I can tell you most people in mainstream science think just like chemelec because they have been trained early on to think within the limits of scientific dogma and they learn very quickly not to challenge the status quo. These folks however will never get a nobel prize because their thinking and creativity are limited. I don't put myself in this close minded group.
My father worked as a cable spliceman for the phone company for over thirty years. He was a simple man by many standards, but one thing he taught me is that nothing is impossible. He was a "McGuiver<sp?>" of sorts and could fix anything. For example, when I was seventeen and my speedometer went out in my old Datsun B210, we didn't have the money to buy the parts needed, so he fabricated the spiral coil mechanism out of cutting one out of a tin soup can. Needless to say it worked perfectly. He was also an electronics guru and specialized in radio systems when he was in the Navy. Thinking back, I wish I had paid more attention to his knowledge in this area as I am sure it would be helpful now in trying to learn about all this neat pulsed DC electrolysis stuff. Once he gets settled into his new home, I hope to get him interested in this stuff again now that he is retired and has time to play around.
Anyway, my point in writing all this is to encourage you guys to keep learning and keep doing your projects and not to be discouraged by the dissenters that sound off here every now and then. While you don't have the fancy equipment and access to shop engineers and materials that the mainstream scientists have in academia and industry, you are not constrained by the dogma and thus you are much freer to try things that others might not think of. Moreover, I am a firm believer that you are more creative when you have less to work with. I once heard an interview with Jack White of the rock band White Stripes. His breakthrough album only cost him 5K to produce and he used no computers, only analogue recording equipment with only four channels. The reason he did this was because he believed that you are more creative when you have less and he used the first blues musicians as examples. After all, their home made guitars only had 3 chords to work with and I don't have to convince you of what blues has done to advance many forms of music in our times.
I also understand first hand Bob's fear of public domain thieves in the area of patents. I hold a few patents in the area of pharmaceuticals (some of which are licensed and generating royalties) and I submit invention disclosures to the University on all my research before I publish. I know naive colleagues who have had their ideas stolen from big pharma and I get requests for meetings with big pharma all the time and I refuse to meet with them most of the time especially if they refuse to sign a CDA (a nondisclosure agreement). I prefer to work with smaller companies that I can trust. On this subject, I would advice you guys to become familiar with searching the US patent database <www.uspto.gov> before disclosing an idea that may be of significant value on a public forum. There is also alot of free info and advice on the website on how to go about filing an invention disclosure (for a small fee). Filing an invention disclosure will give you a protected date in time and also give you one year to gather more data needed for filing a patent. Unlike the days before the internet, you can do alot of things now in the initial stages without the need for a patent attorney. Fortunately, I have a patent office on campus, so I have the luxury of not having to do a lot of the expensive and tedious paperwork that independent inventors have to deal with.
I would also suggest that you scan the scientific literature because most scientists these days stay constrained within their little niche areas of expertise and fail to stand back and look at the bigger picture. I can't tell you how many times I have pieced together a novel idea by simple connecting the dots already published in the scientific or patent literature.
After all, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA was largely already laid out for them in previous published research. They simply stood back and looked at the larger picture.
My favorite research tool for this hydrogen stuff is the web of knowledge <webofknowledge.com> because it will allow you to search topics within a database that contains most scientific journal and books in the world. It also allows you to track a particular line of research through time in the way that original paper was cited in the future. For example, Bockris is probably considered one of the world's authorities within the mainstream on hydrogen production systems. He wrote a theoretical paper in in 1985 titled "On the splitting of water. (see abstract below)" That paper has been cited 21 times and the web of knowledge allows me to quickly review the titles and abstracts of those papers. Now many of these journals (that are online) will charge you a price to get the PDF version of that paper unless like me you are affiliated with a University with a subscription. Unfortunately, we don't have one for the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HYDROGEN ENERGY, so the article below cost me $30 bucks to get.
Others I have access to for free thru the University subscriptions. However, as I stated to Bob, I would be willing to share these papers with a select few legally and justified under research collaboration efforts if they are willing to give feedback on their utility for new ideas, but I can NOT and will NOT post them online for everyone because of copyright laws.
Now you may be asking yourself, “why in the hell is this academic researcher going out of his way to give his time and advice to those on this forum?”. The answer is rather simple actually. When I was 18 I lived through a direct hit of a category III hurricane on a small barrier island in NC and for 5 days my family and neighbors lived through what most in this country have never experienced. No clean water, food, sewer systems, and in some cases adequate shelter for nearly a week. I learned first hand how dependent we all are on comforts of modern day civilization. I have never forgotten that experience, and though I pray it never happens, there may come a day when something like that happens again but on a much larger scale than even what the folks down in New Orleans’s faced. If and when that happens, it will be the free thinking creative folks that have found themselves on this forum who are going to be the leaders, thinkers, and the ones who survive and rebuild this great country. Also, I just want to learn more about making inexpensive hydrogen from water using everything tools and materials to impress my three boys the same way my dad used to impress me.
BOCKRIS JO, DANDAPANI B, COCKE D, et al.
ON THE SPLITTING OF WATER
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HYDROGEN ENERGY 10 (3): 179-201 1985
Times Cited: 21
Abstract
Future energy needs and requirements in manufacturing processes (like fertilizers, synfuels, etc.) makes hydrogen an important chemical commodity. It is projected that hydrogen required for various processes may reach 1.8 × 109 MBTU by the year 2000. This increases the importance of producing hydrogen especially from a cheap raw material like water. A survey of the different approaches for splitting water (electrolysis, plasmolysis, magnetolysis, magmalysis, photolysis, photoelectrochemical methods, radiolysis, etc.) is made and discussed in detail in this review.Statistics: Posted by decisive — Fri Jul 14, 2006 2:14 pm
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