Francis Thomas Bacon

Francis Thomas Bacon was a British engineer, born December 21, 1904 at Ramsden Hall, Billericay, Essex and died May 24, 1992, who built the first practical hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell. Educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent decades overcoming the practical obstacles that had stalled fuel cell research since William Robert Grove first demonstrated the principle in 1839, developing an alkaline fuel cell that used activated nickel electrodes and a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, later refined into porous nickel sheets. By 1959 his team demonstrated a 5 kilowatt forty-cell battery achieving 60 percent efficiency, work that reached the public eye when NASA adapted his design for the Apollo program, since the fuel cell offered rising efficiency at lower power loads and used hydrogen and oxygen already carried aboard spacecraft for propulsion, with its water byproduct usable by the crew. President Richard Nixon is reported to have told him, without you Tom, we would not have gotten to the moon. He was appointed OBE in 1967 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1976 and a Fellow of the Royal Society.