I’m visiting my mom with a huge task at hand. She will be moving soon and needs to downsize drastically. When my dad passed away a couple years ago I had to go through boxes and boxes of files. I reduced hundreds of boxes down to 8 that I kept. What did I think was worth keeping?

My dad was a brilliant man, genius level, with all the quirks that come along with Asperger’s level exceptionalism. He was a kind of mad scientist who came up with brilliant ideas that actually worked… he just never had the business acumen or any luck in getting these ideas to market.

I’m trying to document what I can (scanning his notes) to record two key concepts:

1. A patent to extract platinum from catalytic converters and electronic waste. This was proven to work effectively with a grant from The Ontario Research Foundation or ORTEC.
2. A diesel additive that mixed water and diesel to a perfect solution, and ran more efficiently than diesel alone. Dad experimented on old trucks and 2-stroke engines with his additive adding 10-25% efficiency, with higher efficiencies in older motors.

Both of these involve science well beyond my understanding and I’m struggling to decide what’s worth copying.

Then I come up to other ideas like a nuclear powered plane that he shared with the military. I have no idea what to do with this? I took a picture of a few pages, then I realized I just can’t keep this all. It would take me days and days to copy it all and nothing will ever come of it.

He had so many brilliant ideas and it’s just sad to see them disappear. But I don’t have 15 days to copy everything and sort it all in a meaningful way. I’ll be hard pressed even to copy everything for the two inventions above.

So back I go to try to archive this stuff as best as I can… hoping that some day someone can actually use his ideas rather than for his brilliance simply to disappear forever.