What If We Didn't Need Water to Cool AI?
A British engineer solved this in 1956. Then they burned his house down.
Before I get into this one, I want to say something.
The words I'm about to share are a little different than what I normally put on here. I'm not always on here to inspire you with the way I arrange my sentences into cute little prose. Sometimes I am, and sometimes I'm not.
Sometimes I'm on here because there's something I know, and I don't feel that I should be the only one who knows it. Sometimes it isn't about the writing the great American novel or having something profound to say.
Sometimes it's just about telling the truth to as many people as you can.
Because in the current state of affairs deprogramming is a priority.
This is one of those times.
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I keep seeing the same conversation. Different accounts, same beat.
AI is using too much water (and it is). Data centers are draining water from local communities (and they are).
Kind of makes you feel like every prompt you type is a sin against some reservoir somewhere. Conserve. Cut back. Live less.
I get the immense gravity of the situation. I just don't accept those limitations as the only solution.
Because I'm always trying to hear beyond what's being said and see beyond what's being shown, and something about this one hasn't been sitting right with me for a while. There's more to it than conserving water. There's more to it than any of us being asked to live smaller. The question we're being handed isn't really a question. It's an instruction. Ask for less. Assume the current arrangement is the only arrangement that was ever possible, and the only lever available to you is your own restraint.
I'm not sure that's true, and I'm not sure that's the only lever available to us. And the reason I'm not so sure of that today is because I spent an evening watching a documentary about a British electrical engineer named John Searl.
I want to tell you about him. Not as a conspiracy story. As a reminder.
Searl was abandoned as a child. Moved through the foster system in England. Almost no formal schooling. What he did have was an unusual mind, a savant's mind (my favorite kind of mind), the kind that could look at electrical systems and see where they were broken in a way other engineers couldn't. By his teens, he was supervising equipment at one of the largest industrial electric plants in London, and that's where he started asking questions about magnetism that he wasn't supposed to be asking.
Between 1946 and 1956, he built something.
He called it the Searl Effect Generator. From what I understand, he was just trying to find a way to power his own home and his own workshop, so he had the men at the London electric plant where he worked make the parts for him over the course of a decade, and eventually he brought the assembled device back to his flat and started plugging things into it.
He plugged in a light. The generator spun faster and got colder.
He plugged in a cooker and it spun even faster.
Then he plugged in an iron, and the thing spun so hard it lifted off his workbench and rose to the ceiling. The story goes that when he reached up to grab it, his hands clung to the device and he couldn't let go because his hands were starting to freeze to it, and thankfully his landlady happened to be in his flat at the time and saw everything happen, and the reason he still had hands at the end of that day was because she beat the generator with a broomstick and poured hot water over his fingers until the device slowly lowered itself back down to his bench.
Sit with that for a second. A man in his flat, trying to power a lightbulb, accidentally builds a device that levitates and runs cold.
Cold?
What I want you to focus on is that it ran cold.
Everything we use for power runs hot. Combustion engines run hot. Laptops run hot. Data centers run so hot that entire towns are watching their water get diverted to cool them down. Heat is what we understand as the byproduct of energy.
But the byproduct of Searl's generator was cold … to the point of freezing?
Now imagine, for a moment, an AI data center that didn't need to be cooled with water. Imagine a generator that produced its own power and cooled its own environment at the same time. Imagine that we never actually had to choose between AI services and drinking water, and the only reason we have to make that choice now is because the technology that would have made that choice unnecessary was quietly shelved seventy years ago.
That's not a hypothetical I'm inventing. That's the implication of Searl's work if you take it seriously. And a lot of people did take it seriously, which is where the trouble started.
By the late seventies, Searl had wired his home to run off his own generator. Off the grid. The electric company noticed of course, because his usage dropped to nothing, and they decided the only explanation was that he was stealing electricity. Because capitalism right?
So they came to his house, followed his wiring into the wall, hammered through the plaster, ripped out the generator, and confiscated it. Then they took him to court.
The judge asked a reasonable question. Where was the device? Bring it in. Let the court see it.
The electric company said they'd lost it (of course they did). The judge dismissed the case, and that should've been the end of it, but it wasn't. Within months, while Searl was giving a lecture in Zurich, his belongings were dragged out of his house and burned under police supervision. Later, the house itself was demolished. No device, no papers, no physical record of what he had built.
That was 1982.
I know how this sounds. I know mainstream physics has never accepted Searl's claims and I know the device has never been independently replicated in a lab. I'm telling you the story anyway, because sometimes the reason something hasn't been replicated is that the people who could have were stopped from doing it. Sometimes the absence of proof is the proof.
He spent the rest of his life trying to rebuild what he'd made the first time, and telling anyone who would listen what had been done to him.
Here's where I could take this into a much darker place, but I'm not going to.
Because the point of Searl's story, for me, is that the device ran cold, okay?
There's a company in San Diego County called SEG Magnetics, Inc., founded by a former IBM engineer named Fernando Morris, who made direct contact with Searl in 2003 and spent years working alongside him. They've been actively developing a prototype based on Searl's original design, and while they haven't fully replicated the effect yet, they're trying.
The generator itself uses four kinds of materials arranged in concentric rings: neodymium, Teflon, a magnet, and copper, with cylindrical rollers around the outside. You give it a push and the layers start spinning, and it begins to self-propel, and it produces electricity. That's as much as I can say about the mechanics, because honestly the technology is greater than even I can understand, and that's also not really my point.
The point is that a device that was supposed to be gone forever is being rebuilt, right now, in California, by people who were inspired by a man whose house was demolished to make sure this never happened.
Information disappears because people want it to disappear. And there are people who are casualties of that.
There have been so many of them. Nikola Tesla. Dr. Royal Rife. Tom Ogle. Others whose names we don't know because they were erased before their work made it out. Scientists get surveilled, inventors get threatened, labs get burned down, careers get bankrupted. It's a pattern, and it's real, and it doesn't make the news for the same reason a lot of things don't make the news.
And still.
And still the work resurfaces. Because ideas are a form of energy that moves through people. Because the collective consciousness is collective. Because a man in California picks up where a man in England was forced to stop. And who knows, maybe a child being born today may already be carrying, in some way we don't yet understand, the piece of the answer that was buried in 1982.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I have a five-step plan for dismantling the energy grid. I don't. I'm telling you what I learned this week, and I'm telling you why it encouraged me, and I hope it encourages you too. Encourages you to understand that it's correct to hope. When we look at the current state of affairs, it's correct to hope. There are answers. There have always been answers. Some of them have been hidden and some of them have been burned and some of them are being rebuilt right now in a workshop in a town you've never heard of by people whose names most of us will never learn.
We've already seen that we don't have to run our cars on gasoline. So maybe we don't have to pay a utility company for the right to have energy in our homes. And perhaps we also don't have to choose between AI and clean water. I know we do now, I know the problems seem insurmountable and the arrangements seem fixed, but what I'm really saying is that it didn't have to be this way. Which means maybe it doesn't have to stay this way?
This is a set of arrangements. Somebody else wrote these rules. Rules can be rewritten.
And the planet isn't dying. She's renewing herself, and yes, she's going through some birth pains right now, but we're meant to be her co-creators, with harm to none and in benefit to all. Not consumers who just use up her resources and ditch this planet for the next one, but co-creators in the sense that we work with what's here. Indigenous, first nations people understand this better than anyone.
When we excavate the genius from within ourselves, and when that genius has a right to live and breathe in the world, it allows us to build things that replenish what we've been given. Because where do you think John Searl got the idea for a generator that runs cold, in a flat in England, in the 1940s? God knows where. Divine Intelligence knows where. That's the whole point.
Is it so wild that this could be possible? Maybe we're just remembering what we already always knew, and what was once taken. And that encourages me, because I think we're all realizing that some part of this human experience on Earth is us remembering what used to be true. And in doing that, we're encouraged to believe better, for ourselves, for each other, for our communities, and for our world. If we can remember, we can build back better and stronger. And I have a lot of hope for that.
I mean … an electrical generator that runs cold.
Do you know how different life could be if this was in circulation?
I literally went to bed smiling last night, because I thought about the AI water crisis, and I thought, maybe it doesn't have to be this way.
It doesn't.
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One more thing.
I know some people are going to read this and think I'm crazy—that’s cool. That's part of why my comment section is sometimes closed. But I want to say something about why I do this, because I think it matters.
Sometimes being a thought leader isn’t about having a large following, or being published in magazines, or having big brand collaborations. Sometimes it's that, and that's great.
And sometimes being a thought leader is genuinely about making an original argument about a live cultural conversation that nobody else is connecting the dots on.
My intention with pieces like this isn't clickbait. It isn't about turning heads or getting people riled up. Sometimes it's just about introducing an original thought that gets our minds thinking in a new direction, that opens up a new possibility for how the world could be.
How the world could be … As a storyteller, that will always be the most important and most interesting thing to me. It's why I do what I do.
When I write something, when I put a frequency out, it isn't about attention. It's about transmission. And sometimes when the right person receives it, it opens something in their mind that allows them to think differently, and that creates a domino effect of change none of us can measure.
© 2026 Lana Jackson. All Rights Reserved.
