The Fuel Cell

In an age when climate change is of vital importance, it is necessary to seek ways of ‘decarbonizing’ energy. In the 1840s a lawyer friend of Michael Faraday, named William Grove, invented a new method of creating electricity without producing carbon dioxide. He gave a Discourse on the subject in 1843. This he did using what later became known as the fuel cell. Effectively, under the right conditions, a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen on coming into contact with a catalyst like platinum, generates electricity directly. This is now the basis of the hydrogen economy, which is being increasingly studied the world over. Another Discourse on the hydrogen fuel cell was presented at the RI in 1960 by Francis Bacon, who was responsible for designing the fuel cell used by the astronauts who landed on the moon.