We May Burn Water and Solve the Fuel Problem, Says Tesla

CAPT. EDWARD C. WARREN, master mariner, engineer and scientist, has invented a new hydrogen motor with which he expects to revolutionize the science of power production.

Capt. Warren bears some resemblance to the wizard of electricity, Nikola Tesla, who speaks to me in the highest terms of Warren’s achievements in the engineering world. Capt. Warren has recently returned from a two-years’ vacation cruise on a sailing vessel and has brought with him the crystallized results of many months of study and research. While he has been sailing the deep or leading alternately the strenuous and the simple life ashore he has steadily pursued his experiments, building boats and apparatus for the purpose, and now he is preparing to give the results to the world.

This invention is nothing less revolutionary than manufacturing fuel out of water — as Mr. Tesla remarks the process represents in the broadest sense the burning of water.

We now secure power from water by utilizing its weight on an old-fashioned water wheel or a modern turbine. We also utilize the power of water by turning it into steam. Capt. Warren’s invention separates the chemical constituents of water and takes advantage of the explosive capacity of these elements in recombining to produce power. The product of recombination is water, which, of course, may be used over and over as many times as extraneous forces are applied to decompose or separate it into its elements.

“Burning” Water.

“Burn water?” said Capt. Warren when interrogated. “Only in the sense in which we burn carbonic acid. Both are products of combustion. The constituent elements of each are combustible when isolated. The only problem is to separate or isolate them after they have once been combined. This nature is constantly doing, and we have only to accelerate or ‘short circuit’ her processes in order to restore immediately these combustible substances to their elemental state and have them ready to reunite at our bidding in the phenomenon of combustion. Burning, or combustion, is simply the manifestation of the action of chemical affinity. We burn the elemental substances, hydrogen and oxygen, by bringing them together under conditions favorable to the operation of the affinity which causes them to unite in a new chemical compound which when condensed is water. We separate these elements by subjecting their compound, water, to conditions which overcome or neutralize this affinity.

“When we can burn hydrogen for power, when the industrial world awakes to the fact that prodigious expenditures for coal and liquid fuel are entirely unnecessary and that there is right within our grasp an unlimited supply of fuel substance available practically without cost — for it is self-producing — there will be a revolution in the industrial world. When the century-old theories of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of energy and matter have once become really understood by men, we will witness the utter collapse and extinction of one of the oldest and most gigantic of human industries, the mining of coal.

Means Increased Speed.

“And further,” he continued, “speed would receive a new impulse. We could have a 50-mile boat and a three-day Lusitania. To-day the fastest ship of the seas carries 5,000 tons of coal in her bunkers and 15,000 tons of machinery necessary to drive her. By the installation of my propulsion devices and new motive power the Lusitania would be so lightened that she could, by changing her construction somewhat, make the trip of 2,720 miles to Liverpool in three days or less. She would have more cargo room and be free from the terrific vibration that now characterizes all high-speed ships, for the new system does not involve extensive machinery. It consists of a process partly chemical and partly mechanical. The entire propelling mechanism now used would be eliminated, as the pressure of expanding aqueous vapor would be applied directly to projecting water astern.”

As applied to warships the inventor believes that his new propulsive power will be of far-reaching importance and give the American battleships adopting the fuel and apparatus he has devised immense advantage over the warships of other navies, as the mechanism of the Warren scheme is so simple and comparatively small that it will not be easy for a torpedo or shell from the enemy to reach it.

“That hydrogen may be manufactured from water by more or less complex and expensive processes is, of course, well known,” said Capt. Warren, “but my process is the first by which it may be produced economically and utilized in an engine or a motor.

Economy in Its Use.

“In the process of burning coal and generating steam power in an engine an efficiency of from five to ten per cent. is the best that is realized with the most highly developed modern equipment, and this is not taking into account the manufacturing cost of the coal — mining, cleaning and transporting — or even the prodigious cost of merely shoveling it into the furnace, this latter item in the case of the Lusitania amounting to nearly as much as the cost of the coal delivered aboard ship. All this is eliminated when we manufacture our fuel as we go along, drawing our own supply of raw material without cost from the boundless ocean of water and air in which nature has stored ready to hand limitless supplies of fuel energy in the form of hydrogen and oxygen, to be had for the taking and costing nothing but the harnessing to yield us in measureless abundance that mechanical power so essential to human advancement.

“Suppose carbonic acid, the product of carbon and oxygen in combustion, were readily condensible into liquid form at atmospheric pressure and temperature, would we not then be found endeavoring to effect its immediate decomposition into its elements in order that we might again avail ourselves of the energy liberated by their union? But the natural cycle of carbon carries it through the complex evolution of plant life before it is finally returned to a concentrated condition. In carbonic acid it retains its gaseous form at all ordinary temperatures and pressures and so is difficult to deal with.

“Not so with hydrogen. When burned with oxygen it takes the form of highly rarefied aqueous vapor which is immediately condensible into water at ordinary temperatures, and we can immediately recover it in form adapted to our needs.

In Heating Value.

“The heating value of hydrogen in combination with oxygen is 60,000 heat units per pound. The heating value of the best coal is about 14,000 heat units per pound. Heat units mean power units, and it is heat units we want when we buy fuel. A process for the manufacture of hydrogen on a basis that will yield us more heat units for a dollar than a dollar will buy in the form of coal must obviously put an end to the use of coal for fuel, for hydrogen is a perfect fuel. It leaves no ash, makes no smoke or poisonous gas and, being derived from water and being made as required, it requires no transportation or handling.”

“But what is the secret of the production of this new motive power?” Capt. Warren was asked.

“The secret of the production of hydrogen for fuel lies in the successful manipulation of that mysterious force in nature called chemical affinity of elements — in other words, the isolation of the hydrogen under certain conditions and its recombination through combustion with the oxygen with which it was originally associated in the form of water.”

While Mr. Warren would not discuss in detail his methods by which nature is thus to be tapped and her exhaustless sources of fuel made adaptable to the airship, the automobile and other power plants, it is known that the process is chemical and economical and by its adoption fuel will be provided in condensed and portable form within the reach of all.

Thus the world will have made the greatest stride in power since Watt discovered the steam engine. — Edwin Wildman, in the New York Sunday World.