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Fuel Cell History

The principle of the fuel cell was discovered by Swiss scientist Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1838 and published in the January 1839 edition of the "Philosophical Magazine" [6]. Based on this work, the first fuel cell was developed by Welsh scientist Sir William Grove. A sketch was published in 1843,and he created the first fuel cell. The fuel cell he made used similar materials to today's Phosphoric-acid fuel cell. It wasn't until 1959 that British engineer Francis Thomas Bacon successfully developed a 5 kW stationary fuel cell. In 1959, a team led by Harry Ihrig built a 15 kW fuel cell tractor for Allis-Chalmers that was demonstrated across the US at state fairs. This system used potassium hydroxide as the electrolyte and compressed hydrogen and oxygen as the reactants. Later, in 1959, Bacon and his colleagues demonstrated a practical five-kilowatt unit capable of powering a welding machine, which led, in the 1960s to Bacon's patents being licensed by Pratt and Whitney from the U.S. where the concepts were used in the U.S. space program to supply electricity and drinking water (hydrogen and oxygen being readily available from the spacecraft tanks).

Parallel with Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, General Electric developed the first proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) for the Gemini space missions in the early 1960s. The first mission to utilize PEFCs was Gemini V. However, the Apollo space missions and subsequent Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab and Space Shuttle missions utilized fuel cells based on Bacon's design, developed by Pratt & Whitney Aircraft.

UTX's UTC Power subsidiary [7] was the first company to manufacture and commercialize a large, stationary fuel cell system for use as a co-generation power plant in hospitals, universities, and large office buildings. UTC Power continues to market this fuel cell as the PureCell 200 [8], a 200 kW system. UTC Power continues to be the sole supplier of fuel cells to NASA for use in space vehicles, having supplied the Apollo missions and currently the space shuttle, and is developing fuel cells for automobiles, buses, and cell phone towers. UTC Power claims to be "the global leader in the development and production of fuel cell technology" for both transportation and on-site power markets. In the automotive fuel cell market, UTC Power demonstrated the first fuel cell capable of starting under freezing conditions with its proton exchange membrane (PEM) automotive fuel cell. Note: UTC Power also uses the UTC Fuel Cells [9] name when referring to fuel cell products.

Extremely expensive materials were used and the fuel cells required very pure hydrogen and oxygen. Early fuel cells tended to require inconveniently high operating temperatures that were a problem in many applications. However, fuel cells were seen to be desirable due to the large amounts of fuel available (hydrogen & oxygen).

Despite their success in space programs, fuel cell systems were limited to space missions and other special applications, where high cost could be tolerated. It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that fuel cells became a real option for wider application base. Several pivotal innovations, e.g. low platinum catalyst loading and thin film electrodes drove the cost of fuel cells down, making development of PEMFC systems such as automobiles more or less realistic.