SATELLITE BEACH --Nov 22 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Rich McKay The Orlando Sentinel, Fla.

It started with a rocket scientist, a Slinky and the first energy crisis of the early '70s.

Now, a generation later with a new energy crisis, the son of that rocket scientist thinks he is close to perfecting that spare-part dream: a machine that might make cheap, clean electricity from the ocean.

"I believe it'll change the world," said second-generation inventor Tom Woodbridge, a NASA engineer.

The renewed interest in finding cheap, plentiful and renewable energy has rekindled interest in the work of Woodbridge and others. He knows about 20 other companies trying to get energy from the sea.

Alternative energy is in the forefront again as high fuel costs after Hurricane Katrina wreak havoc on the nation's oil refineries and Americans' wallets. Federal officials estimate that all types of fuel will cost Americans one-third more this winter if temperatures are average.

But Woodbridge, a bookish 45-year-old with wire glasses whose old Hobie surfboard hangs in the den above his computer, is chasing an elusive prize that his father, David, now 84 and retired, never caught. It is one that countless would-be inventors have squandered fortunes and careers on: failed efforts to pry electricity from Poseidon's kingdom.

In theory, the idea is simple.

Almost any eighth-grader can tell you that spinning copper wires through a stable magnetic field makes electricity -- lots of electrons jumping off the magnetic field and zooming through a conductive metal.

And since the ocean waves are already moving, why not cobble together a machine to harness that energy?

The elder Woodbridge founded Aqua-Magnetics Inc., a small company that Tom now runs.

"The sea is very powerful; there's a lot of energy out there. But the sea is a very hostile environment," said professor Elias K. "Lee" Stefanakos, director of the University of South Florida's Clean Energy Research Center in Tampa.

But after tinkering with the idea off and on for years, Tom Woodbridge is making a final push toward making his father's dream a reality.

He has six U.S. and international patents, a $30,000 grant from the state's Technological Research and Development Authority and prototypes that take up most of the family garage in Satellite Beach.

Woodbridge has added $10,000 of his own money to the project.

His father's idea, to use the rocking motion of the waves to generate electricity, came from looking at his son's Slinky toy back in 1972. After noticing how easily it transferred energy, he thought, why not use something like the Slinky as a coil that rocks?

It's a radical departure from most attempts at ocean-based electric generators, which try to use the force of the waves to turn a wheel. Professor Eric Thosteson of the Florida Institute of Technology and others say they've never heard of an idea like it.

The elder Woodbridge has credentials. He's a physicist who worked with the famed Wernher Von Braun on how to get rockets to safely re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in the 1950s and '60s.

But David Woodbridge never perfected his generator.

"There was not enough time to do everything," he said recently. He had a family to raise.

And as Craig Williams, executive director of the Central Florida Renewable Energy Society, points out, America's attention on the energy crisis was short-lived.

"America got the wake-up call and then rolled over and went back to sleep," Williams said of the Arab oil embargo of 1973 that caused fuel prices to quadruple by 1974.

But with fuel prices expected to rise this winter, and dwindling world reserves of oil, there's a new focus on alternative energy.

Tom Woodbridge has a system that follows his father's principle of capitalizing on the rocking. But there's no Slinky.

Think Pogo Stick inside a floating drum. The rocking motion of the waves pushes a long cylinder of magnets up and down a copper coil.

Testing in the Indian River is planned this spring. Then, if he gets financial backing, Woodbridge will build three full-sized buoys, each about as big as the size of a small bus, for testing in the open ocean.

His prototypes stand about head-high, upside down in the family garage and are painted bright yellow, as the Coast Guard required.

His small model generates 10 watts of power in a 6-inch wave chop. A full-scale version could generate 160 kilowatts. That one buoy is enough to power 160 houses, following the rule of thumb that the average U.S. home uses about 1,000 kilowatts of electricity each month.

Smaller versions could make navigational buoys self-powered, providing warning lights and navigational signals to ships.

Woodbridge says he needs about $550,000 for 18 months of development for three ocean-trial models, and he expects it will cost $4.2 million to complete through production. Woodbridge said he has had a lot of inquiries but not a lot of investors.

"No one wants to give just a couple hundred thousand," he said. "They say I'm to call when I need $5 million. That's the biggest obstacle: up-front money to build with, and work out the kinks."

Stefanakos says he is glad people are looking for alternatives to fossil fuels such as oil, but he's cautious about getting electricity from the sea.

The ocean is "caustic, things corrode. Look at what they have to do for ships -- put them in dry dock and scrape them," Stefanakos said.

Woodbridge has heard naysayers for years, but his wife, Amelia, and two daughters believe in him. And he's determined to make it work.

"Maybe I'll get rich and famous; maybe I won't," he said. "But I want to get into the history book of energy as the man who made this work."

And his father's name will be there next to his, he promises.