Stanley Meyer: a timeline

Everything the archive can date in Stanley Meyer's life, in order, with the source for each line. Where a date rests on one person's memory, or on Stan's own account of himself, it says so; where the sources disagree, the disagreement is set out at the end rather than settled by choosing one. A year on its own means only the year is known.

The chart draws the same record in six lanes: zoom with the presets or the year sliders, switch lanes off, search, and click any mark for its entry and source.

The family he was born into

• Henry Stewart Meyer, his father: born 15 February 1906 in Ohio, the son of Carl A. Meyer (1875–1961) and Antonia Meyer (1878–1930). Find a Grave.
• Marie Hessler Meyer, his mother: born 11 May 1906 in Orange Township, Delaware County, Ohio, daughter of Frank C. Hessler and Blanche Huddle. She had a daughter, Barbara, by an earlier marriage, whom Henry raised as his own. Find a Grave; the people who knew Stan.
• Henry Byron "Hank" Meyer, his elder brother: born in Columbus on 23 August 1936; later the owner and auctioneer of Columbus Auction. Obituary, 2016.
• The family was comfortable. Marie owned and ran the Gay and Fourth Garage in downtown Columbus, was later business administrator of the Medical Sciences Building and a director of Mercy Hospital, and retired as a realtor, M. H. Meyer and Associates (her obituary, 1987). Charles Hughes, who took Stan in during the 1970s: "his parents were wealthy… He grew up with chemistry sets and everything he wanted." Hughes, 2012.

1940–1958: Columbus and Grandview Heights

• 24 August 1940. Stanley Allen Meyer and his twin, Stephen Foster Meyer, are born "within an hour of each other", to Henry Meyer and Marie Meyer, née Hessler. The record is filed on 3 September 1940. The birth certificate.
• 1940s. The family lives on Columbus's East Side, on Livingston Avenue; the house number is not in the holdings. No television; crystal radios; "coming out of the war years" (Stephen). The Dispatch; Stephen, 2007.
• About 1954. The family moves to Grandview Heights, the town where the twins finish school.
• 1955–1956. Stephen is in the Grandview Heights class groups; Stan is not. 1957–1958: Stan is, as a sophomore and a junior, and on the reserve football team; his senior entry reads "STANLEY ALLEN MEYER — Reserve Sports — Football 2; Boosters." The senior year is presumably 1959, though no page prints it. The Grandview Heights yearbooks.
• About 1956–57. At sixteen Stephen gives Stan the Chevrolet he rebuilt with their father, at their father's asking. Stephen, 2007.

1958–1963: Ohio State, the service, a first marriage

• 1958 or 1959. The twins go from Grandview straight to Ohio State; Stephen says Stan joined Air Force ROTC there. Reported by Stephen only. Stephen, 2007.
• Between August 1961 and August 1962. Stephen goes into the Air Force "when I was 21", as a ground-radar man. The Stephen Meyer interviews, checked.
• August 1961. Their grandfather Carl A. Meyer dies (Columbus Dispatch, 6 August 1961).
• 24 September 1961. "Stanley Meyer, 21, of Columbus" is treated after a diving accident at Rocky Fork Lake. Probably him; the paper gives no middle initial. Hillsboro Press-Gazette.
• Army service, dates unknown. His death certificate records service in the Army with an honourable discharge. The Grove City Record of March 1976 says he "studied optics engineering, electronics and mechanics at the U.S. Army Engineering College in Washington, D.C., [and] later was employed by a communications firm." Stephen's account has Stan discharged from the Korean DMZ and reaching their mother's door within an hour of Stephen's own homecoming. His sister Barbara remembers both twins coming home from the Army for their father's funeral, and the family believes that is when the discharge came. The archive has no document dating any of it; the map puts Korea at about 1962. The death certificate; Grove City Record, 18 March 1976.
• 30 September 1962. His engagement to Betty Jane Saxa of Olmsted Falls, an Ohio State junior, is announced. He "attended that university and is a student at the Institute of Electrical Technology in Columbus"; his parents are "Mr. and Mrs. Henry S. Meyer of Columbus". The Plain Dealer.
• 15 June 1963. He marries Betty Jane Saxa at Olmsted Community Church. Their daughter is Melissa. The Plain Dealer; Cuyahoga County marriage index, vol. 653, p. 330.

1963–1975: the undocumented years

The archive holds almost nothing dated from these twelve years. What there is comes from later accounts:

• He worked as an electronics technician at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus; by October 1976 the Record calls him a "former" Battelle technician. Channel 4 in 1995 said he left high school early to go into research there, which the yearbooks and the 1962 notice contradict. Grove City Record, 1976; It Runs on Water.
• In 1965, as he told it, he was in Washington, D.C., at a meeting on a fail-safe nuclear power system. Global Sciences, 1992.
• In the early 1970s, as he told it, he was in the retail truck-parts business, "making well over a million dollars a year of profit", and at some point designed heart monitors for hospitals, a "Validator System" for banks and a "Nivax Actar System". Sidney Daily News, 1987. His wife Donna's family owned Reliable Truck Parts in Columbus: founded by her grandfather in 1927 (Ohio Jewish Chronicle, 1943), worked in by her father (1990), and trading for nearly a century, latterly at 1950 Refugee Road (Yellow Pages). The five-acre Refugee Road property, "formerly Reliable Truck Parts", has since been listed and sold (the broker's listing). In October 1984 he told the Grove City Record he had been "a corporate entrepreneur, a multi-million dollar a year truck part distributing company" (the Record). Reliable is the likeliest business he meant; no document yet puts him there.
• 1969. The marriage to Betty Saxa ends in divorce in Franklin County, according to the Ohio divorce index. The people who knew Stan.
• Between 1969 and May 1972. He marries his second wife, Donna Marie Sowalsky, daughter of Israel and Jeanne Sowalsky of Columbus (Ohio Jewish Chronicle, 9 May 1958). A notice of December 1966 still has her under her first married name (Ohio Jewish Chronicle), and on 12 May 1972 "Stanley A. Meyer and Donna Marie Meyer" mortgage 2931 Bryden Road. No marriage record has been found.
• 1973–74 is when Stephen dates the start of the water-fuel work. Stephen, 2007.

1975–1980: the Solar Silo

• 1975. His own starting date for the work, and the year of his conversion: "If I would have died back in 1975, the only place I would be is in hell today." Stan and the Bible.
• 18 June 1975. First use claimed for the SOLAR SILO mark.
• 3 September 1975. Applications filed for a Solar Heating System and a Light Guide Lens, with Stephen R. Gray as co-inventor; his address is 2931 Bryden Road, Columbus: lot 73 of the Bexley Park Extension, which he and Donna had mortgaged on 12 May 1972 (released in January 1997). In June 1981 Donna, divorced from him in 1976, is still there as "Mrs. Donna Meyer" (Ohio Jewish Chronicle).
• Mid-1970s to about 1979. He works from, and for a time lives at, Charles and Valorie Hughes's house on Marlane Drive, Grove City, and builds the two-storey Solar Silo beside it; later he moves to an apartment over a garage. Hughes, 2012.
• 18 March 1976. The Grove City Record: "Stanley Meyer, of 1063 Urlin Ave., Columbus" and his planned demonstration at the Hughes home. Grove City Record. Further reports follow on 29 April, 29 July and 21 October 1976.
• 20 July 1976. His first patent: US 3,970,070, Solar Heating System.
• 1976. Donna S. Meyer divorces him in Franklin County (the Ohio divorce index). The mid-1970s are the years he is living in the Hughes house.
• 4 and 8 March 1977. The first of his copyright registrations: two "Solar-Pak" flow charts, registered as unpublished technical drawings. Six more drawings follow that year: an R.P.M. control valve, a steam equalization valve, a rotary piston steam engine, a 50-page studded light-guide injection molding apparatus, a deflection shield, and the 59-page Electro-pak system. They appear in the Copyright Office's printed catalogue for 1977, not in its online records, which begin in 1978 (the registrations).
• 6 March 1977. His father, Henry Stewart Meyer, dies, aged 71. Obituary in the Columbus Dispatch, 7 March 1977; buried at Green Lawn Cemetery. Barbara remembers Stan and Stephen both coming home from the Army for the funeral.
• 1977. Talks on the "Solar-Pak" system: at an energy fair at the Licking County Joint Vocational School, Newark, on 15 January, and at the Carnegie Public Library, Washington Court House, on 26 April, with Charlie Richardson. And a charismatic church service. Solar energy system introduced here; Charismatic services slated.
• 20 March 1978 onward. The light-guide registrations: a "Studded light-guide lens", and five more on the light guides and the silo by April 1979.
• 15 August 1979. First use claimed, in his 1997 trademark filings, of WATER FUEL CELL, WATER AS FUEL and MEETS ALL ENERGY NEEDS.
• 3 October 1979. Schuler Leukart Inc. sues him in Franklin County over solar parts (79 CV 004853); the AP later put it at $200,000. Dismissed before trial on 8 September 1981. AP, 1984.
• 29 November 1979. "Solar Silo: is it a big hoax, or our last hope?" Grove City Record.
• 1979. He marries his third wife, Marilyn M. Wells, born Marilyn Klott in 1945, in Franklin County (the Ohio marriage index). She is his wife for the rest of his life.
• 20 June 1980. "Hydrogen airdation processor": the first registration with hydrogen in the title.

1981–1989: the water fuel cell

• 5 May 1981. US 4,265,224, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System. 30 June 1981: US 4,275,950, Light Guide Lens.
• 31 May 1981. First use claimed, in 1983, for WATER FUEL CELL.
• 16 September 1981. The earliest water-fuel application traced: US Serial 302,807, "Hydrogen Generator System".
• 23 September and 26 October 1981. The Record, then the UPI wire: "Stanley A. Meyer, 41, of Grove City" is testing a hydrogen fuel cell in his garage laboratory. Grove City Record; UPI.
• 26 October 1981. The Columbus Citizen-Journal's own feature, with a photograph of him at a large octagonal "hydrogen fuel cell" and a Bolens riding tractor; he says he refused $250 million from "the Arabs" in 1977. Citizen-Journal.
• 27 October 1982. Copyright on "Water fuel cell", 65 pages.
• 21 November 1982. He preaches at the 10 a.m. service at Greenville Creek United Church of Christ, Bradford; the notice says he has been "working on energy problems for 20 years". The earliest talk the archive can date and place. Troy Daily News.
• 14 December 1982. Six European applications filed, from 3792 Broadway, Grove City. February 1983: Canadian and Japanese filings follow.
• 1983 and 1984. He shows at the Great Darke County Fair, by his own account "with just the cell": it is not yet running an engine. 1 May 1985: he shows the fair board a videotape of the car and asks for an hour in front of the grandstand at that year's fair, to show the cell running an engine; Greenville Daily Advocate, 2 May 1985. 14–17 August 1985: the Advocate's fair section bills the car as "a new attraction", but on the fair's second day it is withdrawn from the junior fair parade, because "the car will not clear the U.S. patent board in time"; a display shows the theory instead, "as in years past". The fair section; Water-power car silenced.
• 28 June 1983. US 4,389,981, Hydrogen Gas Injector System. 20 December 1983: US 4,421,474, Hydrogen Gas Burner. 14 August 1984: US 4,465,455, Start-Up/Shut-Down.
• 25 October 1984. The Grove City Record's copyrighted story by Shannon Hamons: the dune buggy's Volkswagen engine run on hydrogen from the cell, Charlie Holbrook raising and lowering the revs at the cell's valve, and the cell already shown "to the public at fairs and at meetings". Local man solves energy problem!; the follow-up, 8 November.
• 12 November 1984. The AP: "I'm at war… It's economic." Thirty patents applied for. AP.
• 1985. The Deer Creek talk. Deer Creek.
• 11 October 1985. The dune buggy's first road test, with Lt. Col. Edward Parkinson of the Air Force among the witnesses and a "Marilyn" called over to the car. Stephen: "His wife, Marilyn, was taking a picture." So by 1985 he is married to Marilyn. Jack's VW; Grove City Record; the road-test film.
• 1986. The Water Fuel Cell Technical Brief is registered (May and August). 23 September 1986: US 4,613,304, Gas Electrical Hydrogen Generator, and US 4,613,779, Electrical Pulse Generator.
• 1987. The five pencil pages of the VIC windings. In the lab talk he calls it "a fantastic year". Lab talk.
• 12 April 1987. His mother, Marie Hessler Meyer, dies suddenly, aged 80 (the obituary says 81). The obituary lists "Stanley A. and Marilyn Meyer, Grove City" among her survivors. She leaves eleven grandchildren. Buried at Green Lawn.
• 20 June 1987. Guest speaker at the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship in Piqua; the notice mentions his book in progress, "With the Lord, There Is Purpose". Sidney Daily News.
• 11 April 1988. The dealership "Lab Talk" master tape. The VHS shelf.
• 1988. Jim Wight of Good News Productions, who filmed the lab and the demonstrations, is photographed with Stan on a visit to the Grove City lab; the year is the photograph's caption. Jim Wight and Good News Productions.
• 17 January 1989. US 4,798,661, Gas Generator Voltage Control Circuit. 2 May 1989: US 4,826,581, the first patent to print his address at 3792 Broadway, the house and laboratory he keeps until he dies.
• Mid-1989. Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin's association begins, by Griffin's account. The Griffin file.
• 12 July 1989. A Poole firm, F & S Marketing, plans to sell his cell in Britain. Evening Echo.
• 28 October 1989. He lectures at the SAFE congress in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. raum & zeit. The New Zealand house meeting belongs to the same year. New Zealand, 1989.

1990–1998: the dealers, the court, the last years

• 26 June 1990. US 4,936,961, Method for the Production of a Fuel Gas.
• 16 August 1990. "Stanley Meyer, age 49", taken ill to Mount Carmel hospital. The report.
• 19–22 October 1990. The British delegation (Griffin, Laughton and Hindley) at Grove City. 30 October 1990: the Washington Court House dealership for the Bushmaster aircraft. Electronics World; WFC Public Notice.
• 23 January 1991. Stan, Stephen, Barbara and a fourth sibling sue their brother Henry B. Meyer Jr. for partition of family land (Franklin County 91 CV 000630). The land is sold that August and the proceeds distributed on 27 August 1991.
• April 1991. A dealership seminar at the Deer Creek State Park lodge: about thirty people, a four-hour lecture, shares at $5,000 down. Spy's writer, who attended, says they were held "once a month". Spy, December 1991.
• June 1991. The Extraordinary Science conference in Colorado Springs; the date is disputed (below). The talk. Leonard Holihan of the Advanced Energy Research Institute, London, introduces him, and tells News 13 on camera that the delegation "came back saying this is one of the most important inventions of the century." The short talk; News 13.
• February 1992. The Global Sciences Congress, Orlando. The talk.
• 22 September 1992. US 5,149,407. 6–8 October 1992: Perkins Technology's visit and "the Treaty of Taco Bell". Project TACO. At the bench on 8 October, by Griffin's account, dissociation begins at about 10 volts, the current never reaches a milliamp, the glass and its pipework stay at room temperature, and the gas, lit, melts stainless steel wire. Griffin's account, in the 1995 test report.
• 16–18 April 1993. The International Symposium on New Energy, Denver. 13 September 1993: Griffin reads "Water as Fuel" at the Southampton Institute. Water as Fuel.
• 4 August 1993. Schneider, Brooks and Gilvesy sue him in Franklin County (93 CV 005477), dismissed by the plaintiffs in May 1994. 21 September 1993: Willis and Harper, dealers from Washington Court House, sue him in Fayette County. The Fayette docket.
• 15 March 1994. US 5,293,857, his last patent. 19 March 1994: his letter to the distributors, signed as "Executive Chairman of Directors, Founder/Owner/Inventor". The letter.
• 15–17 July 1994. SEER '94, Ukiah, California, with the buggy. Ukiah Daily Journal.
• Early 1995. Philippe Vandemoortele of Belgium begins funding him. September–December 1995: a run of copyright registrations, among them The Birth of New Technology. 17 December 1995: Channel 4 broadcasts It Runs on Water.
• February and May 1996. The Fayette trial. 7 August 1996: the oral decision, "gross and egregious fraud"; final judgment 24 September 1996. $40,515.72 is garnished in October; he pays the balance on 9 December. 16 October 1996: Griffin dies.
• May 1997. The Denver lecture and workshop, among his last public teaching. Denver, 1997.
• 23 October 1997. He asks Vandemoortele for $21,000 for the Development Center site plan. The fax.
• January 1998. Grove City approves a 56-acre research campus on Seeds Road.
• 17 February 1998. Philippe Vandemoortele buys the two Seeds Road parcels, 56.5 acres, in his own name for $1,979,215. Philippe Vandemoortele.
• Friday 20 March 1998. He collapses at dinner at the Cracker Barrel on Stringtown Road with Stephen and two Belgian investors: "They poisoned me."
• Saturday 21 March 1998. He dies at Mount Carmel West, aged 57, on the day the Development Center was to be inaugurated. Cremated on 24 March; funeral at Evans Funeral Home on 26 March. On 21 May the coroner certifies a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, natural causes. The day Stan died.

After

• 26 June 1998. Stephen Barrie Chambers, research director of Xogen Power, a Calgary company John Grove had founded that year, files the first of its patents; it cites Stan's US 4,798,661. The story that Chambers was Marilyn's brother, or Stan's technician, has no support in any record. People who knew Stan.
• 24 March 1998 to 11 January 2001. No will. The estate (Franklin County Probate 457686) is administered by Alphonse P. Cincione; the inventory comes to about $306,000, with no real estate. The court approves a search of his computer and the upkeep of his Canadian patents, the estate files a valuation of the Water Fuel Cell as his sole proprietorship (15 September 1999), his widow applies to buy the estate's assets (18 November 1999), and the "83 DuneBuggy" is transferred on 5 May 2000. Two years and ten months, not the five years Don Gabel remembered in 2008. The estate; Don Gabel, 2008.
• 29 July 2003. Marilyn dies in Columbus, aged 57, and most of what survived passes to Charlie Holbrook. Find a Grave. January 2008: Charlie Holbrook dies, aged 73; his son David runs the estate sale. The archive's unpublished photographs were taken in Holbrook's basement that year.
• 26 April 2016. His brother Hank dies.

Where the record disagrees

• The service. The death certificate records Army service with an honourable discharge, and the 1976 Record an Army engineering college; Charles Hughes said "No, he wasn't in the military." Stephen has Stan discharged from Korea, and Barbara remembers both twins coming home from the Army for their father's funeral; at Bremen in 2019 she said "the boys went in the Air Force". Henry died in March 1977, and the Grove City Record has Stan at work in Columbus and Grove City through 1976, so the archive has not yet found the paper that dates the discharge. Their grandfather Carl's death, in August 1961, is the other family funeral of those years.
• School and work. Grandview High to Ohio State to the Institute of Electrical Technology (the yearbooks and the 1962 notice), against leaving high school early for Battelle (Channel 4, 1995).
• When the work began. About 1962 ("20 years" in 1982), 1973–74 (Stephen), 1974 ("a labor of 17 years" in 1991), and 1975 (Stan, most often).
• The marriages. Three, in the records: Betty Jane Saxa (1963, divorced 1969), the mother of his daughter Melissa; Donna Marie Sowalsky (divorced 1976); and Marilyn Klott, then Wells (married 1979). His niece Lorraine remembered two, Donna and a second wife the family never knew, with Melissa "from before": the first marriage is the one her count leaves out, and the wife the family never knew is Marilyn. Stephen's wife was also a Donna ("Donna Meyer v. Stephen F. Meyer", filed on 10 December 1980, Franklin County 80 DR 003760), which is easy to confuse. Marilyn has also been called "born Chambers", the sister of Stephen Barrie Chambers of Xogen; her birth family were the Klotts of Columbus, and no record of them has a Chambers in it.
• His father's birth. Stephen said 1910; the headstone and the grave record say 1906.
• Colorado Springs. The Echo put the session on "Saturday, June 27" 1991, but 27 June 1991 was a Thursday; Stan's own list of talks says 1990.
• The time of death. 6:20 p.m. in the Grove City Record; 8:25 p.m. on the death certificate.