In the middle of the nineteen seventies energy crisis, a young Texas mechanic named Tom Ogle claimed he had found a way to make a massive American sedan travel extraordinary distances on remarkably little gasoline.Reporters rode in the car. A patent followed. Investors became interested. Then Ogle was shot outside a bar, survived, and died only months later under circumstances that would become inseparable from the legend of his invention.Did Tom Ogle really build the fuel system that could have changed the automobile industry? And was his death connected to it, or did later mythology connect events that the evidence does not?

In nineteen ninety, a British hairdresser appeared on television with a strange white material and a raw egg. A blowtorch was aimed directly at the egg. Minutes later, the shell was cracked open.
The inside was still raw.
The material was called Starlite. Its inventor, Maurice Ward, claimed it could survive extraordinary temperatures and perhaps protect aircraft, spacecraft, buildings, and even equipment exposed to the thermal effects of nuclear weapons. Scientists became interested. Aerospace engineers paid attention. Yet Starlite never transformed the world.
This episode asks a deceptively simple question.
If Starlite really worked, why did almost nobody get to use it?

In a California fire station, a light bulb installed more than a century ago is still glowing. Yet for generations, ordinary incandescent bulbs were commonly designed around a lifetime of roughly one thousand hours.
This episode investigates the Phoebus cartel, the companies that coordinated the global light bulb industry, the technical tradeoffs behind bulb lifespan, and the uncomfortable evidence showing that manufacturers really did work to shorten lamp life. Was this one of the earliest documented examples of planned obsolescence, or is the famous story missing an important part?