Kit Roberts
A man who claimed to have invented a car run on water died after screaming some harrowing last words.
Inventor Stanley Meyer said that he had come up with an engine which would run solely on water.
This was allegedly strong enough to power a buggy, and had entirely clean emissions.
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So how did this work exactly?
Meyer claimed that he had created a fuel cell which used a principle of splitting water atoms into their constituent elements.
With good old H20 these are of course hydrogen and oxygen, of which hydrogen can be used as a fuel.
The inventor claimed that the engine was able to separate these down and burn the hydrogen to create energy, with oxygen and some water residues being the only emissions.
That's quite a claim, almost too good to be true.
The size of the global oil market is simply enormous, with hundreds of billions of dollars in oil production alone.
Bearing all that in mind, it's fair to say there might be some people who would be less than pleased at the prospect of an engine that could massively reduce oil demand.
So Meyer's last words were slightly unnerving, and captured the attention of newspapers when he died in 1998.
According to his brother, the inventor had been out to lunch when he suddenly grabbed his throat and screamed 'they poisoned me'.
An inquest into Meyer's death included a toxicology report which found 'no poison known to American science'.
In the end the court found that Meyer had died as a result of an aneurysm, with the coroner concluding that he had died from 'natural causes'.
As for his claims that he had invented a revolutionary device, in 1996, two years before Meyer's death, a court in Ohio ruled that these were fraudulent.
At the time Meyer had also been ordered to pay back money received from investors.
There is also a flaw in the design of breaking water down into hydrogen and oxygen.
Water molecules are very stable, so breaking one down into its constituent elements uses more energy than you get out of it.
If you want to use something as a source of energy, then this is a pretty big problem.
Of course, it is possible to use hydrogen to generate power and there are many projects which are exploring hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels.