I have a friend who is a huge fan of Stanley Meyer and his work. If you have never heard of Stanley Meyer, here are two videos and an article that talk about Meyer:

Stanley Meyer’s Water fuel cell

If you watch the videos you can see how seductive the idea is – you use “magic technology” to easily crack a water molecule and separate the hydrogen and oxygen. Then you combine the hydrogen and oxygen back together, creating more energy than the cracking process consumed. In other words, it is a classic perpetual motion machine. And eventually Meyer was labeled as a fraud:

End of road for car that ran on Water

Here was the pitch:

The secret, he said, was to “resonate” electricity at a very high voltage through water and so “fracture” the hydrogen/oxygen molecular bond. This, he claimed, opened the way for a car which would “run on water”, powered simply by a car battery. The car would even run for ever since the energy needed to continue the “fracturing” was so low that the battery could be recharged: from the engine’s dynamo.

Here was the evidence:

The cell had been the centrepiece of Meyer’s sales pitches. It was a transparent cylinder of water inside which was a core of stainless steel electrodes. When plugged into an electrical supply,the cell bubbled away merrily, producing apparently copious amounts of gas that Meyer ignited through a welding torch.

But reality is reality:

To the layman it was an impressive performance and hundreds of small investors signed up, but it did not impress three expert witnesses in court. They decided that there was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis. Meyer was found guilty of “gross and egregious Fraud” and ordered to repay the investors their $25,000 (£15,000).

And yet, many people (take my friend for example) still pursue the dream. Here, for example, is a person working to reproduce Meyer’s cell:

The description of the video says, “Started WFC at 0.5 Amp input again.” The description for the YouTube profile says: “This replication is based on Dave Lawton’s Circuts with some modifications. Its a bigger WFC than Dave’s and Half the size of Stan’s demonstration WFC.”

Here is a recent video describing the dream: