The Water Engine [View all]

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Wed Jul 18, 2012, 02:49 PM - Edit history (9)

One of the great modern myths is the idea that a water-fueled engine suitable for powering an automobile was, at some point, invented and then suppressed by energy corporations.

It makes no sense as a story, but is resonant as myth. It speaks to a lost potential... almost like the loss of Eden. And it plays on the very real reality that businesses are not in it for the good of humanity, and that our lives are controlled by shadowy economic forces.

But as a story, a theory, an idea of something that could have happened in the real world, it's strictly comic-book.

First, water can't power squat. It takes more energy to break the hydrogen and oxygen apart than you can get from recombining them. That's why we have water in the first place. It is chemically pretty stable. It is possible to construct a hypothetical where a hydrogen engine could be cheaper to run than a gasoline engine... if the price of gasoline is $100/gallon and the price of electricity stays the same then using electricity to bust apart water molecules might be less $$$, but the process still consumes more energy than it releases. You would have to make the hydrogen at home, of course. The closed system of the car itself would have to produce more power to break up the water than it would get out of it, so the car would have to produce more electric energy than the energy the hydrogen gives up in burning. If that were possible (it isn't) you would have invented a battery-less electric car and the whole water thing would be unnecessary. And if you use tons of electricity to make hydrogen at home and then pump that into your car then that's a hydrogen engine and nobody has ever questioned that a car could run on hydrogen. (Hydrogen destroys engines, though, which is why we don't use it. Very reactive stuff, hydrogen.)

(When water powers a hydroelectric dam the energy is solar—the sun evaporates the water which then rains down at high altitudes where it has potential energy in the form of gravity urging it back downhill. The energy involved in getting the water uphill is much higher than it can generate running back downhill.)

Second, in the modern era there are not "lost" inventions. If conditions are such that X can be invented at the time, and there is a motive to invent it, then if one guy doesn't invent X then somebody else would invent X a short time afterward. No inventor is indispensable. Five years after Tesla's death we could speculate about things he might have invented that were lost. But ten years later? Fifty years later? No. If it is there to be discovered with the theory and engineering of the time it will be discovered. Many inventions wait a thousand years because there isn't the overall technological culture in place. Heavier than air flight on human muscle power, or even steam power, is not practical. But once the internal combustion engine came along there was a rush to invent the airplane. The Wright brothers had their equivalents all around the world. All the brilliant people throughout history failed to figure out evolution, but then two men at opposite ends of the world got the same general idea the same decade. Calculus was never invented for millennia, then suddenly invented in slightly different forms by two guys in different countries. Heck, even writing was invented completely independently three times. (Mesopotamia, China, Central America.)

If Alan Turing (who I greatly admire) had never lived the UK would have been a little less clever about breaking the German enigma codes in WWII, and the computers they built to do so would have been somewhat less effective, but it wouldn't have prevented the development of computers. If Bell Labs hadn't come up with the transistor someone else would have the next year or two.

(The reason we don't see the transistor invented 100 times is that once someone comes up with the thing all researchers in the field stop what they're doing and switch to working on improving it, not inventing it again.)

The US and Germany were both doing atom bomb research during WWII because the state of physics at the time showed that U-235 is readily fissionable, and the state of engineering at the time made isolating U-235 in quantity plausible. When Leó Szilárd realized a chain reaction was possible he wasn't laughed at. He said to other scientists, "Hey, U-235 could create a chain reaction," and they all fiddled with their slide rules and went, "Hey, you're right!" None of them had trouble understanding it. If he hadn't thought it through then somebody else would have a few months later. It was an idea whose time had come. And if the US and Germany had both squelched all such research then the A-bomb might have waited until 1947 or 1949. An atom bomb is the sort of thing everyone wants. And being miles ahead of everyone else means a few years. If Einstein had died in infancy then the description of relativity might have taken a few years longer, and that's GENIUS. A few years ahead is epic. If water has powers that our current physics and engineering can exploit then the water engine would have to be suppressed every few weeks... forever.

Third, a conspiracy to suppress all knowledge of something everyone in the world wants is an absurdity. China would be delighted to have a water engine. Everyone would. When their research points toward a water engine (as it would time and time again) do they kill all the scientists who saw the work? Why? To protect Exxon? It makes no sense to explain why X would want it to not be developed unless one can explain why everyone doggedly ignores the supposed capabilities of water. It would have to be an air-tight conspiracy of all business interests, and all governments and all scientists. Competing nations, competing companies, competing universities, competing scientists... all engaged in intentionally not discovering the greatest technology out there. It only takes one person to publish reproducible water-engine results on the internet for an hour and the cat is out of the bag. Yet somehow nobody ever does.

And this would be such a BIG idea to hide. A water engine would mean that either thermodynamics is bunk (the most shocking and wide-reaching discovery in centuries of scientific history) or else there is a novel and easily exploitable energy in molecular bonds of which we are utterly unaware, or a way to dissolve molecular bonds using little or no energy (either would be the biggest science story of our time). A water engine wouldn't just change engines, it would change all of science. It would alter everything we think we know, from cosmology to biology. Everything.

(And if the conspiracy is that good, why are we talking about it? Why do we "know" about the water engine at all?)

Fourth, economics. Even if the water engine could somehow be hidden for a generation, why? There's more money in owning it than hiding it. A water engine would be the most valuable patent in history, by a lot. If a guy ever takes a water engine to GM or Exxon they may well murder him, but not to suppress the engine... to steal it to exploit it themselves, and as fast as possible. The idea is worth almost infinite money, but if one guy invents it then it is known to be possible with contemporary technology, which means that another guy is liable to invent it independently tomorrow. So the race to exploit the water-engine technology would be the biggest corporate gold-rush ever. If Exxon owned the water engine patent they would be ten times as rich as they are selling oil. It is quaint to think their devotion is to oil. It is not. Their devotion is to money and nothing (perhaps not even cold fusion) would be worth more money than a water engine.

So an entity has the world's most valuable technology and choses to NOT patent it, to keep it secret? They leave the technology legally unprotected so anyone who happens upon the same idea (in almost any nation) can patent it and be the richest person on Earth.