Inventor Stanley Meyer will be best remembered for his claims that he had invented a car - a dune buggy - that could run on water.
He was thought to have developed an engine that would run solely on water - which would obviously be a really big deal if it had worked out for him.
There are varying reports as to how he said he'd managed to do this. One reported theory was that he'd created a fuel cell that used a principle of splitting water atoms into their constituent elements.
Of course, this means hydrogen and oxygen, using hydrogen as a fuel, strictly speaking. Meyer's claim was apparently that his engine was able to separate the two elements down, and burn the hydrogen which would create energy. Oxygen and some water residue would be the only emissions, according to his engine plans.
Given the oil industry is so lucrative, something like this invention would completely turn that all upside down. So you can understand how not everyone may be pleased with a nifty, environmentally-friendly invention like Meyer's supposed water-fuelled engine.
Advert
Meyer died in 1998 and his reported last words made headlines, given how chilling they were.
He'd apparently been out at a lunch, according to his brother, when he grabbed his throat, fell to the floor and uttered the words: 'They poisoned me'.
But following an inquest into the death, a toxicology report was found to show 'no poison known to American science', various reports have since said. It was reported that Meyer died as a result of an aneurysm and the coroner's conclusion was a death from 'natural causes'.
Two years before his death, an Ohio court found him guilty of "gross and egregious fraud", and ordered him to pay back investors for money he'd been given.
Advert
A Reddit thread, r/pics, from a few months ago has some interesting comments and explanations.
One person explains: "The 'car that runs on water" and the "100MPG carburetor" are myths that have persisted for a long time and gained a lot of traction in the 80s and 90s. I remember hearing about them all my life.
"Both are technically true, you can run a car on 'water' and you can get 100MPG out of a carb, but whats left out is that we don't do those things for a reason, there are huge drawbacks. With water, you're basically just using hydrogen which takes way more energy to produce than you can get by burning it, and you can get 100mpg out of a carb but it won't output enough horsepower to be actually useful (think car unable to maintain speed or even climb a gentle hill).
Advert
"These conspiracies persist because there's enough of an element of truth to be extremely enticing to people who don't fully understand the problem".