Water - the Perfect Fuel

As a freshman in high school, I failed chemistry class due to an extreme disinterest in the entire subject. I do recall a demonstration in which the teacher hooked a large one and a half volt battery to a glass and wire electrolyzer that transformed water into separated hydrogen and oxygen. I would later learn that commercial hydrogen and oxygen producers also used this method in an inefficient manner that requires more energy than the fuel produced can generate through combustion.

In the late eighties I would learn that a boy genius in California learned to make hydrogen from water efficiently with a twelve volt battery and standard auto electrical system, during the 1970s. Around 1990, my machinist neighbor built a hydrogen generator that did not work due to defects in the plans the boy genius had drawn up in prison when he was no longer a boy.

My neighbor was not interested in correcting the defect when it was discovered and I was only a bit disappointed. My father was a hobby style inventor and he gave me a good idea for a cheaper and much more effective 12 volt hydrogen generator. I never got around to building it and decided there was no point in separating the oxygen and the hydrogen after splitting the water.

Because the hydrogen and oxygen have opposite electrical charges, they readily recombine as a compound I call hydrox. The man who discovered this gas and fooled with it to make underwater welders and cutting torches, named the gas after himself, so hydrox is also known as Brown