Water fuel cell

The water fuel cell is a proposed design for a perpetual motion device that claimed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burn the hydrogen, recombining it into water while supposedly producing net usable energy, a claim that is not physically possible. It is associated with Stanley Allen Meyer, who claimed his device could power a car using water instead of gasoline before his death in 1998. The science writer Philip Ball, writing in Nature, described Meyer's claims as pseudoscience that would violate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and expert witnesses who examined the device in court found it was ordinary electrolysis with nothing new about it. An Ohio court ruled in 1996 that Meyer had committed what it called gross and egregious fraud against investors in the device.