“A Modern ‘Philosopher’s Stone’”: Techno-Analogy and the Bacon Cell

For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was nearly impossible to read popular literature on science and technology without encountering encomiums for the fuel cell, a device that converts chemical energy into electricity. Widely heralded by scientists, engineers, and politicians, the technology was a virtual byword for sustainable power. At the core of its popularity was the belief that it was a sort of “electrochemical engine” 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 California’s Zero Emission Vehicle Law of 1990 to market electric automobiles in ever-increasing quantities,² the automobile industry saw the fuel cell as a vastly preferable power source to the conventional battery, citing greater range and convenience. While batteries took hours to recharge, promoters claimed that consumers could fill their fuel cell electric vehicles with a chemical fuel in minutes; they predicted an impending revolution in power technology that would allow motorists to continue to enjoy comfort and convenience while accommodating their “green” sensibilities.³ Eventually even the White House came on board, framing the hydrogen fuel cell automobile as a technological panacea that would end air pollution and enable energy independence for the United States.⁴ Billions of dollars from the automobile industry and the U.S. Department of Energy flowed into research. But while early experiments and trials of pre-commercial technology showed promise, developing the fuel cell as an affordable and durable electrochemical engine proved extraordinarily difficult. Early into the new millennium, government and industry greatly reduced their investments, indefinitely postponing plans to market fuel cells on a large scale.

This was not the first time that fuel cell technology had captivated imaginations. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a wave of enthusiasm for the technology engulfed science and engineering communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, as in the 1990s, fuel cells appealed to a broad constituency. In part, the view of fuel cells as a promising technology derived less from the concrete results of research than from a convenient elision that sponsors, researchers, and promoters sometimes made between the efficient hydrogen fuel cell, a device employing a costly fuel, and the less efficient carbonaceous (or hydrocarbon) fuel cell, a device that was believed to be capable of using cheap commercial fuels. This tendency toward elision, or analogy, began with the development in the 1950s of a technology widely interpreted at the time as the first practical fuel cell, a belief that has persisted to the present. The invention of the British engineer Francis Thomas Bacon, the “Bacon Cell” used pure hydrogen and oxygen in an alkaline electrolyte and was relatively sturdy and powerful, although supplying and storing hydrogen in large quantities posed daunting technological and economic problems. Nevertheless, many observers viewed it as a harbinger in the field of electrochemical-energy conversion. The performance of the hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell would be widely interpreted as a sign of the feasibility of the carbonaceous/hydrocarbon fuel cell.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Bacon’s work on the cell attracted a series of state-backed sponsors, yet the device never found a customer in Britain. In the wake of demonstrations in 1959 that established the technology as the most powerful in its class, the American aero-engine company Pratt & Whitney licensed it, eventually developing a version that achieved fame by powering the Apollo moon spacecraft. This gave impetus to other fuel cell projects already under way and helped trigger its first postwar boom.

At first glance, the episode appears to reinforce the claim that Britain was “good at inventing but bad at developing.”⁵ Articulated repeatedly by administrators and technocrats across the ideological spectrum during the postwar period, this belief helped inform a discourse and subsequently a historiography that held flawed science and technology policy as cause and consequence of what their framers interpreted as national economic decline. The story of the attempt to commercialize the Bacon Cell invites comparison with that of penicillin as a...