Fire, Ice - And A Billion Dollar Science Lesson

By G. E. Shuman

It is the week after Easter, and as I made my morning coffee today I happened to notice that the outdoor thermometer read 7. That’s right… 7. It didn’t read 47, 37, or even 17. It said, in it’s big bold liquid-crystal numbers, in this case ‘number‘, 7. To me, 7 degrees is a bit cold. Especially for the week after Easter, no matter how early that particular Easter happens to be.

You know how it is. You go to work and hear one co-worker saying to another: “Hi Joe. How cold was it at your house this morning?”

“Oh, it was 7.”

“7? It was about 5 point 5 at my house.” And the degree-splitting conversation goes on from there, but we won‘t follow it. Suffice it to say, if you feel like sufficing something, 7 may be the perfect number, but as far as temperatures go, it is a very low and cold number. It is only a tiny 7 degrees above 0 Fahrenheit, and a whopping 25 degrees below the point when liquid water simply refuses to move, and becomes the frigid stuff encrusting my home, yard and driveway today. I hope that by the time this paper comes out the temperature will have improved some, for your sake and mine.

As I looked out my kitchen window, sipping a mug of that coffee I made two paragraphs ago, what I saw was a six foot high pile of the once beautiful winter-wonderland stuff that I always despise by this time of year. By this date on the calendar, I have long stopped thinking of smiling snowmen, toboggan rides, Rudolph, and sparkly, fluffy flakes gently wafting down onto some majestic country scene or other. Those thoughts have been replaced by ones of early morning windshield scraping, lingering flu symptoms, and visions of filthy cars and dirty, repeatedly thawed and frozen snow banks. As I peered out at the snow that I hope will soon be only a memory, I thought that people who truly love the white stuff must either own snowmobile dealerships or sell ski equipment. To me, especially right now, I have no love for it. In fact, I have no like for it. I stood there, sipping more coffee, listening to the soft rumbling of the blessed, overworked, oil-sucking furnace in my basement. That very moment my flaming fuel was likely enriching the life of some Saudi sheik as it burned an ever bigger hole in my checkbook. I cradled the hot mug in my hands, and mumbled to myself that there just MUST be a better way to keep from freezing in Vermont. (I believe that mumbling to ones self is an acceptable thing to do. I have often been tempted to actually talk to myself, but would probably put my cell phone to my ear if I did, just to not seem weird. I think I would do this even if I were alone.) Anyway, I then mumbled: “Look at all that snow.”

Then: “Look at all that water trapped inside of all that snow. Yes, look at all that H2O.” I’m good at mumbling rhymes, especially early in the morning. And with my rhymes, the mumbling helps a lot. I drank more of my hot flavored H2O as I thought some more. Hum… H2O. Let’s see. I know what that is. It is two atoms of hydrogen, and one atom of oxygen. Every school child knows that. At least every school child from my generation knows it.

I stared through the pane, and the pain, at that huge pile of dirty white ice the other side of my carport. Yes, I thought. H2O… water. I remember learning that hydrogen and oxygen are something else when they are not busy being water. Oh yes. I remember now. They are…um… something known as rocket fuel. That’s right. Liquid hydrogen combined with liquid oxygen will gladly ignite and shove your rocket as far up into the heavens as you like. So there I was, staring out my kitchen window at piles and piles of rocket fuel, as I listened to imported oil being consumed in an increasingly expensive fire, to warm my home.

And now, the billion dollar science lesson. The problem with heating my home, or your home, with the snow pile behind it is that, so far, separating the hydrogen in water from the oxygen requires more energy to do so than can be produced by the resulting separated elements. The secret would be to come up with a way to do it more efficiently. One hint would be to use a bit of the released ‘rocket fuel’ energy to add to the process, and then add more and more as it is produced, until the whole thing becomes self regenerating. Just don’t tell anybody. This seemingly boring stuff is something worth thinking about, as the person who finds the answer will enable our country to advise the sheiks as to just what they can do with their crude and dirty, crude oil, and become rich enough to hire Bill Gates to cut his lawn in the process.

I hope I beat you to finding the secret. I got a start at my seventh grade science fair. My experiment consisted of two test tubes, mounted upside down in a pan of water. Electrodes attached to carbon rods were placed up inside of each of them, and the other ends of the wires connected to one of those big old lantern batteries. What happened, simply enough, was that one test tube soon filled with hydrogen from the water, and the other oxygen, in a process called hydrolysis. That is something different from electrolysis. In hydrolysis you separate hydrogen from oxygen, not whiskers from a hairy chin. (There I go, rhyming again.)

All this convinces me that God has a sense of humor, placing nearly unlimited fuel right under our noses, or behind our carports, as the case may be. Or maybe He has surrounded us with all this energy, in the forms of snow banks, rivers, lakes and even oceans for another reason. Maybe He wants us to have unlimited, nearly free power, but only when we have become knowledgeable enough and mature enough to unlock the secret, and generous enough to freely share it. I wonder all of this as I continue to sip my mug of hot, coffee-flavored rocket fuel.

A quick note regarding my last column. I want to thank J.D. Green of Froggy 100 for the fun radio chat a week or so ago. J.D., I forgot to mention one other point in defense of our quite unappreciated pot holes, and that is this. Has anyone, anywhere, EVER named a sports team after potholes? Even once? Hummm? Oh, sure, other road features get attention. But aren’t pot holes at least as valuable as frost heaves? It’s just food for thought.