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For a time in the late 10s and early 2000s, it was nearly impossible to read popular literature on science and technology without encountering praise for the fuel cell. Lauded by engineers, scientists, and policymakers, the device, which converts chemical energy into electrical energy, was then a virtual byword for sustainable power. The technology had an unusually broad appeal. At the core of its popularity was the belief that it was a kind of electrochemical engine, a universal chemical energy converter capable of running on any hydrogenous fuel, combining the best features of the internal combustion engine and the galvanic battery without their handicaps.1 Compelled by the California Air Resources Board and its Zero-Emission Vehicle mandate of 10 to market electric passenger vehicles in ever-increasing quantities, the automobile industry saw the fuel cell as a power source superior to the conventional galvanic battery, both because it seemed to afford a much longer range and because it seemed to promise less disruption of the established liquid-fuel automotive culture. Instead of having to reorder their lives around the lengthy recharge period of a conventional battery, consumers could top up their fuel cell electric vehicles with a liquid fuel in minutes. For this reason, fuel cells were also investigated by the oil industry, which hoped to supply the specialized fuels required by the energy conversion technology if it became commercialized and ubiquitous. Dramatic advances in the state of the art were often followed by predictions of an impending revolution in power source technology, one that would allow consumers to continue to enjoy the comfort and convenience of the modern automobile while accommodating their green sensibilities.2 Even the White House promoted the technology, framing the hydrogen fuel cell applied in electric vehicles as a power panacea.3 Billions of dollars flowed into research, mainly from the automobile industry and also from the United States Department of 1 Introduction Fuel Cell Futurism VVVVVVVVVVV Energy. But although laboratory experiments and precommercial prototypes showed promise, the fuel cell proved extraordinarily difficult to commercialize. Early in the new millennium, government and industry indefinitely postponed plans to market it. This was not the first fuel cell boom to go bust. Scientists and engineers have perceived the device as the holy grail of power sources following its invention in the mid-nineteenth century. To many, the fuel cell seemed exempt from the Carnot-cycle limitation on the efficiency of heat engines. Such devices convert chemical energy into heat, using the resulting kinetic motion of molecules in a hot gas to drive a mechanical device such as a piston or turbine. But much of that heat dissipates into the environment without doing useful work. In contrast, fuel cells directly convert chemical energy into electricity without randomizing that energy as heat in the manner of a heat engine. The fuel cell concept was first explored by European researchers experimenting with reverse electrolysis. Instead of using electricity to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen, they attempted to combine oxygen and hydrogen to produce electricity. Working independently, the British lawyer and amateur scientist William Robert Grove and the Swiss physicist Christian Friedrich Schönbein used platinum foil to catalyze a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen in 183. Grove further elucidated the chemical basis of this reaction in subsequent experiments published in 1843 and 1845. Little more was done until the 180s, when European scientists revived the concept in a new series of experiments using coal and coalderived gases as a source of hydrogen. One of the more enthusiastic proponents was the German physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. In a passionate address before a group of engineers in 184, he held that the direct electrochemical conversion of solid coal to electricity could replace the steam engine, a technology Ostwald saw as “incomplete” because it converted only a fraction of the energy in coal to useful work and turned the rest to waste heat, soot, and smog.4 A number of such devices were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but none were practical. In 13, the German researcher Emil Baur remarked how strange it was that advances in fuel cell theory and in the state of the technological art in the 180s had borne no fruit almost half a century later.5 But the idea of the fuel cell as a universal chemical energy converter did not die. Indeed, it proved remarkably resilient. After the Second World War, it was revived by...

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