Stanley Allen Meyer

Stanley Allen Meyer (1940 to 1998) was an American inventor remembered for the water fuel cell, a device he said could run a car on water instead of gasoline. Meyer described a process in which electricity passed through water released hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen was burned in an engine, and the resulting water vapor was recycled, which he claimed needed less energy than conventional electrolysis. Scientists who reviewed the idea concluded it would break the laws of thermodynamics, and the writer Philip Ball in the journal Nature called the claims pseudoscience. In 1996 an Ohio court, hearing a suit by two investors who had bought dealerships in his technology, found that he had committed gross and egregious fraud, after expert witnesses found only conventional electrolysis in his cell. He died suddenly in 1998, and his patents have since expired. This entry records him as a notable disputed inventor, not as a validated engineer of a working fuel system.