Somewhere I have a book titled “The Greatest Cons of all time”. The book is about highly successful con artists. Obviously Ponsi has a chapter, but one of the more interesting chapters was about a gentleman who made a fairly nice living with a water as fuel scam. He took both Tom Edison and Henry Ford as investors. He would allow anyone to inspect a car, and verify that it was a normal auto with no hidden fuel tank or anything like that, and that the fuel tank was empty. He would then pour pure water into the tank and add a small vial of olive colored fluid that smelled like almonds. The car ran perfectly.
He would conduct the demonstration for any potential investor. No one was ever able to disprove that he really running the car on the water mixed with his magic chemical. He needed investors to further develop his invention and to get ready to go into production. Many people invested, but he was never quite ready to bring his miracle fuel to market. When he died, there was no clue as to the formula, and he had spent all the money.
Chemists have come up with various mixtures that can be added to water, and then burned in an internal combustion engine, particularly the low compression, low octane engines of the day. The only problem is that these chemicals are far more expensive than gas. Both Edison and Ford got conned, They were so amazed with the fact that they had seen a engine run on water (not really it had chemicals added) that it didn’t occur to them that it wasn’t cost effective. Water is cheap right?
