Water igniter

An American engineer wants to prove that he has invented a new type of fuel.

In modern science, miracles in the form of discoveries made on the knee are rare. Unfortunately, the era when unknown self-taught people from the outback could with their own minds reach discoveries of world significance ended either in the century before last, or even earlier. Nowadays, in order to discover truly unusual things, we need scientific centers and billions of dollars or at least rubles. But sometimes I really want to believe that the Kulibins are not completely extinct yet.

Apparently, a similar story happened in Erie, Pennsylvania. Local resident John Kanzius managed to get on the pages of newspapers and even in news agency reports, where he was presented as a talented self-taught inventor. At first he was presented as the creator of some technology that might help in the eternal fight against cancer. Then they started talking about very strange things: supposedly Kanzius managed to “set fire to salt water.”

The message about the fight against malignant tumors, which appeared at the end of August, looked desperately strange. Citing CBC News, it was claimed that Kanzius, who has leukemia, had invented a way “using metal nanoparticles activated by radio waves to burn cells without damaging surrounding tissue” (quoted by UPI). No details of this “super technology” were given, except that the most difficult thing will be to find a way to target these same nanoparticles to cancer cells. In other words, no one can imagine how to apply this revolutionary scientific idea.

And then a piece about Kanzius appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which talked about a certain experiment metaphorically called “salt water setting fire.” It was described as follows: during his experiments with radio waves and water, Kanzius allegedly managed to create such conditions when a certain gas began to be released from a solution of table salt. The gas turned out to be flammable, from which it was concluded that with the help of radio emission the inventor was able to decompose water and apparently release hydrogen. To confirm the experiment, a chemist from the University of Pennsylvania, Rustum Roy, was called in, who stated that “this is the most significant thing that has been done in the science of water in a hundred years.” According to him, no electrodes were used in the experiment, and the experiment is not at all some kind of “trick.” Encouraged, Roy also allegedly said that he was going to extract funding for continued research from the Department of Energy or the Military Department.

The decomposition of water molecules itself is well known to chemists. For example, the classical electrolysis of water has long been described, when, when an electric current is passed, it is separated into oxygen and hydrogen. There is radiolysis, when the disintegration and ionization of molecules is caused by hard radiation, and photolysis, when this occurs under the influence of photons of visible light. In general, radio radiation is not used to decompose water, although there is, perhaps, nothing impossible in this. However, Kanzius’ experience is described in the press and agency reports so vaguely that it is somewhat difficult to understand what exactly happened in his test tubes.

In particular, it is absolutely unclear what kind of gas is released from the solution - pure hydrogen or, for example, an explosive explosive mixture (hydrogen mixed with oxygen). If, as is reported, the flame turns different colors under different experimental conditions, it can be assumed that there are some impurities in the burning gas. It is also unknown what kind of radio emission the American Kulibin used, how its installation was designed, etc. Finally, there is the main problem: does Kanzius's experiment have any practical meaning or is it just another trick for a school chemistry class. The inventor, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, points to the “enormous amount of energy” released when the resulting gas is burned. This is possible, but not a word is said about how much energy his mysterious radio emitter, in turn, absorbs (since there are no perpetual motion machines, more must be spent than is obtained at the output).

Nevertheless, John Kanzius made quite a splash, since his mysterious experiment attracted the attention of not only local newspapers, but also larger media outlets. And after that, the story went for a walk on the Internet, along the way acquiring catchy headlines about the burning of water and malicious comments recalling Chukovsky’s tit that set the sea on fire. When Kanzius tried to come up with a device to kill cancer cells, his work was not taken seriously. But when his strange experiment was presented under the guise of a scientific miracle, the public's attention to his radio engineering experiments was guaranteed.

Mikhail MANSKOY