Stephen Meyer Interview Part 5 (5-12-2007)

Stephen Meyer Interview Part 5 (5-12-2007)

JR = James Robey
SM = Stephen Meyer

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 the May 12th segment of the Kentucky Water Fuel Museum webcast. Tonight we have with us for the fifth time Stephen Meyer, who is a renowned inventor and industrial troubleshooter, twin brother to the famous inventor Stanley Meyer, who developed along with him the water fuel cell. Stephen, you're with us?

SM: Yes, I am.

JR: Welcome.

SM: Well, thank you.

JR: And just before getting on the air, we were discussing the fact that this is the 70th anniversary of this week. It is Sunday. This past Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster.

SM: I know a little history about that, too. I haven't read a book, of course. That happened down in Caldwell, Ohio, if I remember correctly. And they thought that it had gone down because of, well, it was coming in for a landing or a mooring, if I remember correctly. And they were trying to attach it to a tie-down tower, if you will. And there was lightning in the area, and it was stormy. And when they dropped the rope, when they went to tether it, there was a charge on the blimp itself, and then when it grounded it, it caused a flash. And that's when the Hindenburg caught on fire.

JR: Yeah, it actually happened in New Jersey.

SM: In New Jersey?

JR: Yeah. I'm looking at the table of contents of this book, as we were discussing before going on the air. This book is by Addison Bain, Dr. Addison Bain, who is a retired NASA, I guess you'd call him a rocket scientist. Okay. And he apparently is the first one to really dig into the Hindenburg story and discover that the hydrogen that was being used as the, I guess you'd say the flotation.

SM: I thought it was helium.

JR: Medium. It was actually hydrogen, I guess. But he's the one who discovered that it wasn't the hydrogen that really caused the disaster as much as it was the flammable, what do you call it, coping?

SM: Well, the way the ship was constructed, it had a bone frame around it, if you will, and then they used panels, which was like canvas panels. And these panels were kind of sewn around the frame itself, and then they were, all those panels were grounded to the frame. And what happened was, in the beginning, when they made it, it was changing altitudes because of the heat. And so they wanted to come up with some way to control that, and they decided that they would paint it with a reflective color, which would be like aluminum color. So they mixed some paint up, and they painted the panels, and sure enough, it worked. It helped out as far as the heat goes. And then, as the ship was being used, some of the panels, the grounding straps, had broken loose or come loose.

And when there was a lightning that actually, or the ship actually got hit by lightning, then what happened was those panels caught on fire because the paint that they created for this reflectivity was actually rocket fuel, which we used in some of the rockets a couple years, you know, 10 years ago or so. And that caught on fire, and then they, as it came down and crashed, everybody blamed it on the hydrogen or the helium that was in it. But in reality, if the hydrogen caught on fire, it would go up, and the ship never really did explode. It just simply burned, and as the gases were being burnt, it lost its ability to stay buoyant in the air, and it came down. And then that was also confirmed by the Smithsonian Institute of Technology, by the way.

They actually got a piece of that material, and so one of the eyewitnesses to the crash had picked up a piece of material, so they had got a hold of that and did the analysis, and it confirmed what had happened.

JR: Yeah, very interesting. The name of the book is The Freedom Element, Living with Hydrogen. And as I say, it was written by this Dr. Bain about three years ago, 2004. It is available on Amazon, and it's a used book. You can get it for just a few dollars. I think I paid $4 and some change for it.

SM: Wow. I think I'll get that book and read it. Is it a thick book?

JR: (5:00) It's quite a book. It actually has just about 300 pages.

SM: Wow.

JR: Mm-hmm.

SM: Wow. Have you read it at all?

JR: No. I just received it late this afternoon in the mail.

SM: Oh, I see.

JR: I'm just sort of thumbing through it now.

SM: That's pretty exciting.

JR: Yeah, it is quite interesting. He tells his story, how he got interested in physics and math in his youth, and how he went on to work for NASA. Wow. And how he worked with hydrogen quite a bit, so he took it on himself to investigate the Hindenburg accident and came out in defense of hydrogen as a fuel.

SM: Oh, sure. Well, you know, NASA uses slush hydrogen, and they use it for their rockets because there's more energy in that. If you look at the weight ratio and the power of the hydrogen, you find out that hydrogen has a lot more power than is related to its weight, so that's why they use it.

JR: I would like to read you the last paragraph of his introduction.

SM: Okay, sure.

JR: Before Chapter 1, this is what he has to say. He says, At the heart of the book is the importance of hydrogen in our daily lives, its partial solution to the world's energy crisis, and how it can someday release the world from the shackles of the petroleum czars, thus the title, The Freedom Element.

SM: Wow.

JR: Isn't that interesting? Next thing you want to read the book.

SM: That is very, very powerful. And it's true. You know, from where we're coming from and things that we've been doing, I see it and I feel it, sense it and taste it. And we will go on with the hydrogen because it's a renewable source, excuse me, it's a renewable source, and that's the importance of it. And it also has the power density that gasoline has, so why not? And it also answers a lot of questions on the environmental issues of the emissions and so forth and the consumption of oxygen. So, boy, it just seems like it's a natural way to go.

JR: Yeah, and even to produce electricity, the fuel cell, you know, to think that of all the chemicals on this planet that we have access to for producing electricity without using a spinning shaft or generator or whatever, it seems that breaking water down to hydrogen oxygen and using that in a fuel cell is the best way to produce electricity, isn't it?

SM: Really? So how would you do that?

JR: Well, that's a good question. I'm not really that much of a fuel cell enthusiast, but at least, I guess you'd say solar energy would probably be the best way to convert something that's around us into electricity. But, I mean, chemically, it would seem that the fuel cell is a...

SM: Yeah, the fuel cell is coming along, and it's hit some plateaus at the moment, but I think that those will be resolved as we go along because essentially the way it's being configured right now, and from my point of view, that it has a limitation to it, and they haven't quite realized what that limitation is. And they keep supplying hydrogen to it on one side, and then they supply oxygen from the atmosphere on the other side. And then set up the electrolytes and the membrane, and it's like a proton exchange membrane. What happens is they actually limit themselves. They're putting H2 on one side, but what's coming in from the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen, which is O2, and the problem is it's out of balance. The ratio is not correct as far as really wanting to get efficiencies.

Now, some of the fuel cells, you know, they get up to 90%, but what happens is they soon get contaminated, and that's been the problem right now, that the certain types of electrolytes that they put in there don't last too long. The other thing is that the way the membrane is made, it's a polymer membrane, which is impregnated on the surface with a catalyst, and what happens is eventually that becomes contaminated, and the fuel cell falls off. So you can have one in your car, and it will take you 50,000 miles, but then you've got to replace it. And that's the hard part. And the other thing is that right now the fuel cells are made in sections.

If you just think of a loaf of bread, for example, and if you look at the slices of that loaf of bread, if you took two pieces of bread that are sandwiched together, you look at that perimeter around that bread, that's quite a bit in the area that you try to seal. Now, if you stack all those breads up to make a loaf of bread, you see that the area that you're trying to seal and hold seal is quite a bit, and what happens is if you add any vibration or movement to that bread or to that cell, they eventually start leaking, and that's another problem that they're trying to resolve is that mechanically it's not there yet.

JR: (10:45) But it's somewhat sensitive, huh?

SM: Well, vibration, if you put it in the back of a truck or into a car, and you know as you drive that car, it's subject to vibration, and eventually those seals between those cells are going to leak, and hydrogen just loves these little small holes.

JR: That's an issue with people building electrolyzers for use on board a vehicle also. Well, that some of the designs are not real conducive to the bumpity-bump ride down the road.

SM: Exactly. You know, a lot of people, you can look at it this way, too. Take your car battery, for example. It lasts about maybe three, four years, maybe five on the outside. But now ask yourself a question, why is that? And you find out that the plates of the battery, in between the plates of the battery, they use lead. And lead is formed in such a manner that in the process of charging the battery and using the battery, the lead is being transformed, and then what happens is as it goes from a solid, if you will, solid lead to kind of a slushy electrolyte, and then as you charge the battery back up, it tries to reform itself in the lead. But what happens is as you drive, the vibration causes that lead between the two plates to finally fall in the bottom of the battery. So as it does that, the battery becomes less and less capacity, has less and less capacity, and eventually it fails.

One of the cells either start to reverse itself or it breaks open with no lead between it, and it dies. So a battery only has about five years of life because of that.

JR: You know, someone recently has suggested that you can convert a lead-acid battery to an alkaline battery by, I guess, turning it upside down and dumping out all the acid, maybe even washing it out, and then filling it with distilled water that has had alum powder added to it. And I haven't talked to anyone who's actually confirmed that. That's kind of interesting.

SM: I know that when I went into the Air Force, when I was 21, I had a 49 Chevrolet, and the car, I had done a lot of work on it, and it was in meant condition. And so what I did was I wanted to put it in storage, so I put it in the garage and jacked it up, took the wheels off, and actually covered the car and everything to preserve it. And one of the things I did, I took the battery out of the car, and I got this bright idea, well, I'll just dump the stuff that was inside the battery, I'll just dump it out. And I could preserve it that way, so I put the distilled water in it. And then when I came back, put the car all back together, well, that battery was as dead as a doornail. I mean, it was dead. It would not come back alive no matter what. So I learned that that slush is inside the battery.

That's, you know, that's the part of the equation of the chemical reaction between charge and discharge. You know, and lead is kind of an interesting product because it's a byproduct of decay from radioactivity. If you look at that lead, it has about seven times more electrons in that material than most other materials.

JR: Really?

SM: It is really rich in electrons.

JR: And that's why it's used in a battery, I suppose.

SM: Well, I think that's what they found. You know, it's easy to form. You just heat it, and you can form it in any shape and then use it, and it became very cheap to use because lead is found in a lot of places on the Earth. Typically, what happens is that the Earth had a lot of radioactive hotspots, if you will, uranium-U-235. And as time went on, the five billion years went on, that radioactivity decayed and turned into lead. Well, there's large, large deposits of that. So it became easy to mine and to use it in manufacturing. And when they created the batteries, boy, this is a nice product, you know.

JR: And that's interesting because the first battery apparently didn't use lead at all. The early batteries used other metals. And you can supposedly stick galvanized steel or just about anything, I think, into the ground and get a certain amount of volts out of it, can't you?

SM: (15:52) Well, that's how, you know, that's how they discovered the battery, you know, early in the sciences. A lot of things were like what they call physical science. And one of the things that you see these old movies and pictures where the guy will give them a gold coin and the guy will bite on a gold coin and look at it and say, yeah, it's gold. But what they used to do is they used to have metal. And one of the things that happened was they put some zinc on his tongue and they got a jolt out of it. And that's how they discovered that that was the first indication of a battery.

JR: Isn't that amazing?

SM: Yeah.

JR: It's just like a shock.

SM: Yeah, it was the saliva in the mouth that interacted with zinc. And then we got a shock. And then that's how Volt, when Volt built his first pile, the battery was not known. So he put, he was able to put these elements together and finally created a cell that had voltage on it. And that was, he called it the pile.

JR: Voltaic pile.

SM: Yep. He did. And it was incredible.

JR: So as far as the notion of being able to generate electricity from water itself, I think we may have mentioned on a previous program that Daniel Dingle, the Filipino water car inventor, when I spoke to him on the phone a few weeks ago, he mentioned that he has a new technology, which since then I've talked to Patrick Kelly in England, who claims that Dingle is not the first one to come up with this idea. But I think I mentioned to you that he claims to have some kind of exciter, as he calls it, that is placed in water. And I think he said it has two capacitors that sort of bounce back and forth. In some manner, they charge and discharge each other or something through the water, and it ends up becoming like a perpetual source of energy.

SM: Well, you can take, you can charge a capacitor, and then you can use, create an inductive source with that capacitor. You could charge it up, and that's what a tuned circuit is in electronics, is that what happens is when you take a capacitor and put it in series of the coil, for example, and if you wind that coil and select the capacitance of that capacitor so that they have the right relationship, you can actually put a pulse or signal into that circuit. And what happens is in the very beginning, if you throw a switch, what happens is the capacitor acts like a short. So, and the inductor itself acts as a current limiter. So, a coil likes to resist the current flow, initial current flow, and a capacitor will act like a short. So, what happens is current will flow through that coil and actually build up a magnetic field.

And when that magnetic field gets built up, eventually, once the current is stopped, there's no more current flow, then that magnetic field will collapse. And what it does is it reverses the polarity on that coil, and it dumps that energy back into that capacitor. Now, that oscillation, they call it the Christmas tree oscillation, and what it does is it'll, during each cycle, the amount of energy and amplitude of the signals will get less and less and less because it doesn't sustain itself. Now, however, that's not to say that you couldn't come in and what they call pump that circuit. In other words, it's like a flywheel effect. If you take a flywheel, for example, and you spin it, say, like a bicycle tire, if you spin that bicycle tire really, really fast, the energy that's stored in that bicycle tire is related to the square of the RPM. Well, that's a lot of energy.

And so, what happens is if you take your hand off of it, and it's the relationship of a flywheel where it'll maintain the spin for a period of time where it's starting to slow down. And then as it slows down to a certain point, you can take your hand and rub it across the wheel again, push it across the wheel again, and bring it back up to the initial speed. So that's what they refer to as pumping. Once you get it going, once you've got the energy in there, it doesn't take much energy to keep it going, but you do have to pump it. And same way in this resonance circuit, you would have to pump it to keep it going. But the energy to do that is a lot less. So maybe he's come up with something where he can start the initial reaction and then pump it as it goes along where he's not adding all that energy. It's already there. He's just trying to maintain it.

Now, if the capacitor is oscillating back and forth in the water, one of the nice things about capacitors is a capacitor is a charge device. It takes a charge, which is a current charge, and it converts it into a voltage. And so it is possible to charge those capacitors where you have a voltage. So now the water molecules are being subject to that voltage. And in one of our discussions earlier, I mentioned that the difference between the electrolysis process with the added chemicals is that the voltage potential across each plate is very low based on the material that you use. And there's a point that I want to point out in that is that the most efficient part of an electrolyte solution is its decomposition voltage.

And if you were to take a cell and start off with zero current and zero voltage, you would start to adjust the voltage a little bit, say, take it up to half a volt, and then you'd look at the current and take it up to a volt and look at the current and then finally get up to a point where, say, 2.5 volts would be the decomposition point. You would reach a voltage and a current which is the most efficient for that cell. And if you try to raise the voltage even further, what happens is you get kind of an avalanche of current. Just like water, it takes a lot of heat to get water heated. Well, in this case, as soon as you get above a decomposition point, why, the system will start taking all the current. All the current you can give it, it'll take. And it converts it all in the heat.

So the most efficiency point is you don't want to go above that decomposition point, which is like 2.1 volts or 2.5 volts. That's about the highest of those cells go. But now on these capacitors, it's possible to take it up to a lot higher voltage. And if you remember, I indicated a while back that it only takes about 11 volts to pull the electrons out of the hydrogen.

JR: (24:04) Now, that's something that people were amazed at when they saw demonstrations in the water fuel cell, is that there was no heat, even after seeing it run for half an hour or longer.

SM: Well, there's been a lot of work done on that. In fact, there's a YouTube fellow I had actually set up the demonstration. And he actually had been creating hydrogen and put a temperature meter into the water. And the highest he ever got was 75 degrees as he was doing it. Now, to me, there's a temperature rise. There's a temperature rise. And you have to be careful about what level you're talking about. Because you can say to some people, well, I've got 1,000 degrees or I've got 360 degrees or I've got 75 degrees. You've got to really ask them what their reference is. So you get a good idea what that temperature is. So electrolysis is a process that people drive it all the way as hot as they can get it. But what happens is as soon as you go in the water vapor, it stops making the hydrogen. It makes water vapor.

JR: Yeah, which may not be a bad thing. If what we're trying to do is run an internal combustion engine, the success in running that engine is what counts, not what kind of mix of gases you're producing. I mean, as long as you're capable of producing it on demand under the hood and you're not overloading your charging system, my contention is that I don't care whether it's got 50% water vapor or whatever combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and then some form of dry steam or whatever it is that mixes well with the combustible gas and then the oxygen and actually causes an engine to run. And apparently, I think some of the successful systems have actually been maybe producing more vapor than hydrogen and oxygen.

SM: Well, I think that's the point. I think that's a point well taken because you have to look at what combustion is and how it works in the internal combustion engine. And once you understand that, then now you're introducing these gases that people are producing and they're quite complex. And it's the whole thing and not just one thing. You know, I indicated before that you've got to look at the production, how you're producing it, what you are producing, and then how you're controlling it and then how it's going to be used in the internal combustion engine. Once you understand all those phases, then you've got a real good chance of really making a headway, an accomplishment here. I mentioned, I went down to Florida and I went over to a fellow that was on the Internet.

JR: You're referring to Denny Klein?

SM: Denny Klein.

JR: Yeah, I think you told me you had seen him. So you actually met with him for the first time?

SM: I actually met with him. He's a very nice gentleman.

JR: He has what's called high-tech applications. Is that the name of his company?

SM: Hydrogen Technology Applications.

JR: Yeah, Hydrogen Technology Applications.

SM: It's his company. And he actually has a very nice office. It's kind of what they call a bay, industrial bay, where his office is very nice. He had two secretaries working for him, and he had a lot of products. He had his welders there.

JR: In other words, he's manufacturing what we would commonly call Brown's Gas Welders?

SM: Exactly. Brown's Gas, when I met with Huel Brown and I saw his product that he brought in from China, Noroco, which was a military jaunta, when they made those products, his units were not anywhere near to our industrial standards, and they didn't run very long.

JR: In other words, Huel Brown did a demonstration of one of his welders to you and others working for a company?

SM: I'm sorry, say again?

JR: Are you saying that you were among those who saw Huel Brown's product demonstrated when he came to the United States to demonstrate it years ago?

SM: Oh, exactly. I went out and visited with him twice with his products.

JR: Was he in California at the time?

SM: In California. I was introduced to his products, and they actually failed. They only ran for a couple days, and I got a call from a fellow who said that his unit had died and wanted to know if I could repair it. So I looked at it, and I said, oh, my gosh, we have some problems here. And then I went out to see Huel Brown, and I was talking with him. I said, we need to take care of these problems with this unit. Otherwise, the industrial base in America won't accept them. I said, it's a great machine, but it's not done well.

JR: (29:32) It had some quirks.

SM: It was not up to our standards at all. And that's why they were failing. I mean, he didn't supply a warranty. He didn't supply service contracts with them, and he wouldn't supply any information about them. And so they just died.

JR: Well, I know that George Wiseman, who I interviewed last week, I don't know if you caught that program. I think you said you did. He makes the comment that his welders are superior to Huel Brown's. Apparently, Huel blazed the trail for the popular use of these machines, but others have actually improved on the design since then.

SM: Oh, absolutely. Dennis Klein's machines are very nice machines, and they are converted to industrial standards. In fact, that's one of the things that he's been doing is improving the machines, bringing them up to speed. In fact, he showed me different models, and his last model that he showed me was process controlled. So he's using computer processors to monitor and control the operation of the machine. And the wiring and the configuration of parts and the unit itself is just superb. It's a beautiful piece of machinery.

JR: Yeah, and that's seen in the news clip that's viewable on the Internet, right? One of his green units.

SM: Yep. And it is. I mean, it's one thing to see it on the Internet. It's another thing to see it physically, and it was a very nice machine. I was very pleased with what I saw. Because it's that kind of effort that's going to really make the hydrogen industry go. People, and also one of the things that Dennis has done is he does his demonstration like he did on the web, but he also has products that he shows. He makes a little storyboard, and then he takes these pieces that he worked with, and they're very nice, high-quality pieces where he was doing some bed welding with some of the material. And he even had metal pieces that they brought in from the military where they were cutting the hull of the ship, and they were quite thick, you can imagine, for like a submarine. And it cut right through it, he said, showed the edges to it. And in fact, it turns out to be that, let's see, the U.S.

Air Force at the Shepard Air Force Base actually purchased one of those units back in 2006, his 1,500 unit. And then the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg bought two of his units. And I saw some pictures where it looked like he made, I would say, 25 machines that were being produced in a production setting. So he had a little production line going on these machines. Well, good for him. Yeah, I mean, Dennis Klein is really into this. He's really serious about developing this technology. And he introduced me, he had hired a Ph.D. fellow, and he had a Jeep down there that they had, two fellows were taking the motor out of this Jeep that they were going to modify. And then he introduced me to two other fellows that were working on, he had one of these huge buses. I'm not sure of the model of the bus, but it was really huge. And they were working with that, trying to run it off of the hydrogen.

JR: A diesel bus?

SM: Yeah, it's a diesel bus. It's huge. You see these buses like some of the country western stars and drive around?

JR: Yeah, sure.

SM: That's what this is. And he's trying to get that running. And then also he did a lot of work with propane gas. He actually takes hydroxyls, or not the hydroxyls, but his gas, and then mix it with the propane to create a better-looking flame. It turns it into a very nice, bluish flame.

JR: Now, you made a distinction between his gas and hydroxyl. What would the difference be?

SM: Well, it depends on, in my way of looking at things, it depends on what you're looking at and what your understandings are. And what I think is happening is that people are looking at what they're doing, and they look at a segment of it, and then to understand it, they either coin a term for it, trying to explain that particular point of interest. And it's like Santini, for example, that came up with a new species. They were doing a chronograph analysis, and they saw a little blip, and they said, boy, that blip, that's a new species of an element. But the problem was with that is that it's never been reproduced, and the blip could have been caused by several things, but until it's actually reproduced, it doesn't have much merit.

JR: (35:18) So is this where he's referring to these as magnicules? Is that what you're speaking of?

SM: Exactly. Yeah. What does that mean? What is it that... How is he explaining that, you know? And what is its influence? I guess that's the point.

JR: I have some papers that he emailed me.

SM: Okay.

JR: You might be interested in reading them. There are some scientific papers that go into some depth. I haven't really had a chance to look them over.

SM: Oh, I would like to. Yeah. Can you email them?

JR: I can forward that to you.

SM: Yeah, would you? I would be very interested in reading that, because the more I learn about this, I think the more we're going to bring in this hydrogen industry, to build this industry, is to understand it. And the more I know of what other people have been doing, I can put it in perspective.

JR: Well, now, Danny Klein himself has named, I guess, Aquagen, hasn't he?

SM: Yes, he has. That's a trade name, you know.

JR: So it's not necessarily referring to anything different than what we already know. It's just his trade name for it. Is that it?

SM: Exactly. Yeah, you can go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and you can put in a trade name. Because you want a product identification, right? So you coin a name for that and then register it, and then you promote your products with that registered name.

JR: There's something a little bit irksome to me about it. I don't know why. I guess, you know, someone named something Coca-Cola or something. Well, that's fine. It's their formula. But when you break water down into hydrogen oxygen and then you try to put a trademark name on it, it makes it a little bit...

SM: Well, they're trying to do that trademark on what they're doing, you know.

JR: If there's processes indeed special.

SM: Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, how are they handling it? How are they working with it? There's more to just the production, you know. Once you produce it, then how do you use it, you know.

JR: Yeah, or how do you treat it after you've separated it?

SM: Yeah. What are you going to do with it, you know? You've got this marvelous gas of oxygen and hydrogen, and you've got a choice. You can separate the two, or you can leave the two together, or you can adjust different levels, you know, a density of it, and so forth. And as you look at it, you try to say, boy, what are we going to call this thing? And then that's how they coined the terminology. Yeah.

JR: Well, I really shouldn't blame people for wanting to, you know, create a niche for their own, you know, I guess you could say their gas, if they truly have...

SM: Oh, and so their product logo and their image, you know, what they're trying to promote. Yeah. Because I notice he's got, like, hydrogen, but he's got H-sub-2.

JR: Or he uses H-H-O as his, the way he describes it, huh?

SM: Exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of... I've been reading some of the patents, and that's how they describe it. They'll say H-H-O in it, or you can say H-2-O. I mean, how do you want to say it, you know?

JR: Well, apparently they're distinguishing H-H-O from H-2 and O-2. Is that it? They're trying to say that they're maintaining a monatomic atom?

SM: Well, that's a point. You're absolutely right. And that's the key to this whole thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that when you refer to H-2-O, the H-2 is diatomic, but O is not. O is molecular. So, but when you say H-2-O, then what you're referring to is a compound, and the compound consists of two hydrogen and one oxygen molecule. And so, you know, what is he referring to? A compound, which is really, truly what it is. But if he's talking about a gas, that's entirely different. And a gas will not. You can't take two molecular hydrogens and create a gas, because they're not. Molecular hydrogen is not a gas. It's only a gas when they come together and create H-2. Then it is a gas. It's a hydrogen gas.

JR: Well, apparently, people have observed different properties coming out of the different gases that have resulted from different processes of electrolysis or, you know, decomposition.

SM: Oh, I'm sure. You know, a lot of things that people have not done and should do is, for example, when you use an electrolyte, and there's about seven of those products that you use, they refer to as you have hydrogen and oxygen being produced. But you also have all the combinations of that ingredient, which is in that electrolyte. So, if you're, you know, if you're putting potassium hydroxide in there, you're going to get components of those atoms. So, it's not really true what they say. They're just saying, well, I've got hydrogen and oxygen, but what about all these other stuff?

JR: (40:59) Well, what about the dissolved oxygen and nitrogen or whatever from the air?

SM: Well, exactly, your steam coming up, all of a sudden you have steam, so there's another element, and things like that.

JR: And all this affects the usefulness of the gas as a fuel in an internal combustion engine.

SM: Absolutely. I mean, if your gas is a city, and that's been one of the key points here that the auto industry is trying to work with, is that the hydrogen and oxygen is a very active gas, and it attacks everything. And you put it with bronze or brass, brass will soon turn dark. And so, the auto industry, what they've done is, a lot of their component parts is that they actually create a membrane inside the piping system, like coated with plastic or something, so that it's impervious to the corrosiveness of the reactants of the hydrogen and oxygen. And that's one of the things that's been slowing up the process, is that after a while, when they tear the engines down, they see quite a bit of damage to the component parts. And, you know, when you pay $40,000 for a car, it's not too good of a feeling to find out that after 50,000 miles, the parts have been eaten up.

So, you have to look at those kind of things if you want this industry to really go. And it can't be solved. I mean, it's a selection of material, and it's the temperature of the material, it's the pressure of the material, it's how it works with the fuels. And there's this relationship between molecular and diatomic that people aren't paying attention to. A lot of people are not paying attention to that, and that's why they haven't had all the successes that they should have.

JR: Yeah, well, hopefully there can be a bringing together of the facts. And, of course, with so many people going about it differently, you're not going to have any kind of harmonizing, necessarily, of information, because the approach they're using is different, so it may be difficult to...

SM: You should. That's exactly right. When people are trying all these different things, what we need to do is to analyze the good points and the bad points, and then, finally, get enough understanding of these points that we can bring it together in a commonality, so that it can be solved. Well, because one person may see something and the rest of us won't, but if that is understood and people know about it, then what happens is people start thinking about it. And that's why, earlier on in our programs, I mentioned that we have to change our thinking a little bit on what this process is. We have to understand it and then think about how to apply it and then look at the results of that application, and then we can solve it. We can really solve this issue. And the thing that I see in this whole thing is that the goal is there. It will work, in my opinion, from what I see in my studies.

We're going down the right track. We just have to get better at it, and we just have to get more good solutions.

JR: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And there is a cooperative spirit on the part of people all over the world who are, you know, you can really say suffering. We may not be choking as if, you know, the atmosphere is so contaminated that we can't breathe. But we are aware of the harmful effects of what really amounts to centuries-old fuel, you know, fossil fuels, nothing new, you know, a carbon-based fuel. And even, I just read this week that Tesla suggested in the year 1900 that humans should not be using fossil fuels. And he said that's something that has to stop. It is not.

SM: Well, you know, that's kind of early in the game. A good example I can come across with is, for example, is the Freon used in air conditioners. You know, the man invented that in Chicago. He was in wintertime, and he was waiting for a bus. And he was trying to think of why, what happens to the moisture in the wintertime. And he realized that the frost that he was breathing out, when he could see the frost, and he realized the snow was on the ground, boy, it led him to the discovery of Freon. And one thing, when he picked Freon, the nice thing about Freon is it has an absorption rate of 12,000 to 1. And that's what hydrogen is. You know, when Dennis and Hugh Brown and so forth put their fingers on the tip of that gas where it's lit, and they say it's cold, the reason it's cold is that gas is picking up the heat. And when it's converted to a gas, that's when it absorbs all the heat.

So the tip is going to be cold. And that's what happened to the air conditioners when they discovered Freon. He says, boy, I can have a liquid, and I can push it through a little orifice, and when I do that it will convert into a gas, and when it does, I can pull in 12,000 to 1 heat. And then all I have to do is take that gas and push it on the outside and condense it back into a liquid, and it will give up that heat. And so it completes this cycle. Well, that's an important point, and it's the same thing with the hydrogen gas here and the demonstration is, yes, when you touch a tip using that hydrogen torch like Dennis showed and like Hugh Brown showed, it's going to be cold. And that's the reason it is cold, because the gas has the ability to absorb a huge amount of heat. But now hydrogen is a very reactive gas with the oxygen with the product is heating.

And, for example, when it starts to heat metal, the metal breaks down and becomes part of the process. And that's why the temperature goes way up when it's in contact with the metal. You saw Dennis' thing where he heats that brass ball. Well, that is phenomenal, when it heats that brass ball as fast as it did. But you see, the brass became an integral part of the flame.

JR: (48:40) By the way, I'd like to ask you something. Since you were down there, the Fox News video clip shows him in a car, and it makes some claim about four ounces of water and 100 miles. Did you get any explanation as to what that was actually talking about?

SM: Well, I saw the car, and he showed me the car, and I saw what he was doing.

JR: I think it was a small Ford car or something.

SM: Yeah, it's a very small, light car.

JR: So what was he actually doing under the hood of that car? They didn't really go into detail in the news broadcast.

SM: Well, what he did was he put an alternator, a truck alternator, into the car, and he's pushing 260 amps of power into his cell. And his cell arrangement and configuration is virtually like Huell Brown's. It's the bread sandwich affair.

JR: You mean vertical plates or something?

SM: Yeah, vertical plates. And, you know, there's space.

JR: A series-type cell, is it?

SM: I'm sorry, what?

JR: Is it a series-type cell where you're only connected to the two outer plates? That seems to be the...

SM: I think that's what he has. I can't say for sure.

JR: Where there's no electrical connection between the plates, just the electrolyte acting as a conductor.

SM: Yeah, I think there's two amp plates, and then he's relying on the dielectric of the water, I think, to divide the voltage between the different plates.

JR: Yeah.

SM: But he has an alternator, which is 260 amps, and then...

JR: Is he actually pulling such high amps all the time, or is it...?

SM: Yes, he is. It's really a lot of amperage going into that system. And the thing is that you have to look at the alternator to create the wattage out of an alternator. For example, you can... If you measure the current and you measure the voltage, and your voltage is an RMS measurement, right? Root means square. So when you measure the amperage and the voltage, you find out how much power you have. Now, if you generate, let's say, 300 watts of power, let's say 360 watts of power, and you divide that by the 746 watts in a horsepower, you find out that it takes a little bit of horsepower to run that alternator. And some alternators, you can load the maximum output power, and it takes about five horsepower to drive it. So that's what you have to do. You have to pump in five horsepower into that alternator and then get enough power out to drive your cell.

JR: Well, it would seem to me that if he was pumping all those amps into that little cell, I'm assuming it's a little cell, was it a huge arrangement? Was it in the trunk of the car, or was it under the hood, or what?

SM: Actually, when I saw it there, what he did was he had removed the back seat was removed, and the driver's seat was just a single seat, like a captain's chair, and then over on the passenger side on the floor was his cell.

JR: So he did need a lot of space for it.

SM: Yeah.

JR: But you would think that it would be creating a lot of heat with all those amps.

SM: It was. It was. The unit has, it's really a rugged unit, but it's designed so that it has cooling, cooling vents on the outside of it.

JR: Yeah.

SM: And so, yes, it's hot.

JR: So was he then running the vehicle on the output of the cell only, or was he using it as a gasoline, like hydrogen booster?

SM: What he did was he took the gas out of his cell and he ran it to a regulator, and then he introduced the regulated gas into the air intake manifold. And in his case, he went right into the manifold itself. So, and it was kind of a downdraft configuration because his tubing and things that he was using was not very conducive to hydrogen components. The rubber tubing and stuff like that is not really designed for hydrogen, and the clamps and whatnot were not really. So I knew that from just looking at that, there was a reliability issue.

JR: It was experimental, obviously.

SM: Yeah, exactly. You know, I did this, and it does that. And then, now, how much water does it use and how much hydrogen? The really only way you could really tell that, because you can get water vapor, you know, if you get it so hot that you've got vapor going in there also, and you don't have the hydrogen.

JR: (54:05) Yeah, it sounds more like a Stanley steamer.

SM: I don't know about that. But, I mean, you know, obviously he was running a car. In fact, he has a car down there that he indicated that was the first car, the first hydrogen-powered automobile in the U.S. And...

JR: You mean from water? Or you mean a tank hydrogen?

SM: It's a tank hydrogen. In other words, he created the gas and then put it into a tank and then...

JR: Yeah. Well, sometimes people take credit for things. They haven't done enough research to know that they're not the first. True. I don't know who was the first person in the U.S. to run an engine on tank hydrogen, but I know that Roger Billings, you've probably heard of him.

SM: Oh, sure.

JR: Roger Billings was 16 years old when he used a bottle of hydrogen gas to run, I think it was a Model A Ford that he had. And Roger Billings is pushing... He's got to be at least 60-something, if not 70 now. I know he's no young sprout. So you're talking at least, you know, 50 years ago, Roger Billings did that.

SM: Oh, yeah. You know, I go back in your book when we were talking about the wagon where the guy had developed the piston where he exploded and the piston went up and then it came back down and it was kind of jerky and he was trying to move it up the hill, you know. Had he... Had they really realized at that time that the flywheel would have solved his problem?

JR: Yeah, but, you know, he was the first, so...

SM: Oh, yeah. That's what I'm saying.

JR: Yeah, with our hindsight, yeah, we can say he could have done better.

SM: Sure.

JR: And he probably would have loved to have talked to one of us if we could have gone back and related to him what's been done.

SM: Wouldn't it be nice to get a time machine and go back?

JR: Well, I think that the resurrection of the dead will be like that because we'll have an opportunity to say, you know, Mr. DeRivas, and I look forward to that, even, for that matter, your brother, you know.

SM: Oh, exactly. Well, I think we're really on to something, James. I feel it in my bones and I see it and I sense it. I know the work that I'm doing and the work that the other fellows are doing, and I hope we can bring more and more of them into the program so we can listen to their history and to things that they have been doing so that we can learn, and I'd rather not keep making the same mistakes. What I'd like to do is to learn what's been done, what is being done.

JR: The successes rather than the mistakes, huh?

SM: Well, you learn from the mistakes, and if you learn from the mistakes, it means you don't have to make them. And so what happens is the movement starts moving faster and faster, and the successes start to come quicker and quicker. And that's the key point to me is that the more we can learn what people are doing, then we can start grouping, making this thing work together as a collective idea and make it really happen and do it right. Start thinking in the modern, today, automobiles and today's technology, and it's good to understand the history, but let's move it to today.

JR: Make it work in today's machines, huh?

SM: Exactly, exactly.

JR: No, in fact, I'm surprised that in recent months it's become clear to me that the newer cars are perfectly suitable for this fuel. It's not necessary to tweak anything. If you're using the output of an electrolyzer, obviously you've got some other ingredients along with the mix, maybe some vapor and whatnot, but that the modern computers and whatnot in the cars will adjust to, even the timing, supposedly, will adjust itself to optimize for this fuel.

SM: Well, exactly. They're using multi-flex cars now, and they're programming in the computers in the car to handle multi-grade fuels. So if we can come up with a methodology that works and it doesn't change these sensors all that much, the computer doesn't know the difference.

JR: Yeah, when the computer needs to be tweaked is when you're trying to mix hydrogen, oxygen, and gasoline as a booster-type scenario. Then's when the oxygen sensor needs to be tweaked or the MAP sensor or something, the output to adjust so that it doesn't keep dumping more fuel. The injectors don't keep dumping fuel when they see oxygen in the exhaust.

SM: Exactly. But, you know, one of the things I've discovered that I really sense and feel this and I see it is that we have not really been able to produce things real time, and that's what happens to fuel. They have to use a cracking plant to make it, and then they store it, and then we put it in our tanks and we use it. So a car is not a manufacturing process. But one of the things I've noticed here that's got me very excited is that we may not have to produce all of this gas to make it work, and that's exciting to me. I've discovered something that it keeps me awake at night because all of a sudden I realize that we don't have to make all this gas in order to make it work.

JR: (59:46) The volume of gas that an engineer might have you believe is necessary.

SM: Exactly. When I look at the tanks that they're using, 5,000 pounds of pressure, to get the power density into that engine and to get it to go 250 miles until you get another fill-up, I look at that and I ran across something that really excited me, the fact that, wait a minute, we don't have to make all that gas in order to make it work. And that's what I'm working on right now. If that happens, it changes the whole equation, absolutely whole equation.

JR: Yeah, it sure does. And you know what's amazing to me about it is that the same liquid that the fuel is being made from is the very thing that can make that fuel go farther in an engine and actually work in an engine, but in a different form.

SM: Yeah, exactly. Let me give you a little food for thought for everybody out there. Okay, let's take some of the elements that are inside of an engine and let's say, look, why can't we use these elements differently to make things a little bit better in the future?

JR: Let's take an example.

SM: If you take helium, for example, you can take four helium atoms and you can pump it into a carbon. And if you pump it into a carbon, it'll become unstable. And that carbon will split. And when it splits, it's 10,000 to 1. 10,000 to 1. Now let's talk about the next step in this whole process and let's talk about that. Think about that.

JR: I never have.

SM: Yeah.

JR: I wasn't aware of that.

SM: Yeah.

JR: So in other words, you're saying that could be used as a fuel?

SM: Well, of course. We've got everything in the car. We've got everything available right now to put together an incredible new concept, a new concept with far-reaching implications and far-reaching power than we're doing today. That's what I see. That's what I understand. And it'll be amazing.

JR: That's something to look into. Well, our time is up. It's been a very enjoyable discussion. I hope it's been enlightening to our listeners. And you've left us with some food for thought for another program.

SM: And do me a favor. Send me up the e-mail for that book so I can read it about the handbird.

JR: Yeah, I'll do that.

SM: And I've got to look up the one that I knew down in Caldwell, Ohio. There was a blimp that went down there when I was a young lad. And it was the same thing. There were three blimps that went down.

JR: Well, the Hindenburg was just slightly before your time, I think.

SM: Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing on this one. I think there were three of these ships, and one of them went down at Caldwell.

JR: Yeah, interestingly enough, there are a couple of survivors of the Hindenburg. There's an eight-year-old child on board who's now 78. Wow. And there is a young man. He was about 17, I think, who was on the ground crew. So he's now 87 years old.

SM: Wow. What a story.

JR: They were present for the memorial service there in New Jersey this past Sunday evening.

SM: Wow. I've got to read that book.

JR: Yeah, if anyone wants to get a copy of it, it's called The Freedom Element, Living with Hydrogen by Dr. Addison Bain. And like I said, I actually picked up three copies off of Amazon. I thought they were so cheap. They were like $4.85 each. So I went ahead and picked up three copies of it. Perhaps I can just forward it to you as soon as it arrives, one of them.

SM: Oh, super. Great. I'll pay it for them.

JR: Yeah, not a problem. Whatever it is. Okay, well, listen, thanks so much. And I thank everyone else for tuning in, and we'll look forward to having another chat in the future.

SM: I have a lot more information on a fellow up here in Minnesota that I wanted to bring out, too.

JR: That sounds great. We'll look forward to it.

SM: Okay, then. Talk to you later.

JR: Take care.

SM: Bye, everybody. Thank you. Bye.

JR: Join us next week. Thanks again. Bye. Bye.