What the Papers Said

The archive has just taken in a folder of twenty-one newspaper clippings, from 1961 to 2007, most of them new to the archive. This film reads them in the order they were printed, and it finds two kinds of paper in the folder: small Ohio papers that met a man, and national papers that wrote a story.

About the voice. Where you hear Stan Meyer in this film, you are hearing a synthetic voice built by a machine from thirty seconds of his voice on the Deer Creek conference tape of 1985. It reads two passages, both his own words as the newspapers printed them: the Associated Press interview of 1984, and what he told the Darke County fair board in 1985. The narrator is a stock voice and nobody in particular. Treat both as a reading, not a recording.

Before the work

Two notices in The Plain Dealer, nine months apart, record his marriage to Betty Jane Saxa at Olmsted Community Church on 15 June 1963 — a marriage before either of the two that every account of his life names. The engagement notice also gives his father's name, Henry S. Meyer, and says he went from Ohio State to the Institute of Electrical Technology in Columbus. Behind it, the Grandview Heights yearbooks.

The local years

The UPI story of October 1981 is the earliest print of the water fuel cell the archive knows of. After it, the rooms he showed it in: a church at Bradford in 1982, three summers at the Great Darke County Fair, and a Full Gospel supper at Piqua in 1987 — five public showings before Einsiedeln. The Associated Press story of 1984 carries "I'm at war", a Battelle scientist declining to dismiss the field, and the 1979 Ampsco lawsuit over the solar silo's parts.

The English end

Donald Walton and A. Harvard-Bailey planned to build the cell in Dorset in 1990, and by 1991 Walton had walked away — in a column that also dates the Colorado Springs hydrogen session to Saturday 27 June 1991. Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin read Meyer's paper at Southampton in 1993, and told The Argus in 1995 that he had been to the workshop in Ohio eight times.

After

The Express, four months after his death, is the earliest national print of the story of that evening; the film reads its first paragraph against the record. It also carries Lawrence Simanowitz, who filmed him for Equinox, and the $9 million he wanted for Bibles. The Star-Ledger in 2007 shows how far the legend had set in nine years.

Help wanted

The foot of the Express spread; the rest of the 1963 wedding notice; any copy of With the Lord, There Is Purpose; and whether he got his hour in front of the Greenville grandstand in 1985.