Matthew N. Eisler, University of Alberta

The record of fuel cell research and development presents one of the great enigmas in the history of technology. Despite over 50 years of concerted work since the end of Second World War, researchers have largely failed to deliver long-lived and affordable commercial fuel cells to the marketplace, mainly because expectations have always been higher than the knowledge base. I argue that we should look to fuel cell research and development communities as a central node of expectation generation. These communities have functioned as a nexus where the physical realities of fuel cell technology meet external factors, those political, economic and cultural pressures that create a “need” for a “miracle” power source. I argue that the economic exigencies and distinct material practices of these communities have played an important function in producing expectations of technological progress, playing as much of a role in shaping the resultant artifacts as the requirements of actual and potential customers.
For many years, this electrochemical power source, which combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and waste water, excited imaginations. Because fuel cells directly convert chemical into electrical energy, researchers long believed them to be exempt from the so-called Carnot Cycle limitation on heat engines, which dictates that such devices must operate at less than 100 per cent efficiency owing to the randomization of energy as heat. Consequently, fuel cells have struck some scientists and engineers as the “magic bullet” of power technologies.

I explore how the efforts of research and development communities in Britain and North America shaped the material culture of fuel cells in two post-war “booms,” the first in the 1960s, the second in the 1990s. Definitions of what constitutes a successful fuel cell have varied according to context and application. Tests of very simple devices using pure hydrogen and oxygen in controlled laboratory conditions have led people to believe that building long-lived and affordable commercial fuel cells using chemically complex hydrocarbons would be relatively easy. Assumptions developed through early trials of notional laboratory devices have tended to be disproved during long-term tests of scaled-up hydrocarbon fuel cells.

I also investigate the recent popular idealization of the fuel cell as a “miracle” battery. As a novel power source that may be used in a wide variety of applications including radios, radars, spacecraft, automobiles and distributed and central electricity generation plants, fuel cells have been all things to all people. In the last 20 years, the idea that fuel cells would allow the reconciliation of our taste for modern consumer products with our desire for a clean environment has become powerfully attractive to groups from across the ideological spectrum. The efforts of environmentalists and the business community to use fuel cell technology to serve quite disparate socio-economic and political ends reveals the depth of the affinity for technological utopianism in American culture.