Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. It is time for
Speaker 1: a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published
Speaker 1: April twenty third, two thousand fourteen. It is titled How
Speaker 1: Hydrogen Fuel Works, Part one. Yep, this was back when
Speaker 1: we would say part one or part two in our episodes,
Speaker 1: and I don't really do that anymore now. I give
Speaker 1: each episode a different title. But yes, as the title reveals,
Speaker 1: this is the first half of a two parter about
Speaker 1: hydrogen fuel. Fascinating stuff. And you know, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of people who were predicting a hydrogen fuel based
Speaker 1: economy probably about two decades ago, and we're still not
Speaker 1: there yet. So we're gonna learn more about this fuel
Speaker 1: source and what it is and how it works and
Speaker 1: why we don't actually have hydrogen fuel fueling everything these days.
Speaker 1: So let's take a listen. We're going to describe everything
Speaker 1: about hydrogen and how it's being used in multiple ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because hydrogen is a really simple element with a huge
Speaker 1: amount of potential. Simplest element in the universe one proton,
Speaker 1: one electron. That is it, get yourself a proton, get
Speaker 1: yourself electron and let them make friends. You've got a hydrogen.
Speaker 1: So it's also the most abundant element in the universe.
Speaker 1: It's it's everywhere. This is the stuff that the Sun
Speaker 1: fuses into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have had to put that in there. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: so so it's technically fueling well everything, I suppose once
Speaker 1: you've got it working in the sun. Yeah. Yeah, pretty
Speaker 1: much everything on Earth, life as we know it exists
Speaker 1: because of hydrogen being built into helium in the sun.
Speaker 1: There are some exceptions, like you could look at some
Speaker 1: extreme of files in Earth where they're living off chemicals
Speaker 1: that are being produced by the gases and things being
Speaker 1: released in deep undersea fissures. But most of life, the
Speaker 1: vast majority of it, depends at least in some part
Speaker 1: on light. Yes, and hydrogen. Although we have only known
Speaker 1: about its existence as an element for a relatively short
Speaker 1: period of time, has has been kind of theorized about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's been people who have worked with what they called
Speaker 1: like they had various words for it, inflammable air, being
Speaker 1: a popular one because they realized, hey, there's the stuff
Speaker 1: that when you do things to other things happens. And
Speaker 1: then if you put a fire near it, it blows up, right,
Speaker 1: inflammable meaning inflammable meaning inflammable, Yes, exactly able to be
Speaker 1: set fire to. Right, And in this case, it's not
Speaker 1: just that it burns, it's exclusive. So the word hydrogen's
Speaker 1: actually combination of two words from Greek hydro and genus,
Speaker 1: which together mean water forming. And once you know about
Speaker 1: hydrogen and you know what water is, it's H two O.
Speaker 1: Makes perfect sense. You've gotta have hydrogen or you don't
Speaker 1: have water. Of course, if you don't have oxygen, you
Speaker 1: still don't have water. And while this hydrogen stuff is everywhere,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the most abundant element in the universe,
Speaker 1: it isn't often found on it's lonesome. That's because it
Speaker 1: makes friends really easily. Yeah, it's it's kind of like
Speaker 1: the opposite of me. It actually gets real buddy buddy
Speaker 1: really fast, and and and the buddies like it. See
Speaker 1: I got half that equation. But anyway, hydrogen forms compounds readily, right,
Speaker 1: you get compounds and all sorts of stuff. You get
Speaker 1: water being a big example at hydrogen bonds with oxygen.
Speaker 1: You have water, you have lots of hydrocarbons, you've got um.
Speaker 1: You even have occlusion, which is molecular condensation inside igneous rocks.
Speaker 1: The point is is that it's bound up with other stuff.
Speaker 1: It's not just out there its own. So if we
Speaker 1: want to harvest hydrogen to use as fuel, you gotta
Speaker 1: think a little outside the box. You can't just go
Speaker 1: to the hydrogen store by it. Yeah, it doesn't grow
Speaker 1: on any hydrogen trees. Now you have to you have
Speaker 1: to do something to something else generally in order to
Speaker 1: get some of it exactly, which means you've got to
Speaker 1: expend energy in order to get this fuel. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that's really important about any sort
Speaker 1: of fuel. It's not just hydrogen. We're talking about any
Speaker 1: kind of fuel where you're planning on getting energy out.
Speaker 1: If it requires you to put more energy into it
Speaker 1: to get the fuel, then you're getting as a benefit
Speaker 1: of the fuel. Is a losing proposition, right. Although there
Speaker 1: are lots of different ways to to produce hydrogen um.
Speaker 1: You can use light to split water molecules, you can
Speaker 1: gasify biomass waste, you can even just kind of let
Speaker 1: a bunch of microbes do the work for you as
Speaker 1: part of their normal metabolism. Um. But one of the
Speaker 1: most popular ones right now anyway, what accounts for about
Speaker 1: of the hydrogen in the United States is something called performing,
Speaker 1: in which a carbon based fuels like natural gas typically methane,
Speaker 1: are reacted with steam at high pressures and temperatures. That
Speaker 1: produces hydrogen, a little bit of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide,
Speaker 1: that last of which is then reacted to produce more
Speaker 1: hydrogen and carbon dioxide. UM. You will note that that
Speaker 1: both of these do produce greenhouse gases, so it's a
Speaker 1: little bit less friendly than something like electrolysis, although you
Speaker 1: have to pump a whole lot of energy into electrolysis.
Speaker 1: We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Overall,
Speaker 1: reforming does have the potential to overall reduce our carbon
Speaker 1: footprint if it could provide the hydrogen for like a
Speaker 1: whole fleet of fuel cell vehicles. Right That's one of
Speaker 1: the big things about hydrogen. We'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: just a second, about how it does not give off
Speaker 1: greenhouse gases in ideal cases. Uh, keep in mind we're
Speaker 1: talking ideal cases because it all depends on how you're
Speaker 1: using the hydrogen. So, uh yeah. I also read that
Speaker 1: there have been some studies of algae that give off hydrogen, which,
Speaker 1: you know, if we were ever able to make an
Speaker 1: algae farm that was efficient enough, that would be a
Speaker 1: great way. But there are a lot of people who
Speaker 1: question whether or that that's practical. It may not ever
Speaker 1: be something that generates enough hydrogen for it to be
Speaker 1: worth the amount of effort it would take. Again that
Speaker 1: sort of energy losing proposition night. So some other things
Speaker 1: about hydrogen. It has a low ignition energy. That means
Speaker 1: you don't have to apply a lot of energy to
Speaker 1: it to get it to ignite. That makes sense, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't take much to set it on fire, essentially,
Speaker 1: is what we're talking about here. It actually requires an
Speaker 1: order of magnitude less energy to ignite hydrogen than it
Speaker 1: does to ignite gasoline. Yeah, so that means that gasoline
Speaker 1: is pretty pretty flammable, pretty or inflammable. Yeah. Kids, let's
Speaker 1: not play with the stuff at home, shall we, or
Speaker 1: anywhere else for that matter. Let's treat it like serious business.
Speaker 1: But it's both a good and bad thing, right because
Speaker 1: the hydrogen stance it's easy to ignite, means that you
Speaker 1: can easily implement that in an engine. Uh does it
Speaker 1: very efficiently. You don't have to spend a lot of
Speaker 1: energy to make it do what you wanted to do.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, because it has such a low
Speaker 1: ignition point, it's also a challenge engineering wise, because if
Speaker 1: your engine gets hot enough, the engine itself could cause
Speaker 1: the hydrogen to ignite prematurely before it gets into the
Speaker 1: operative fits right, and then it could make everything inoperative.
Speaker 1: You would get an operative right quick. So that's you
Speaker 1: know that there's a there's a good and bad side
Speaker 1: of this. If you can engineer your way around it,
Speaker 1: it can eventually be a benefit. Oh sure, it technically
Speaker 1: has the highest energy output by weight of any fuel
Speaker 1: um though it is the lightest elements, so that's kind
Speaker 1: of yeah. You kind of have to get a lot
Speaker 1: of it together too. So it's because it's it's not dense,
Speaker 1: you know, which is something else will chat about. So
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why we're even talking about hydrogen,
Speaker 1: one of the big ones, it's what we alluded to earlier,
Speaker 1: is the fact that the combustion is really clean, particularly
Speaker 1: if you're using hydrogen and pure oxygen as the mixture
Speaker 1: that goes into your engine, right, because then your output
Speaker 1: is going to be just energy and water. Yep. You
Speaker 1: get energy in the form of the power that you
Speaker 1: generate and some heat because of course we don't have
Speaker 1: any perfect systems where we don't lose some energy in
Speaker 1: the form of heat. But yeah, the only other thing
Speaker 1: you get is water. You don't get anything else. And
Speaker 1: this is when I when I talk about mixtures. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about combustion engines a little later too. This is
Speaker 1: a typical thing where you mix together some fuel and
Speaker 1: some air to go into a combustion engine. Same sort
Speaker 1: of thing with hydrogen. You're not putting just pure hydrogen
Speaker 1: and you're mixing it with some form of air, in
Speaker 1: this case oxygen. However, that being said, most hydrogen combustion
Speaker 1: engines are not using pure oxygen to mix together to
Speaker 1: make the combustible mixture. They're using air. So air has
Speaker 1: stuff in it besides oxygen. In fact, the primary component
Speaker 1: of our atmosphere is not oxygen, it's nitrogen. So one
Speaker 1: of the byproducts you get with using a hydrogen combustion
Speaker 1: engine that uses air is that you get some nitrous oxides,
Speaker 1: nitrogen oxides, I should say, not nitrous oxides, which would
Speaker 1: be hilarious until you suffocated, but nitrogen oxides. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a pollutant. You don't want that. Um. And
Speaker 1: you can also get carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide if
Speaker 1: you get some oil seeping into the combustion chambers, because uh,
Speaker 1: oxygen does. Our atmosphere doesn't have like tons of carbon
Speaker 1: in it, but oil does. So there are chances of
Speaker 1: having a hydrogen combustion engine this kind of pollutants. You
Speaker 1: can get around that if you wanted to go with
Speaker 1: fuel cells, and we'll talk about those two. We'll be
Speaker 1: back with more discussion about hydrogen fuel in just a second,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break. So the amount
Speaker 1: of power that hydrogen engine can generate is dependent upon
Speaker 1: a few different things. It depends upon the mix of
Speaker 1: air and fuel and how that fuel is injected into
Speaker 1: those combustion chambers in your engine. So, theoretically, the maximum
Speaker 1: output of a hydrogen based combustion engine using a pre
Speaker 1: mixed method. This is where you have like a carburetor
Speaker 1: type situation that is mixing air and fuel together and
Speaker 1: then it goes into the combustion chamber. Uh. If you're
Speaker 1: using that method, theoretically your maximum output is about eight
Speaker 1: of the power generated in a comparable gasoline engine, So
Speaker 1: not as powerful, right, But if you were to take
Speaker 1: a direct injection approach, which mixes the fuel and air
Speaker 1: after the intake valve in the combustion chamber closes, then
Speaker 1: the hydrogen based engine can theoretically produce fift more power
Speaker 1: than a gasoline engine. So you kind of have a
Speaker 1: less in one way or pent more the other way. Um, However,
Speaker 1: this is all based upon the idea that you're using
Speaker 1: exactly the amount of air you need to complete combustion,
Speaker 1: so you're using just the right mixture of air and
Speaker 1: just the right mixture of hydrogen. But the downside of
Speaker 1: that is that you also produce more pollutants that way. Right.
Speaker 1: Although okay, so, so this is a complicated issue and
Speaker 1: the numbers on it are always going to be rough.
Speaker 1: But when you're talking about fuel efficiency, you you need
Speaker 1: to use more gasoline in order to make an engine
Speaker 1: do the same amount of work than you would hydrogen. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: Like you have this note about gasoline vehicles operating at
Speaker 1: around efficiency. What that means is that of all the
Speaker 1: energy that's being generated is actually going to doing the
Speaker 1: thing you needed to do. The other is being lost
Speaker 1: in some way or another. Sure, you usually due to
Speaker 1: heat loss. That's the big one, especially with engines. I mean,
Speaker 1: engines generate lots and lots of heat. The the ideal
Speaker 1: of a fuel cell vehicle using hydrogen, it's closer to
Speaker 1: six efficiency. For for the record, electric cars may manage
Speaker 1: somewhere between twenty five and sixty fuel efficiency depending on
Speaker 1: where you get the electricity to recharge that battery. Right,
Speaker 1: and and if you want to be really technical, a
Speaker 1: fuel cell vehicle is kind of a subset of electric vehicles.
Speaker 1: It's just that it's an electric vehicle that you are
Speaker 1: refueling with hydrogen rather than a closed battery system exactly. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a great point. And that's another thing that we
Speaker 1: have to take into consideration. Now. Typically, if if we're
Speaker 1: talking about you know, I just mentioned about having just
Speaker 1: enough air and fuel to complete combustion, and you get
Speaker 1: that that crazy hundred and fifteen percent of a gasoline
Speaker 1: power engine, but you produce more more pollutants as well.
Speaker 1: Usually we're not using exactly the amount of air because
Speaker 1: we want to cut back on those pollutants. One of
Speaker 1: the big reasons we want to use hydrogen is to
Speaker 1: cut back on pollutants. So if we're producing more pollutants
Speaker 1: by making it really efficient, then we're like, well, we
Speaker 1: just kind of traded off. That was a lot of
Speaker 1: money to not do any better exactly. So what we
Speaker 1: tend to see our engines that use about twice as
Speaker 1: much air as is actually required to complete combustion. Now,
Speaker 1: this reduces pollution, but it also reduces the output of
Speaker 1: the engine. Yeah, sad trombone. Okay, so these are just tradeoffs.
Speaker 1: This is the way the real world works. We have
Speaker 1: to sit there and say, Okay, there's not a magic
Speaker 1: solution that is going to solve all the problems equally,
Speaker 1: we have to start making tradeoffs. This is a pretty
Speaker 1: good one because you can you can enlarge the engine
Speaker 1: size and make up for a lot of it. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you make the hydrogen based engine larger than
Speaker 1: a gasoline based engine, you can kind of make up
Speaker 1: this this loss. Now that does, of course, mean you
Speaker 1: have to redesign vehicles around a larger engine. So I
Speaker 1: mean it's you know, it's those domino effects, right. You
Speaker 1: could also include what's called a turbo charger or supercharger,
Speaker 1: and you might wonder, hey, how did those work. We'll
Speaker 1: do another episode because it's already going to be a
Speaker 1: long one for this one. So we can't. We can't
Speaker 1: sit there and uh and jump into that and hope
Speaker 1: to make it out alive, because no will kill us.
Speaker 1: The protective barrier is only so strong. Okay. So, like
Speaker 1: we said, hydrogen not very dense. When you've got one
Speaker 1: proton and one electron, you don't expect it to be Nope,
Speaker 1: So it's uh room temperature is a gas. Getting enough
Speaker 1: hydrogen together in one place to be useful as a
Speaker 1: fuel takes a lot of work, and some of the
Speaker 1: easiest ways of storing it, like in extremely cold liquid form,
Speaker 1: aren't really practical for toting around in a consumer motor
Speaker 1: vehicle that might not want to incorporate a complex cooling
Speaker 1: system due to you know, cost and weight and space issues.
Speaker 1: So usually we end up having to figure out a
Speaker 1: way of pressure rizing it under intense amounts of pressure. Now,
Speaker 1: that of course creates another safety issue. Anytime you have
Speaker 1: a compressed gas, it's under a lot of pressure. If
Speaker 1: you rupture that containment unit in some way. Yeah. You
Speaker 1: that's and then at on top of that that the
Speaker 1: gas itself is inflammable, and you've got the potential for really,
Speaker 1: really a bad day, Which is why a lot of
Speaker 1: companies that have looked into using hydrogen as a fuel
Speaker 1: in one way or another, whether as a bustin engine
Speaker 1: fuel or whether as a fuel sell fuel, have put
Speaker 1: in a lot of research and development in safety for
Speaker 1: these hydrogen canisters or you know else. They will never
Speaker 1: be able to market it because it would just be
Speaker 1: too dangerous. Although some people argue that, I mean, gasoline
Speaker 1: tanks being driven around are also that's a it's a
Speaker 1: good point. It's a fair point. I mean, we're we've
Speaker 1: been relying on a technology that has a an inflammable
Speaker 1: fuel for more than a century. And you know, although
Speaker 1: it's not quite as dangerous as movies make it out
Speaker 1: to be. I mean, it's not that. Yeah where where
Speaker 1: you you your car your car sways a bed and
Speaker 1: then explodes. Y. Yeah, so if Michael Bay made cars,
Speaker 1: no one would ever get in them. But fortunately, as
Speaker 1: far as I know, he has not made one. Uh so,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, We've we've been making use of this hydrogen
Speaker 1: for a long time, and in fact, we, like Lauren said,
Speaker 1: we were kind of playing with this stuff before we
Speaker 1: even had any idea of what it was. We didn't
Speaker 1: really know about elements or even gas is. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna take you on a historical journey, and along this
Speaker 1: journey will be explaining how some of this stuff works,
Speaker 1: because we figured we'd kind of incorporate both the history
Speaker 1: and the technical stuff altogether. It's an experiment. Now before
Speaker 1: we jump into the way back machine, because I know
Speaker 1: all you guys have been missing it, Laurence looking at
Speaker 1: me terrified. Yeah, Lauren, that's what that big thing is
Speaker 1: in the corner that we haven't been using. It's all
Speaker 1: dusty and stuff. Turns out it wasn't in Mongolia. It
Speaker 1: was just in a supply closet. Alright. Well, our our
Speaker 1: fuel gauge is not on empty yet. We still got
Speaker 1: a bit more to go, but first let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. Okay, So we're back and we're ready to
Speaker 1: get into the way Back Machine, which I know is
Speaker 1: going to sound absolutely amazing. I can't believe all the
Speaker 1: bells and whistles that indicate to you that we've actually
Speaker 1: traveled back in time. Because in truth, it's silent. But
Speaker 1: we have to give you some you know, way of
Speaker 1: knowing that that's what's happened. Otherwise it's not it's not
Speaker 1: fun radio trauma exactly. So let's let's just go ahead
Speaker 1: and get in now. Over here, we've got the dial
Speaker 1: which I'm going to set back to uh early seventeenth century.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know how it knows where I
Speaker 1: wanted to go. It just does. But when is really tricky.
Speaker 1: All right, let's just hit the button. Here here we are.
Speaker 1: It's a glorious and smelly So I want to introduce
Speaker 1: you to Johann Baptista van Helmont, who is the first
Speaker 1: person to describe hydrogen as a gas, and not only that,
Speaker 1: he's the first person to come up with the word
Speaker 1: gas to describe substances that have the qualities of a gas.
Speaker 1: He was thinking of stuff that is heavier than air,
Speaker 1: or misty, or he was just trying to come up
Speaker 1: with like a collective noun to call this stuff. He
Speaker 1: proposed gas, and it's stuck. So he goes on to
Speaker 1: make some more observation which in a few decades get
Speaker 1: picked up by another person of philosopher, A natural philosopher,
Speaker 1: and we'll chat about him. His name is Robert Boyle.
Speaker 1: So between Robert Boyle and Johan we have in sixteen
Speaker 1: fifty Serteodor Turk with the men May yearn which I
Speaker 1: know I've absolutely butchered based Swiss, so so I'm sure
Speaker 1: he's fine with it. Yeah, They the Swiss have a
Speaker 1: beautiful way with words that escapes the physical contortions my
Speaker 1: mouth can go through. So, but he produced hydrogen and
Speaker 1: he called it inflammable air by combining iron with sulfuric acid. Now,
Speaker 1: hydrogen is found in a lot of different compounds, including
Speaker 1: all the acids, So if you are able to combine
Speaker 1: it with other stuff, usually that that reaction you get
Speaker 1: by introducing an element into acid will release the hydrogen exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy one we get to that Irish philosopher I
Speaker 1: had mentioned, Robert Boyle. Now he experimented with producing hydrogen
Speaker 1: as well, and he was of the New philosophy movement.
Speaker 1: This was a really interesting movement. It combined observations and
Speaker 1: experimentation with logical thinking to understand the world around him.
Speaker 1: So this is sort of a proto scientist movement. It's
Speaker 1: before we really had the formal sciences. We this is
Speaker 1: when alchemy was starting to transform into chemistry. Right. We
Speaker 1: had people who had made observations and calculations on things
Speaker 1: like physics, but it's now starting to actually take form
Speaker 1: into the sciences as we know them today. So he
Speaker 1: produced hydrogen by combining iron and various assets, and that's
Speaker 1: how he started to take a look at this hydrogen gas.
Speaker 1: And he was he was pretty pretty intelligent. He noticed
Speaker 1: that a gas volume varies inversely with pressure, hence Boil's law. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we named it after after him. He also believed in
Speaker 1: alchemy and transmutation, so he didn't get everything right. You know,
Speaker 1: lots of people today still believe in alchemy and transmutation,
Speaker 1: so well, will leave that for now. But yes, Boil,
Speaker 1: he did a lot of work, and a lot of
Speaker 1: his work inspired other people. So over the next several decades,
Speaker 1: lots of different philosophers and then later chemists and scientists
Speaker 1: began to experiment with hydrogen gas. They didn't really give
Speaker 1: it a name yet, but they knew that the stuff
Speaker 1: would blow up if you exposed it to flame, so
Speaker 1: they began to really study it further until we get
Speaker 1: to seventeen sixty six, and now we get to go
Speaker 1: to England, because that's where Henry Cavendish was and he
Speaker 1: was the first to recognize hydrogen as a distinct substance.
Speaker 1: And he was also the first to describe the composition
Speaker 1: of water. You know, before that, everyone just said it's wet,
Speaker 1: and if it gets cold, it gets hard. That's that
Speaker 1: was pretty much it. If it gets really hot, it
Speaker 1: gets cloudy, that's you know, just that's where we were
Speaker 1: with science until Cavendish came along. I might be exaggerating
Speaker 1: a little, but he absolutely loved learning for learning, saying
Speaker 1: he wasn't actually a scientist per se though as he no,
Speaker 1: not really, I mean he was. He was more like
Speaker 1: just obsessed. He was one of the wealthiest men in
Speaker 1: all of Europe. He had inherited a crazy sum of money,
Speaker 1: and he chose to live very frugally in London. He
Speaker 1: wasn't interested in the trappings of wealth. He wasn't interested
Speaker 1: in ostentation. He was actually, according to one thing I read,
Speaker 1: the only reason we even have a sketch of him
Speaker 1: is because an artist surreptitiously drew one while at a gathering,
Speaker 1: a small private gathering at his house because he didn't.
Speaker 1: He didn't you know, want he didn't. He didn't sit
Speaker 1: for a portrait. He was introvert, super introvert, and he
Speaker 1: didn't really publish most of his work. He published some
Speaker 1: of it, but not all of it, because he wasn't
Speaker 1: really interested in that. He know, he just wanted to
Speaker 1: know how the world works. He was just fascinated with learning.
Speaker 1: He wasn't not necessarily as fascinated with teaching, but he
Speaker 1: was definitely fascinated with learning. I want someone to make
Speaker 1: a awkward action here a movie about this guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that we have to invent a
Speaker 1: lot of of facts about his life, which makes it
Speaker 1: even better. Yeah, that's what movies generally do. Anyway, I'd
Speaker 1: be less offended if I knew less about the history
Speaker 1: of the actual guy. So yeah, I think Henry Cavendish
Speaker 1: Supervillain would be an awesome movie. So I'll get to
Speaker 1: work on that. Yes, all right, then we moved to
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty three, when Jacques Charles makes his first light
Speaker 1: in his balloon La Charliere, which used hydrogen as it's
Speaker 1: a lifting agent because hydrogen is lighter than atmosphere. So
Speaker 1: if you get enough of it together, the buoyancy will
Speaker 1: counteract gravity and then you'll float right off the ground.
Speaker 1: Go up. Yeah. Meanwhile, in eighteen hundred, William Nicholson and
Speaker 1: Anthony Carlyle described the process of electrolysis, in which electricity
Speaker 1: is applied to water to break its molecules down into
Speaker 1: their constituents, being oxygen and hydrogen. This will become important later, yeah,
Speaker 1: but just understanding that. Hey, this process where hydrogen and
Speaker 1: oxygen gets together to make water is reversible if you
Speaker 1: just pour energy into it. That's pretty cool. Eighteen or
Speaker 1: six we have Francois Isaac de Rivaz, a Swiss inventor.
Speaker 1: He built the de Revaz engine. And again I apologize
Speaker 1: if I'm absolutely butchering that, but this was the first
Speaker 1: internal combustion engine to use hydrogen and oxygen as a fuel.
Speaker 1: It would be nearly sixty five years before you get
Speaker 1: the first gas lean powered internal combustion engine. So actually,
Speaker 1: hydrogen combustible engines predate gas, yeah by quite a bit.
Speaker 1: So you know, we've talked a lot about how electric
Speaker 1: cars are older than you think, so are hydrogen combustion
Speaker 1: engine cars. So that's kind of cool. Then in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty we have the Reverend W. Cecil who writes a
Speaker 1: paper and I love this title. Here we go on
Speaker 1: the application of hydrogen gas to produce a moving power
Speaker 1: and machinery with a description of an engine which is
Speaker 1: moved by pressure of the atmosphere upon a vacuum caused
Speaker 1: by explosions of hydrogen gas and atmospheric air. I think
Speaker 1: it's a sinct pretty much. You've read the whole article
Speaker 1: just by the title. But yeah, he proposed an engine
Speaker 1: and using hydrogen as the combustible material. But it's a
Speaker 1: different style of combustion engine than what we see today.
Speaker 1: So his design involved having a chamber that you would
Speaker 1: fill with hydrogen plus regular old air, and it would
Speaker 1: be connected to a valve so that you could insert
Speaker 1: this stuff but it wouldn't escape back out. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then the you would put a flame in there, and
Speaker 1: then you have the valve switched so it would allow
Speaker 1: it to escape again. Right, you put the flame in.
Speaker 1: This causes the gas to expand rapidly. Uh. And normally
Speaker 1: in our combustion engines we used as a pushing force,
Speaker 1: but at this case, the the piston in this chamber
Speaker 1: is all the way out already, so it can't be
Speaker 1: pushed further out, so he's not using as a pushing force. Instead,
Speaker 1: once that guest starts to cool and is released, it
Speaker 1: starts to shrink down. It's not and he's not letting
Speaker 1: more air in there to replace it, and the valve
Speaker 1: is closed, so it's pulling the piston back in in
Speaker 1: that vacuum that's created in the chamber exactly. It's a
Speaker 1: partial vacuum and imperfect vacuum, and that creates an area
Speaker 1: of low pressure. That low pressure pulls on the piston,
Speaker 1: which then moves to the other end of the combustion chamber.
Speaker 1: So you're using this vacuum engine. Now. It worked, but uh,
Speaker 1: it's not really practical, So this particular design wasn't widely implemented,
Speaker 1: but it does in fact work. The principles are all sound.
Speaker 1: So then you had a lot more experimentation following with hydrogen,
Speaker 1: which included everything from inventors to chemists to physicists and
Speaker 1: regular old crazy people and all of this is leading
Speaker 1: up to some pretty cool stuff, including the first fuel cell,
Speaker 1: and that wraps up part one of how hydrogen fuel works.
Speaker 1: Next week we will have um let me chip my
Speaker 1: nose oh part two? Hey how about that? So, if
Speaker 1: you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, or maybe there's a topic
Speaker 1: that we have covered that is in sore need of
Speaker 1: an update, let me know. The best way to do
Speaker 1: that is to pop on over to Twitter. Our handle
Speaker 1: is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.