Sunday Times Innovation 1 Dec. 96 (http://www.sunday-times.co.uk)

End  of road for car that ran on Water

American court finds inventor of water-powered car is guilty of fraud.
Report by Tony Edwards

It appears to be the end of the road for maverick inventor Stanley Meyer and
his water-powered car after a recent American court verdict.

The car was a wonderful, if unlikely, dream while it lasted, offering a
pollution-free future powered by a limitless source of energy. But the
dream was shattered when Meyer was found guilty of fraud after his Water
Fuel Cell was tested before an Ohio judge.
It is rare for an inventor to be prosecuted for an invention that does not
work, but Meyer's problem was that he had been selling "dealerships",
offering investors the "right to do business'' in Water Fuel Cell tech-
nology in anticipation of the day when water would power anything From
domestic boilers to cars and aircraft.
 But recently two suspicious investors could not wait for that day to dawn
and sued Meyer to get their money back.
Meyer defended, maintaining his long-held claim that the Water Fuel Cell was a truly
revolutionary invention that could split water into its two constituent
gases of hydrogen and oxygen far more efficiently than conventional
electrolysis.  The secret, he said, was to "resonate" electricity at a very
high voltage through water and so "fracture" the hydrogen/oxygen molecular
bond. This, he claimed, opened the way for a car which would "run on wat-
er", powered simply by a car battery. The car would even run for ever since
the energy needed to continue the "fracturing" was so low that the bat-
tery could be recharged: from the engine's dynamo.

Meyer claimed to have adapted a 1.6-litre Volkswagen Dune Buggy to run on
water. He replaced the sparkplugs with "injectors" which, he said, sprayed
water as a fine mist in a "resonant cavity" where it was bombarded by a
succession of high-voltage electrical pulses. He claimed this instantly
converted the water into a mixture of hydrogen  and oxygen that could be
combusted in the cylinders, driving the pistons just as in an ordinary
petrol engine.
One of the experts due toexamine the car was Michael  Laughton, professor
of electrical engineering at Queen  Mary and Westfield University, London,
but he was not allowed to see it. "Although Meyer had  known about our
visit weeks in advance, when we arrived he made some lame excuse about why
the car wasn't working, so it was impossible to evaluate  it," said
Laughton.
However, the one thing Meyer had built that appeared to work was his Water
Fuel Cell, and it was this device that the Ohio judge called as evidence in
the recent lawsuit.
The cell had been the centrepiece of Meyer's sales pitches. It was a
transparent cylinder of water inside which  was a core of stainless steel
electrodes. When plugged into an electrical supply,the cell  bubbled away
merrily, producing apparently copious amounts  of gas that Meyer ignited  
through a welding torch.To the layman it was an  impressive performance and
hundreds of small investors signed up, but it did not impress three expert
witnesses in court.
They decided that there was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and
that it was  simply  using conventional electrolysis.
Meyer was found guilty of "gross and egregious fraud" and ordered to repay
the investors their $25,000 (£15,000).

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