Fuel cells are not a new idea - for more than 200 years, researchers have been working on variations of fuel, electrodes and electrolytes to produce electricity. But with over 100,000 fuel cell powered vehicles expected on the roads by 2004, this quiet power source is at last becoming quite an achiever.

William Grove's drawing of his experimental "Gas Battery"- image from "Proceedings of the Royal Society".

As early as 1802, at the age of 24, Sir Humphrey Davy (the mine safety-lamp man) created a simple fuel cell with which he was able to give himself a feeble electric shock. But he didn't bother to document it.

Then, in January 1839, Christian Friedrich Schoumlnbein, the German/Swiss chemist who discovered ozone, published an article about the hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell in the Philosophical Magazine but he didn't pursue it either.

At about the same time, Sir William Grove, a Welshman who was working on the series and parallel connections of his powerful platinum-zinc battery, published an article, interestingly also in the Philosophical Magazine (perhaps I should be writing about the Philosophy of Fuel Cells).

Almost as an afterthought, Grove added a note to his article, based on experiments on the electrolysis of water he had carried out, of the possibility of using the hydrogen-oxygen reaction to generate electricity.