"Dude, you promise not to tell anyone?" He didn’t care what my answer was; the question was merely part of that giddy, I’ve-discovered-something-the-world-doesn’t-know feeling that infects every inventor. He was so excited telling me about his particular incarnation of the hydrogen powered car that I hardly had the heart to tell him. Instead I cringed inside as I listened to his simple, elegant, and perfectly wrong logic.
There are two types of inventors of the proverbial perpetual motion machine. One type should know better, but doesn’t and won’t be convinced otherwise. He’s the type that cares what your answer is when he swears you to secrecy. Art Bell is welcome to those nuts. The other type I'm learning to regard with warm sympathy. They should know better and many do, but they are romantic dreamers who can’t resist the delicious fantasy--wouldn't it be swell if maybe, just maybe....
When I was a child I spend most of my time in the garage building or dreaming about what I would build. I remember riding my bike around town looking in the dumpster of a local cabinet manufacturer thinking that maybe, just maybe this week they will have thrown out that perfect strip of rock maple that would make a perfect crossbow limb. I remember taking a hacksaw to my mother's bicycle thinking maybe, just maybe she won't mind if I "borrowed" it to build a pedal powered car. I remember climbing to the top of the tool shed with cardboard wings strapped to my arms thinking maybe, just maybe I've stumbled on just the right geometry. I remember pointing my telescope at the moon thinking maybe, just maybe I'll get a glimpse of the other side this time.
Oh I knew well enough that some of my plans were impossible, but kids have a way of responding to real world limitations with a mixture of hope and fantasy. Even if a chasm stands between your meager tools and your grandiose inventions you convince yourself that you're on the verge, almost there, just a little bit more, there's a chance it might work. When I was a kid I used to check payphones for left-behind change. Somehow this morphed into a recurring dream I still have occasionally where I happen upon a vending machine that returns more change than I put in. Even in my dreams I know this is fantasy, but it's a delicious one to indulge and, who knows, it's
possible it could actually happen. And so you chalk up this dream among the good ones, like that one where you can fly. That's what it's like for inventors to dream.
I never quite figured out what type of inventor this guy with the idea for a hydrogen car was. One thing is certain: he had convinced himself that he invented the perpetual motion machine even if he didn't realize that's what his hydrogen car was. You see, he intended to use power from the engine's alternator to split water into its constituent elements and use the resulting hydrogen to run the engine that turned the alternator. The poor guy couldn't be bothered with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and who was I to bother him?
