article
Jim Wight: Driving on Water
Not visible on the page photographed · 16 May 1991
Jim Wight: Driving on Water
A stub: the page is photographed below, and the text is not yet transcribed. Only the opening page is in the photograph; the article continues beyond its right-hand column.
What the page says
The Independent's Close-Up column gives most of a page to James Wight, photographed crouched on the bonnet of a car whose California number plate reads H2O PWRD. The visible column says he has no doubts the technology works (asked why, he answers that he can add two and two), that he once ran an appliance repair business, and that he first heard of hydrogen's promise in 1978, while still living in Colorado, from the radio broadcaster Paul Harvey's story of two college students who ran an eight-cylinder car on hydrogen split from water. It calls him hooked ever since, not a scientist, and untroubled by the scepticism of established science.
About this page
The page header reads only "The Independent". It is the Santa Barbara Independent, the weekly that printed Wight's letter in March 1990: the paper's digitised run has this page, 16 May 1991, page 53, and its text matches Wight's name and the hydrogen story. It fixes two facts the archive did not have from him: the Colorado years before Santa Barbara, and 1978 as the year the idea took hold. See James Paul Wight and Good News Productions.
The original
Provenance
- Shelf
- Press coverage
- Page
- 53
- Byline
- Not visible on the page photographed
- 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 citation is what a reader needs to find the original.
- Caption
- The Santa Barbara Independent, Thursday 16 May 1991, page 53: the opening of the Close-Up.
- Citation
- The Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara, California, May 1991, pp. 53, by Not visible on the page photographed
- Publication
- The Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara, California
- Transcription
- From the James Paul Wight / Good News Productions papers, photographed for the archive in September 2026. A photograph of the printed page; not yet transcribed.