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Chapter 1. Device in Search of a Role
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18 VVVVVVVVVVV The modern dream of miracle electrochemical energy conversion may be said to have originated with an obscure English inventor with a distinguished pedigree . Working in the leafy environs of the ancient university city of Cambridge, the mechanical engineer Francis Thomas Bacon, a descendent of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the father of the seventeenth-century English lawyer-philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, developed what would become widely acknowledged as the first practical fuel cell.1 Bacon occupies an unusual place in England’s pantheon of illustrious technologists, for he gained fame for inventing a device that by most conventional standards was a failure. Employed in the 130s by the storied power-equipment maker C. A. Parsons, Bacon learned of a German idea for employing off-peak electricity to electrolyze water and then using the hydrogen so produced in an internal combustion engine. Perhaps, Bacon reasoned, the conversion would be even more efficient if hydrogen and oxygen were combined electrochemically. Aided by a personal inheritance that allowed him to quit Parsons in 140 and devote himself completely to the project, Bacon sought to build what he termed a “reversible cell.” Despite his lack of formal schooling in electrochemistry, he won backing after the Second World War from a succession of sponsors of science and technology who saw his invention as a means of helping revivify Britain’s shattered economy, enabling it to compete with the American industrial colossus. In this way, Bacon and his supporters played a key role in triggering the first postwar fuel cell boom. But fame and success did not come quickly to the gentle-mannered Englishman. For years, he toiled in obscurity in the style of the traditional amateur inventor, constantly searching for new patrons.2 It was not until the late 160s, three decades after he had begun his life’s work, that his efforts were finally rewarded, although in a way he likely did not anticipate. The inventor 1 Device in Search of a Role Dr. Ellingham remarked that Mr. Bacon was to be congratulated in making an advance which brought the cell into a new field but still emphasized the point that the ERA was sponsoring a piece of fundamental work with no great promise of return. —Minutes of Electrical Research Association meeting, June 8, 1949 DEVICE IN SEARCH OF A ROLE 19 had long envisioned the reversible cell as a replacement for the lead-acid secondary battery, first in niche roles and perhaps later in locomotives or the fleets of electric milk-delivery trucks that plied the narrow streets of English towns and cities every morning. With further development, he hoped, the device could be used to power small, short-range electric cars. Instead, the “Bacon cell,” as it came to be known, found fleeting first use along the semitropical coast of southeast Florida, a jumping-off point for journeys hundreds of thousands of kilometers long. There, within the confines of the sprawling Kennedy Space Center, Bacon’s dream became part of the “American technological sublime.”3 Buried within the stubby cylinder of the Apollo spacecraft topping the 111-meter Saturn V rocket, the most powerful vehicle ever built by human beings, Bacon-type fuel cells would supply the electricity and water that sustained the first people ever to travel to the moon. An advanced version of Bacon’s original design later found use in the Space Shuttle, further crystallizing the device’s association with space travel. This indirect triumph of British ingenuity came at a time when the battery and fuel cell community had long since pronounced the Bacon cell a commercial dead end owing to its requirement for pure hydrogen. This was widely viewed as an impractical fuel for most industrial purposes, far too expensive to supply in all but the most specialized applications. Despite its limitations, the Bacon cell was taken by many engineers, scientists, and administrators in Britain and the United States as a sign of things to come in the field of electrochemical energy conversion. For some observers, it was merely a superior kind of electrical storage device. For others, it had far greater potential as a kind of multifuel energy converter. But although it found favor with a series of statebacked impresarios of research and development, the Bacon cell never attracted customers in Britain. In the United States, however, after demonstrations in 15 that established the technology as the most powerful in its class, the aviation-engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney licensed it, eventually developing...