Exploring the wonder that is Hydrogen Cars
About twenty years ago, I and my wife were owners of some pretty interesting antique and special automobiles. We serviced them at an excellent antique car garage and sales place on 18th Street In St. Petersburg, Florida. I had long been close friends with its proprietor.
When I stopped by this time to have the timing adjusted in my old Rolls Royce Phantom II, he said"Its gonna take a few hours. But I'm gonna send you up the street to Mr. Marlborough's and you are not going to believe what he's going to show you."
Mr. Marlborough was a very old, perhaps 90 years old, automotive engineer amd had become rather famous for his inventions. I had met him some years before and he knew of my interest in exotic cars, so no introduction was necessary.
My auto friend phoned him.As I arrived at his house, the old man was pulling on a jacket ans striding toward a 1960 Dodge Dart that stood in the yard. He stopped at the rear of the car, and picking up a garden hose, seemingly filled a tank with tap water. "Get in the front." he said, and that was necessary, for the back of the car was completely full of machinery, and there was a suspicious bulging of the trunk where the lid had been replaced, and more machinery was sticking up.
He turned a switch and waited several minutes, then turned a valve on the dash, then hit a third switch, a starter button, and the engine burst into life.
He drove it gingerly onto busy 34th Street and accelerated. It seemed to me in function to be that good slant six that Chrysler had perfected.After 20 minutes of silent driving, he returned to his house and fixed me a bourbon and water in his comfortable study.
"Have you figured it out?" he grinned.
"No. What I've figured is impossible!"
"That's right! It was impossible until I found the way.And I've sold the process and all the secrets to a company in Colorado for a nice sum. I can quit working and die rich and happy!"
"I'll explain the fundamentals to you."
The most of the afternoon was spent in details about the system, but it can be explained in a few words.
Water, H20, is two gases, oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen is highly explosive, particularly when mixed with oxygen , both as GASES, not a fluid.
There have been several ways to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, for more than a century. But never in a QUICK and efficient way. Electrolysis, the use of positive and negative poles of Direct Current electricity to attract the oxygen and the hydrogen, as gases, has been known since the discovery of electricity. But it has always been a tedious and slow process. But using recent methods of producing extremely high voltages of direct current, but with low amperes, our engineer had been able to produce enough hydrogen and oxygen and mix them properly in a specially designed carburetor. Moreover, that bulge in the back was an armored tank that contained the necessary hydrogen. A smaller tank under it received the oxygen. The great fact was that AS THE CAR RAN AND MOVED it was making hydro-oxygenate fuel and storing it AS WE SPED ALONG! And that from a large tank of tap-water.
BULKY but very efficient.
"What will they do to reduce the bulk of your machinery?" I asked. "I don't know!" he replied. "But I do know it's feasible."
I hurried back as the Rolls place was closing and my friend said. "Do you believe it?"I said "Yes, I have seen it."
I wondered and pondered and two years later, my Rolls Royce mechanic phoned me, "I heard that Mr. Marlborough has died. He was living over on the East Coast in a famous resort. But he was ou of the car business." He was 99 years old.
What happened?
Were engineers able to miniaturize the equipment?
Why didn't any publicity accompany the millions-of-dollars purchase that had been made from Mr. Marlborough?
But all of my desire for information is still frustrated.
I can only surmise that the gigantic oil industry with its trillions and quadrillions of dollars, pounds and francs, had squashed the major engineering coup. Why?Perhaps to save THEIR millions, trillions, and quadrillions?
Were they American, English, Saudi, German, Iraqi, Iranians, Afghani?
Did billionaire young Osama Bin Laden, then living in the United States, buy it?i
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