Fifty Years Ago:

On November 1, 1952, the United States produced the first hydrogen fusion detonation.

    Today, ambitious research across the wide spectrum of peaceful uses of hydrogen is revealing incredible promise for the future of humankind.

h2glow2.gif (16911 bytes)Hydrogen in History

British World War I recrutment poster depicting German Zepplins dropping bombs on civilians, with a close up of a woman being killed. "ENLIST! By staying at home, you are giving your approval to this sort of thing."

The Era of the German Hydrogen War Zeppelins

 

German Zepplin Captain Ernst A. LehmannThe Zeppelins

The Development of the Airship,
with the Story of the Zepplins Air Raids
in the World War
by
GERMAN CAPTAIN Ernst A. Lehmann

Zeppelin Sails Through the Skies Again
New York Times     November 18, 2001

RELEASED!


The Original 1937 FBI Files on
The Hindenburg Disaster
337 Pages     Freedom of Information Act     PDF Format
1  2  3  4

THE TRUE STORY OF HYDROGEN AND THE `HINDENBURG' DISASTER
United States Congressional Record

A Zeppelin for the 21st Century - Scientific American

Click to go to the Poul la Cour Museum in Vejen, Denmark. HYDROGEN IN HISTORY
Storing Wind Power
    From 1891 to his death in 1908 Poul la Cour systematically researched how wind power could support his social vision. The biggest problem was storing wind power from the stormy days to the days with no wind. When he came up with the idea to solve this problem he asked the Finance Committee of the Danish Parliament for money to build the test turbine at Askov. In 1891 the test turbine was ready and the tests started.
    By using the energy of the wind, the movement of the blades
The electrolysis basement below the wind turbine building at Askov around 1900. The basement had 10 electrolysis tubs. The electricity for the electrolysis came from direct current dynamos which were driven by the wind turbine. On windy days up to 1000 litres of hydrogen and 500 litres of oxygen were produced per hour. should drive a dynamo which then produced electricity. The electricity was led into a tub of water where it split the water into the gasses oxygen and hydrogen and the gasses were then separately collected in tanks.
Poullacourturbinel.jpg (6954 bytes)     At first, la Cour used the gasses for lighting e.g. Askov Folk High School but later on he discovered that the gasses could also be used for autogenous welding and for a time he was a leader in this field.
    All of his life, Poul la Cour discovered new ways to store energy as he thought accumulators were too expensive. The test turbine was used to make soda lye, calcium
The first test turbine from 1891. The cratostat and the water separation unit were developed in the wooden shed. carbide and fertilizer. But he finally concluded that the most realistic
solution was a small accumulator battery that could store one  day’s electricity consumption.  A farm wind turbine could only be used for threshing on windy days and all labour on the farm involving the wind turbine would have to be planned according to the weather.
    If a large wind turbine was installed at an electricity plant, it was equipped with a backup engine running on petrol or gas. He received money to build a new wind turbine in 1897 and after some years this prototype was used at Askov electricity plant. For thirty years the turbine produced electricity with a very moderate consumption of backup power.    
-- Courtesy of the Poul la Cour Museum in Vejen, Denmark.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ICHC SHORT LIST


1) The Riversimple Open Source Car Design

Are Our Designs Free?
Patrick's blog    40 Fires Foundation    June 19, 2009

How does open source car design work?
    The honest answer is that we won't know until we have done it. But we have plenty of ideas, which will develop over the coming months as we share the designs for the Riversimple technology demonstrator and start to produce collaboratively a production prototype.
    There are lots of inspiring examples from open source software, and we are being advised by people with experience in this area. But there are many differences between open source hardware and software design.

Differences between open source hardware and software
    There are some major differences between open source software and hardware design:

- There is a "gap" between the on-line design work and the finished product delivered to the consumer. Not only is there substantial physical testing to be done, but also there is significant work to be done to turn the designs into an actual functioning product (we like the analogy of a food recipe – a recipe is not a meal, you need a chef to turn it into a meal). The answer we believe lies in establishing the right relationship between 40 Fires and the manufacturers (the first of which is Riversimple), where each party has its needs met.

- There’s a technical challenge to share ideas on-line, where there is no satisfactory open source CAD (Computer-Aided Design) application. Our solution is to use a low tech approach at first, using a wiki-based website and freely available 3-D viewers to show the 3-D drawings. In time we may get involved in developing a OS CAD program.

- Licensing. We cannot simply take the standard OS software license (the GPL is the most common), since we are dealing with hardware, which is not so well protected by copyright. See further down for some thoughts on the licensing issues.

We'd like to hear from you!
    As in Open Source software projects, we are not attempting to do everything at once and we don’t have to. The designs that Riversimple is licensing to 40 Fires resemble in many ways the code base which a complex software project starts with.
    However, because a car is different to software and requires different development stages and processes, we will be asking for input into specific areas, as well as procedural matters.
    That's why we would like to hear from you, not only from engineers or designers, but also if you have contributed to large scale open source software projects and can help set up our project management structure. Lawyers with an understanding of copyright and patents would also be useful as we review the most appropriate license to use and if and how we should be using patents for some new inventions which emerge.
    To get involved, send an e-mail to participate@40fires.org explaining your interest and skills.

The stages
    We envisage different stages:

Stage 1  Over the coming months, starting this month (July 2009), we will make available design schematics from the Riversimple technology demonstrator vehicle, together with a description of each component's function in the whole system, and a vehicle design brief for the production prototype. We will provide a mailing list or discussion forum to enable comments and discussions. At this stage we expect Riversimple, as the creator of the original designs, to be leading the discussions.

Stage 2  As the detailed discussions develop, we expect a broad consensus to emerge amongst the participants as to which is the best solution to pursue for each design . By this stage, we expect the conversations to be more democratic, with a broad cross-section of collaborators participate, sharing their knowledge and insights.

Stage 3  We start creating detailed designs collaboratively and publishing them on-line. Eventually an entire vehicle will be created, and tested, on-line. We are aiming to complete the design of the production prototype by the summer of 2010.

Stage 4  Riversimple and other entrepreneurs, under license from 40 Fires, can start downloading the schematics and building and testing the vehicles. With the lessons from this, work can start on an improved production prototype.

Are our designs free (as in beer)?
    Richard Stallman famously said that free software is "free as in speech not free as in beer."

Are our designs free?
    We consider that the designs themselves will be free in the sense of free speech, with one exception. Currently we have chosen a Creative Commons, non-commercial license. So the designs can be used, modified, distributed under the same license terms but not for commercial purposes.
    We have chosen to be conservative at this stage and not allowed commercial use. This may change - we intend to set up a discussion group to debate this. The issue is that we don't want a large, profit-focused organisation taking the designs and starting manufacturing with them yet. We intend that when we grant a manufacturing license, this will be for a small fee (say $10 per car) to cover 40 Fires running costs.
    We are also keen on collaborating so if a commercial organisation wants to use the designs, we'd like to chat with them first before allowing them to use the designs for commercial purposes.
    The licensing issues are very complex (patent law is not copyright law; cars are not software) and we don't pretend to have all the answers. It is quite possible that our license may in the end not meet the strict requirements of the Free Software Foundation. But all we really care about is that the license works to ensure that the cars can be built in hundreds of different variations around the world, by local companies and entrepreneurs as well as big multinationals if they like, and that no one company (whether Ford or Riversimple) can dominate the market and keep the ideas to itself.