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THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF STANLEY MEYER AND HIS WATER POWERED CAR


A MYSTERY UNRESOLVED TO THIS DAY AND STILL VERY TOPICAL

 * 02 November 2020
 * 4 min read
   
 * 8 images
   
   

The crime scene is in Grove City, Ohio, Franklin County.

With all the ingredients of the setting in the American province that is dear to
crime writers.

It’s the 21st March 1998, the first day of spring, and four men are having lunch
in a restaurant.

A waiter serves one of them some cranberry juice, perhaps (but we will never
know for sure) chosen for dessert. This man, immediately after the first sip,
suddenly gets up as if he’s gone crazy, he holds his hands around his neck, he
loses his breath, runs out into the parking lot, collapses to the ground and
pronounces his last words “they poisoned me”.

Stanley Meyer, with his buggy powered by the water-powered system he had
patented

Steve Robinette, the lead detective on the case, collected the testimonies of
everyone in the parking lot, including the final disturbing words of a man
immediately identified as Stanley Meyer, a citizen of Grove City. His brother
Stephen was one of the four at the table, and he heard the words spoken at the
end of his life. Robinette is not one for interminable investigations. He
performed a toxicology analysis, which gave no significant results, and he also
spoke to the coroner, who attributed his death to a brain aneurysm, compatible
with previous episodes of hypertension. In just three months, he closed the case
file, sealed it with a coloured elastic band and wrote on the cover “death by
natural causes”. Formally, the case was now resolved.

One of the many newspaper articles that spoke of Stanley Meyer’s surprising, as
well as unproven invention

In 2015 Robinette retired from the police force, and devoted himself to
politics, becoming president of the city council, and in 2019 he also ran for
mayor.

But we can all rest assured that in all these years he never forgot the case of
Stanley Meyer, the inventor of the water-powered car who, in 1998, got up from a
table at a restaurant to run into a car park, some say just to leave us a
message: “they poisoned me, and it’s because of what I’m doing to revolutionize
the car world”. The coroner’s report contained the following statement: “no
poison known to American science has been found”. But maybe the search for
Meyer’s enemies should have gone beyond American soil. We have to go back to
1975, when Meyer, who spent his life patenting technical solutions of every
kind, from the banking sector to, ironically, heart monitoring, decided to
explore the automotive world. In that year, the effects of the Middle East oil
embargo, which had also led to a crisis in the United States, were still
considerable, with a significant drop in car sales.

Stolen one week after the inventor’s death, Stanley Meyer's “Water Powered Car”
currently appears to be in Canada, but there is no evidence whether it actually
works

Meyer thought that the way to get out of oil dependency was through water
propulsion. Yes, water. A “very” alternative solution, it goes without saying.

He created a fuel cell, based on the principle of splitting water atoms into its
elemental form, burning hydrogen to create energy and releasing oxygen, along
with water residues, through the exhaust pipe, thus generating harmless
emissions.

After a few months he managed to develop his water-powered engine, mounting it
onto a dune buggy painted with the conspicuous writing: “water powered car”, and
with a call to his Christian faith, to communicate the spirit of protection and
creation, which animated his actions.

Meyer claimed his vehicle was able to travel 180 km. With just 4 litres of
water, and nothing else. Forty-five kilometres with just a litre of something
that cost hardly anything must have sounded truly magical. And that’s exactly
when his troubles started.

One of the drawings of the patent filed by Stanley Meyer for his “Water Powered
Car”

Taking a look at what’s left of this inexplicable series of events, there is a
film of this moving car, and various photos of the car surrounded by admiring
people. But many argue that no one had ever really verified the actual operation
of the engine, whether it was powered purely by water and whether the patent or
the project worked at all. Analysing the case, there have been rivers of words
and ink spent over the years both to support and to refute Meyer’s thesis, and
especially the veracity of what he claimed. Even an American judicial authority,
in 1996, two years before his mysterious death, had looked into Meyer’s
invention, petitioned by several small investors who had financed the
development of his project, who later became suspicious and worried that it was
doomed to bankruptcy.

Water is part of automobile history: in this image the Fiat Stanguellini 750
Sport that won the Tobruk/Tripoli race in 1939. In that case, water was
vaporized in the combustion chamber to improve cooling

The Fayette County Judge (Ohio) had appointed three surveyors, to whom Meyer
refused to submit the car, and who concluded by noting that the chemical and
technological process “invented” by Meyer would not be at all revolutionary,
even going so far as to call it trivial, and that no evidence was provided that
it could actually effectively power an automobile engine.

The Judge then issued his verdict, in which he decreed that the funds received
by Meyer had been stolen by deception (“gross and egregious fraud”), and he was
sentenced to return it to investors. For a man whose livelihood depended on his
ingenuity, this was certainly not a small financial pill to swallow and, perhaps
worse still, honour. Certainly, this was a very sad epilogue for someone who had
proclaimed themselves to be the saviour of the complex equation between
efficient automotive propulsion, respect for the environment, and affordable
power.

Stanley had previously stated that he had been threatened many times by
representatives from oil companies from around the world.

Even the Ferrari 126 C2 Turbo Formula 1 used the vaporization of water in the
combustion chamber

Including tales of car chases with armed guards. Fantasy?

He also claimed he had been offered the hyperbolic sum of a million dollars
(some even say a billion dollars) to kill all evidence of his technology, and
that he had refused.

A scientist who tried to get in touch with Meyer to learn more about his project
declared that Stanley had a “paranoid” attitude, and that he had flatly refused
to subject the Dune Buggy to a test in order to verify its performance, even if
they promised not to open the “black box” containing the electronic components
that powered the system.

We know just how many car manufacturers have faced the delicate problem of
hydrogen propulsion – water still lies at the heart of the process – but with
far greater design and construction complexities. Stanley and his brother
Stephen, despite their defeat, tried to protect what they continued to declare
as the invention of the century.

GM studied for turbo engines - in this case for the Oldsmobile Jetfire - a
cooling system that mixed alcohol and water

Stephen Meyer claimed that one week after Stanley’s death, unidentified people
had stolen the Dune Buggy from Stanley’s garage, along with all of the
inventor’s instruments, and that the vehicle had subsequently been found, but it
is unclear under what circumstances and conditions.

The patent had been registered, and the Dune Buggy was later closed off in a
room without doors, so that no one could steal it and destroy it (but according
to Meyer’s detractors, so that no one could examine it and discover the weakness
of the patent). It seems that in 2014, and therefore some sixteen years after
the death of Stanley, the vehicle turned up in Canada (perhaps sold by his
brother Stephen), now under ownership of the Holbrook family (claimed to be old
associates of Stanley), but nothing is known of it after that date.

We cannot therefore exclude the possibility of new chapters being added to this
thriller, in which reality, reticence and supposition alternate continuously,
firmly keeping the suspicion of Meyer’s supporters alive, who still doubt,
against all investigative evidence, the purity of that cranberry juice.

In 2006, BMW presented the Hydrogen version of its 7 Series: its V12 was powered
by petrol and liquid hydrogen. This tells us that water will no doubt play a
role in the future of the car, confirming, in a certain sense, the idea of
Stanley Meyer



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