On May 30, 8:00*pm, Lee wrote:
Running a car on water may be an urban legend or something similar,
but there's enough of a "ring-of-truth" to it to make me believe there
is some credibility to the concept.

In the early 1990's, when oil prices spiked as a result of the first
Iraq war, when Saddam's retreating troops torched the oil fields in
Kuwait and southern Iraq, there was a lot of talk about US dependence
on imported oil and development of alternative fuel vehicles.

Here in Phoenix, AZ we had a radio talk show host named Preston
Westmoreland that, at that time, was on radio station KTAR (620 AM).
He had a guest on his show talking about the feasibility of hydrogen
powered cars. This guest was a professor of engineering at ASU who had
worked as a laboratory assistant to a Professor of Automotive
Engineering following WWII. During the war, the professor had been
very distressed about the petroleum rationing that had been necessary
and decided to find a way to prevent this from ever happening again.

As a result, this professor invented a way to convert water into
hydrogen and powered a regular car with it. The car had been driven
around Phoenix and attracted a lot of media attention at the time. It
had no emissions and could be driven about 300 miles on a tank of
water. The professor was "bought-off" by a consortium of auto and
petroleum companies because they didn't want people filling their cars
from their garden hose and having engines that would be so reliable
that they wouldn't have to be brought to dealers for service. The
"payoff" was that, in exchange for a "very large" sum of money, the
professor would transfer all patent rights to the "buyers", would stop
further research on the project and would not talk about his invention
with anyone from that point forward. All documents relating to his
project were destroyed, and "mysteriously" the files from the local
media companies disappeared. The inventing professor moved away to an
island home paid for with his silence money and had not been heard
from in several years.

This guest professor said there were a few remaining individuals at
ASU, like himself, that knew this professor and knew about his
"invention" but age had caught-up with most of them and several had
passed away. (Now, 14 years later, probably more have gone to that
great garage in the sky.)

I’m not sure, but I believe the person interviewed for this story was:

Charles H. Terrey, Vice President
American Hydrogen Association
322 W. Harmont Drive
Phoenix, AZ 85021-5643

One of the problems with trying to prove such theories is the
companies involved probably have no recollection of the personnel
involved, and kept few, if any, records on such a transaction, since
it was prior to computers being used for recordkeeping, or know what
happened to the documents and parts that were "paid for" with an
accounting transaction that was probably not traceable to it's real
purpose, since even at that time, the anti-trust laws existed and were
enforced. *And, now with 50 years having passed, it's quite probable
that whatever they did have, has been destroyed or is stored in some
place where no one even knows where or what they might be.

I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but if you think the automotive
and petroleum companies, at that time, had any interest in producing
cars that could be filled up from a garden hose, and engines that
required almost no maintenance, I'd say you must be smoking something.
Let's face it, at that time, when gasoline cost around 30 cents a
gallon, and even less when the gas-wars were going on, and everybody
had forgotten the rationing that had been a part of life during the
war, there was little incentive to pursue environmentally friendly
automobiles, let alone ones that could be filled for free.

Lee

On May 30, 10:19*am, David Nebenzahl wrote:



On 5/30/2008 9:05 AM Harry K spake thus:- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Another mythical story to add to the 100MPG carb that was bought up by
Detroit, the guy who could turn water into gasoline, etc. Eveyone
knows cars can run on hydrogen, either through an internal combustion
engine or fuel cell. And everyone knows hydrogen can be extracted
from water. The simple science lab experiment of using an electrical
current to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen demonstrates
that. The only problem is, from very basic chemistry, we know that
it takes as much energy to break the hydrogen-oxygen bonds in water as
it does when you get it back. In other words, the energy to produce
the hydrogen, has to come from somewhere.

Face it. If anyone had any miracle breakthrough that stood science on
it's head and turned water into hydrogen via some new process, they
wouldn't sell out for peanuts from some nysterious buyers. They
could have a Bill Gates size fortune and the fame that goes with it,
by simply making it public.