The inventor John Kanzius , a retired engineer from Pennsylvania, was completely astonished when heating a mixture of water and Morton’s salt with a radio frequency device that he himself devised to fight cancer caused the liquid to flare up . “I was not looking for an energy source, but a desalination method,” acknowledges Kanzius. But serendipity, as in so many other cases throughout the history of science, worked in his favor.
To verify that it was not a trick, the veteran chemist Rustum Roy, from the North American University Penn State, repeated the experiment and concluded that he was facing ” the greatest discovery in 100 years of researching water “. Roy and his team of materials science experts argue that radio frequency releases hydrogen from salt water by weakening the bonds with sodium chloride and oxygen. That explains why the flare reaches 1600 ºC. “The potential is enormous,” says Rustum Roy, who says that now is the time to confirm whether the energy released will be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery.
