article
A car that runs on water?
26 October 1981
A car that runs on water?
COLUMBUS (UPI) — A suburban Columbus tinkerer says he is on the way to perfecting a device that will enable a car to run on water.
Stanley A. Meyer, 41, of Grove City, said his invention — a hydrogen fuel cell — produces a practical hydrogen fuel from water and can be fitted to a conventional car for less than $1,000.
What’s more, Meyer said, a car can burn the fuel as easily as gasoline with no major alterations to the engine.
Besides being fuel efficient, Meyer said the device is nonpolluting since the exhaust from the engine is mostly oxygen.
Meyer, who has been testing the gadget in his garage laboratory, said he hopes to begin commercial conversions within a few months.
The hydrogen fuel cell takes advantage of an “electromagnetic characteristic” of water molecules that causes them to separate into their component gases — hydrogen and oxygen — when electrical charges are introduced, Meyer said.
Another process then converts the hydrogen into fuel, he said. He declined to be more specific since he said he has several patents pending on the device.
Meyer, who once worked for a research and development firm, said his goal is to help the United States gain energy independence.
Two headlines, one story
The Troy Daily News ran it on 26 October 1981 as “A car that runs on water?”. The Daily Sentinel-Tribune of Bowling Green ran it a fortnight later, on 9 November, as “Columbus man expects car to run on water”, set in two columns beside a Chevrolet dealer’s used-car list. The wire copy is word for word the same. A subscriber somewhere kept it on the spike for two weeks, which is what happened to most of this coverage: it travelled by wire and surfaced wherever a page needed filling.
What it dates
“Several patents pending” in October 1981 puts the first filings before that autumn. “Commercial conversions within a few months” is the first of the deadlines, and it is worth reading beside the figures he gave three years later: by November 1984 the wire services had him at thirty patent applications and $195 million sought, and the conversions had not happened.
The original
Provenance
- Shelf
- Press coverage
- Page
- Troy Daily News, 26 October 1981; The Daily Sentinel-Tribune, Bowling Green, 9 November 1981
- Rights
- The newspaper page is copyright its publisher and is reproduced here as a record of what was printed at the time; the archive claims nothing in it. The watermark marks the archive’s copy, not its ownership. The citation is what a reader needs to find the original.
- Caption
- Two printings of one wire story: the Troy Daily News of 26 October 1981 (“A car that runs on water?”) and The Daily Sentinel-Tribune of Bowling Green, 9 November 1981 (“Columbus man expects car to run on water”).
- Citation
- United Press International, October 1981, pp. Troy Daily News, 26 October 1981; The Daily Sentinel-Tribune, Bowling Green, 9 November 1981
- Publication
- United Press International
- Transcription
- Transcribed from two printings, photographed and supplied by the archive’s editor. The two papers set the same wire copy under different headlines; the text below is identical in both.