Stephen Meyer Interview Part 6 (6-8-2007)

Stephen Meyer Interview Part 6 (6-8-2007)

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 a June 8th segment of the Kentucky Water Fuel Museum webcast. With us tonight is a long-time guest, Stephen Meyer. Stephen, you're there.

SM: Yes, I'm here.

JR: Welcome to the show.

SM: Thank you very much.

JR: Well, we've had several weeks past since we last chatted on air, and there are some interesting things to discuss. How have you been, by the way?

SM: Great. I'm having an exciting time. I really enjoyed the book that you sent me, The Freedom of Element, Living with Hydrogen. I devoured that book in about three hours and went back over it again just so I could make sure I understood it. It was really fascinating. They did a fabulous job on it.

JR: It really is a fascinating book, and I know Mr. Bain apologizes for talking about himself so much along the way because his personal life story is woven throughout the book. But personally, I think that's what makes it interesting.

SM: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you've got to talk about yourself a little bit because a lot of people don't know about you, you know, the things you've done privately and only a few things that they know about you publicly. And this book is a good example of where he's gained a lot of experience, and he's trying to show people how safe hydrogen is and what really happened to that event with the Hindenburg. And, you know, that brought me back when we were first talking about that was that I was lucky to marry my high school sweetheart, Donna, and her dad and her dad and her mom, when I was going through the courtship. They invited me to go with them down to Caldwell, Ohio to see Donna's uncle who lived there and Wade. And it was during that visit where they were introducing me to the family where Wade asked me to help me move some things out of his basement.

And he was quite up in age at the time, and that's where I bumped into some of his artifacts with the Hindenburg. And I saw this newspaper and article, and he started telling me about it. And he brought out some of these components and pieces of it, and that's why I thought at the time that it occurred in Caldwell, Ohio. But what really happened, because I went back and talked to my wife, my ex-wife, and she said that he was there and he picked up some of these artifacts. And one of the things that I noticed when I was looking at them, it's Stan and I were really heavy into building model airplanes. And they didn't have real good model airplane kits back in those days. A lot of the airplanes were just you built them, you carved them out of bustlewood and so forth, but the kits were starting to come out.

And I noticed that when I was looking at some of those artifacts that he handed me, he said, this is part of the skin. And I looked at it, and I said, wow, it's soft and pliable. And on these model kits that they were bringing out, they had this, it was kind of a paper, real thin paper that you could glue onto the wings, and you could glue it on when it was wet, and then you took a hairdryer, and you warmed up the paper. And as it did, it, with all the wrinkles that were in the paper, would cease to be there, and it would be real taunt, like a banjo. And we used what they called dope, it was like a banana oil paint that we would paint, and it was really pretty pungent stuff. And we would paint our model airplanes with it, but it was very flammable. And that's what I remember seeing this material, that it looked like it was painted with some sort of a dope.

And here it turned out to be that oxide and that rocket fuel that they had used. And it's really a small world, because I don't know what happened to those artifacts that Wade had. I know he passed away several years after that, and it must have been, you know, given to his family. But he was right close to Kentucky, so I was amazed at reading the book. And I just wonder, you know, if some of that stuff might have, you know, gotten into the Smithsonian Institute, or maybe some of those other people that were trying to do research on it, you know.

JR: Well, these days, if anyone has any kind of artifacts at all, they usually end up on eBay.

SM: Well, yeah, if you had an original piece like that, oh, that would be just awesome, you know. Well, but I think he's gone a long way in this book to explain to the reader that hydrogen is not as dangerous as they portrayed. And, of course, the news media, they're, you know, I don't think they purposely, but they, you know, if it doesn't have some excitement to the story, nobody will pay attention to it. So, and then I'm not so sure they could analyze it at the time it was happening. So, I think that's why a lot of people saw the movies and saw the articles. And then you can imagine the news flashback in those days of coming over radio. They were very descriptive on the radios. When we were kids, we used to listen. Stan and I used to listen to the radio because that was the major communication. We didn't have television. So, they're descriptive.

They would describe, and what they do is paint a picture of the event. And they would use words and phraseology that would really get that across. And so, I can imagine when that news flash came across about the Hindenburg and the events that occurred. I was shocked in the book to find out that from the time that started to the time it was down on the ground, it was only about 52 seconds. Because that, shoot, that blip was 12 stories high and three football fields long. And for all that to occur in 52 seconds, that is amazing.

JR: (6:14) It wasn't as destructive a disaster as people would have thought. In other words, there were many survivors, and apparently many of those who died died from jumping.

SM: Oh, yeah. There was one guy that he jumped and then he ran, but I think he got disorientated. And so, instead of running to safety, he actually made a turn and went right back into it and fell on top of him.

JR: Well, here's what I'm wondering. There's apparently increasing evidence that our jet travel, convenient though it may be, is causing extensive damage to the atmosphere because of the placement of the exhaust right into the upper atmosphere at 35,000 feet or whatever it is.

SM: Oh, it does. It does. When the engines get up, when a plane is cruising at 35,000 feet, there's not much oxygen in relative terms as it would be down in the troposphere closer to the Earth. And so the planes are going faster and the air is being processed, the thin air is being processed. And so when you look at the percentage of dilution, if you will, or the percentage of the fuel as compared to the oxygen, it's quite heavy. And a lot of the exhaust from planes and things, when they're down in the troposphere, the troposphere is the area that's closest to the Earth, and that's where all the storms are. And, of course, the planes, they like to fly above it. But if you're flying in the troposphere, the rain brings all those products, a lot of those products, back to Earth. And when you get into the ionosphere, it stays up there.

And then the other thing that occurs is that the solar wind particles, which are the protons, are hitting and colliding with the Earth in the ionosphere, and they're bumping into those particulates. And there's a reaction, and so, you know, Al Gore, when he made his presentation, it's an inconvenient truth. He showed what happened when, during the 9-11 attack, it was unprecedented for the United States to order all of the planes in the air to land. And when they did, it took them about three hours to get all the planes on the ground. But the scientists noticed that there was a spike in the temperature of the Earth. So they went back and they looked at what the contributions of the planes was during that time, and it was substantial. I mean, to ground all the planes and then see a blip in the temperature, that's amazing to me.

JR: It is interesting. Very interesting. Well, what I was getting at is that if our jet travel is contributing to the degradation of our atmosphere in such a disproportionate way to ground fossil fuel usage, because of the placement of the exhaust up there in the, you're calling it the ionosphere?

SM: The ionosphere, yeah, there's five layers to the Earth's atmosphere. As I mentioned, the lowest is the troposphere, and then you, boy, I've got to remember. The ionosphere is up towards the top layer.

JR: Okay. Well, the point that I was trying to get at is this, and I don't think that Addison Bain went to this extent in suggesting that we should switch to blimp or, you know, airship travel, but he emphasized that airships could be beneficially used for things like putting out fires and hauling heavy construction materials up to mountaintops and things like that. And I would suggest that perhaps the airship travel, which apparently became very popular in the 19th century, there were a bunch of blimps flying around. They didn't look like the Goodyear blimp or the Hindenburg, but in the 18, around the 1870s, apparently there was a big upsurge in Europe in the number of these aircraft. And to think that it was a very Earth-friendly way of getting around.

SM: Well, you know, they started air travel, you know, lighter than air was the balloons over in France and Germany. They were the ones that even, I even believe some of the Chinese had created hot air. They would make a great big balloon, essentially, and build a fire and capture the heat from the fire. And then they were using those balloons to get around, and that was a state-of-the-art back in those days. These crafts were lighter than air, and they had a lot of problems with them, being that they were hard to steer. You were subject to the air currents, and they pushed you around. Now, you did have a buoyancy capabilities where you could raise the balloon higher in the atmosphere or lower by casting off counterbalance weights.

JR: (11:41) And thus benefit from the different currents.

SM: Exactly. The air currents would push you around, and it was good travel. But it was tough because a lot of them, you couldn't pick your spot to land and things like that, and a lot of people got killed with them. But it was a sport, and it was new aviation, and so they took it as far as they could. And even today, I can't remember the fellow that broke the world's record around the Earth with the balloon at the moment, but he was the same fellow that went for the XPRIZE for the plane that went into space. He did a good job. So I used modern technology and GPS and so forth, and he was able to steer and command that module to go around the planet. And I took my hat off to him because it was a fabulous feat, nonstop, by the way.

JR: Well, you know what came to me this week? If someone is concerned about the safety of airship travel as a means of getting around, what about using one as an energy-producing system? In other words, you could lift heavy things such as water. It wouldn't have to travel horizontally. It could strictly be a vertical movement from the ocean or a lake or even groundwater that's in the ground could be hoisted up high enough to where, as it falls, it could be used to generate electricity or something. And you've not had to expend the energy, you know, to pump it up there. You know what I'm saying?

SM: Well, they, I don't know, you know, they used the waterfalls and used the dams, you know, the Hoover Dam and the large dams around the world, like Niagara Falls, for example. That was an incredible feat to build systems that would turn generators. In fact, it's kind of interesting that Minneapolis, Minnesota was the first pilot site for hydroelectric. Right downtown here between Minneapolis and St. Paul, there's St. Anthony's Falls. And when they came up with the concept of developing the hydroelectric, the actual prototype site was here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And they had, they built this site and what they did was they had drilled these tunnels, if you will. They were vertical tunnels and the waterfall from St. Anthony's Falls would fall down these tunnels and at the bottom of it they put in these turbines.

And what happened was Minneapolis, Minnesota was, is in the grain belt and they had built these huge grain elevators and Goldflower was, Pillsbury and Goldflower was a very, very good industry up here in the flour mills. And they used that falling water to not only turn the turbines, which in turn would mechanically couple the energy into these plants so they could grind the flour. So they had an idea, so why don't we try this new concept on generating power? And so they built this prototype building and they put in these two generators. If anybody comes to Minneapolis, Minnesota, they can go down and take a look at them. And they generated electrical power and they wired it up to the local community. And then everybody got to see these light bulbs and lit up at night.

JR: So this is way back when.

SM: Yeah. And then what happened was it ran for about a year. And then from that they went back and started the whole program of building dams and hydroelectric power.

JR: Isn't that interesting?

SM: Yeah, from that model. And it's interesting to see the generators and stuff because they're, you know, they're the real old, but they're high tech.

JR: Yeah, reading Addison's book made me think of the possibility of using the lifting power of hydrogen because he mentioned that extremely heavy things that cannot be transported by helicopter to some of these, you know, projects that are being done, dams and bridges and so on in the mountain areas, that an airship could be used beneficially to lift such things.

SM: Oh, sure.

JR: As well as putting out forest fires. Exactly.

SM: Now, at first, I wonder a little bit about the forest fires because the blips are so big and they're controlled by air currents that one of the disadvantages about forest fires are is that the wind that's feeding that fire is very turbulent and very violent. And so I don't know if you could really control an airship like that during that event. It would be pretty tough. And they have a tough enough time with these great big cargo planes that they fill up. And they're just modifying a new 747. I say new. It's new for putting out forest fires because they put this chemical in the plane and then fly it over the fire and then discharge it so that it smothers the fire. And they're having a difficult time because that plane is so big that it's being affected by the air currents.

JR: (17:17) Yeah, and especially with the so-called Hindenburg mentality, the last thing you'd want is to have a hydrogen airship above a fire.

SM: Well, yeah, the last thing you'd want is to be bobbing up there trying to control it, and I think it would be pretty tough. That was very interesting in the book that he was talking about the Hindenburg and what caused the fire was the fact that the exhaust of the engine was one of the main culprits of that because I was of surprise that they modified the engine. They originally had the propellers in the back where it pushed the blimp, and then they discovered that they could put the propellers in the front, and what they did was they used the exhaust and they captured the water, and they brought that water back into the airship, and they used it for drinking, but that was the ballast.

So Hindenburg was working just like a submarine does, and so they would collect this water as they were flying along, and then the weight of the water would be the ballast, so whenever they wanted to land or change its altitude, they would either jettison the water or add water to it. And it was really kind of neat. And they determined that the fire, one of the engines, they were studying the exhaust out of the engine, and they were trying to see how far the temperature of the exhaust was away from the back of the engine, and that's where in the book they brought out that the fire actually started in the tail section of the blimp, and that's the reason why it started from the engine itself, the exhaust from the engine.

And they were coming in for a landing, and there was a shift in the air, so they had to rev up the engine to counter-react the shift in the air, and it just turned out to be that the exhaust went across the back tail section of the blimp, and that's where it caught on fire.

JR: Very interesting.

SM: He did a fabulous job in this book. I take my hat off to him because that's a lot of research. And he even shows a model of it that he made a picture, had a picture in his book that showed him where he was making the model, a model of the back tail section, which is where the fire started. And then his recording of where people were at what time and what was happening was fabulous.

JR: Yeah, quite a job, and it is a very interesting read. He's got a lot of little nuggets of information about the way the space program and the, I guess you'd say, the military-industrial complex, the way the whole thing functions, and really how much of what happens is by accident. You know, there was a lot of coincidences that resulted in the forward movement of the space program and his research about the Hindenburg. A lot of interesting little nuggets.

SM: Oh, absolutely. You know, the next, they're working right now on the hypersonic aircraft. It's been on the drawing boards and being produced for about 10 years. And it's using hydrogen. And the technology is that they've known quite a bit about the ramjets in the past. And now the Star Wars, the strategic defense system where we actually detect a flying missile and then we try to shoot it down, those are all being controlled and powered by these ramjet engines. And they can go from zero up to 5,000 miles an hour in a very short period of time. And the new hypersonic aircraft they're designing to take the place of the space shuttle is one that it'll take off from an airport and actually gain altitude and reach the 5,000 miles an hour to leave Earth's atmosphere. And then the idea is that it'll come back in and glide like an airplane to land. And so they're using slush hydrogen to do that.

And it's an interesting technology because, see, a jet airplane has its limitations. If you plot the forward movement of an airplane and then you plot it against the elevation that it can go, you'll find that as you go up in an altitude, the plane will go faster and faster and faster to a certain point. And then as you keep going in an altitude, the air gets thinner and thinner and the plane starts slowing down. So there's an optimum point of speed for an airplane. It can't be flying too low and it can't be flying too high to maintain that maximum speed. And so what happens is the jet engine actually limits the forward motion of the airplane because it's trying to compress the air. Air comes into the jet, it's being rammed into the jet at the high speeds. But the problem is that the blades in the jet actually slow it down.

The blades become a brake, an air brake, rather than compressing it and creating the forward speed. So the plane becomes limited by the jet engine. So what they did was they looked at it again and they came up with a ramjet design again because as you go faster and faster, all you need to do is to duck the air through the plane and add your heat to it and you can obtain tremendous speeds. And so the ducked air doesn't put on these air brakes like a regular jet engine does. So we're going to see very shortly that this hypersonic aircraft uses slush hydrogen. And why they like slush hydrogen, it burns so fast that they can use it at these supersonic speeds.

JR: (23:40) And what is it you're referring to as slush hydrogen?

SM: Slush hydrogen is actually they take hydrogen and they cool it. You know, you can take any element like hydrogen and you can make it a gases or you can make it a solid or you can make it a liquid. And we see most of it in a liquid form or a gases form. Most people think of hydrogen being in the gases form, but actually you can cool it down and it will start to get into the liquid area. And so they refer to that as it gets cooled down as a slush hydrogen.

JR: Oh, okay. So it's not that it's half frozen, but just liquid.

SM: Yeah, it's a liquid that is cooling and cooling and cooling. Now, the nice thing about this whole thing is as you get higher in space, you see, when you go from the troposphere, the next layer on the Earth is a tropopause. A tropopause is about minus 68 degrees F, and it's that temperature all the time, relative speaking. But then as you go higher and you get towards space, if you're on the dark side of the planet, it's pretty cold. And if you're on the sunny side of the planet, it's not as cold, but it's cold. And so what happens is the higher you go, the colder it gets, the hydrogen goes more and more into the slush. And when they do, they get more power density, so they get more push. So it's a tremendous improvement in the space travel with this new technique using slush hydrogen.

JR: Yeah. Well, what I'm wondering is what we can do to improve our air travel in the short term, not having to wait for some long-term solution to our jet travel pollution problem. I'm wondering, is it possible, for instance, to convert our current aircraft to burn hydrogen? Well, I know the Russians did this a number of years ago, but I don't know that there's been any move toward eliminating the fossil fuels in jet aircraft.

SM: Well, what they've been doing is, you look at it two different ways. It's like the small lorry automobiles. You have these little trucks they call lorries, and you can put a couple suitcases in them and transport them, but then you have to make 25 trips to get something from A to B. Well, you build a bigger truck, and you can move more in that truck from A to B, and if you look at the consumption aspects of things, it's less consumption because you have a bigger truck and you're only making the trip one time and possibly coming back. Well, you'll notice that the airplanes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger because the passenger seat mile in a large aircraft, the consumption of the fuel is so much less. An aircraft, when it goes through the air, it has the friction of the air, but in comparison, it's sliding on ice.

An automobile, for example, has a huge amount of friction from the tires, but if you have a plane design where it goes through the atmosphere with very little resistance, what they call drag, then it doesn't take so much to push it, and that's what they're looking at to go from continent to continent now is these bigger, bigger airplanes so that, you know, it's unreal if we would go to our forefathers and say, look, we're going to fly 500 people from New York to Europe in one aircraft, they would say to you, no way, and that's a huge aircraft. So that's how they're doing it. And then the engines themselves, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney have done a very nice job on improving the performance of the jet engines. And just a couple of years ago, they announced that they got a 40% increase improvement in the efficiency of the jet engines.

So they're doing everything they can to not burn up as much fossil fuels because it's so expensive. And now they're looking at other alternatives, which I think eventually the large aircrafts will start looking at some of the slush hydrogen.

JR: Yeah. Well, you know that I had an interview with Dr. Bain. You did? We did a show last week, I suppose it was, two weeks ago. Fabulous. Is it on the air? Yeah, it's in the archives on blog talk. Oh, okay. One of the things he mentioned, he said he couldn't really talk about it because he's, I guess he's under a nondisclosure with a company that's doing something along this line, but it had to do with airships and hydrogen.

SM: Really? Yeah. Well, I can imagine because it's, you know, it's the wave of the future. You know, they've got to, the fossil fuel process has done quite well for us. For, you know, 150 years or so, it's done quite well for us. But we have to look in the future. And hydrogen is it. You know, the next time you pick up a Coke, I want you to think about this for a minute. Now, pick up a Coke and have, you have an aluminum can, and when you pop open that Coke and you drink that Coke, I want you to think about that aluminum that's in your hand. And this aluminum is fabulous, fabulous amount of hydrogen. And it's very interesting. I mentioned before a couple of the other shows that when we're dealing with the water technology, it's a barrier technology. And so let me give you an example of this, about this aluminum. It's very interesting.

You know, aluminum is, when it's made by an arc furnace, you can only make, you take bauxite and you do some little bit of processing.

JR: (29:42) It takes a lot of electricity.

SM: Well, it takes a good amount of electricity, but then you make the aluminum. And the nice thing about it is aluminum doesn't rust. And it seems to be impervious to a lot of the atmosphere, you know. But what happens to aluminum is that it forms an oxide on its layer, on the surface where the air comes in contact with it. Why? It forms an oxide. And so aluminum is very, if you look at it as far as metal goes, it's very pliable and machinable, and you can form it. It's very interesting. But now let's take a little concept here, and I mentioned before, we have to change our thinking a little bit about what's happening and how we can solve this problem. And it turns out to be that aluminum is very interesting because when it forms this oxide, it's a barrier between the atmosphere and the atoms within the aluminum.

Now, if you could take that oxide away from the aluminum, then it would release, using water, it would release all of its hydrogen. And what happens is that you can take gallium, and you can take about a kilogram of gallium.

JR: Okay, and this is something that came out in the news this week, isn't it?

SM: Yeah, exactly. Okay, go ahead. But I'm trying to make the point is that he took Woodo from Duke University. What he did was he took chunks of aluminum, which was about a gram apiece, so he put about 12 chunks of aluminum in this gallium. Now, the gallium was being stirred and heated to about 100 degrees, and then as he was stirring it, well, the aluminum melted in the gallium just like an ice cube would melt in a glass of water. Okay, now, when it melted, what he was doing is there's three phases to every element. There's a solid, there's a liquid, and there's a gas. So the aluminum was a solid and the gallium was a liquid, but when it melted into the gallium, now it had one phase, which was liquid. But what happens is the gallium would remove the oxide coating from the aluminum. Now, the aluminum in the gallium oxide, the atoms are exposed.

As soon as you pour water into the beaker, he had a Pyrex beaker that could handle higher temperatures, and then he, as soon as he poured water in it, he had all of the water converted to the hydrogen instantaneously. Instantaneous conversion. Why? Because the oxide was removed. It exposed the electrons of the atoms to the water molecule, and the water molecule says, gee, I like those electrons, and so it split, decomposed the water. And then what happened was the oxygen within the water went to form the aluminum oxide, which turned out to be a frost, and it turned into a solid. And then the gallium was still there. It's completely inert, and it doesn't do anything to the process, but it acts as a catalyst. And it released those huge amounts of hydrogen instantaneous.

So here, he looked at it, and he said, wait a minute, you know, you can take, in his experiment, you can take two and a half pounds of aluminum, and you can convert it into 30 liters of hydrogen. And the reaction is instantaneous. So you see, it's a barrier technology here that is very important to get these catalysts. So there's a good example of what the future is, of how we can generate hydrogen. Now, the good thing about what he did was that engineering today is very important, because once you produce a product that you want, you have to understand what you're going to do with the waste of that product. You just can't throw it on the ground. So it turns out to be that he can take that froth, which was white in color, and you could dry it, and it's crusty and hard as a solid.

He can ship that back to, say, a COA plant, for example, that's close to a nuclear reactor, that they can put it in the arc furnace, and they can resupply the electrons and convert it back into aluminum. So it turns out to be that the aluminum, there is plenty of aluminum on this planet. In fact, the United States is using about 50 trillion watts of power for the whole United States, and aluminum could supply almost five times that amount easily. So here's where science, they say that there's nothing new under the sun. That may be true, but here's a different technique. There's a different way of looking at it, and the same thing is with water. It's a different way to look at it. And to me, the water is the way to go because of the fact that it's very, very abundant, and it returns back to its energy state very easily.

Once you use a hydrogen and it goes back in the water, all it has to do is be charged by the sun, and it's back up.

JR: (35:29) Yeah, exactly.

SM: It gets its energy back up.

JR: Well, in getting back to Dr. Bain, he mentioned in the interview with me that he works for the Department of Energy now.

SM: Really? Well, I would imagine.

JR: Since he retired at NASA, he's a major player in the Department of Energy's hydrogen research department.

SM: Wow. Well, you know, that's really a feather in their hat because they have done a lot of projects that really haven't been defined well, and a lot of them haven't worked the way they thought it would. And, of course, I think he's going to be very instrumental, if you will, excuse me, on how to apply hydrogen and how to use it. Because in his book, he brought out a very good point where he was talking about the tanks where you store the hydrogen, and he was talking about the control valves on these vessels, the size of them. And he realized that, you know, if you had a hydrogen bottle that was full of hydrogen, and you had a valve in there, and that valve would get broken off, the hydrogen would exit that bottle very, very fast. And because it's moving so very fast through a very small orifice, if you will, the metal actually catches on fire.

JR: Wow.

SM: And so one of his inputs was, wait a minute, you've got to have a certain size orifice where that doesn't happen. And then they did research and found a metal that actually does not catch fire. And so every hydrogen bottle that you're going to see from now in the future is going to have this particular metal on the valving to keep it from catching fire. And people don't realize that just the velocity of that hydrogen past a metal could cause it to catch on fire.

JR: Very interesting.

SM: And this aluminum that I was talking about, where you remove this oxide, the British down in, when they had the Balkans War, it was down in Argentina. There was an island, and there was a dispute, and they had a war. And Argentina, I think, shot a French missile at it, and they sank it. And they were shocked about that, because it was one of their most modernistic boat it was. And what happened was, they had aluminum on it, and when the missile heated the aluminum, and when it got hit with salt water, that's what happened. It released its hydrogen, and it just burned. And it shocked everybody. So it's amazing.

JR: Well, Mr. Bain, Dr. Bain, has a hydrogen production unit at his home. Yeah, I saw that in the book. That was kind of neat. Ha, ha! And he's running a Ford Crown Victoria. It's actually a dual-fuel vehicle. It has both regular gasoline and a hydrogen tank on board also, that he's able to fill from his own electrolyzer, making his own hydrogen from solar panels, I believe. Well, I mentioned the possibility of producing hydrogen on demand from water under the hood, on board. And he was unacquainted with the concept. Now, here we are in 2007, and Dr. Bain is working for the U.S. Department of Energy. How long ago was it that your brother demonstrated a dune buggy running on hydrogen made on board from water?

SM: Well, he did his work back in 1973. You know, that was one of the most astounding things that there was, you know.

JR: Well, the news media release was actually in 1984. But, yeah, he started that.

SM: Well, I think, you know, his actual work that he actually started, you know, when he started this thing, I was down at his house one day, and he had this little thing in his hand. It was really small. And he says, this thing produces hydrogen from water. And I said, well, okay. And so he started to show me, and he had a little coffee cup, and he put this thing in there, and he put his electrodes in it, and they had these little bubbles coming out. He said, well, that's hydrogen. And I said, I don't know, Stan. It looked like bubbles, you know, when you put carbonation in your drink, you know. And you pop it open, you get a little fizz, and you have some bubbles on it. And so it took him three years to convince me that that's what he was doing. I was just looking at it. I marveled at that. And the first thing he ever ran was a 12-horsepower lawn engine.

He got an engine, and they put it together, and he ran it, and everybody said, wow, that was pretty interesting. But he didn't know at that time anything really what was going on, you know. He just said, I just look at this, you know. And then from that, he kept working and working and working with it, and he kept moving from smaller to bigger and to bigger, and finally got to his car, you know. And that was his highlight, he was driving that car and getting it to run. And I've got movies of him where the first time he ran the car on his cell, and I'll tell you, it was really exciting. His wife, Marilyn, was taking a picture. Stan was running a car, and a guy named Charlie Holbrook was there, and he had his dune buggy, and on the back of the dune buggy, he had a great big vessel, which was a gas tank at the time.

And then so Stan took his apparatuses out of the lab, and it was still wired to the house power because he wasn't sure anything about the engine itself. But he said, well, I'm just going to power myself and get the hydrogen going, and then I'm going to start this car. And so he did. They started up, and it just sat there and idled. And I'll tell you, he was so excited. He had his watch on, and the more they put their hands down and felt the exhaust, and then he would try to smell a little bit and see if there was kind of different odors coming out of it. And they were, he just, he was beside himself because it was running so well. And in a movie, he would say, ladies and gentlemen, he says, if you think this car isn't running off of water, and he points to the tank, and he said, this car has been running for over 12 minutes, 15 minutes off of this hydrogen.

He said, if there was any gas within that carburetor, it was long gone. And so he kept running, and then he came back. It took him a long time to figure out the right ratios to get it to work. I mean, it wasn't like he went out and did it and it took off right away. It took him years to figure it out. But then he got to the point that he could repeat it, and that was the exciting part. You know, and this video I got of him, I don't know if you've got a video of it or not.

JR: (43:12) It's not one that's viewable online?

SM: It's probably a copy to a copy to a copy, huh?

JR: Is it something that's already viewable online, though?

SM: Oh, no. A lot of different videos. Oh, no. Oh, no. This video is, this is a video, a family video.

JR: Oh, so it's never been seen.

SM: I don't believe it ever has.

JR: Yeah, well, we'll have to get a copy of that. That should be something that the public would be very interested in. But, in fact, I'll tell you the truth. The interviews that we have done together are of more interest to the public than anything else that I've done, because on this blog talk radio, the person who's running the show can see how many people have listened to the archived shows.

SM: Yeah.

JR: The numbers are there. They're not there for the public to view, but the person who's running the show has access to those numbers.

SM: Well, I'd like for you to have a show or send me someone else.

JR: Yeah.

SM: I've been getting some calls from all over the world. I got a call the other day from Finland, I think it was, or Norway, from Norway, and then a couple from England.

JR: Well, people are interested in, especially, and again, this is no disrespect to Dr. Bain, but here you've got a guy who served as the chairman of the Department of Energy's hydrogen program. They meet twice a year in Washington, D.C. and discuss what projects they're going to fund. He said the budget originally was like $100,000, and now it's in the millions. And when I mentioned the concept of running a vehicle on water that's produced on board, he was totally unaware of and disbelieving of the possibility. And yet, this...

SM: Well, I think they do. I mean, you know, this concept that I was talking about, the aluminum, where Dr. Woodall, you know, he discovered it back in 1967. He was working with IBM.

JR: And with regard to gallium.

SM: Well, yeah, what happened was that in 1967, you know, integrated circuits, transistors came in in 1950 and 55, and commercially they were available in the 60s and 65. Transistors were just coming out. And then they decided that transistors are really bulky. So, they were studying the substrates and realized that they could make these, dope the substrates into transistor junctions. Like I say, it's a barrier technology. And in order to make the wire connections on the substrates, they used aluminum because gold is too expensive. And two, nobody really knew how to overlay gold onto a substrate and keep it to stick, make it stick. So, they used aluminum for their tracing. Well, aluminum is not quite as a good conductor as gold is, but they were making the transistors smaller and the wiring connectors shorter so they could make the integrated circuits much faster.

Well, he was working with the substrates and using some of this aluminum. And they used gallium in the process of making transistors. When they dope transistors, that's the interesting thing about it. You can take germanium and silicon and what you do is you dope it. And what they're doing is they're making it impure. They're taking something that's very pure and adding atoms where it makes it impure at a certain percentage, a very small percentage, so they make that material a semiconductor. And so what happened was that he was cleaning up some material and there was a bowl and he wanted to wash it out and he put it down underneath the sink and it had this huge outgassing and it shocked him. He said, it scared him to death. What the hell was this reaction?

So he went back in his office and it took him a period of time, maybe a week or a couple of years, whatever it was, to figure out what the world happened. And so, but at that time, you know, a lot of times things happen like that. There has to be a period of time where you think about it and it's more of a lab curiosity and they don't know what to really do about it. But then eventually he started thinking about it and then they got some funding and then he started to replicate and understand what he was doing and then he came up with this process where it releases all that hydrogen.

JR: You're saying that the recent news media attention to this, I think it was Purdue University.

SM: Yeah, exactly.

JR: And you're saying it actually began years ago at Duke University.

SM: (48:14) No, it started in IBM in 1967.

JR: Okay. So here we are 40 years later.

SM: Yeah, exactly. Wow. It takes 20 years or 25 or 30 years in order to take a laboratory curiosity to...

JR: Turn it into something.

SM: And it's the same thing that's happened to Stan. And all Stan says, man, look what I got. And everybody kind of says, you know, some of them were interested and some weren't and others didn't pay attention. And here it is all this time from 1973 to, well, to today where people are starting to realize that, hey, maybe there's something here.

JR: Yeah. Well, I do have to say this. Of everyone who's been involved in water fuel technology, your brother is probably the most well-known. I mean, you mentioned Dad Garrett in 1934 and people scratched their heads and they don't know. But people who've been paying attention will say, oh, Stanley Meyer, of course. So he did a good job in getting, you know, mustering some publicity for the technology. But, in fact, here's something very interesting. I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but there is a website. It's called h2earth.org.

SM: It's called what?

JR: H2, the letter H, the number two, and then earth.org.

SM: R-T-H dot O-R-G?

JR: H2, E-A-R-T-H dot O-R-G.

SM: Okay.

JR: And they actually have a countdown, and I'm looking at it right now. It says the countdown is 18 days, 21 hours, 10 minutes, and 0 seconds to when your brother's patent, number 4,936,961, is going to go public domain.

SM: Okay.

JR: You can believe that.

SM: Well, I believe it.

JR: And up above, it says, countdown to the 2007 first annual water-free celebration. So apparently, it says, this is when Myers expires. I don't know if you want to talk to me, yes.

SM: Well, he's already expired. Well, they're talking about his patent. They're saying, well, that's what patents are for. Patents are disclosures. And they, if you get a patent, you have exclusive rights to use your work for a given period of time. And then for that exclusive use, you will, after a period of time, it will become public domain. And then the, but what really happens is that the rate of knowledge is increasing as a square root, or as a square. And so for 20 years in today's technology, it goes far beyond it. I mean, our understanding today is far beyond what Stan has done in some respects. But then again, a lot of things that were understood that he understood that people are starting just now to catch on a little bit about what it was that he was trying to show and do. And so after the patent, it lapsed, people use it.

And that's what happens to, like, the automobile industry and stuff. You see a lot of the technology that these inventors have developed show up on the cars as time goes on. And the unfortunate thing is that the guy that does all the pioneering work and so forth really doesn't reap much of the benefits.

JR: No, if there's one thing I've learned in following this technology over the last couple of years, it's that inventors are some of the most abused people in society. For all the benefits that they bring to society by their hard work and their, you know, ingenuity, they do not get the kind of payback that is, you know, should be commensurate with their effort.

SM: Yeah, it's like teachers, you know, if you go over to Europe, like in Japan and whatnot, if you look at their dollars and so forth at the end, so to speak, you'll notice that a lot of people on their money as teachers, they hold the professors at high esteem, where in the United States, that's not so. You know, you very rarely are the professors held at high esteem. You know, it's like what you're saying is they understand their contributions and so forth, but they're not well received in a lot of areas. You know, you say you're a teacher and I say, well, that's fine. But it's the teachers that are very, have a very important position because they're the ones that are training our kids. And their job is fabulous. I mean, if technology is at the speed of squaring, the teachers have to stay in tune to the progress of today.

JR: (53:32) Well, that's a major problem in academia now is that the teachers aren't aware of what's being done in people's garages and they're denying it.

SM: Well, yeah, I agree with that. You know, a lot of times I talked to, like, the state of Minnesota and went up there and talked to one of the inventors. It was really very exciting. I mean, he finally got to take the idea of he can create hydrogen real time by using these reformers. And he finally got the concept of between molecular and gases. And they finally figured it out. And so he had some success at it. And I thought, I went over and talked to him a little bit, I said, I really was impressed because he's the only one that I have found that tied that together the way he did. And he had a nice success at it. So a lot of these reformers now are real-time processing. They're looking for real-time processing. But still, again, what's happening is, right now, because of things going on, everything still seems to be tied in with carbon. They're doing everything.

We have a coke processing plant down here that converts oil into gasoline. They built a plant right next to it, a pilot plant. Believe it or not, they take natural gas, and they strip the hydrogen from the natural gas, and they ship it over across the road to the coke plant so they can produce oil to couple it back in with carbon. And so what's happening is all these solutions are still strapped to carbon.

JR: Well, and I think it has to do with the fact that in order to justify a price, you know, charge the public for it, you have to do something, and you cannot do that with rain falling from the sky or someone going down to a river or an ocean and scooping up a bucket of water. If the average person can access the raw material to produce energy from for free, then you can't sell it to them, you know?

SM: Yeah, but see, they really figured that out a long time ago. When Stan was shown his vehicle, what the state of Ohio did at the time was that everybody that renews their driver's license plates for their car has to put on a form how many miles, what the mileage was when they started that year and what the mileage was at the end of the year. And the whole purpose of that was that if you developed a vehicle that could drive on alternative fuels, their tax space would still be there because they would charge you on the miles driven.

JR: There has to be a way to continue the supplying of tax dollars for highway maintenance or whatever it's used for on the part of people who do not buy fossil fuel. That's obvious.

SM: Exactly. And so they've implemented that, and so they're set so that if people start driving alternative vehicles, they can still get the tax space. And even the guys on the hybrid electric cars that plug them into the electricity now on the grid, that'll kick in. You know, they're giving them an incentive to go that way, and then when they go to pick up their license plates the next year, they'll find out how much it's going to cost them.

JR: Yeah, basically. And you know something? The average person does not object to that. I've talked to a lot of people, and I've asked them point blank if they would object to paying, say, $300 a year in taxes instead of paying at the pump, as you're doing now when you buy gasoline and pay $0.40 a gallon or more for taxes. And the people I've talked to have almost unanimously said, absolutely. I would not object to paying once a year or however often a tax that is equal to what I'm currently paying in taxes to use fossil fuel.

SM: Oh, sure. I mean, I can see that. In other words, like Minnesota has, you can send a dollar in every time you pay your electric bill. You can send a few dollars in, which goes for wind generation. So it's like you're contributing your money so that they can put in these windmills and eventually get more and more off of the different types of fuels. And I visited the windmills down in southern Minnesota here, and they were fabulous. I visited the windmill farm, an ethanol plant, and a methanol plant, and it was just incredible. But the thing that really, really got me was that this ethanol plant was using 100,000 gallons of water a day for their process. And they were pumping that water out of the ground, and they built a plant not even near a river, and now the groundwater is being depleted.

So the farmers that are supplying the grain within a 25-mile area of this plant is going to have a water problem shortage, which is now going to affect the growth of their plants and the delivery of the product that produces the ethanol. I looked at all that water, and I calculated the energy in the water, and I was shocked about, my God, you're only using a very small portion, less than 10 percent of that water energy was being used. And I was shocked. I said, all this, and you could be using that 150,000 gallons of water.

JR: (59:23) And the whole purpose, so that you can sell fuel to someone. Obviously, the sale of fuel is the world's biggest business, and that's the way they want to keep it. And if there's a simple and easy answer, they certainly don't want people to access it if it doesn't mean lining their pockets. Now, I'd like to conclude by just mentioning something, because this should be of interest to everyone, including you. I believe you may have already heard from this gentleman, but I got an email from a reporter with the Columbus Dispatch newspaper, and he said that he's doing an article on your brother.

SM: Oh, yeah. I had a call from a guy.

JR: Mm-hmm.

SM: Yeah. And I haven't heard from him.

JR: He asked if I wanted to have any input into the article, and so I've been communicating with him. Well, super. Yeah, I've been communicating with him, and he just cannot believe that there is such a thing as a conspiracy, wherein the purveyors of fossil fuel do not want us to access something like fuel from water, and that academia would be somehow influenced by this trillion-dollar industry to not acknowledge to the public that it's doable. And so, you know, anything that I said to him, he took it very skeptically. I said, but just look at the evidence. He says, well, I want to see people demonstrating this public. I said, well, it has been done. I mean, I said, your brother, Stanley Meyer, did, the very one you're doing the article on, did numerous public demonstrations. And he said, well, there were never anyone from academia viewing them. I said, that's not true.

SM: Oh, heck, yeah. I'll give you a break. I mean, he was rubbing elbows with some of the most influential scientists in the world.

JR: But look, this is the kind of thing that happens when a newspaper man tries to do an article on water as fuel.

SM: You know, they had a meeting down in South America sometime just before the, right after the first oil embargo, I think about 10 years, had a meeting down there, and the oil companies were trying to determine what it was that they were going to do in the future. And British Petroleum came out of that meeting, and they said, we're going to change our image, and we're going to clean. And you notice that British Petroleum, every place around the world, is showing another face on the oil system because they, from that meeting and from the work that Stan had done and from these scientists that realized that we're running out of fuel, oil, and so forth, they looked at it and said, hey, what is the future? It's not that they don't want it to happen. They just don't know.

You know, they're going to keep producing the oil and doing what they're doing because that's the only thing they know how to do. And two, they don't have something to switch to just yet. They don't know what to do to switch, so they can switch.

JR: Yeah, the problem they have, too, I think, is that they don't want to switch to something that you can gather yourself. If water becomes fuel, then everyone who has access to water by a rain barrel or whatever can bypass them supplying it. You know, they have to come up with an idea that they can have a quarter on.

SM: Well, I think they will. I mean, it's just, I don't think the, it's the apparatuses and things that's producing the energy that is where the focus will be. I mean, if the oil industry, once a process is really commercialized, it really gets commercialized, the money is based on the consumables being used and the product being developed, and that's where they'll focus their revenues. I mean, they'll go after that to make their money. So oil, gas production vehicles, as we generate the modern vehicle. And what I see in the future is far, far reaching than what you're seeing today and these boosters and those kind of things. They're kind of like the first step along the way. But my research leads me to believe, and I sense and feel and I see it, that there is more to this, and there's more energy that we can use which will benefit mankind, because it's a huge amount of energy.

It's available. We're only using it.

JR: More than just the hydrogen, oxygen combustion that a booster or even something like on the dune buggy would have done, huh? Oh, exactly. More than just the far in excess of that.

SM: Oh, exactly. Exactly. What I see from my testing and development, it's huge. It's incredible about how much energy is available and what we can do to use it. I just, what I need is money. I'm like all these other inventors and scientists. There's a little different flavor for you and I and what we're talking about. One thing I've been trying to bring out is that it takes a little more science to make this thing happen. And as I go through and study this science, I see this door opening more and more, and it keeps me open at night, because I said, wow, this is, I can't believe some of the things that I'm finding. And I have to be very careful that I'm not injecting. You know, I've got to be very careful that I want this to happen, so am I doing this? Are you being wishful? Yeah, yeah, being wishful or not so much wishful, but am I seeing this correctly?

And I go back and revisit different ways, and I say, wow, it's incredible. So the future is going to be incredible. I mean, we're going to see, if you thought the 21st century was something, you wait until you see that. Oh, yeah, if you thought the 20th century was something, you're going to see. You know, they had the Chicago World's Fair, and that's where they introduced electricity. They made the biggest Ferris wheel in the world. It wasn't so much the Ferris wheel being so big. It was the fact that they were running it off of an AC motor, and that was huge. Well, I think this next, in our new millennium here, by the time it's all said and done, there's going to be a transfer in this technology for our automobiles that will be awesome, just absolutely awesome.

JR: (1:06:12) Well, that's a nice note to end this conversation on. I appreciate your having been with us, and I'm sure you have more to share that we didn't get around to because of a limited time, but it's been enjoyable. I'm sure people have benefited from your observations, and hopefully you'll be getting more calls from people around the world who will be... Send money. Well, you know something? Addison Bain is just the one to talk to. I kid you not. I'll give you his phone number.

SM: Would you please? Send it to me on an email, will you?

JR: Yeah, because let me tell you, he's one of the ones who determines where Department of Energy funds go.

SM: Yeah, I have, after reading his book, I have so much respect for him, I just, I can't tell you.

JR: I do too, but you know, I feel as the Bible says that Jesus said to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, he said, are you a teacher in Israel, and yet you do not know these things? And for some reason that scripture came to my mind in...

SM: What does that mean, by the way?

JR: The fact that someone can be in a position of authority and responsibility and enlightenment and yet not know basic facts that should be well known.

SM: Well, I mean, how can you with the knowledge base as it is? I mean, my son, back in 1974, I took a survey. At that time, he had to read 18 books to every book I read, and knowledge was as an exponential. And today, you'd have to read, I don't know, I'll just take a guess, 2,000 books to every book I read back then. And today, I read over 300 books a year, and I can't keep up with it. So, you know, there's a lot of events that I don't think you can have one person, but I...

JR: There's information overload, no question about it.

SM: Well, I think the key here is that as information comes in and you have this ability to scan and review it, and what I like about this, doing with this water, I have a complete focus. The water technology is my focus, and that keeps me from going too far left and too far right. I stay with my focus, and it's really incredible. If you do that, you can concentrate. If you can read all the literature and information about water that you can garner, okay, and you create your focus that way, you start to see things that other people that haven't done it or are not aware of it, you know, won't see it.

JR: Well, you know, I sent him my book, and so if that's the first time that such evidence has been presented, which I expect that it is, I hope that his eyes have been opened to what the possibilities are, because this information is in the public domain. It's in the U.S. Patent Office. There's no reason why any of us should not know that these possibilities, that this technology is real, and there's no excuse for it not being implemented worldwide.

SM: Yeah. If you can get past what happens is you can't get – it's hard to get past the situation. I didn't do it, so, you know, if I didn't invent it, I'm not going to listen to somebody else. And that's what happens. You put these – this is what I call educational blinders. You let your education – and that's one thing about Stan was as much as I was – I understood about science and things at the time, I never told him that he was – that it couldn't be done. I simply listened to him, and at first I just said, you know, you're – I don't know what you're smoking, but I want some of it. But, you know, but I said, you know, but I never said that he couldn't do it. And then as the years went by and as he would explain it to me, and then I got involved with him, I said, well, Stan, if you – you know, what about this and what about that?

And then all of a sudden we started to see and explain what was going on, and we got excited. I mean, we used to talk. We'd start a conversation at dinnertime, and it was not unusual to finish up at 3 o'clock in the morning trying to figure out what the hell we were doing.

JR: Yeah, and that's the way that the technology progresses many times through conversations. Exactly.

SM: You know, we used to take – the Wright brothers used to do that. You know, they would – when they were inventing their airplane and trying to understand controls, they would take opposite – one would take a pro and a con to an argument, and then after a while they would switch. And they would switch that, and you'd be surprised that when you do that, the fallout of that conversation can – you can really narrow down what it is that you're – because they were trying to figure out a wing warp. Why in the heck would warping the wings allow the plane to turn? They couldn't understand that. And you know what it turned out to be? The Smithsonian Institute, they were creating a new airplane, and they did the B-1 bomber.

And they went back and studied the wing warping, and it turned out to be that it took away one of the problems that commercial airplanes have today, which is they use ailerons to cause the plane to bank, and when it does, it causes the plane to go into an unstable position in a mode, an unstable mode. And here they warped the wings, and that condition didn't exist. So here the Wright brothers had figured out the right approach, but it was – nobody took it as being practical.

JR: (1:11:48) Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And I might say in conclusion that it was two Ohio brothers, and not far from where you and Stan were born and raised.

SM: Oh, exactly. Yeah, they were over in Dayton, Ohio.

JR: Yeah.

SM: Yeah, I like going over to the museum.

JR: Oh, me too. Yeah, I love the Wright-Patterton Air Force Base Museum. It's a wonderful place to get up to speed on aviation technology. Thanks so much for joining us, Mr. Meyer. Glad to have you as a guest again. Look forward to it again in the future, and I hope everyone has a good evening.

SM: Enjoyed it, and everybody have fun. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.