Hydrogen powered cars are kind of an illusion!

Hi Dr. Waug!
My name is Bell. You may have heard of me. I'm from an age that came before you, and you can thank me for inventing the telephone, which led to the connections that you used to call home from college, pay your tuition fees, and even shop for airline tickets and buy them using the Internet! I did not invent telecommunications as it is today, with videos you can upload and download, and all that, but I did get it started.

I wanted to state my importance because I want your visitors to the WAUGkidsWeb to know that I'm not just some old grumpy dead guy. I'm as alive as you are, but in a different dimension. Without further palaver, then, let me tell you, when you read that this president or that prime minister or some writer is pushing the idea of battery powered cars, or even hydrogen powered cars, because they are "clean," and don't burn gasoline or diesel fuel, they are leading you astray.

Hydrogen is what powered the Saturn rocket that put American human beings on the moon. When ignited in the presence of oxygen, the product is heat and water. All that "smoke" the Saturn made as it lifted off was actually steam and dust. But before you can put hydrogen in an automobile and burn it to get the heat and steam, you first have to get it from somewhere. You can get it in two major ways: You can cool off air until it becomes a mixture of a lot of liquids, including liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and liquid nitrogen, but then you'd have to separate the liquids and isolate the hydrogen. The hydrogen would be a tiny portion of that, and all that would take a lot of work, and the amount of energy consumed would be enormous and costly. So it won't work. Then you cold separate hydrogen from oxygen by the "electrolysis of water," which means literally using electricity to split water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen. This is really expensive too, and is usually done using fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Both of these power sources pollute the earth. So powering a car with hydrogen is a basically stupid way of saving the earth. Sorry about that, but it's the truth.

Sincerely,
A. Bell