Energy

A bit of history

The use of hydrogen as fuel was already known around the 1950s. At that time in big Italian cities, and still today in some European cities, the so-called “city-gas” was distributed for household heating purposes. That gas was a mixture of hydrogen (approximately 50%) and carbon oxide, achieved through the reaction of carbon and water steam. Many people still associate hydrogen to the memory of the first German airships, the mythical Zeppelins, “filled” with hydrogen (lighter than the air) and very famous thanks to their transatlantic routes. Unfortunately, tragic memories emerge too. To highlight the dangers of hydrogen, the tragedy of the Hindenburg airship is often mentioned, which exploded and fell on the ground in 1937. A more accurate analysis actually showed that the presence of hydrogen was not the main cause of the tragedy. Recent studies tend to give the responsibility for the accident to the very flammable airship cover. Over the years, the sector stimulating most research projects has been the transport sector. For decades, for example, the use of hydrogen has been proposed to replace the fuel currently used in airborne transport, mainly because hydrogen is much lighter. The first experiments in this field date back to 1957, when the United States built a hydrogen-propelled B-57 bomber (a military plane). In the road transport sector, at the beginning of the 1970s an engineer from Turin, Massimiliano Longo, developed a system to use hydrogen in cars. This possibility became strategic with the development of fuel cells over the last decades. Actually, in 1939 the British physic William R. Grove had already shown that the electrochemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen generates electricity. During an experiment, he managed to generate electric energy in a cell that contained sulphuric acid. Inside the cell, two electrodes, made up of two thin platinum layers, respectively attracted hydrogen and oxygen. Nevertheless, fuel cells based on this principle remained a lab prop for over 50 years, i.e. until the ‘60s, when NASA started implementing light (and very costly) versions thereof as energy source for spaceships. At the beginning of the 1950s, the U.S. financed research on a new type of bomb characterised by greater destructive potential than the atomic bomb. The project was entrusted upon a group of scientists headed by Edward Teller and led to the implementation of a new generation of bombs, called “H” bombs or “hydrogen bombs”, the destructive power of which was astonishing, as shown by the first experimental explosion on the 1st November 1952 on the small island of Eniwetok, one of the Marshall Islands (South Pacific). The 65-tonne bomb dug a 3 km wide and 800 m deep hole, virtually annihilating the whole island. Such bombs were never used during a war, but many experimental tests were carried out with undesired effects. In particular, the radioactive fall-out can contaminate food and cause serious diseases such as cancer. Partly to reduce such dangers in August 1963 the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed a treaty to ban any experiment with any kind of nuclear weapon in the atmosphere (including the hydrogen bomb), in the space or underwater. Since then, many nations signed the treaty. However, some countries have not signed it yet and still carry out experiments in the atmosphere.