Hydrogen-powered car due

Hydrogen-powered car due

Associated Press, from Salt Lake City, August 1977. The Orange Leader of Orange, Texas, ran it on page 1 on 9 August 1977, and the Plain Dealer of Cleveland on page 61 the next day. Transcribed from a clipping supplied by the archive’s editor, which ends where the text below ends.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah firm has announced plans to market 100 hydrogen-powered cars next year, and its president predicts hydrogen will be available in service stations within a decade.

Roger Billings, president of Billings Energy Research Corp. of Provo, announced a three-year plan for development of the car.

Billings said the company will sell 10 converted Datsun B210s for $10,000 each this year and 100 at that price next year. Five of this year’s models have been ordered, he said.

Who Roger Billings was

Roger Evan Billings, born in Provo, Utah, in January 1948, won the international high school science fair of 1966 with his father’s Model A Ford converted to run on hydrogen, and went to Brigham Young University on the scholarship it brought. He formed Billings Energy in 1973, and his company built hydrogen-fuelled buses for Provo’s transit service and for Riverside, California; his own patent of 1976, US 3,983,882, is for running an internal combustion engine on hydrogen with water injected alongside it, assigned to Billings Energy Research Corporation of Provo. In 1977 he also started Billings Computer, which for a time outgrew the energy company. Around 1980 he moved the business to Independence, Missouri.

The “Dr.” in the archive’s later clippings comes from the International Academy of Science, an unaccredited institute he co-founded in Independence in about 1985, which awarded him its first “doctor of research”; his accredited degree is a bachelor’s in engineering from BYU. In 1991 he unveiled the LaserCell, a hydrogen fuel-cell car with its hydrogen stored in metal hydride, which he billed as the first of its kind, a claim others dispute. The same year he sued Novell over a networking patent, a case he dropped in 2004 after the Patent Office withdrew the patent. Profiles in the Lawrence Journal-World (27 April 2004) and The Pitch of Kansas City (20 January 2005) found his accounts of himself often larger than the record.

Billings and Meyer

• Meyer used him as the example. At Deer Creek, explaining why electrolysis had never been an economic fuel, Meyer said: “you probably heard about Roger Billings running a Winnebago off of hydrogen since 1975 … What Roger Billings did was develop the hydrogen hydride storage system. They produced the hydrogen gas through the electrolysis process over a two to three-day period to be able to run a Winnebago for a period of four hours.” Deer Creek, part 2.
• The press paired them in 1991. The Bournemouth Evening Echo’s Greenwatch column wrote about Billings’s LaserCell and Meyer’s cell together on 24 June and 1 July 1991: A penny a mile and ‘H’ and ‘O’ start ‘hokum’. A reader’s letter of November 1992 lists “the Billings hydrogen-powered car, the Meyer water fuel cell” side by side: Is the miner worth more?.
• His conference was not Meyer’s. The 1991 World Conference on Hydrogen Energy at Independence, Missouri, on 16 September 1991, where Billings unveiled the car, was his own; nothing in the archive puts Meyer there. Healthy fuel for people and cars.
• Stephen Meyer knew the story. In 2007 James Robey and Stephen Meyer recall Billings running a Model A on bottled hydrogen at sixteen. Stephen Meyer, part 5.

The difference Meyer drew is the one that matters: Billings made his hydrogen by ordinary electrolysis, stored it in hydride and carried it; Meyer claimed to make it on board from water as fast as the engine used it.