Why Stan Meyer built his water fuel cell from kitchen-sink steel, not platinum

Why did Stan Meyer build his water fuel cell from 304 stainless, the steel in kitchen sinks, instead of platinum? "Platinum is extremely ultra expensive," he told a house meeting in New Zealand in 1989; "stainless steel became a very economical material to use." 304 is about 18% chromium and 8% nickel, and the chromium grows a passive oxide film a few nanometres thick that re-forms when it is scratched. That is why it shrugs off water. It is not magic: drive a large current through a stainless electrode and the anode does wear, which is the brown water many builders know. Corrosion in a cell is driven by current (Faraday's law: metal lost is proportional to the charge passed), and Stan's circuits were built to choke the current down and let voltage do the work. He quoted lab testing of a wear rate of "0.0001 per year" and joked that anyone who lived 10,000 years should come back and tell him. Any builder can check it: weigh your tubes before and after a long run, and show us the scale.

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 · house meeting, New Zealand · 1989
• Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
• Chris Bake's bench · 304L sphere cell · February 2023
• Stan Meyer, house meeting, New Zealand, 1989, part 1, at 20:19, 20:28 and 20:43 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 26:34 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• AISI 304: 18–20% chromium, 8–10.5% nickel; the passive chromium-oxide film is a few nanometres thick and self-repairing in air or water (standard metallurgy references)
• Faraday's law of electrolysis: mass dissolved at an electrode is proportional to the charge passed