Speaker 1: Get in test with technology with text stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey the everyone, and welcome to
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Bolkum. And
Speaker 1: today we're going to respond to a listener request. This
Speaker 1: comes to us from Daniels via Facebook. Yes, he said, Hi, guys,
Speaker 1: I've just listened to your episodes about Tesla. I wonder
Speaker 1: how would fully electric cars like Tesla compete with hydrogen
Speaker 1: based cars like becoming Toyota model which is cheaper. Tesla
Speaker 1: is the only successful fully electric car so far. Isn't
Speaker 1: this a sign that this is not the right direction
Speaker 1: for Toyota to bet on hydrogen? It would be nice
Speaker 1: at at some point you could cover the hydrogen car
Speaker 1: and compare them with the electric ones. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: do that, but we're gonna go even further. We're going
Speaker 1: to describe everything about hydrogen and how it's being used
Speaker 1: in multiple ways. Yeah, because hydrogen is a really simple
Speaker 1: element with a huge amount of potential. Simplest element in
Speaker 1: the universe. One proton, one electron, That is it. Get
Speaker 1: yourself a proton, get yourself electron, and let them make friends.
Speaker 1: You've got hydrogen. So it's also the most abundant element
Speaker 1: in the universe. It's it's everywhere. This is the stuff
Speaker 1: that the Sun fuses into helium at a temperature of
Speaker 1: millions of degrees. Yeah, we had to put that in there.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, So so it's technically fueling well everything, I
Speaker 1: suppose once you've got it working in the sun. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much everything on Earth life as we know it
Speaker 1: exists 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 uh, the gases and things
Speaker 1: being released in deep undersea fissures. But most of life,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of it, depends at least in some
Speaker 1: part on light yes, and hydrogen. Although we have only
Speaker 1: known about its existence as an element for a relatively
Speaker 1: short period of time, has has been kind of theorized about.
Speaker 1: There's been people who have worked with what they called like,
Speaker 1: they had various words for it, inflammable air being a
Speaker 1: popular one, because they realized, hey, there's this stuff that
Speaker 1: when you do things to other things happens, and then
Speaker 1: if you put a fire near it, it blows up
Speaker 1: right inflammable mean inflammable meaning inflammable, Yes, exactly able to
Speaker 1: be set fire to. Right, And in this case, it's
Speaker 1: not just that it burns, it's exclusive. So the word
Speaker 1: hydrogen is actually combination of two words from Greek hydro
Speaker 1: and genus, which together mean water forming. And once you
Speaker 1: know about hydrogen and you know what water is, it's
Speaker 1: H two O makes perfect sense. You gotta have hydrogen
Speaker 1: or you don't have water. Of course, if you don't
Speaker 1: have oxygen, you still don't have water. And while this
Speaker 1: hydrogen stuff is everywhere, I mean, it's the most abundant
Speaker 1: element in the universe, it isn't often found on it's lonesome.
Speaker 1: That's because it makes friends really easily. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the opposite of me. It actually gets
Speaker 1: real buddy buddy really fast, and and and the buddies
Speaker 1: like it. So I got half that equation. But anyway,
Speaker 1: hydrogen forms compounds readily, right, You get compounds and all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff. You got water being a big example.
Speaker 1: At hydrogen bonds with oxygen. You have water, you have
Speaker 1: lots of hydrocarbons, you've got um. You even have occlusion,
Speaker 1: which is molecular condensation inside igneous rocks. The point is
Speaker 1: is that it's bound up with other stuff. It's not
Speaker 1: just out there on its own. So if we want
Speaker 1: to harvest hydrogen to use as fuel, you gotta think
Speaker 1: a little outside the box. You can't just go to
Speaker 1: the hydrogen store by it. Yeah, it doesn't grow on
Speaker 1: any hydrogen trees. Now you have to you have to
Speaker 1: do something to something else generally in order to get
Speaker 1: some of it exactly, which means you've got to expend
Speaker 1: energy in order to get this fuel. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that's really important about any sort of fuel.
Speaker 1: It's not just hydrogen. We're talking about any kind of
Speaker 1: fuel where you're planning on getting energy out. If it
Speaker 1: requires you to put more energy into it to get
Speaker 1: the fuel, then you're getting as a benefit of the fuel.
Speaker 1: It's a losing proposition, right. Although there are lots of
Speaker 1: different ways to to produce hydrogen UM. You can use
Speaker 1: light to split water molecules, you can gasify biomass waste,
Speaker 1: you can even just kind of let a bunch of
Speaker 1: microbes do the work for you as part of their
Speaker 1: normal metabolism. UM, but one of the most popular ones
Speaker 1: right now anyway, what accounts for about of the hydrogen
Speaker 1: in the United States. Is something called reforming, in which
Speaker 1: carbon based fuels like natural gas typically methane, are reacted
Speaker 1: with steam at high pressures and temperatures. That produces hydrogen,
Speaker 1: a little bit of carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, that
Speaker 1: last of which is then reacted to produce more hydrogen
Speaker 1: and carbon dioxide. Um. You will note that that both
Speaker 1: of these do produce greenhouse gases, so it's a little
Speaker 1: bit less friendly than something like electron lysis, 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. Um. 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,
Speaker 1: which you know, if we were ever able to make
Speaker 1: an algae farm that was efficient enough, that would be
Speaker 1: a great way. But there are a lot of people
Speaker 1: who question whether or that that's practical. It may not
Speaker 1: ever be something that generates enough hydrogen for it to
Speaker 1: be worth the amount of effort it would take. Again
Speaker 1: that sort of energy losing proposition night. So some other
Speaker 1: things about hydrogen. It has a low ignition energy. That
Speaker 1: means you don't have to apply a lot of energy
Speaker 1: to it to get it to ignite. That makes sense,
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't take much to set it on
Speaker 1: fire essentially, is what we're talking about here. It actually
Speaker 1: requires an order of magnitude less energy to ignite hydrogen
Speaker 1: than it does to ignite gasoline. Yeah, so that means
Speaker 1: gasoline is pretty pretty flammable, pretty dar inflammable. Yeah, kids,
Speaker 1: let's not play with the stuff at home, shall we,
Speaker 1: or anywhere else for that matter. Let's treat it like
Speaker 1: serious business. But it's both a good and bad thing,
Speaker 1: right Because the hydrogen stance it's easy to ignite, means
Speaker 1: that you can easily implement that in an engine. Uh,
Speaker 1: it does it very efficiently. You don't have to spend
Speaker 1: a lot of energy to make it do what you
Speaker 1: want it to do. On the other hand, because it
Speaker 1: has such a low ignition point, it's also a challenge
Speaker 1: engineering wise, because if your engine gets hot enough, the
Speaker 1: engine itself could cause the hydrogen to ignite prematurely before
Speaker 1: it gets into the operative fits right, and then it
Speaker 1: could make everything inoperative. You would get inoperative right quick.
Speaker 1: So that's you know that there's a there's a good
Speaker 1: and bad side of this. If you can engineer your
Speaker 1: way around it, it can eventually be a benefit. Oh sure,
Speaker 1: it technically has the highest energy output by weight of
Speaker 1: any fuel um though it is the lightest elements, so
Speaker 1: that's kind of yeah. You kind of have to get
Speaker 1: a lot of it together too. So it's because it's
Speaker 1: it's not dense, you know, which is something else will
Speaker 1: chat about. So one of the reasons why we're even
Speaker 1: talking about hydrogen, one of the big ones, it's what
Speaker 1: we alluded to earlier, is the fact that the combustion
Speaker 1: is really clean, particularly if you're using hydrogen and pure
Speaker 1: oxygen as the mixture that goes into your engine, all right,
Speaker 1: because then your output is going to be just energy
Speaker 1: and water. Yep, you get energy in the form of
Speaker 1: the power that you generate and some heat because of
Speaker 1: course we don't have any perfect systems where we don't
Speaker 1: lose some energy in the form of heat. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the only other thing you get is water. You don't
Speaker 1: get anything else. And this is when I when I
Speaker 1: talk about mixtures, we'll talk about combustion in gen's a
Speaker 1: little later too. This is a typical thing where you
Speaker 1: mix together some fuel and some air to go into
Speaker 1: a combustion engine. Same sort of thing with hydrogen. You're
Speaker 1: not putting just pure hydrogen and you're mixing it with
Speaker 1: some form of air, in this case oxygen. However, that
Speaker 1: being said, most hydrogen combustion engines are not using pure
Speaker 1: oxygen to mix together to make the combustible mixture. They're
Speaker 1: using air. So air has stuff in it besides oxygen.
Speaker 1: In fact, the primary component of our atmosphere is not oxygen.
Speaker 1: It's nitrogen. So one of the byproducts you get with
Speaker 1: using a hydrogen combustion engine that uses air is that
Speaker 1: you get some nitrous oxides. Nitrogen oxides, I should say,
Speaker 1: not nitrous oxides, which would be hilarious until you suffocated,
Speaker 1: but nitrogen oxides. Uh, that's a that's a pollutant. You
Speaker 1: don't want that UM and you can also get carbon
Speaker 1: monoxide and carbon dioxide if you get some oil seeping
Speaker 1: into the combustion chambers because uh, oxygen does. Our our
Speaker 1: atmosphere doesn't have like tons of carbon in it, but
Speaker 1: oil does. So there are chances of having in a
Speaker 1: hydrogen combustion engine this kind of pollutants. You can get
Speaker 1: around that if you wanted to go with fuel cells,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about those two. So the amount of
Speaker 1: power that a 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 in injection approach, which mixes the fuel and
Speaker 1: air after the intake valve in the combustion chamber closes.
Speaker 1: Then the hydrogen based engine can theoretically produce fift more
Speaker 1: power than a gasoline engine, So you kind of have
Speaker 1: a less in one way or percent 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, Although, okay,
Speaker 1: so so this is a complicated issue and the numbers
Speaker 1: on it are always going to be rough. But when
Speaker 1: you're talking about fuel efficiency, you you need to use
Speaker 1: more gasoline in order to make an engine do the
Speaker 1: 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. Yeah, that's the big one, especially with engines.
Speaker 1: I mean, engines generate lots and lots of heat. The
Speaker 1: the ideal of a fuel cell vehicle using hydrogen, it's
Speaker 1: closer to sixty percent efficiency um for For the record,
Speaker 1: electric cars may manage somewhere between twenty five and sixty
Speaker 1: percent fuel efficiency depending on where you get the electricity
Speaker 1: to recharge that battery. Right, And and if you want
Speaker 1: to be really technical, a fuel cell vehicle is kind
Speaker 1: of a subset of electric vehicles. It's just that it's
Speaker 1: an electric vehicle that you are refueling with hydrogen rather
Speaker 1: than a closed battery system exactly. So yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: great point, and that's another thing that we have to
Speaker 1: take into consideration. Now. Typically, if if we're talking about
Speaker 1: you know, I just mentioned about having just enough air
Speaker 1: and fuel to complete combustion, and you get that that
Speaker 1: crazy near of a gasoline power engine, but you produce
Speaker 1: more more pollutants as well. Usually we're not using exactly
Speaker 1: the amount of air because we want to cut back
Speaker 1: on those pollutants. One of the big reasons we want
Speaker 1: to use hydrogen is the too cut back on pollutants.
Speaker 1: So if we're producing more pollutants by making it really efficient,
Speaker 1: then we're like, well, we just kind of traded off
Speaker 1: that was a lot of money to not do any
Speaker 1: better exactly. So what we tend to see our engines
Speaker 1: that use about twice as much air as is actually
Speaker 1: required to complete combustion. Now, this reduces pollution, but it
Speaker 1: also reduces the output of the engine. Yeah, sad trombone. Okay,
Speaker 1: so these are just tradeoffs. This is the way the
Speaker 1: real world works. We have to sit there and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's not a magic solution that is going to solve
Speaker 1: all the problems equally, we have to start making tradeoffs.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty good one because you can you
Speaker 1: can enlarge the engine size and make up for a
Speaker 1: lot of it. Right, So if you make the hydrogen
Speaker 1: based engine larger than a gasoline based engine, you can
Speaker 1: kind of make up this this loss. Now that does,
Speaker 1: of course, mean you have to redesign vehicles around a
Speaker 1: larger engine. So I mean it's you know, it's those
Speaker 1: domino effects. Right. You could also include what's called a
Speaker 1: turbo charger or supercharger, and you might wonder, hey, how
Speaker 1: did those work? We'll do another episode because it's already
Speaker 1: going to be a long one for this one, So
Speaker 1: we can't. We can't sit there and uh and jump
Speaker 1: into that and hope to make it out alive, because
Speaker 1: no will kill us. The protective barrier is only so strong. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: like we said, hydrogen not very dense. When you've got
Speaker 1: one proton and one electron, you don't expect it to
Speaker 1: be Nope, So it's uh, room temperature is a gas.
Speaker 1: Getting enough hydrogen together in one place to be useful
Speaker 1: as a fuel takes a lot of work, and some
Speaker 1: of the easiest ways of storing it, like in extremely
Speaker 1: cold liquid form, aren't really practical for toting around in
Speaker 1: a consumer motor vehicle that might not want to incorporate
Speaker 1: a complex cooling system due to you know, cost and
Speaker 1: weight and space issues. So usually we end up having
Speaker 1: to figure out a way of pressurizing it under hence
Speaker 1: amounts of pressure. Now that of course creates another safety issue.
Speaker 1: Anytime you have a compressed gas, it's under a lot
Speaker 1: of pressure. If you rupture that containment unit in some way, yeah,
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 combustion 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 where where you
Speaker 1: you your car, your are sways a bed and then explodes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if Michael Bay made cars, no one would ever
Speaker 1: get in them. But fortunately, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: he has not made one. Uh So, uh yeah, we've
Speaker 1: we've been making use of this hydrogen for a long time.
Speaker 1: And in fact, we, like Lauren said, we were kind
Speaker 1: of playing with this stuff before we even had any
Speaker 1: idea of what it was. We didn't really know about
Speaker 1: elements or even gases. So we're gonna take you on
Speaker 1: a historical journey and along this journey will be explaining
Speaker 1: how some of this stuff works, because we figured we'd
Speaker 1: kind of incorporate both the history and the technical stuff
Speaker 1: all together. It's an experiment. Now before we jump into
Speaker 1: the way Back Machine, because I know all you guys
Speaker 1: have been missing it, Laurence looking at me terrified. Yeah, Lauren,
Speaker 1: that's what that big thing is in the corner that
Speaker 1: we haven't been using. It's all dusty and stuff. Turns
Speaker 1: out it wasn't in Mongolia. It was just in a
Speaker 1: supply closet. So we're gonna get in that in a second.
Speaker 1: But before we do that, let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Okay, so we're back and we're
Speaker 1: ready to get into the way Back Machine, which I
Speaker 1: know is going to sound absolutely amazing. I can't believe
Speaker 1: all the bells and whistles that indicate to you that
Speaker 1: we've actually traveled back in time, because in truth, it's silent.
Speaker 1: But we have to give you some you know, way
Speaker 1: of knowing that that's what's happened. Oh yeah, otherwise it's
Speaker 1: not it's not fun radio trauma exactly. So let's let's
Speaker 1: just go ahead and get in. Now. Over here, we've
Speaker 1: got the dial, which I'm going to set back to
Speaker 1: uh early seventeenth century. You know, I don't know how
Speaker 1: it knows where I wanted to go. It just does.
Speaker 1: But when is really tricky. All right, let's just hit
Speaker 1: the button. Here, here we are. It's a glorious and
Speaker 1: smelly So I want to introduce you to Johann Baptista
Speaker 1: van Helmont, who is the first person to describe hydrogen
Speaker 1: as a gas, and only that, he's the first person
Speaker 1: to come up with the word gas to describe aubstances
Speaker 1: that have the qualities of a gas. He was thinking
Speaker 1: of stuff that is heavier than air or misty, or
Speaker 1: he was just trying to come up with like a
Speaker 1: collective noun to call this stuff. He proposed gas, and
Speaker 1: it stuck. So he goes on to make some more
Speaker 1: observations which in a few decades get picked up by
Speaker 1: another person, a philosopher, a natural philosopher, and we'll chat
Speaker 1: about him. His name is Robert Boyle. So between Robert
Speaker 1: Boyle and Johan we have in six fifty stead or
Speaker 1: Turque with the man may yearn which I know I've
Speaker 1: absolutely butchered based Swiss, so so I'm sure he's fine.
Speaker 1: With it. Yeah, they the Swiss have a beautiful way
Speaker 1: with words that escapes the physical contortions my mouth can
Speaker 1: go through. So uh. But he produced hydrogen and he
Speaker 1: 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 come
Speaker 1: find it with other stuff, usually that that reaction you
Speaker 1: get by introducing an element into acid will release the
Speaker 1: hydrogen exactly. Now seventy one we get to that Irish
Speaker 1: philosopher I had mentioned, Robert Boyle. Now he experimented with
Speaker 1: producing hydrogen as well, and he was of the New
Speaker 1: Philosophy movement. This was a really interesting movement. It combined
Speaker 1: observations and experimentation with logical thinking to understand the world
Speaker 1: around him. So this is sort of a proto scientist movement.
Speaker 1: It's before we really had the formal sciences we This
Speaker 1: is when alchemy was starting to transform into chemistry. Right.
Speaker 1: We had people who had made observations and calculations on
Speaker 1: things like physics, but it's now starting to actually take
Speaker 1: form into the sciences as we know them today. So
Speaker 1: he produced hydrogen by combining iron and various acids, and uh,
Speaker 1: that's how he started to take a look at this
Speaker 1: hydrogen gas. And he was he was pretty pretty intelligent.
Speaker 1: He noticed that gass volume varies inversely with pressure, hence
Speaker 1: Boil's law. Yeah, we named it after after him. He
Speaker 1: also believed in alchemy and transmutation, so he didn't get
Speaker 1: everything right. Lots of people today still believe in alchemy
Speaker 1: and transmutation, so what we'll 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
Speaker 1: wet and if they get cold, it gets hard. That's
Speaker 1: that was pretty much it. If he gets really hot,
Speaker 1: it gets cloudy. That's, you know, just that's where we
Speaker 1: were with science until Cavendish came along. I might be
Speaker 1: exaggerating a little, but he absolutely loved learning for learning sake.
Speaker 1: He wasn't actually a scientist per se, though, was 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 super introvert, super introvert, and
Speaker 1: he didn't really publish most of his work. He published
Speaker 1: some of it, but not all of it, because he
Speaker 1: wasn't really interested in that. He know, he just wanted
Speaker 1: to know how the world works. He was just fascinated
Speaker 1: with learning. He wasn't not necessarily as fascinated with teaching,
Speaker 1: but he was definitely fascinated with learning. I want someone
Speaker 1: to make a awkward action here, a movie about this guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that we'd 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 flight
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 bulliancy 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 Isazac de Rivaz, a Swiss inventor.
Speaker 1: He built the de Revase 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 yeah, we've talked a lot about how electric cars
Speaker 1: are older than you think, So are hydrogen combustion engine cars.
Speaker 1: That's kind of cool. Then in eighteen twenty we have
Speaker 1: the Reverend W. Cecil who writes a paper and I
Speaker 1: love this title. Here we go on the application of
Speaker 1: hydrogen gas to produce a moving power and machinery, with
Speaker 1: a description of an engine which is moved by pressure
Speaker 1: of the atmosphere upon a vacuum caused by explosions of
Speaker 1: hydrogen gas and atmospheric air. I think it's a sink
Speaker 1: pretty much. You've read the whole article just by the title.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he he proposed an engine using hydrogen as
Speaker 1: the combustible material. But it's a different style of combustion
Speaker 1: engine than what we see today. So his design involved
Speaker 1: having a chamber that you would fill with hydrogen plus
Speaker 1: regular old air, and it would be connected to a
Speaker 1: valve so that you could insert this stuff but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't escape back out. Uh. And then the you would
Speaker 1: put a flame in there, and then you have the
Speaker 1: valve switched so it would allow it to escape again. Right,
Speaker 1: you put the flame in, This causes the gas to
Speaker 1: expand rapidly. Uh. And normally in our combustion engines we
Speaker 1: used as a pushing force, but at this case, the
Speaker 1: the piston in this chamber is all the way out already,
Speaker 1: so it can't be pushed further out, so he's not
Speaker 1: using as a pushing force. Instead. Once that guest starts
Speaker 1: to cool and is released, it starts to shrink down.
Speaker 1: It's not and he's not letting more air in there
Speaker 1: to replace it, and the valve is closed. So it's
Speaker 1: pulling the piston back in in that vacuum that's created
Speaker 1: in the chamber exactly. It's a partial vacuum and imperfect vacuum,
Speaker 1: and that creates an area of low pressure. That low
Speaker 1: pressure pulls on the piston, which then moves to the
Speaker 1: other end of the combustion chamber. So you're using this
Speaker 1: vacuum engine. Now it worked, but uh, it's not really practical.
Speaker 1: So this particular design wasn't widely implemented, but it does
Speaker 1: in fact work. The principles are all sound. So then
Speaker 1: you had a lot more experimentation following with hydrogen, which
Speaker 1: included everything from inventors to chemists to physicists and regular
Speaker 1: old crazy people, and all of this is leading up
Speaker 1: to some pretty cool stuff, including the first fuel cell.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing, guys, there's a lot more to
Speaker 1: cover here. We've got fuel cells to talk about, we
Speaker 1: have other combustion engine to talk about. We've got exactly
Speaker 1: how hydrogen is going to be used today, how it's
Speaker 1: how it's being used right now, and how it will
Speaker 1: be used in the future. And in fact, it's so
Speaker 1: much stuff we've decided we're gonna split this sucker up,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do a second episode so we can really
Speaker 1: do this justice and dig in here. So, guys, since
Speaker 1: we're splitting this up, it's now time for me to
Speaker 1: ask you that special question. Hey, do you have something
Speaker 1: he wants to talk about? Let us know, because if
Speaker 1: you don't, we're just gonna keep talking about whatever we
Speaker 1: want to talk about, which may or may not be
Speaker 1: what you want to hear. So let us know by
Speaker 1: sending us an email. A lot of you have responded
Speaker 1: already when we asked if you wanted to hear more
Speaker 1: about how to truly surf the web as anonymously and
Speaker 1: as secure as you possibly can. We've heard you, We've
Speaker 1: added it to our list, and we're going to be
Speaker 1: doing that episode. But if you have another idea, send
Speaker 1: it in let us know email addresses, tech stuff at
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Speaker 1: Really Zin for more on this and thousands of other
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