To most people, hydrogen power might sound like something out of Star Trek, but not to Roger Billings.  Known to many who follow his exploits as Dr. Hydrogen, Billings is an affable inventor who has been promoting hydrogen since he was in high school.  He has built hydrogen cars and a hydrogen house.

Read the Full Article about Roger Billings

SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE

Paul Harvey News
Friday, October 19, 1990

“What of today’s news is of most lasting significance?  Maybe this: (First a little paragraph of background.) We can run automobiles with nothing but water in the gas tank, you know.  We can run cars on hydrogen made from sea water; limitless supply; burns clean.  Dr. Roger Billings demonstrated the feasibility of a hydrogen-powered automobile twenty-five years ago, but it was too costly.

Today, Dr. Billings announces a breakthrough which he says makes it cheaper to burn water in your car than to burn gasoline. He calls it the LaserCel™.  The hydrogen fuel cell would replace the conventional internal combustion engine.  Sixty to eighty percent of the hydrogen energy put into the cell comes out as electricity.  No moving parts.  Now, electricity produced by the fuel cell would then power an electric motor which would run the vehicle.  The hydrogen fuel cell technology has proved itself in our space ships and most recently in our space shuttle, but until right now, the space-age version of the cell was not adaptable to ground transportation.  Now Dr. Billings says it is.  With a special electrolytic fuel cell fabricated by a high-power laser, it doubles the 150-mile range of his previous hydrogen-fueled car to 300 miles, and it cuts the cost in half.  Billings projects that the LaserCel™ reduces fuel cost to the gasoline equivalent of $1.12 a gallon.  He is preparing now to license the technology for commercial use.

Ambrose Manikowski of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company has seen a prototype.  He says, ‘The Billings fuel cell is an innovative design, and it may provide a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine and to batteries in undersea applications’.

In a prototype being built for the Pennsylvania Department of Energy, the hydrogen is stored in powdered metal hydride form.  That means it is utterly safe.  Chemistry professor, Dr. John O’M. Bockris of Texas A&M, speaking of the LaserCel™ said, ‘Roger Billings has come the closest to bringing to reality the DREAMS about which I have talked and written.  Billings’ laser fuel cell sounds to me as though it puts America ahead again.'”

More Paul Harvey Coverage:

Florence Times – Tri-Cities Daily: Paul Harvey Reports on Roger Billings’ Work

Los Angeles Times Syndicate: Paul Harvey Update on Roger Billings and Hydrogen Generation

With the exceptions of Ted Turner and a few politicians, nobody who has power or is seeking it wants to say so. It’s unseemly. When people learned that NEXT was planning to cite them for their likely roles in shaping this country’s future, their reactions ranged from “I just work here” to a disingenuous “Do you really think I’ll have that much power?” Even the President of the United States customarily grumps about the growing power of Congress, the press and the special-interest groups.

So who’s really running things around here?  The answer seems to be: many people. Just as the country cannot expect another Churchill or de Caulle on the international scene, it also should not look for a dominating individual at home. Power will be scattered. A kind of decolonization is taking place domestically as well as internationally. There are now 163 nations in the world instead of 40, and at home there are countless groups struggling for power formerly held by a few.

All this is not necessarily bad news. The people leading the various struggles may be less well known and individually less powerful than their predecessors, but they suggest that this country is in for a lively future. Even when they work in traditional organizations, the new leaders are hardly plodding or tradition-bound, and their approaches to power are often strikingly original. A Tom Wilhite can go from Keswick, Iowa (population 300), to running Walt Disney’s film operation at the age of 28. A Lewis Lehrman can build one of the world’s largest drugstore chains, then chuck it all at age 35 to form his own think tank. These flexible, unpredictable people sometimes seem to lead nine lives and to have an influence in each of them.

Talking with them produced two somewhat contradictory impressions about the future of power in the United States. First, smaller and even more specialized interest groups will proliferate; they will be adept at marshaling their supporters for action. Second, there will be an increasing concentration of power in America’s most central institution, the corporation.
Several trends will decentralize power in the years ahead:

• Local and regional issues will attract more world-beaters and earth-shakers. When John F. Kennedy had to choose between running for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts or the United States House of Representatives, he remarked that he didn’t want to spend his life haggling over sewerage contracts—and headed for Washington. Over the next few years, more politicians are likely to opt for the sewerage contracts because of the inconstancy of political power in Washington, residual bad feeling over Watergate, local chauvinism (expressed not just as a love for home but as an unwillingness to submit to such centers of power as New York, Washington and Los Angeles) and, finally, the satisfaction of being a big fish in a small pond. After four years in Washington, Jimmy Carter may not be sure of what he accomplished. But Joe Riley Jr., Mayor of Charleston. South Carolina, knows that he brought the Spoleto Festival—and $24 million in tourism in a single two-week period—to what was once ridiculed as the “Sahara of the Ozarks.” Says Margaret Hance, the Mayor of Phoenix, “Cities are the jurisdiction closest to the people . . . the rewards and punishments are the swiftest and the surest. I don’t feel that going to the Senate, for example, is necessarily an advancement.”

The competition for local and regional office is becoming at times almost comically intense. In New Jersey, with the election still six months off, at least 18 people have declared themselves gubernatorial candidates. At the state’s big Democratic fund-raising dinner during last year’s Presidential campaign, the chairman asked, “Will all those who aren’t candidates for governor please stand up?” Nobody stood.

President Reagan, the self-described “Sagebrush Rebel,” will foster regionalism if, as promised, he turns back power from the Federal Government. A struggle will then be likely between the cities—which have long enjoyed a special and remunerative relationship with Federal grant-makers—and the states, led by Lamar Alexander, Governor of Tennessee, who argues that past Presidents have reduced them to little more than “administrative agents.

•Despite efforts at forming new coalitions, the generation between 20 and 40 years of age will remain politically diverse; different groups will go different ways. But those groups are showing sophistication in exploiting an unusual array of politicaltools to further their diverse ends. They will change the way people and corporations behave. Some examples: The Moral Majority unleashed a direct-mail attack to talk Warner-Lambert out of sponsoring a television show it found unsuitable. A Missouri union, rather than rouse opposition with a television ad campaign, used directmail to get its partisans out to defeat a right-to-work law. Wisconsin activists pushed through a law enabling a citizens board that was monitoring the utility company to use the utility company’s monthly bills as a fund-raising vehicle. Finally, in one of the more imaginative variations on the political poll, Douglas Schoen of New York overcame Venezuela’s high illiteracy rate and predicted his client’s narrow victory in the presidential race through a poll using flash cards coded with colors and political party symbols.

Sometime later in this decade, cable television, two-way computer communication and user-activated information distribution systems may rejigger the whole scheme of power in this country. How will it affect the networks if there are suddenly 140 television stations in Atlanta? How will it change Yale or Stanford if their entire libraries become available at the push of a button to a dropout in Dubuque?

The possibility is that the familiar centers of power will become less important, and peripheral areas, which are often more daring and experimental, will regain their attraction. The new technology will encourage people like David Gockley, who is trying to Americanize and popularize opera—not from Lincoln Center but from Houston and some of the sleepier towns of the Southwest. And the people who will wield the technology may not be just Atlanta’s Ted Turner or Boston’s Bob Bennett, but a hundred Turners ind Bennetts in a hundred once-sleepy communities.

Here, however, is the contradiction: While power is being dispersed to peripheral areas and organizations, it will at the same time probably become more concentrated in large corporations. The country elected Ronald Reagan not just to whittle away at the Federal bureaucracy and turn back its power, but also to unfetter overregulated industries and stimulate corporate investment in new plants. The mandate was not just anti-Government, but pro-business.

How the Reagan Administration will carry out that mandate has already been widely discussed, and the reactions are predictable. Herb Schmertz, vice president of Mobil Oil, argues that the change will promote “individual freedom” by getting Government off everyone’s back. And while he agrees that power will flow back to the corporations, he says that it won’t be “concentrated in any particular corporation.” Ralph Nader, on the other hand, argues that the executive and legislative branches of Government will become “extraordinary prisoners” of corporations, to the detriment of workers, consumers, motorists and the environment.

The Reagan White House is deliberately corporate not just in substance but in style and structure, and that may provide a model that furthers corporate power. “My guess is that an increasing percentage of college presidents will be business executives,” says Robert LeKachman, professor of economics at Lehman College in the City University of New York. “And I suspect that an increasing percentage of new union presidents are going to be managerial types. Because it’s unwise ever to underrate the sheer demonstration effect of success in capturing the White House.”

Even in such unlikely precincts as Harvard (where Derek Bok, the president, still wants to get the university into the genetic engineering business) and the University of California (where Herbert Boyer of Genentech remains a professor), the notion is regaining acceptability that the business of America is, in fact, business.

The corporate model of power and authority may be gaining importance simply because that’s where the money is. LeKachman argues that the continuing influence of corporate political action committees will be at least as great over the next few years as that of the Moral Majority. He portrays the new crop of conservative Senators and Congressmen who were elected with millions of dollars in corporate aid as “people who are not only indebted to corporate contributions, but more than that, who have corporate models internalized, who themselves act as nearly as they can in politics like middle management in corporations.”

Corporate money will also become more important outside politics as other sources of funding disappear. First, the Government will become tighter with handouts. Richard Cyert, president of Carnegie-Mellon University, predicts that science-oriented colleges will lose money for basic research at one end, but gain it back in defense contracts (often directly tied to corporations) at the other; liberal arts colleges will simply lose. Second, foundations will continue to be weakened by a 1969 law requiring them to pay out all of their earnings each year to the Government thus preventing them from building their endowments to match inflation. That means that cultural, educational and civic organizations will have to rely increasingly on business support. Corporate managers will gain influence outside the traditional corporate bailiwick.

How then to make sense of these two contradictory trends in power? Governor Jerry Brown argues that the “tension between the periphery and the center, between the hick and the city slicker” will be the – fundamental power conflict of the 1980’s. And the people who shape the future may be those in the middle. People like Camille Haney in Chicago, who brings together corporations and consu-merists and gets them to compromise. Or like Federal Appeals Court Judge Amalya Kearse. (Ralph Nader predicts that the Federal courts, now dominated by Carter appointees, will become the chief battleground for public-interest groups). People like Brown himself, who seems to root for those on the peripheries of power while aiming for the center. Or like Reagan, who can simultaneously appeal to the localists and to the multinational corporations. Perhaps it will be that ability—to seem a part of the old and the new, the center and the periphery, and to mediate between the two—that will be the crucial quality for those who would wield power in this country’s future.
—Richard Connrff

For many people, the line between science and religion is as distinct as the difference between night and day. Not so for TOYM honoree Roger Billings!

“Many of my most interesting mental experiments have come as results of things I have read and pondered in the scriptures, things the prophets have said. I consider that my religion has given me real scientific insight toward true principles which are the laws of the universe,” says Billings.

Both religion and science play important roles in Billings’ life as president and chairman of Billings Energy Corporation. “I find as I pursue my religious studies, as I pursue my scientific studies, they lead me toward the same conclusions,” he says. He characterizes both as a quest for truth.

Billings became interested in science at an early age. As a ninth grade student in a science class in Provo, Utah, he became enthused about the idea of using hydrogen as fuel. “The idea of burning hydrogen—creating energy and powering a car while producing water—was very intriguing to me. The idea of a pollution-free automobile was really kind of exciting. The idea of a fuel system that could be renewable— you split water to make hydrogen and you burn the hydrogen and get the same amount of water back— that whole concept was very beautiful,” he says.

Billings set to work on the problem. He was just 18 years-old when he successfully converted an old Model A truck to hydrogen power. His work in hydrogen fuel technology has since earned him seven patents and numerous awards.

The progress and the awards might not have come if Billings had not started his own company on a shoe-string budget of S400 after completing his work at Brigham Young University.

“Large political organizations—mainly governments, but also to a certain degree large industries—stymie creativity. If I had gone to work for the U.S. Department of Energy, or for that matter, for a large petroleum company, the ideas that we are now able to show are good ideas with regards to hydrogen energy would have never been nurtured,” he says.

“One of my life goals is to create an environment where (scientifically creative) people can come out of college and not be so structured, but can develop freely and achieve some great things for tomorrow … There’s a little of it in the university environment now, but even there they don’t have the resources to get their good ideas over the hump into reality,” he says.

There are other, more personal dreams he is still pursuing too. “I consider myself a very happy person, I really enjoy every day, I enjoy life fully,” he says. “I would hope that if I can have any impact in the way of an example for my fellow man that it might be in that area. That someone might look at me and learn some of the secrets of the universe that relate to personal happiness. That I might motivate his life to be just a little bit different, just a little bit happier. If that were done I would consider myself to be very successful.”

Despite the success he has enjoyed in his career, Billings believes that he is still in a state of trying to accomplish. “I haven’t stopped many imports of foreign oil just yet and haven’t cleaned up the pollution in very many cities. But I’m still pursuing a dream …”

Billings, 32, his wife, Tonja, and five daughters have recently moved to Independence, Missouri. Billings is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers as well as of Rotary International. He has earned recognition as Western Region Winner of the Ford Future Scientist of America, as Mr. Free Enterprise from the Provo chapter of Sertoma International and as the Provo Jay-cees’ Outstanding Young Man of the Year. He has also been a Gold and Silver Medal Award winner at the International Science Fair, and has earned a citation for outstanding work in electronics from the U.S. Air Force as well as a Certificate of Achievement from the U.S. Army.

by Alene E. Bentley – The Enterprise – 19 August 1975

“Inspiration and genius – one and the same.” ~ Victor Hugo

It was the same old story the day the Wright Brothers rolled down the runway in some rickety contraption they called an airplane. “You’ll never do it,” people said.  “If man were meant to fly, he’d have wings.”

“It’s impossible,” his teachers warned.  “You cannot burn hydrogen in a combustion engine.

“Those were the proudest days of my life.  Driving that truck on a fuel they said would never work.”

That did it.  That was enough to inspire a defiant 15-year old scientist to prove he was right. Working for nearly three years in a makeshift basement laboratory, Billings finally emerged with a hydrogen powered lawn mower engine that ran. He nearly backfired himself out of existence — or at least out of his neighbors’ good graces, but he was, nevertheless, encouraged.

Near the end of his senior year at Provo High, he brought forth what is believed to be the nation’s first hydrogen powered automobile, a Model A Ford.

Today, at the ripe age of 28, Roger E. Billings could be named the Father of Hydrogen Technology.

No Obstacles, Just Problems

“I never saw the big obstacles in developing a hydrogen powered engine,” Billings said, “like the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be able to do it.”

“After I got it to run, I had to give it power.  If I wanted to live in the same neighborhood I had to get rid of the backfires.  I next learned to control the pollution, and finally, we’ve now overcome the question of hydrogen storage.  To me, they weren’t obstacles, just little problems I overcame one by one.”

Billings took the same confident, casual approach to his “formal education” at Brigham Young University too.  “I knew all along I wanted to have a company working to develop hydrogen technology so I took all the classes I thought I would need . . . Chemistry, physics, engineering, business, journalism (for dealing with the ever curious press), etc.  At the end of five years I went to my counselor and said, “I’m through.  I’m ready to graduate.”

Looking over his transcript, his counselor said,”You’re kidding. You don’t have enough hours in any one subject to graduate with.”
“Well, I’ve learned what I need to,” he said.  And left.

Billings said a special Interdisciplinary degree has now been created at BYU and he will soon receive a bachelor’s degree. He also announced his acceptance at an unnamed university to complete a doctorate degree in engineering.

Billings admits that his youthful age has been a handicap at times. “It’s difficult to manage a company of which I am the youngest employee,” he said. “But on the other hand, youth carries the blessing of enthusiasm and energy – both of which I needed a lot of in the beginning.”

Being so young, he is confident he will live to see development of hydrogen technology on a large scale basis too.

Roger Billings believes the greatest rewards of developing hydrogen technology will someday be the knowledge that he personally helped to solve some of the world’s most critical problems – energy supply and pollution. Development of hydrogen technology could feasibly prevent bitter wars, he says.

“And if I never do solve those problems completely, I’ll at least have the satisfaction of knowing I tried.”