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Stan Meyer's $2.50 exhaust tube, and the valve in your car that does the same job

Stan Meyer told a Deer Creek audience in 1985 that a "two dollar and fifty cent recycling tube" would let a conventional car run on hydrogen with no engine changes. The tube was his answer to hydrogen's speed: he put its flame at about 325 centimeters a second against about 42 for natural gas (Color

The archive's own copy, 29 September 2026 26 MB

One of the shorts. Flip through all of them.

What was shown

Stan Meyer told a Deer Creek audience in 1985 that a "two dollar and fifty cent recycling tube" would let a conventional car run on hydrogen with no engine changes. The tube was his answer to hydrogen's speed: he put its flame at about 325 centimeters a second against about 42 for natural gas (Colorado Springs, 1991), close to textbook maximum burning velocities. His fix was to reroute the engine's exhaust and mix it back in with the water fuel cell's gas, "to regulate the burn rate of the hydrogen gas" down to that of gasoline. His 1983 patent, US 4,389,981, Hydrogen Gas Injector System for Internal Combustion Engine, draws it: line 9 carries the non-combustible gases, which it says are the engine's own exhaust "in a closed loop arrangement", through a pump on the engine belt (91) and a valve (95) into the mixing chamber. Exhaust has already burned, so it is mostly nitrogen and cannot burn again; mixed into the charge it slows the flame and lowers its peak temperature. Carmakers fitted the same idea to cars from the early 1970s to cut nitrogen oxides: the EGR valve, exhaust gas recirculation. If yours has ever clogged with soot, that's the part. Stan's tapes and patents are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

  • Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
  • Stan Meyer · US 4,389,981, Fig. 1 · 1983 (labels added)
  • EGR valve · Sven Mildner · CC BY-SA 3.0
  • Clogged EGR valve · Moosealope · CC BY 2.0
  • Stan Meyer, lecture, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 56:18 and 56:48 — stanslegacy.com
  • Stan Meyer, Colorado Springs, 1991, at 18:35 (325 and 42 cm/s) — stanslegacy.com
  • Stan Meyer, Hydrogen Gas Injector System for Internal Combustion Engine, US 4,389,981 (28 June 1983), Fig. 1 — stanslegacy.com
  • EGR valve photo: Sven Mildner, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; clogged EGR valve: Moosealope, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

shorts stanmeyer hydrogen cars egr mechanic engineering