Yes my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable… When the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future.
— Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island (1874–5) was the genesis of the hydrogen economy, but aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin dispels the science in a long, technical and fascinating article for The New Atlantis, preferring ethanol and methanol as viable alternatives to the “hydrogen hoax”. (via Jack Shedd)
