If hydrogen was discovered in 1869, why did it take them so long to find out how to use it for car fuel?

Question

If hydrogen was discovered in 1869, why did it take them so long to find out how to use it for car fuel?

Answer 1

Because hydrogen is not a very good car fuel.  Even compressed to 10,000 psi, hydrogen has one seventh the energy per unit volume of gasoline.  Even today, most drivers would likely be unwilling to exchange a vehicle that runs 300 miles on a tank of fuel for one that would, in all likelihood, run fewer than 43 miles on a tank of fuel.

Answer 2

Soon they'll be using it for your mobile phone, but those weren't around in 1869 either.

If your question is why weren't cars using hydrogen initially, Then that's because the environmental benefits of hydrogen weren't known.

Ever since fossil fuels were 'discovered' they have been the default soulution for many problems, that is one reason why so many sceptics are having a hard time getting thier head around global warming, because fossil fuels have been a great answer to so many problems for so long. Now they are the problem. It's quite a shift don't you think?

Answer 3

Cars were not invented in 1869. But when they were invented, they could have used hydrogen. It doesn't take any special modifications to use hydrogen as fuel, but since it is really hard to make hydrogen, and since hydrogen does not occur in nature, they choose to work with available fuels, like gasoline and natural gas. Believe it or not the car engine was adapted from an engine originally designed to use natural gas. The jump from natural gas to hydrogen is less than the jump from natural gas to gasoline, but they just didn't do it because, where would they get hydrogen? That is still the problem today; where to get that much hydrogen? In the 1800's I recall that they made hydrogen for balloons by reacting acid with iron filings. It caused a horrible mess that was probably just dumped on the ground in those days, and I bet it was expensive. Today, hydrogen is made from petroleum. It can also be split from water by using lots of energy, but generating that energy causes pollution. So no matter how you look at it, making hydrogen causes pollution.

Answer 4

Think about all the logistics into transporting and distributing Hydrogen...  You do know that it is a gas, like AIR at room temperature right?  It is not a liquid so you can't just pour it into your car. You need it to be highly compressed or extremely cold to store it in a small space.  This sort of technology for compressing air hasn't been around for that long so it would have been very very difficult to use.  

We used Hyrdogen for blimps until people found out how dangerous it was.  Ever hear of the Hindenburg?

Answer 5

You might want to actually read the history of the automobile and of combustion engines.....Science and technology was not very advanced in the 1860s

Answer 6

Because every thing was going along smoothly using oil up until now. Why change something  that you have billions of dollars invested into . Now you have such a demand for energy and it polluting the atmosphere because mother nature cant keep out with the house cleaning .

Its just time for all that 100 year old technology to go out the door and if you ask me its about time . Mother of necessity always brings in the new

Answer 7

There are lots of problems for hydrogen such as storage, production, and price.

Answer 8

Well, given that there is no production car on the market that uses hydrogen, and the big obstacle seems to be the ability to safely compress hydrogen to the point that it can actually be carried on a tank in the car, I would say that they still do not know how to use it for car fuel.

Oil was being used for thousands of years before someone used it as a car fuel.  I think that 140 years isn't too bad.

Anti-matter was discovered in the last 100 years, why is it taking so long for people to find out how to use it for Starship fuel?

Answer 9

THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE IT SAFE SO IDIOTS WON'T HURT THEMSELVES OR OTHERS.