoy the challenge of designing and building these things, even if I'm reluctant to tell people I meet about my "hobby." It's always surprising to me, however, to discover how many people I meet who turn out to be interested in this particular work.

Now, comes the latest portable unit to approach operational reality; it is the ultimate in non-combustion inhalation of marijuana -- or tobacco, I guess, which was the original intent of these machines. (Confession: Every time I've tried tobacco in these things, I end up heaving and choking in terrible ways except for one time early on in my vaporizer endeavors when I managed, in a single inhalation no less, to pull into my lungs enough of the active ingredient of tobacco [nicotine, I guess] to feel a most interesting effect. It was a feeling of pleasure and amazing well-being, sufficiently intense to make me think -- but only for a moment -- that now I understood why people use tobacco. I.e., I felt HIGH. But then came the second part of that experience: within 30 seconds, maybe only 10, I was down on my hands and knees, on the kitchen floor, it was, hoping to die. That is to say, I got terribly sick, wanting to throw up all over the place. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. It lasted about two hours during which the hideous nausea tapered off ever so slowly.)

Every new vaporizer design that I have REALized -- i.e., made real, brought into broad-daylight physical reality -- every one of them, even the original Flash Evaporator, has seemed to me to be the ultimate way to do non-combustion inhalation. (See, too, the New Flash Evaporator.) The Eterra was my second production unit, and that name, Eterra, actually derived from the word "ultimate." It happened on the night I first tested it. It worked well, very well, and I thought, "This is the Ultimate," so I begin thinking about a name to reflect that. "Ultimate" itself would not do, and I figured (this was in the late Nineties) that whatever name I chose should have an "e-" at the beginning. "Eltimata," that didn't work, nor did about half a dozen other names that came to mind in about a half-hour period -- till "Eterra" came along, with the initial "E-" and the rest of the word referring, to me at least, to the earth itself, Terra. So I built a thousand of those units under the Eterra name before I found out that others were already using it. (A fellow in California, the Bay Area, bought me out of my stock after I'd sold a couple hundred units. I was glad to get out of that operation because, lemme tell you, home manufacturing is tedious. Unfortunately I had not written and applied for a patent application on the Eterra, as I had for the very first prototype unit I built back in the Seventies (U.S. Patent #4,141,389).

I have written a number of "provisional patent applications" over the years on vaporizers, but not for the Eterra. ("Provisional" patent applications give you one year of world-wise coverage for your idea, for only $100. I got so good at writing patents that a patent attorney friend hired me to write patent applications for him. That's what I've been doing for a living these past 15 years, writing patents for attorneys who deem themselves better at dealing with the legal aspects of that industry than with the technical aspects. Since I enjoy, a lot, everything related to the business of directing energy toward the REALization of my ideas, and because I read a lot on technology and materials science, I have been an ideal ghost writer of patent applications. I've done nearly a hundred of them, related to tires, spinal implants, ion thrusters, fuel cells, and the like at the high end of technological developments, as well as the inventions of people like myself who build their prototypes in garages and figure that a patent is a good way to protect their idea until they figure out how to sell it to one of the big guys who can turn it into Big Bucks for them.)

Because the Eterra didn't have any patent protection, it happened that only a few weeks after my remaining stock got sold to that buyer, a fellow in Oregon, who had bought one of my units, copied them and sold them at half the price I had been asking. Capitalism at work. I'm not sure a patent application would have stopped that Oregonian -- it can cost a lot to defend patents -- but having a provisional application on file with the USPTO at least lets you legally use the phrase "Patent Pending."

The name "Pneuma," which was my third production unit, it, too, refers in a way to the ultimate, but more in the realm of the divine: I am not religious, but the word "Pneuma" (which correspondents point out is an ugly word, reminiscent of pneumonia and pneumatics) also refers to the primordial movement of the air, which, according to Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos" series, the ancients thought of as the breath of the gods. Also, in the bible, in Genesis, note that God breathed life into Adam, made of the dust of the earth. "Pneuma" suggests the holy spirit, making it to me a fitting name for a non-combustion inhalation machine.

The picture at the top of this page is the most recent completed portable unit, another nominal Tobacco Master. (I might try to make a video showing how simple and powerful it is.) But a yet niftier new portable unit is now approaching operational reality. It too uses an amazingly powerful lithium ion battery, one that can deliver more than 300 watts. Perhaps someday I will go that powerful, but for now, this present unnamed new unit (pictures will be posted soon) is designed for 80 watts of air-heating power, so, I hope, it will inhale easy and as fast or slow as anyone would want. And not only will this newest portable unit be powerful, it also has a new feature: it TURNS ON AUTOMATICALLY as soon as you begin inhaling. You don't have to press a button. To me, that is "the ultimate." The word "apotheosis" comes to mind right now; maybe I will build on that . . .

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