This is the story done on me and my work by the Evansville Courier and Press because the Messenger-Inquirer was too busy suppressing my work. For, going on twenty years soon! The reporter got a lot of stuff wrong and I didnt have my facebook group, explaining my ideas, at the time this story was published: The Invisible Man (Owensboro inventor certain hes found the key to making things disappear) By Jacob Bennett July 5. 2005 Evansville Courier and Press Owensboro, Ky.-After years of calculations and diagrams and experiments, Keith Carlock said he has found the key to invisibility. The unemployed inventor cant quite make things disappear; he said he does not have the resources. But he said hes sure if scientists pay attention to the theories scribbled in a decades worth of notebooks, they could build a system with applications in warfare and law enforcement. Ive looked on the Web, and no ones discovered what Ive discovered, Carlock said. This is an underdog story looking for a happy ending. Carlocks obsession has gotten him kicked out of schools, locked up in institutions and shot up with medicines. People have told him that if his inventions were any good, they would already be in a museum. Still, he sits at his computer in his apartment, wishing someone would give him a chance, scouring the Internet for ideas he might have missed. He has found that when youre an inventor with a history of mental illness, you might as well be invisible. It made me seem kind of crazy, saying that I invented invisibility, said Carlock, 31. I hate thinking Im a bum. Ive always concentrated on my work. Im just looking for that one glimmer of hope. Jo Ann Brown didnt understand what Carlock was talking about the first few weeks she knew him. She met him through his longtime girlfriend, Leslie Fowlkes, and hed gab and gab about light reflecting off of lenses and adaptable interfaces. Brown looked at his Web site, but that didnt clear things up, either- too wordy and technical. Then one day in March- it was her anniversary with her husband, Scott, who she said is more likely to laugh with Carlock around- Carlock drew her a model of an invisibility machine on a napkin at the Owensboro restaurant Zazus. It made sense. In my mind, its totally possible, but Im not a physicist or a mathematician, Brown said. Its so simple, I dont know why it wouldnt work. But Brown was most impressed by Carlocks determination, his willingness to talk about his ideas with total strangers. Hes just been put down for so long, why not recognize him for his ideas? Brown said. If it turns out that these things arent technically possible, thats not what Im after for Keith. I just think he deserves a break. The obsession started with a coincidence. Carlock was sitting in his apartment in the early 1990s when he saw two sources of light hitting some BBs piled in an ashtray. The reflected light practically floated off the tiny spheres. Wow, you can use that for something, he thought. So he started sketching diagrams, getting lost in the geometry of reflected light, hoping to impress his teachers in college. He came up with the idea of a lens-covered sphere that could use light to bend reality and hide anything inside the sphere. He began telling people that he invented invisibility. Nobody believed him. My friends used to tell me, Dont talk about it; make something invisible, then well listen to you, Carlock said. Lightbulb. He decided to take 30 pictures of the Ohio River bridge in Owensboro from 18 different angles, then splice the pictures together onto a box to make a cube-shaped three-dimensional view of the bridge. You could look at what he calls the lenticular box from a variety of angles and see the bridge as it would appear if you were really there. This lenticular box doesnt make things invisible, per se. But Carlock says it proves that with mirrors and lenses, you can show people things that arent there- and behind those manufactured images, you can camouflage reality. He sees his lenticular box as a novelty item- something that might be attractive to people who put black lights in their dorm rooms. His girlfriend would love him to market it to the Spencers Gifts crowd. Keiths an inventor, they just have a different take on things, Fowlkes said. Its a great concept. If Carlock had the resources, he said, hed build a room-sized lenticular box that would use various lenses to lay images on top of one another to form a 360-degree landscape. Youre in a room- no, youre at the beach. Look up, youll see the clouds. Look down, therell be sand. Look straight, youll see the ocean hit the horizon. You could visit the Eiffel Tower without getting on a plane. This is the ultimate mural, Carlock said. The images exactly replicate the angle youd see. The reality-skewing properties of the lenticular box could be extended to war devices, Carlock said. He envisions a suit using lenses that would project the surroundings onto lenses covering the armor, making it appear as if no one is there. The limitations of traditional camouflage is that it doesnt change with its environment- in Carlocks suit, the lenses would soak up the background as the soldier moved, allowing for movement against a besieged cityscape. Its a concept that government scientists have been studying for several years. The idea is known in scientific circles as adaptive camouflage. When Carlock first read about this government research, he found vindication. I mean, before I heard of the term adaptive camouflage, I was going around telling people, I invented invisibility! and people would look at me weird like a cat fell out of my mouth or something, he said. The U.S. government has experimented with camouflage for decades, seduced by the idea of reaching an enemy that never knew it was under attack. In World War II there was a highly classified program in which lights were mounted on the wings of black bombers to hide them in flight, so the planes would disappear against the sky. The B-2 stealth bomber that was unveiled in the 1980s is also hard to detect, but instead of shifting its appearance with changing backgrounds, it uses clever design to deflect radar and beat heat sensors. The status of government research in adaptive camouflage is secret, said Philip Moynihan, an engineer with NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., a leading expert on adaptive camouflage. But technology to apply the concept is likely several years away, Moynihan said. Carlock thinks his ideas could speed up the process. He proposes a suit of armor that uses a miniature interface model of the soldier (kept in a backpack, with pulleys moving the replicas arms and legs). Light would hit the miniature model and broadcast background information over the suits mirrors. I know that the interface is the key to invisibility, Carlock said. I have 100 percent faith; 200 percent faith. Few others have faith in Carlock, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic in high school. Some of the people who have reached out to him had to pull back after he threatened them. He said he was kicked out of college in 1998 for threatening a counselor. He said he never planned to hurt anybody. In 1996, while skipping medication against doctors orders, he started standing out on Frederica Street with a sign reading, I Invented Invisibility! He has told people that there is a conspiracy among Owensboro leaders to suppress his work, just because they can. Carlock showcased his work until 2001 at Friday After 5, the weekly downtown festival that includes live music and local booths. Frustrated at reporters who ignored him while interviewing people in the booths around him, he shouted at passers-by to alert them what was going on. People who knew Carlock during his more troubled times either didnt respond to messages or declined to comment. He did a stint last year at Western State Hospital, a mental illness facility in Hopkinsville, Ky., where he said people ignored his work until Fowlkes showed up with printouts of his Web page. But even my doctor... has seen my work and my lenticular box and doesnt consider it delusional after I tried to explain it to him. Carlock said. So he had to tack on obsessive/compulsive to my diagnosis. The last few months Carlock has searched the Internet for other peoples ideas and e-mailed his own with Moynihan to find out if he is indeed onto something. Moynihan offered pointers on how Carlock could improve his experiments. But like Brown, Moynihan couldnt decipher Carlocks lengthy explanations, or his attempts to clarify. But that doesnt mean Moynihan believes that Carlock cant discover something that changes the world. He said some of the worlds best inventions came from people with a perceived lack of expertise in their field. Take Thomas Edison for example, Moynihan said. He had very little formal education, attending school for only a few months. However, he ended up with 1093 patents! How much did the Wright brothers know about aeronautics when they started out? The field didnt exist. What did James Watt know about steam engines or Henry Ford about automobiles? The real credentials is natural curiosity and intellectual drive. *Ill stop right there, because the story becomes cheesy and sappy.*
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 08:01:34 +0000
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