β Scribed by A.J. Appleby
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
It is a great honor and great privilege to address you in this historic auditorium, from the podium used for the famous lectures of Michael Faraday, the 200th anniversary of whose birth we celebrated last Sunday .
It is again a great pleasure to introduce Francis Bacon, Tom to everyone, the father of the modem fuel cell . As we all know, the fuel cell is an electrochemical battery operating at temperatures much lower than those normally used to turn the available energy of fuels into heat by combustion. This gives it thermodynamic advantages . It also means that it cannot produce oxides of nitrogen, so that its pollution is very low. It uses surface catalytic reactions, and therefore it requires clean fuel, which requires the extra cost of refining. This is not a disadvantage, since clean fuel has become an obligation today. It is also efficient, and can therefore make better use of precious energy resources . Better yet, it can be made clean and efficient in small units, which can give an effective doubling in efficiency, since they can use its waste heat for on-site co-generation . This should not only enable us to better use our fossil fuel reserves, but it also should allow us to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases causing global warming, particularly carbon dioxide .
When we gathered here two years ago, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the invention of the embryo hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell by Sir William Grove . It was also the centenary of the invention of the fuel cell in a recognizably modern form, by Mond and Langer in 1889 . Tom, after Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, started
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