article
‘H’ and ‘O’ start ‘hokum’ – fear that this fuelling may be fooling
Peter Tate, in the Greenwatch column · 1 July 1991
‘H’ and ‘O’ start ‘hokum’ – fear that this fuelling may be fooling
COOL, nay, sceptical have been the reactions to Dr. Roger Billings’s claims of a fuel cell which separates hydrogen and oxygen, enabling a car to run on water instead of petrol.
The general feeling is that “H” and “O” are also the first two letters of “hokum.”
Last week, I harked back to the involvement of a local engineer and inventor, Don Walton, in the earlier fuel cell endeavours of American inventor Stanley Meyer.
Don has asked me to point out that he is no longer connected in any way with Mr. Meyer’s invention…and that, very soon, he hopes to announce a technological breakthrough of his own in the power-from-water field.
His own researches have concentrated on ultrasonics as the means to cause the necessary gaseous separation…and this is different again from the methodology of Meyer, Billings and one Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the “Edison of Japan,” whose “Enerex” device purports to produce a fuel from water three times as powerful as petrol.
CONFERENCE
High Energy Enterprises Incorporated, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, are hoping to get Messrs. Billings, Meyer and Nakamatsu under one roof (should that be “bonnet”?) during their three-day 1991 Extraordinary Science Conference, for a session on hydrogen technology scheduled for Saturday, June 27.
The conference has been booked into the local Hilton Inn and the organisers, in their preliminary draft programme, dated April 27, reserve the right to make changes to the speaker list and schedule without notice.
Meantime, British metals company Johnson Matthey, who keep a particularly close eye on fuel cell technology because platinum is often used in cells as a catalyst, have raised a series of technical doubts about the Billings process, one of which, at least, centres on the demonstrator car, an “adapted” Ford Fiesta.
If the outcome of High Energy Ents Inc’s seminar does prove optimistic, there may be more to be learned in the car park than in the conference room.
The Billings Fiesta apparently carries THIRTEEN lead acid batteries in the back to start the car and supply power for acceleration.
Doesn’t sound that much of a saving, overall…
Colorado Springs, dated
The archive has held two Colorado Springs transcripts for a while and an argument about what year they belong to: the introductions read out at the Denver workshops call it “the 1990 International Extraordinary Science in Colorado Springs”, while the transcripts themselves are filed as 1991.
This column settles the year and adds the day. A contemporaneous English source, written from the organisers’ own preliminary draft programme dated 27 April 1991, puts the hydrogen session on Saturday 27 June 1991, at the Hilton Inn in Colorado Springs, organised by High Energy Enterprises Incorporated, with Billings, Meyer and Nakamatsu all invited.
Two cautions. The programme was a draft and the organisers reserved the right to change the speaker list without notice, so this establishes that Meyer was billed, not that he spoke. And a Saturday billing does not rule out his having spoken at Colorado Springs in 1990 as well.
Saturday 27 June 1991 is the date to check the transcripts against.
The original
Provenance
- Shelf
- Press coverage
- Page
- 33
- Byline
- Peter Tate, in the Greenwatch column
- 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
- Evening Echo, Bournemouth, Monday 1 July 1991, page 33.
- Citation
- Evening Echo, Bournemouth, July 1991, pp. 33, by Peter Tate, in the Greenwatch column
- Publication
- Evening Echo, Bournemouth
- Transcription
- A clipping from the printed page, photographed and supplied by the archive’s editor.