Was an Alaskan college student expelled three days after refusing to sell a landmark heating discovery to industry?

Question

According to a recent advertisement named Nov 03 making its rounds on YouTube (I saw it today attached to another video I wanted to watch), a college student named Martin from Fairbanks, Alaska was expelled after developing EcoHeat, a "device that can heat a room 90% cheaper than traditional heating methods" and refusing to sell to "a heating company" that offered "millions" for the rights. According to the video, he was expelled "three days later" subsequent to refusing to sell the rights to his invention.

I'm actually very skeptical of the underlying technology, and also note that the video never actually claims that Martin's expulsion was due to refusing to sell and not another reason such as plagiarism or selling drugs on campus, but I think it is a very specific and verifiable claim and one that implies that US colleges have no tolerance for students who innovate and refuse to sell to industry.

Was a college student from Fairbanks, Alaska expelled from college three days after refusing to sell a heating invention that showed a 90% reduction in heating costs?

While I do have some interest in the accuracy of the 90% savings claim (which, given the ambiguity over the nature of "traditional heating methods", could be interpreted as giving a significant or notable cost savings), I'm more interested in Martin's story - whether he actually exists, is actually from Fairbanks as claimed, did invent a heating product or technology, and was expelled from college under the conditions described in the ad. If the story as presented in the advertisement is true, I should be able to find a reference to Martin's patent or a mention in the mainstream media of his expulsion from college three days after refusing to sell his invention to industry, but I cannot find either.

If Martin made his heating discovery as part of participation in an industry-funded research grant obligating him to give the rights to the discovery to the originator of the grant funds and his expulsion was a result of noncompliance with the terms of the grant (e.g. by attempting to prevent them from taking possession of the device's blueprints), that's an answer!

Answer 1

The law of conservation of energy says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

Normally when we say that some machine, say an electric motor, is "85% efficient", we mean that 85% of the energy is used to make the motor turn and the other 15% gets "wasted" making it hotter. But an electric heater is only turning electricity into heat anyway. This means that all electric heaters are always 100% efficient: all the electricity they use gets converted directly into heat.

Any device that is supposed to extract extra heat from the electricity is therefore a scam. It's a bit like promising to fill your bath using 90% less water.

There are "heat pumps" which can do better than 100% by pumping heat in from outside (basically, like a refrigerator in reverse). This has been well understood for many years. Because the heat comes from outside the building it doesn't violate the law of conservation of energy. However doing that requires plumbing to a heat exchanger outside the building. The device here is being sold as a portable heater, so it can't be getting the heat from anything except the electricity it consumes.

Ecoheat has already been reported as a scam. What you actually get is a little ceramic heater. It "reduces" heating costs by using only a little electricity to produce only a little heat. However if you google for it you will find lots of sponsored links assuring you that it is amazingly good and heats a big room in 60 seconds (they just don't mention by how much).

According to this YouTube video these things are actually produced unbranded by a company called Sharewin, who sell them on Alibaba at $6.45. People are buying them and then selling them on under names like EcoHeat and AlphaHeat at a huge markup, promoting them with social media and fake review sites.

Sometimes the inventor is "Martin from Fairbanks". Other times he is an aerospace engineer, or a Norwegian architect. This inventor was fired or expelled for refusing to sell his work to greedy capitalists, but is now making out like a bandit selling these amazingly successful gizmos that have the energy companies quaking in their boots. Not.

Answer 2

The footage of "Martin" in the video is actually of Taylor Wilson, a nuclear physicist and scientist who garnered attention in his teens for experimenting with nuclear fusion. The entire backstory/biography from the video is completely false and none of it applies to Wilson, who was born in Arkansas, went to school in (and resides in) Nevada, and has no known connection to Alaska.