Project TACO and the Treaty of Taco Bell

In the first week of October 1992 three engineers from Perkins Technology Ltd flew to Ohio with Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin to meet Stanley Meyer, and came away with an agreement. Perkins gave the programme a project name, TACO. The photographs taken on the last day, printed in the back of Meyer's 1995 test report, call it something else: the Treaty of Taco Bell.

This page gathers what the archive holds about it. It is a short record — three documents — and this page says nothing they do not.

What the archive holds

• Griffin's account of the visit, dated 13 October 1992 and initialled A.T.F.G.G., with its annexes: the briefing index, the three-phase programme, and the photographs. Eleven pages, reproduced in the 1995 WFC International Independent Test-Evaluation Report as pages 102 to 112.
• Perkins Technology's meeting with Griffin on 28 February 1993, two pages weighing whether to go ahead on the contract Meyer had proposed: pages 96 and 97 of the same report.
• Griffin's own lecture to the Southampton Institute at Warsash in September 1993, the extract the old site called the Griffin Report: Water As Fuel, in three pages.

The visit, 6 to 8 October 1992

Perkins sent its managing director, T. W. E. Downes, its engineering development manager, G. Purkins, and a project leader and chemist, Dr M. Graham. Griffin had been talking to Perkins since at least October 1991, when his index records a meeting with Downes and Purkins, and had briefed them formally on 2 September 1992 at the Institute of Directors about a demonstration on a Perkins Type 6.3544M engine. The papers behind that briefing run back to a fax he sent Meyer on 29 June 1990.

Meyer met them at Columbus airport on the evening of Tuesday 6 October. On the Wednesday, in his laboratory in Grove City, he showed a new film of the dune buggy, presented the state of the technology, and handed Purkins and Griffin his latest Technical Brief. Griffin lists what it contained, and that list is the only place the archive learns that some of these memos exist:

WFC 420. Hydrogen Fracturing Process — 421. Quenching Circuit Technology — 422DA. Hydrogen Gas Management System — 423DA. Water Fuel Injection System — 424. Atomic Energy Balance of Water — 425DA. Dynamic Voltage Stimulation.

The discussion that followed ended in Perkins deciding, in Griffin's words, "fully to support SM and his WFC technology, subject to 'proof of concept' and costing." Downes and Graham flew home that afternoon; Purkins and Griffin stayed to work out the detail.

On Thursday 8 October Meyer gave a bench demonstration of water dissociated by pulsed voltage. Griffin's account records dissociation beginning at about 10 volts and increasing with it, a current never above a milliamp, the vessel and its pipework at room temperature throughout, and the released gas lit with a match melting stainless steel wire. The programmes for the first two phases were then agreed.

Project TACO

The name was Perkins's. Griffin sets out three phases, and Annex B lays them out as a work list.

Phase 1: proof of concept at Peterborough. Perkins would procure a 1,600 cc Volkswagen engine identical to the dune buggy's, rig and instrument it on a test bed, and Meyer would fit a duplicate conversion kit to it there. Perkins would run the evaluation and pass every test result to Meyer. Meyer still had to complete the specification of a control chip, which Sagantec in Holland was developing and expected to take about two months more.

Phase 2: the Brunel. Perkins would procure a Type 6.3544M marine diesel, the engine then fitted to the Brunel, a Thames ferry, and the two parties would design a minimum-change retrofit kit for it. Once it ran on the test bed it would go into the Brunel itself, by conversion or by substitution, "for as long as required for public demonstration." The photograph captions are blunter about the purpose: to carry Griffin up the Thames past Parliament while it was in session. The owner of the Brunel, C. Livett of Livett Launches, had yet to be asked; Griffin took that on.

Phase 3: markets. Perkins would identify programmes in the reciprocating-engine field, trucks, cars and marine, and consider what a new engine designed around the technology would mean. Griffin undertook to pursue gas turbines and power generation separately.

Some of the smaller points Griffin minuted are as telling as the phases. Meyer wanted to disperse his work outside the United States because he felt its concentration in one man and one laboratory made it vulnerable, and had, he said, recently been cleared to demonstrate any non-classified aspect abroad. He put a production conversion kit at about $1,500 for a car and $3,500 for a truck. Six Voltage Intensifier Circuit bobbins Griffin had had made in Britain at Meyer's request had arrived and were of the necessary quality. And Meyer referred to an earlier conversation with Griffin about hyperdrive, "a radically advanced development of WFC technology and of particular application to ships," on which he would send more; that is the memo the archive knows as WFC 455, and has never seen.

The Treaty of Taco Bell

Annex C is the photographs, taken on 7 and 8 October. They survive only as photocopies of photocopies, and in the test report's pages they are dark enough that the faces are mostly gone. The captions are legible, and the captions are where the name is written.

• Page 109: Purkins, Downes and Graham at the dune buggy as Meyer shows them the water fuel injectors, and watching the injection system being retrofitted to it.
• Page 110: the four of them discussing how the system would go onto the 6.3544M diesel, and Charles Holbrook melting stainless wire with the gas from a tubular-array cell.
• Page 111: Griffin holding a Voltage Intensifier core assembly in the Grove City laboratory, and Purkins with Meyer "after negotiating 'The Treaty of Taco Bell'."
• Page 112: Griffin, "participant at the Treaty of Taco Bell," and Meyer, "negotiator" at it.

Whoever wrote the captions was enjoying the joke, and the photographs do not say where the meal was. Whether the agreement was reached over a table at a Taco Bell in Grove City, or only named for one, is not something the record settles.

What followed

By February 1993 Meyer had proposed a contract, and on the 28th Perkins met Griffin to decide whether to proceed. The note of that meeting sets the terms against the case for going on. The contract called for a deposit of $125,000, a total of $147,374 for Phase 1 and part of Phase 2, and a "no redress" clause should the technology fail. Against it stood the fact, which the note states plainly, that on none of the three occasions British experts had visited Ohio, October 1990, August 1992 and October 1992, had they seen a running internal-combustion engine fuelled by water.

In favour, the note lists the bench demonstrations, Meyer's willingness to stake a public demonstration in Britain, contracts it understood other companies to have signed, Sagantec's funding of the chip, and a Sussex University breadboard said to have produced hydrogen from Meyer's circuitry. The Volkswagen for Phase 1 had already been acquired at no cost to Perkins. The London demonstration was, "according to the TACO agreement," due in July 1993, and the Duke of Kent had agreed to open it.

Griffin was still expecting it in September 1993. His Warsash lecture describes the 1993 dune buggy as "the first demonstration of a complete system, manufactured to a pre-production standard," with a date "yet to be settled, but expected to be within the next 2 months in Ohio."

The record in this archive stops there. Nothing held here says whether the Peterborough tests were run, whether the Brunel was ever converted, or what became of the contract. If you hold anything that does, it belongs beside these pages.

The people

• Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin, who had been corresponding with Meyer since 1990, to whom Meyer delegated the marine application of the technology, and who initialled the account of the visit.
• T. W. E. Downes, managing director of Perkins Technology Ltd.
• G. Purkins, its engineering development manager, who stayed on to work out the detail and is the other party in the treaty photograph.
• Dr M. Graham, chemist and project leader.
• Charles Holbrook, photographed at the bench melting wire.
• C. Livett of Livett Launches, owner of the Brunel.