Despite these big claims and heavy advertising, AD-X2 flopped initially. Ritchie was moving just a few thousand packets per month. In talking to mechanics and engineers, he soon realized why—the National Bureau of Standards.
Among other responsibilities, NBS tested consumer products for other government agencies to make sure the products worked as advertised. During World War I, the bureau started testing various battery dopes and found them worthless. It finally issued a circular in 1931 warning consumers against all of them.
That explained AD-X2’s poor sales. So Ritchie got in touch with NBS. He asked the bureau to test his compound and prove it worked.
The bureau declined. According to law, it could test consumer products only at the request of other agencies. Moreover, according to its own policies, the bureau never weighed in on specific brands, just general classes of goods. To do otherwise would risk compromising its impartiality and scientific independence.
These were sensible measures, but you can understand Ritchie’s frustration. NBS had essentially declared his product worthless 16 years before he invented it. It didn’t seem fair.
Ritchie instructed Randall to use his weight as a professor at a prestigious university to pressure NBS to test AD-X2. Meanwhile, Ritchie began complaining loudly that onerous government regulations were squashing a scrappy, hardworking inventor like himself. That message—bureaucracy run amok—always plays well in the United States, and Ritchie soon convinced both the Oakland Better Business Bureau and a U.S. senator from Oakland to put additional pressure on NBS.
To top things off, Ritchie sought endorsements from the military. He offered packets of AD-X2 to five bases in California for mechanics to test on vehicles. Three bases deemed the compound useless, but two said it seemed to work. The tests they ran lacked controls and had small sample sizes, but Ritchie crowed about the results anyway.
Although the bureau’s hands were tied publicly, one chemist there decided to test AD-X2 on his own. His tests showed it didn’t extend battery life. But more troubling, a chemical analysis revealed AD-X2 was nothing but sodium sulfate and magnesium sulfate—the exact same ingredients as Protecto-Charge, a substance Ritchie had already proved didn’t work. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he was perpetrating a fraud.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission, which governs advertising in the United States, was growing suspicious of Ritchie’s claims of extending battery life by two or three times. So in early 1950 the FTC formally asked NBS to test AD-X2. At last, the agency had the bureaucratic cover it needed to publish its results on AD-X2. And in an unprecedented move, the bureau broke policy to publicly name a consumer product. In August 1950, it explicitly stated that AD-X2 didn’t work.