Late great engineers:  William Robert Grove - Inventor of the hydrogen fuel cell

When it comes to the marquee names in science and engineering, it’s a safe bet that most will have heard that of Thomas Edison, the American inventor commonly supposed to have invented the light bulb. And yet hardly anyone unfamiliar with the history of 19^th century physics will know the name of William Robert Grove, the Welsh scientist whose invention of the incandescent electric light predated Edison’s co-option of an established technology.

While the laurels for the invention of the early photographic process called the daguerreotype inevitably go to the Frenchman that lent his name to it – Louis Daguerre – few, if any are aware that It was Grove’s pioneering work (in collaboration with English amateur scientist and cigar entrepreneur John Gassiot) that paved the way for both the daguerreotype and its competing ‘multiple discovery’ technology the calotype or ‘talbotype’, invented by William Fox Talbot. Back in Wales, the popular media occasionally remembers Grove in lists of the principality’s most famous sons, and with a certain amount of both poetic and scientific license dub him ‘the Welsh Tesla’. But this is hardly a fitting tribute to the scientific and legal polymath who came up with the original hydrogen fuel cell technology upon which future environmentally sustainable vehicles may one day rely.