Stephen Meyer Interview Part 2 (4-1-2007)

Stephen Meyer Interview Part 2 (4-1-2007)

JR = James Robey
SM = Stephen Meyer
LJ = Larry Jarboe, a caller from St. Mary's County, Maryland, who joins at 49 minutes

Transcribed from the recording by machine (OpenAI Whisper, turbo model), with the speakers told apart by machine (pyannote speaker diarisation) and the result read through for obvious faults, but not checked word by word against the audio. Time marks in italics are minutes into the recording. Part 1 is the transcript the old site carried; parts 2 to 6 were transcribed for this archive in September 2026 from the MP3s the old site linked.

JR: (0:00) Hello, and welcome to another webcast from the Kentucky Water Fuel Museum. The date is April 1st, but this is not April Fool's Day, because we are here to combat such foolishness with accurate knowledge about alternative energy technology. So with us for the second time is the renowned inventor and industrial troubleshooter Stephen Meyer. Stephen, are you there?

SM: I'm here. Thank you.

JR: Great. Is that an accurate description of your job title? Are you sort of a troubleshooter?

SM: You know, it's interesting that you point that out, because I've always felt, at least in my professional position and career, that I like to solve problems. I'm a problem solver, and I realized that in my young engineering days out of school, I had the attitude, I didn't care about money, and just tell me what problem you needed to get solved, and I'll go do it. And I do that today, you know.

JR: And the money should follow. If you're helping people solve problems that are costing them a great deal of money, because they are, usually these problems have to do with efficiency of systems, don't they?

SM: They do. They do. If you've got a problem, the most important thing to do is to find that problem. And so some of the techniques are really important. Like, for example, what I do is I just take a sheet of paper, and I crease it in half vertically, and then I write on the left side of it. I always write down what I know. And you can't start with what you don't know, but you can start with what you know. And after you start writing that down, and then pretty soon you start to realize what you don't know. And that technique will take you into areas where you can solve your problem.

JR: And, you know, I think that's a major part of the reason why there aren't more solutions to the world's energy problems forthcoming from the general population, because that left side of the paper is blank. We've been kept in the dark either through our own complacency or through, you know, the lack of education. And many people have asked, why aren't the school systems, both in the public school systems and then the higher education, why aren't they teaching the kind of things that we've been discussing on this program and that you pretty much have to do a web search knowing what you're looking for to find, you know? Why isn't academia teaching these kinds of subjects?

SM: Well, the way I see it is that I took a survey when I was in 1973. I graduated out of college, and I had been in academia for a long time as a student. And what is happening is in 1973 I took a survey, and I realized that my son would have to read 18 books for every book that I read because of the exponential rate at which knowledge is exploding. Now, to extrapolate that out to today, a student would have to probably read, I'm just going to take a shot in the dark, probably about 100 or so books for every book that I read. So the information, the more people that are on the planet, the more people that are becoming educated are contributing to this. And what's happening in the schools is that they can only talk about snippets of things rather than really getting into those things.

So what happens is that kids go through kindergarten, and they mature, and they have to, the education system knows how and when and what to teach these kids. But by the time they get through high school, the kids say, well, gee, I'm set for life. But in reality, they're just getting started. You know, all they've really done is told them where the library is, where to get the information. And now the kids have to say, well, what am I going to do? And then get in there and research it. Go to college, and then they get their BS, and they get their master's degree, and now they get their PhD degree, and then beyond that they get their fellowships. And so that's when they mature and decide what subject they want to really get into, you know. So education right now is it's just snippets.

And the kids don't realize that they're getting all of this information and just a little bit of a picture, if you will, of what it is. But they've got to make a decision to pick something out and just dig into it. And then they become experts.

JR: Well, speaking of kids and their development, in order for them to become inventors, such as you and your brother were, you had told me a year ago that you and your brother were very much hands-on type tinkerers as children. In other words, you built, I guess your family was of limited resources, and so you built a lot of your own toys and whatnot?

SM: (5:14) We did. It was kind of extraordinary. My dad was a very gentle man, and he fostered a lot of our creativity because he could have slapped our hands and said, don't do this. But he was always showing us what we can do. So there was a time when Stan and I were doing work during the summer, and my dad would say, come on, boys, it's after breakfast, go out, and you've got to do something. And we'd have to either go pick fruit off the trees or rake the yard or cut the grass. So every day he would tell us, he'd say, come on, boys, it's not your birthday. Get out there and do some work. So our birthday came up on August 24th, and Stan and I decided that when we went to bed that night, we were not going to do anything on our birthday. So we got up in the morning, and Dad came in and said, come on, boys, I want you to go out and paint the swing on the front porch.

And we said, no, we're not going to do that. Mom came in and said, come on, boys, have your breakfast and go out on the front porch and paint the swings. And we said, no, we're not going to do that. And finally, they got kind of upset with us. So we protested, and we had our breakfast. And so Stan and I went back and got our paint cans and paintbrushes and walked around the side of the house to the front of the house and coming up the steps to paint the swing. And we were just absolutely livid about having to work on our birthday. And lo and behold, here was these brand-new Swin bicycles, chrome fenders and handlebars, just absolutely gorgeous bicycles. And if I had been my parents at that time, I would have said, no way, you kids aren't getting any bicycles. But Dad said, okay, ride your bicycles down the end of the street and bring them back. So we did that.

And then when we brought them back, he says, okay, tear it all apart. And we were shocked. What do you mean tear it apart? Well, no, tear it all apart. He says, and every down, every last bolt and nut and so forth. And then he showed us how to put it all back together. And then when he got it all done, he says, now, boys, he says, let this be a lesson to you. He says, you take care of those bicycles now. I know you can do it. That's just the way he was. And so we did. We built our own stuff, and then we learned how to appreciate things, too.

JR: Yeah. Well, that's an important lesson in starting on a path of being a mechanic. And you told me that you had also built other types of toys or model airplanes and so on.

SM: We did. And Stan and I really went through, we went through the gamut of crystal radios. It was kind of interesting, too, because when we were kids, it was coming out of the war years, and everything was vacuum tube. And I always thought it was kind of interesting because we would wind coils around blocks of wood and then put a, get a crystal. And I had these germanium crystals at the time, and they were point contact type devices. And we'd go down and get earphones and put them on. And then I would adjust that catwhisker on that germanium rock. It just looked like a rock. And then you could hear the sound. And I thought, boy, that is kind of neat. And I was puzzled over the big vacuum tube radios that we had, that this little catwhisker type device would work and pick up the sound. And that was a forerunner of the transistor technology.

JR: Isn't that something?

SM: Yeah.

JR: Now, going on to the present, I mean, we were talking about a span of many, many years. But I would say that the early interest that young people have in such things contributes to their confidence in being able to build devices as they get older. And I think that's missing in the young generation of today.

SM: Well, I don't know. You know, I look at some of these kids and some of these toys, and I like to pick them up and see what they're doing. And some of these new toys are just fabulous. I look at the future of the way the toys are built and what they are. And when I see these robots and transformer units and things, that's what the future is. You know that when we were kids, and this is true today, when we read comics books and we had funny paper comics, and do you know that 80% of all those comic strips have come true? I mean, I used to read about Dick Tracy wristwatch and video films and Captain Video ray guns and power packs and Captain Marvel and those things. All of those things basically have come true. And what I think has happened is that the kids read those comic books, and they don't have any education. They don't have that resistance to it.

They just look at it and say, boy, it would be kind of neat. And then some way, randomly, as they grow up and get older and get educated, then somehow those devices come about. So they're all here. We've got lasers and we've got jet power packs and things of that nature, and it's just incredible.

JR: (10:46) It is quite amazing, isn't it?

SM: Yeah.

JR: Well, it would seem that science fiction can actually be a more accurate predictor of technology than the, you know, mainstream media.

SM: Well, I think so. Well, I mean, look at Captain Kurt and, you know, Beame Me Up Scotty and the transporters and the tricorders. All of that will be here. There was a, when I was a kid, there was a magazine. I think it was Life magazine. And they came out with all of these artist concepts of spacemen. And they had vehicles in space. They had spacemen with suits. And it was just incredible. And I took that magazine and I cut it all up and pasted everything on my wall in my bedroom. And I said, I want to be one of these things, whatever it is, like an astronaut. And it was a goal of mine. And, unfortunately, I had a next-door neighbor that had worked for the post office. And I was talking to him one day about becoming an astronaut. And he said, well, son, he says, you'll never get to the moon in your lifetime. And so I went up and took them all down and said, why am I wasting my time?

And, of course, there it is today. They went to the moon. Armstrong went to the moon.

JR: Isn't that funny?

SM: And he was approximately my age when he did it. So, you know, don't believe the guy next door.

JR: Yeah, well, no doubt that there is a lot of discouragement that most successful inventors will repeat what you just said. Don't believe such people. I know Henry Ford's, some of his quotes are quite popular along that line. And we would certainly say that's true about running vehicles on water fuel, which is the main thrust of this program. Sure. I've had plenty of people tell me that it's a fantasy, that it violates the laws of the universe.

SM: My goodness.

JR: To overcome the bonds, it takes more energy than what you get out of the gases that result.

SM: E-gabs. Well, maybe I can shed some sight on it tonight. I can start looking at the things we've been doing. And, you know, one of the things that really pops out from your show when you started years ago with your museum and things, you never really have anything that works. You know, that's been the big problem, I think.

JR: Yeah, and I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing that I didn't have any working devices there. In fact, somebody even warned me, I think it was you, not to have a working device there, which I took as being good advice, because a messenger of a technology is in a different class than someone who's actually parading around a working device saying, here it is. Oh, that's true. I agree with that. No one had ever done this before. There had never been a museum that told the history of water fuel technology. I think maybe the Tesla Museum at one time that existed in Colorado may have had something about it. But mine was the first museum to ever say, these are the facts about this technology. It goes back all the way to the first vehicle that had an internal combustion engine. And why is it the Henry Ford Museum doesn't admit this, you know?

Why is it Switzerland wasn't celebrating the 200th anniversary of the internal combustion engine automobile in 2005? Instead, I was. There's nothing on the Internet from Switzerland celebrating their native son's invention of the internal combustion engine automobile that ran on hydrogen.

SM: Yeah, it's a shame. But what happens, I think, a lot of times is that the technology, you get a lot of different things that appear along the way, and then people pick and choose the ones they kind of like and the ones that work. You know, like my dad, for example, and he was born in 1910, and my dad, his high tech was the automobile. And when I was 15 years old, my dad said, Steve, how much money do you have? And I said, well, I've got a little bit of money, Dad. I've been carrying papers and so forth. And he says, well, come on. We're going to go down and buy you a car. Well, 15. Boy, that was pretty exciting. So he liked, for some reason, he liked the Chevrolet two-door sports coupe. And it was a very heavy car. It was a very heavy gauge deal and so forth. But that's what he liked. And we went down, we bought one, and we brought it home and put it in the garage.

And then Dad says, okay, son, tear it apart.

JR: That's great.

SM: You've got one year to get it done and get it fixed and get it repaired because if it was 16, you could only drive when you were 16. So I did that. We tore that car all the way down to every bolt. And everything that was rotating and moving, we replaced, repaired, or refurbished. And I remember placing all the parts of that engine on a – we had built a table and put the parts of the engine on the table. And as we tore them apart, it looked like 300 parts or whatever they were. But to me, that was like, Dad, we're never going to get this thing all back together. I said, this is incredible. And Dad said, no, come on. So he showed me how to overhaul that engine in that car. And so by 16, we had it all back together and even painted it. It was just cream puff when we were done.

Well, when we put the engine back in there and Dad was getting the engine ready to start and run, he asked me, he says, Steve, he said, now what I want you to do is when you go in there, I want you to step on the starter and I want you to look at the fan blade of this motor. And you just tell me how many revolutions it makes before the motor starts. And I said, well, okay, Dad. And they had a floor starter where you just push on the floor. There's a button you push on it. It would engage the starter and that motor started turning over. And that blade never moved more than a quarter of its rotation. That engine was running. And I got out of the car and I couldn't hear the car run. I said, Dad, is the car running? And I said, there's no way this car could run like that. And he said, oh, yeah.

And so he put a glass of fuel, he had a glass and put some fuel in it, put it on top of the carburetor. And he said, now look at that, son. He says, you see those ripples in that? And I said, yeah. He said, now watch this. And then he would tune it up. And he tuned that car up where those ripples would disappear or diminish. When he was all said and done, that car ran beautiful. And he told me, I said, Dad, I said, Dad, it's like running like a watch. And he said, son, he says, in my day, the cars were very unreliable, absolutely unreliable. They had the small tire, balloon tires and so forth. And they rattled and broke down. And he says, in our day, what we did was did everything we could to make them run good and quiet. And the point of that story was that my dad asked me to give my twin brother, Stan, my car.

And I was hesitant to do so, but finally drove it around the block one time and came in and gave him the keys and said, there you are. And then my dad promised me to buy me another car. And it was summertime, and I was 16, and I wanted to drive a car. And he was a little slow in getting that. So I went down and bought a Ford, a 49 Ford flathead, a V8 flathead Ford. And I was kind of nervous bringing it home, but I did. And then finally my dad looked at it and said, well, sonny, he says, I see you got a Ford. And I said, yeah, I did. He says, well, I'm never going to drive it. He said, don't ever ask me to ride in it. And I goes, whoa, sorry, Dad. Okay. And then I found out the story that he really blamed the recession on Ford. Ford had started producing cars, and then he was paying outlandish salaries to his people so he could buy the cars and keep the plan going.

And my dad blamed him for that. So I guess that's why he was a Chevy man.

JR: (19:08) Interesting.

SM: But the case in point there is that my dad, when he showed me about that engine, we got all done. And I asked Dad, I said, Dad, what's the energy driving a car? And he said, well, sonny, it's the gasoline, and you set up the carburetor for a 15 to 1 structure metric ratio and so forth and so forth. And then when he got done, I'd ask him again. I said, Dad, where's the energy coming from that drives his car? I mean, how does it really work? And he said, well, he uses a spark plug and it fires and does this. Well, I soon realized that he was telling me the best way. He knew how this car runs, how the fuel runs. But nobody at the time could really answer my question. Even through high school when I went to chemistry class and things, I would ask him, where was the energy coming from? And I started to get little snippets from people of what they thought was happening in the cars.

So that's where I got my interest on why and how cars run, where the energy is coming from.

JR: Okay, let's get back to that matter of the conventional wisdom dictating that you cannot improve upon the efficiency of the decomposition reaction, I guess you'd call it. There's the consensus on the part of... In what way?

SM: In what mode? What way? Well, tell me how you're looking at it.

JR: Well, in other words, they're saying that, yeah, you can do anything you want to try to do. And, in fact, the head of the American Hydrogen Association, Warren McAllister, told me this. He said...

SM: McAllister? I don't see this.

JR: Yeah, he's in Arizona. And he said, I'm willing to look at anything you come up with. Anything anyone comes up with, I'm willing to look at it. But I have never seen, and I tell my students, and I've challenged them. He says, I've never seen anyone ever produce hydrogen and oxygen from water with an efficiency greater than, I guess, 100%. That's what he was saying.

SM: Oh, well, that's a safe thing to say. You know, I mean, that's true. So, when you look at 100%, but then you have to go back and, well, what is your, what are you gauging? What is your 100% level? Well, and when developing technology, and you're looking at the, yeah, how can I explain? Okay. The way I look at these things is not as a component. I have to look at it as a complete system. And so, what I've been doing is going through looking at all of the components and the whole rather than the parts. And then I start to understand what the parts are, and then I try to understand what kind of improvements that might, could be made and might be made and things of that nature. So, you know, and that's what Stan did. And we started off, he started off looking back on, back in 73 and 74. You know, Hubert's Peak was a very interesting, it's a very interesting book.

If you get a chance, you should read it, because Hubert was a, he was a professor and he was studying things about how many oil fields were being drilled and then how many there were and how much fuel we were using and the rate of it and so forth. And he realized that the United States was running into a problem because as the cars became more and more popular, it's not that the American people are addicted to oil, it's the fact that the American people love their cars. And it's, and it's, and it's the freedom of the cars that, that excited the young people and the old people in the United States. But Hubert was doing some calculations and he set up an algorithm and he plotted his bell-shaped curve and he noted that, wow, man, we're going to have a problem.

And so, in my graduating class from college, it was kind of interesting because we went down to the Coliseum and our speaker was from Ashland Oil. He was the president of Ashland Oil at the time. And during his delivery of the commencement, he said that what's coming up in the next couple of years is a real problem. And being brand-new students, we could care less. All we want to do is throw our hats in the air and get the heck out of there. But later on, as I started thinking about what he was saying, he was trying to tell us that the oil embargo and that the United States is running out of oil. So the oil embargo occurred. The people had a knee-jerk reaction and saw what the problems were. And then a lot of people, a lot of people said, what can we do? What can we do? So they took off and tried to do some things.

And then what they did was the United States made a decision to buy oil out of the country. And they did. And they went over to Saudi Arabia. And in Saudi Arabia, they found a lot of oil. It was American engineers that found the oil over in Saudi Arabia. They wanted water, and they kept coming back with oil. So then they realized that, okay, the United States and the other countries of the world could get this flow of oil. And so they started shipping it to the United States. And, of course, we bought the product, and we're driving the cars. Well, last November, there was another scientist that was doing the same thing as Hubert's Peak. And he said, whoa, last year in October and November, he concluded the same conclusion that the world is running out of oil. And now we're going sliding down the hill. The American people are still buying the products and the cars because they need to.

I mean, you can't. How do you get to work and so forth without your vehicle? And the problem is, too, is that if you're running out of oil, we can't get the oil to the United States as fast as we used to. In other words, if you look at the number of boats and the volume of oil that they're bringing across the Atlantic and to the United States and around the world, they can't bring them in fast enough to keep up with our consumption. So we're back in the same situation right now that people are starting to look at it and say, well, now what can we do? Plus, we have this realization of this global warming and the problems occurring. And the discussion is over with. You know, people with our television and our communications and things of that nature see that the Earth is in trouble. So we've got to make a paradigm shift. It's a paradigm shift.

And it's going to take everybody, one contribution here, another contribution there, and finally somebody's going to hit on something and people are going to collectively get together and they're going to make it happen. And this thing about water is very interesting to me because when Stan got involved with it, he saw a need back in 73 and 74. And by, you know, some of the first things he did when he put together his cell, I remember Charlie Oldbrook and Stan said, Stan said, I can do something like that. And he went back and fashioned his first cell and he went and he started running a small engine and they ran it. He didn't care how efficient it was and so forth. It ran and everybody, they just marveled at it.

JR: (27:16) And what was the style of that cell? Was it tubes or was it plates or what?

SM: Stan went through the whole gamut of designs and he started off with plates. And I marveled at the number of configurations that he designed, put together to see what these events were, what was happening. And he had one that I marveled at because it was the two vertical plates that it was set up so that you could move the plates and make the gap either bigger or smaller. And he adjusted these things. They were so high, I don't know, but maybe two feet high. And he adjusted these plates. And then I could see where the plates were adjusted out, where you could see this small ribbon. And it was kind of an interesting ribbon of flow right in the middle. And I marveled at that because I could see it with my human eye, you know, with the eyes.

JR: In other words, it was a chamber that you could look down in and see the liquid, the electrolyte in between the two plates.

SM: Yeah, you could not look down it, you could look through it.

JR: It had plexiglass sidewalls?

SM: That's correct. Oh, yeah, he used plexiglass tubing and stuff so he could see these.

JR: So you're mentioning a phenomenon that others have commented on too, and that is that there is something that happens between two plates. There's some kind of electromagnetic field that causes a chemical reaction?

SM: Well, that's what I want to bring out. And I mentioned the last time that we were on the air. And this is the inventors that are inventing these products. And when I read the patents and see what they're doing, I get very interested. And what I'm indicating by that is that you have to define and think about what it is that you're doing. And maybe you don't know why you're doing it, but you've got this gut feeling that you're doing it. And then when you do do it, you want to sit down and look at it and think about it and then say, you know, where am I going with this thing and is it worth it? And the biggest question is you write down what you know about it, and then all of a sudden you know what you don't know. And when you find that out, go out and research it and come back and take a look at it. And, you know, when I was in high school, I was introduced to electrolysis process.

And, you know, it was 15, 20 minutes. You get a beaker, you put some water in it, and then you put in 25 or 20 percent of some electrolyte solution. You could pick it out and put it in. And then today they have about, I think it was about eight or nine products that they can put in for electrolytes. And the interesting thing about the electrolytes is that they all have a voltage, what you call the decomposition voltage, and that voltage ranges from like 0.98 up to 2.1 volts or something like that. But if you study the atoms and you study the molecules of that product, that's what it is. When you look at a cell, at an automobile battery, for example, if you have a 12-volt battery, you have cells in that battery. And you have a lead, and you have sulfuric acid, and in that cell, it produces 2.2 volts.

And so you put the cells in series, and you add them up, and you have either 6 volts or 12 volts, depending on the number of cells. So that electrolyte has a very low voltage level. And so what happens in the high school experiment when they show the electrolysis process, you put two carbon rods into the solution. And then you go over and you put a battery across those two carbon terminals and possibly a switch. And then you put two inverted tubes, if you will, over those electrodes and then turn the switch on and then let the battery do its thing. And it will create hydrogen on one carbon electrode, and it will create oxygen on the other carbon electrode. And pretty soon, after watching it for a long time, you start to see the volume, and you start to see the ratio of two hydrogen to one oxygen. And you turn it off. And the chemistry teacher says, okay, guys, what do you see?

You've got the ratio. And he says, it takes more energy than you get anything out. And so every kid going through the chemistry class goes through that experiment. And then when you get into college, they redo the same experiment. And they tell you the same thing. You know?

JR: (32:44) So they're apt to convince you that there's no point in pursuing. In fact, they call hydrogen an energy carrier for that reason. They refuse to call it a source of energy.

SM: Well, the energy carried in the gases produced is known better today than it was back then. It's the emphasis, you know, effectively hydrogen, the hydrogen and oxygen, particularly the hydrogen will, when you produce it, you get about three watts per cc of storage in the hydrogen. And if you start, you know, multiplying that up to a kilogram and so forth, boy, you can see that there's quite a bit of energy there that it will store. Now, the question is, how good is the storage? And one of the problems is that they're trying to solve right now on hydrogen storage on cars is that you can drive your car to work and keep it in the parking lot. And then when you come out after work, you find out that you lost some hydrogen. Hydrogen likes to wick its way through material, and it will deplete itself after a period of time.

JR: You know who first commented on that? The first reference that I could find in literature to that tendency to escape?

SM: I don't know.

JR: In my book, I mention this. It's Edgar Allan Poe.

SM: Edgar Allan Poe? I probably did.

JR: Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called The Balloon Hoax about a transatlantic crossing in a, well, what would have been a hydrogen balloon, only they used coal gas to fill the balloon. And the reason why, he says, is because hydrogen has a great tendency to escape.

SM: Well, it does. I mean, it'll go, you can take, you know, even today, you can take a balloon and fill it up with helium and then watch it after a couple days, and all of a sudden you'll notice that the balloon will start to, will change its height and start to go towards the Earth, and then eventually it'll just, it will not hold itself up anymore because the hydrogen is leaked out through the rubber, through the plastic, and hydrogen's even worse. So, it can wick its way through a lot of material, and it does, and that's one of the concerns right now, is how do you, how do you store this hydrogen so that you won't lose it? I mean, that's a lot of waste of energy.

JR: And those of us who know something about water fuel know that that's a pointless question because it's not necessary to store it.

SM: Well, now, one of the things I want to bring out today is that, and that's one of the challenges that we have, is that real-time production is the long-term solution, but cars never have, cars are not really a production plant. And when you, you go down to the cracking, when you turn oil into gasoline, it takes time to do that through the cracking process. So, you know, you boil the oil, and then you get it up to a certain temperature, and then you cool it at a certain temperature, and then through the cracking process you create your gasolines. And it takes time to do that, and then you put it in a storage tank, and then eventually put it in your car, and you can drive it at a speed that you can use up that gasoline. It may have taken eight hours to make that gasoline, but you can use it up in two hours in driving your car based on your speed.

So, cars never really have had the ability to create the fuel that they use real-time. It's a consumption product, and that's why they, you know, they built filling stations and fill them back up. But now, when you talk about these devices where you're trying to run them off of water, you're going to, you get into this same situation. You can't really create it real-time, but if we keep working on it, we will. I mean, it's getting better and better. From the things I've been doing, I see, I really see and feel and sense that there's a future to this with this ability.

JR: Yeah, as evidenced by your patent application.

SM: Oh, yeah.

JR: Now, you use the word hydroxyl in that patent application. Is there a special meaning to that word, or is it basically the same as what we would say hydroxy or oxyhydrogen?

SM: (37:46) There's a reason that I use that term. And as time goes on, as you'll see, that I've looked at the production of the fuel, but I also have looked at the use and the consumption of the fuel. And I think I'm on to something on, it's like a bow tie. Look at it like a Lazy 8 kind of affair where the left side of the Lazy 8 is the fuel that you're working with. And then as you come through the center of the Lazy 8, that's the process that you're actually trying to develop. And then on the right side of the Lazy 8 is actually the device that's consuming your product. If you understand the whole, and in this case, in the water, I not only see the source, I see the process, and then I also see how it can be used and consumed. And so there's a reason why I chose what I chose.

And a point I want to make about this high school and college electrolysis, when you start to get into your master's degree and your Ph. degrees, they really get into it. And, you know, if a professor wants to pursue that avenue, he'll take a doctorate student and say, okay, let's look at this thing a little differently. And so electrolysis, electrolysis first means electricity. That's what it is. And then whatever device or products you use to try to do the conversion, you look at the source. And let me give you this example, for example. When you put 20% of an electrolyte in the water, one of the things is that water is a, it's not a conductor and it's not an insulator. And when they say that water has a dielectric of 78, what that means is that it's 78% of resistor and the rest is a conductor.

And that's a very, very important point is to, first of all, start understanding what it is that you're working with. And the other thing that I mentioned last time was that water has the longest moment arm of any atoms that we have. Water does not work like the compounds, the other compounds. Water is really different. And this moment arm is the longest moment arm between any atoms that we have.

JR: And what does that refer to, the word or the phrase moment arm?

SM: Okay. And when you pick up a hammer or you pick up a shovel, but particularly when you pick up a hammer, you look at that hammer and it'll say 16 ounces or it'll say 22 ounce hammer. And that hammer has, the handle may be one foot in length. And then the weight of that hammer is a certain number of ounces. I think it's 16 ounces or a 22 ounce hammer. And what that refers to is when you swing that hammer and you hit something with that hammer, you have a multiplication of the force. So you have force times distance. And we use an automobile and around a torque measurement called foot pounds. And that's what it means. You've got a lever that's one foot long. And if you pull on it, you can get one pound. When you pull on it with one pound, you will get one pound of torque. And so if you pull on it with five pounds, you get five pounds of torque.

So it's called foot pounds, and that's called a moment arm. And that's the same thing that you look at with a water molecule. This very long moment arm from a hydrogen standpoint, if you want to turn that molecule, all you've got to do is go over and flick that hydrogen. And because it has that large moment arm, it's very easy to move that water molecule. And that's one of the reasons why a water molecule is so viscous. No matter what container you put water in, it'll form that shape. And that's a very important aspect of water.

JR: Now, does this get back to that ribbon that you saw in between the plates? Are we able to say that that's related to this?

SM: (42:50) It's part of it. It's definitely part of it. The other part is the realization that water is a dipole. Now, nature likes to be balanced. Nature does not like to be off balance. For example, electricity is not normal. Effectively, you know, if the generators turn off, the grid collapses, right? And so electricity disappears. And so in nature, nature likes to be balanced. In other words, if you've got pluses and minuses of things and they can get together, they will neutralize and they will become neutral. And so nature likes to do that. But now when you look at water, all of a sudden you find out that it's bipolar, which means that the length of the hydrogen and the way the hydrogen connects to the water molecule, it sets up a charge. And so water has a charge to it.

It has a plus and a minus charge, just like you would think of a magnetic magnet, for example, would have a north and south pole. Water is a dipole, which has a plus or a minus. So that means that you can use a charge to flip it around, wouldn't you say?

JR: Oh, yeah. And then the idea is to use a charge to try to break them as well, huh?

SM: Well, that was the point that Stan and I talked about in the very beginning, because we were looking at the 20% solution that they used. What was the purpose of that? Well, the purpose was they used carbon rods. And it's very interesting in the carbon rods, because carbon rods do not contribute anything to the electrolysis process. They are neutral. All they do is transfer the electrons from the battery, from the source, to the solution.

JR: So was there a purpose in using carbon over any other material?

SM: Well, with carbon, you have to realize that what science likes to do is to break down the compounds to their constituents. And that's what science is. That's what they're trying to teach you is that water is made up of these two components, and we can demonstrate that, and this is how you do it. But nature, you know, nature is not necessarily that way when you go to use it. But in this case, in electrolysis, when you put a battery across that solution, if you put a battery across there of 2 volts, then you have a chance of making the efficiency of that cell a little bit better. In fact, they say that if you adjust your voltage down to 1.43 volts, and you have an electrolyte that has a decomposition point of 2 volts, let's say, it's more efficient. And if you push 2 volts in there, the efficiency is going to drop.

And if you take a 12-volt battery and try to push it through that, into that cell that's 2.2 volts, the efficiency drops down to 10%.

JR: Because it's overkill. You're dumping much more voltage into it than you need to.

SM: Well, what happens is the water, everybody talks about this avalanche. I've been listening to, I get to a certain point, I'm drawing 40 amps, and I hear my alternator growl. Well, you know, it takes 12 horsepower to drive an automobile alternator, and typical alternators will put out about 35 amps is what they're designed for. And so you're trying to run the electrical systems of your car as well as you're trying to drive these cells, and they're taking that voltage and putting it into cells that there's a mismatch. And like I say, if you put 12 volts across a cell that has 2-volt electrolyte in there, what you're doing is that battery thinks it's going into an infinite heat sink, an infinite current sink. And that battery will just dump all of its electron, all of its energy, into that solution. And then the solution says, I really don't want that.

What happens is in the electrolysis process, they drive the heat up.

JR: (47:54) Yeah, so it creates heat.

SM: It creates the heat, but the thing is that the water boils at like 212 degrees, and then you're dumping all this current in there. Now, the electrolyte will allow it to go a little hotter. It won't boil quite as easy. But the harder you get that solution, the more it likes it. But the problem is, as you start to create the steam, you're not creating hydrogen.

JR: Yes.

SM: So what happens is there's a point where the hydrogen starts to diminish, and the steam starts to show up, and then...

JR: And apparently that's what a lot of these hydrogen boosters that are being sold on eBay basically are.

SM: Exactly.

JR: Steam generator.

SM: They're not looking at the whole picture. And so that's why I'm bringing these comments out to help bring to light a little of some of this information so that these inventors can look at their products and take a little better look at it. And then what will happen is, collectively, the cell and the boosters will get better and better and better,

JR: which is what we need. Well, apparently that is actually happening. In fact, we have on the line right now a caller from Maryland who I believe he has a question or two to ask you. His name is Larry Jarboeck. Larry, are you there?

LJ: Yes, I'm there, James. How are you?

JR: Very good. And so we have with us tonight Stephen Meyer.

LJ: Hi, Stephen. How are you?

JR: Great. Great. Now, Larry's a county commissioner in... I'm sorry, what county is it?

LJ: St. Mary's County.

JR: St. Mary's County. That's on the coast in Maryland, isn't it?

LJ: Well, actually, it's in western Maryland. It's between the Patux and the Potomac Rivers.

JR: Oh, okay. Very good. Oh, okay.

LJ: So, anyway, yeah, Stephen, you were just talking about thermal runaway. I've run across that many times in the boosters I've built and the units I've built, and it's obviously something you don't want. It sure shows well. It shows a lot of production, but it's not the production you're looking for. Anyway, you were talking earlier about the things that, as young people, that we've seen changes, for example, my gosh, computers, the Internet, cell phones, DVDs, CDs. The technologies have really taken off in the electronics world, so to speak, and yet we're still driving internal combustion cars powered by basically gasoline or diesel fuel. When are we going to see the water fuel car?

SM: Well, I think you'll see it once the inventors that are working on this start to realize that they should look at what they're doing, and they should look more into the understand what the end result is, and then also understand what is currently really happening into the internal combustion engine. And so, you know, what makes, for example, what makes the hybrid electric car very attractive, what that really is, is that an internal combustion engine today is only 12% efficient. And so, when you put your energy into that engine, and you're only getting 12% out, some of the inventors are looking at reformers where they can separate the hydrogen from the gasoline.

And then what they do is they put that into a fuel cell, which has an efficiency of 80% to 90%, and then you run an electric motor that is another 80%, so in that process you've only lost about 40%, and the engine is down to 12%, so you divide 12 into 40, you can find out that the hybrid electric car gives you a little more advantage to the money that you're paying for the energy. So, and that's what it's all about, is how can you take this internal combustion engine? The engine has been really designed well and modified and changed over the years, and I hear the inventors talk about the past, and you have to understand the past and what's really happening today at the present in order to solve the problem.

It's today what we do that really dictates the future, so you have to understand why things are the way they are, and then make some intelligent decisions based on your knowledge of what to do about it.

LJ: (52:55) Well, yeah, I agree with that, but what I would say is, because I go back to the mid-70s myself, as far as my interest in all this, I started building vapor carburetors back late 70s, early 80s, and for years I was building these units that got better mileage on my vehicles but always had glitches, you know what that's like as an inventor, and eventually went... Oh, you don't say. That's right, the glitches, oh my goodness, and so eventually I went to electric cars, because you can modify a car fairly easily, and you've got a vehicle that you get 50 miles of range, you know, with standard lead-acid batteries, and I drive one on a daily basis, it just makes sense, and for running errands and stuff like that, it's fine, but the next level of the hybrid electric, you know, the problem is that I see with it is I would like to extend my range, but use it using hydrogen.

If I had a 30kW genset, I could basically run my electric car with a tag-along trailer without a problem, and that's my project right now, is working on a genset that's hydrogen on demand. I just passed a couple of weekends...

SM: Is that the one with the Jeep?

LJ: No, this is actually, I've got a MR2 that we race, it holds some need to records, and it's set up for the racetrack, so, in fact, the motor's out of it right now, because we doubled the voltage and blew it out, but we blow things up so you don't have to, it's our motto. Okay. But all that said is it would be nice to be at the track, you know, generating hydrogen or, you know, on demand and then charging the car with it, so to speak, from the generator. And I've run the generator a little bit. I can get it, I can make enough hydrogen to run for a few seconds at a time, just enough that, you know, once the pressure goes down, then we've lost it again. And that's the challenge, is either the resonance or, if the Herman Anderson concept is right, radiolysis, the high voltage.

But what I've found is over the years, I can find things on the Internet, for example, if you want to build a vapor carburetor, you get the free plans from Paul Pantone, who unfortunately is in jail, but his plans are still on the Internet. But there really is no, or you want to build an electric car, you can go to this site, and step by step you can build an electric car, get the schematics, the whole thing. There's no place that I've been able to find that you can find the schematics for a simple, basically, hydrogen-on-demand unit. The closest I came to was Paul Zagouris' circuitry. I don't know that his cell was as good as his circuitry was. And, of course, that was purchased up by the, who knows who purchased it, but basically Paul's not disclosing anything about his unit. He's talking on the Internet, but it's not about his, so much his circuitry or schematics or anything like that.

And that's really, in order to get it out there, we've got to have these units where people can see them at the track, or they can see them different places so they recognize it's possible.

SM: Let me run something for you here, just real quick.

LJ: Sure.

SM: Listen to this.

JR: Listen to this. Let's go. Listen to this. We're in here. Let's do this here. One red là, two photonics. Come on.

SM: All right, back on, back on.

LJ: Was that your brother Stan's dune buggy?

SM: (57:57) No, no, that's my own design.

LJ: Oh, okay.

SM: What I was trying to show there in the sound is that we've been studying this. I've been studying this thing since Stan died. It's been about nine years. And I've taken this technology that he started and then tried to understand what it was that he was doing and then trying to make it better and then seeing what we can do to actually make this conversion into different types of power sources for automobiles. And what you heard right there, for example, is that is a unit we put together. And basically what it was, we've been able to adjust our engine design down. So that engine is sitting at curb idle, engine running about, let's say, 1,000 RPMs. And then what we do is we flip a switch and the engine climbs all the way up to about 3,800 RPMs.

LJ: Perfect for a genset, yeah.

SM: Yep. And then, well, we're looking at, you know, what it does with the internal combustion engine. And so what we did was we got it where we're on to something. We've got the knowledge and we've got the know-how. What we need is investors that can come in and give us some money to really put the wheels on the ground. We're building a sieve unit right now, the sieve one, and then that we need to get investors that can help us so we can put this thing on the ground. And when we do, then the thing is it's a demonstrable product. And let me give you some idea about this water-powered system that people are working on and why I see a future to this whole thing. So we were able to do some testing and we took our little engine and we know what it can do and what it can't do. And so what we did was we ran the engine off of gasoline.

We've always used gasoline as a point of reference and then compared what we were doing to that. But if it wasn't as good as gasoline and then we went back and said, what can we do to make it the same or better? And so what we did was we plotted out that engine under load under gasoline. And then we had established three windows, and the three windows of opportunity, we call it, was strictly gasoline. And then we put in our hydroxyls at 50%, and then we did our best shot to see just how good things were. And it turns out to be that right now we were able to reduce the consumption of gasoline down to 75%. We can adjust it for 50% quite nicely. And that was an important part for us because at 50% consumption of fuel and 50% of our hydroxyls, we know what the bridge of the energy is.

We know what the energy is in the gasoline, and we know what the energy is that we're supplying with our hydroxyls. That was a bridge. And with that 50%, we find out that just looking at the gases that we can produce, that gives you about, it gives us a factor. It tells us that we're on the right track, that this water idea that's there can work. And we now understand why it works. We've still got a lot of work to go, to do, to make it practical. But we have our proof of concept. And Bioguri, these types of products that everybody's working on, has a future. They just have to learn a little bit about what they're doing and understand a little bit about how it's being used in internal combustion engines.

Now, that's a good point to come back to is because you can't replace the gasoline completely in an automobile at this point because the hydroxyls, the gases that you're putting into it, it burns too fast. But the other thing is you can't put the gas into your engine. Now, what I mean by that, if you go a liquid, you have a liquid, gasoline is a carrier of energy, which is carbon and hydrogen, but it's a liquid form. And when it is brought into an internal combustion engine through the mechanical shearer of things, it converts to a gas. And the gas is 1,280 to 1. So all this gas that you're trying to put in in the car with that kind of ratio is that, and because the engine is a mechanical engine, you've got to figure out some way to get energy density into that engine properly in order to use it. And that's where, you know, there's a lot of work to be done.

LJ: (1:03:37) Yeah, I agree. The one thing I found is, you know, most systems that traditional systems using hydrogen have a bubbler to help keep from the flashback and also to purge the electrolyte out of the, you know, out of the vapors, so to speak. And what I've been using in my bubbler is turpentine. Henry Payne, back in 1884, it's in James' book, Water Fuel, used that and found that it buffered the hydrogen and made it more like coal gas, which it doesn't have quite as quick a flame front, so to speak. And so that helps, you know.

SM: Well, yeah, see, that's part of the solution. That's why, you know, why we're talking on the air, that each little item contributes to this thing, and it'll be random. The contributions will be random, but what will happen is we will solve this problem. You know, we've got it in our psyche. We've got it in our minds. We've got, just like the comic strips, you know, you say it's possible, and if you think it's possible, then it's doable.

LJ: Well, and what was it, Henry Ford said something about if you think you can or you think you can't, either way it's true.

SM: Really? What I liked about Henry Ford was that, you know, they took him to court and they said he wasn't smart enough. I mean, you know, here he was, tinkering around his garage, he makes a car, and now he's making a manufacturing plant. And some of the people didn't like him running the plant, so they took him to court and they said he didn't have enough smarts to run the plant. And he said, I don't have to have smarts to run the plant. I just push a button and the people come to the door.