Elmer Clarence “Mox” Meukel told his story to a couple of hobos in a shack on Scott Island in the Truckee River near Reno.
Most people wrote him off as a crackpot dreamer. After all, he was a sometime songwriter and self-taught inventor, but these men listened to his story.
Mox said he and some co-workers at Bendix Corp. had been designing a motion detector that would sound an alarm when a child got near a swimming pool…