Practically seven a long time after revolutionising clear vitality, British engineer Francis Thomas Bacon’s groundbreaking work is about to be recognised with a blue plaque at his former residence in Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire. Mr Bacon, an Essex-born innovator, invented the hydrogen-oxygen gas cell – a clear, high-efficiency energy supply – that helped propel Apollo 11’s historic moon touchdown in 1969 and reworked vitality analysis.
Mr Bacon’s gas cells, later named “Bacon Cells” by NASA, had been instrumental within the Apollo missions, supplying secondary energy that enabled astronauts to speak, function gear, and even drink water generated by the cells. In a 1969 BBC interview, Mr Bacon defined the machine’s significance: “Usually, in the midst of time, a battery runs down and you have to recharge it. Now, [with] this machine, so long as you go on feeding hydrogen and oxygen into it, and also you take away the water fashioned, it would go on producing energy indefinitely – and the astronauts drink the water.”
His work earned excessive reward, with then-President Richard Nixon reportedly telling him, “With out you, Tom, we would not have gotten to the moon.”
The Cambridge-based charity Cambridge Previous, Current & Future is championing the plaque as a tribute to Mr Bacon’s contributions, which proceed to encourage sustainable vitality analysis right this moment.
Professor Sam Stranks of Cambridge College, an professional in vitality supplies and optoelectronics, emphasised the significance of Mr Bacon’s imaginative and prescient. “He was a pioneer,” mentioned Mr Stranks, as per the Guardian. “Gas cell know-how was extraordinarily essential to the house program as a result of so long as you’ll be able to repeatedly provide the gases, you’ll be able to hold producing electrical energy.”
This environment friendly, adaptable energy supply was splendid for distant environments like outer house and has since influenced renewable vitality improvements throughout sectors.
Gas cells are experiencing renewed curiosity as a possible inexperienced vitality supply. Mr Stranks identified their relevance in trendy functions, significantly in powering long-haul vehicles, ships and distant services the place standard batteries could be impractically massive and heavy.
Reflecting Mr Bacon’s imaginative and prescient, he added, “I at all times hoped it might be used for driving automobiles about,” and anticipated that “in a modified kind, it’ll come.”
Mr Bacon’s curiosity in gas cells started in 1932 after his research in mechanical sciences at Cambridge. Impressed by the theoretical work of physicist William Grove, who explored the idea of gas cells in 1839, Mr Bacon started his personal experiments. He quickly confronted an ultimatum from his employer – both abandon the dangerous analysis or go away. Selecting the latter, Mr Bacon pursued his work at Cambridge College after which Marshall, an area engineering agency.
For years, he struggled to fund the venture till, in 1962, NASA adopted his alkaline gas cell for the Apollo program. A US firm invested $100 million, a serious breakthrough for Mr Bacon’s once-overlooked invention.
Regardless of this success, Mr Bacon remained largely unknown exterior the scientific neighborhood. Professor Clemens Kaminski of Cambridge College mentioned, “British engineers have a number of the most sensible concepts, however turning these concepts into industrial successes is what then usually fails, and Bacon confronted this. But he persevered.”
In recognition of his contributions, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins personally thanked Mr Bacon, gifting him a signed {photograph} of Mr Armstrong’s well-known moonwalk.
Although Tom Bacon died in 1992, his legacy continues to encourage. Professor Stranks described him as “a visionary and an unsung hero,” believing Mr Bacon’s pioneering work on gas cells nonetheless foreshadows right this moment’s clear vitality efforts.