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98 VVVVVVVVVVV Ever since Grove and Schönbein first succeeded in electro-oxidizing hydrogen in the mid-nineteenth century, researchers associated hydrogen and fuel cells. In large measure, the history of fuel cell research and development has been characterized by a central lexical muddle: the term “fuel cell” was coined by Mond and Langer to denote a hypothetical device that produced electricity by electro-oxidizing the hydrogen bound up in carbonaceous fuels. Yet the first practical devices to be so-referred used pure hydrogen and were more properly termed hydrogen fuel cells. Over the years, this crucial distinction was elided by sponsors, pundits, politicians, the media, and, sometimes, by researchers themselves, for reasons we have examined. Builders of hydrogen fuel cells, consequently, set standards for performance and ease of operation that were very difficult for builders of carbonaceous fuel cells to match. In laboratory settings and in specialized aerospace applications , pure hydrogen was the most attractive fuel but also the most uneconomic . As NASA wound down its human spaceflight project in the late 160s and early 170s, the torch of fuel cell power passed from the space agency to the United Technologies Corporation, gas and electric utilities, and, eventually, the federal government, all organizations with an interest in the carbonaceous variants. Curiously, this commercial project, one designed to preserve the existing fossil fuel production and distribution system, helped reinvigorate the association between the fuel cell and hydrogen, in turn inspiring advocacy of a hypothetical revolutionary electrochemical energy conversion order built around these technologies. This was known as the hydrogen economy. The brainchild of a small group of researchers in the early 170s, the expression connoted a future clean energy regime. But it was imprecise, for a sort of hydrogen economy was already 5 Fueling Hydrogen Futurism The electricity will originate from nuclear sources. Electrolysis of water to give hydrogen will occur at site . . . the hydrogen produced would be pumped to consumer sites, and converted into work by non-Carnotlimited devices (i.e., fuel cells). —J. O’M. Bockris and A. J. Appleby, July 1972 FUELING HYDROGEN FUTURISM 99 embedded in the vast chemical and petrochemical industrial complex built up during the twentieth century. Hydrogen has long been a key industrial input and by-product. When synthesized with nitrogen in the Haber process, the result is ammonia, the chief ingredient of fertilizer and explosives. The petrochemical industry produced and consumed vast quantities of hydrogen. As a storage medium and energy carrier, however, hydrogen had historically generated virtually no interest among technologists outside a handful of futurist thinkers, owing to high cost and technological complexity. More popular were experiments using hydrogen as a fuel for propulsion. The German engineer Rudolf Erren pioneered the use of the element as an additive to improve the performance of fossil fuels in converted internal combustion engines in the 120s and 130s. Similar efforts continued sporadically throughout the century, mainly in the United States and Germany and later in Japan. But only the aerospace sector, especially in the United States, ever developed a practical requirement for hydrogen as a propellant. Not until the early 170s, with the advent of the energy crisis and popular dissatisfaction with the rising environmental and economic costs of dependency on fossil fuel, did researchers seriously consider the possibility of using hydrogen not simply as a fuel but as an energy carrier and storage medium in an allencompassing system. This idealized hydrogen economy should properly be understood as a form of hydrogen futurism, a term encompassing a rather amorphous bundle of practices including visionary hypothesizing, scientific modeling , and experimental engineering. Hydrogen futurism is often said to have literary origins that date back to the late nineteenth century. Many hydrogen futurists trace their inspiration to two adventure novels, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874) and Max Pemberton’s The Iron Pirate (183). Verne’s protagonist Cyrus Harding discusses the possibility of using electricity to produce hydrogen from water, while Pemberton tells the tale of a rogue superbattleship using hydrogen-powered engines to stalk and overcome its prey.1 Hydrogen boosters paid homage to these two works of fiction so frequently that their influential role became a staple factoid in periodic media summaries of the hydrogen movement over the years. Hydrogen futurism can be defined as high technoscientific positivism imbued with quasi-mystical undertones, one embracing many scientific and engineering fields. As the most abundant element in the universe, comprising 75 percent of chemical elemental mass, hydrogen...

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