Ah, the frustrating life of an inventor. It sounds so romantic, but turning great ideas into money-making products isn't so easy.

Robert Hockaday said he discovered the joy of inventing things when he was a kid with dyslexia who, despite falling several grades behind in math and reading in school, fiercely believed in the power of his imagination.

"I had this terrific imagination," he said. "I'd try things out in my little world."

Whenever he felt stupid, he worked harder to be smart. "I made a pact with myself: I'm going to become more intelligent," he said. "If you exercise your brain, you can become more intelligent."

As a high-school student in Hawaii, he began experimenting with fuel cells and started a fire while drying electrodes in his mother's oven.

Even after he muddled his way through a bachelor's degree and a master's degree (he worked on the fuel cell concept for his master's thesis at New Mexico State University in 1984), he eventually became a scientist and took a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Still, he reserved the wee hours of the day to tinker around in his basement with micro fuel cells that might be appropriate for electronics, such as cellular phones or digital cameras -- a market he considers more immediately realistic than the automobile market.

Fuel cells, which provide an efficient way to convert alcohol or hydrogen into electricity, are lightweight and produce five to 10 times the power of lithium-ion batteries.

In 1987, he formed a company called Energy Related Devices. The stated mission: "To manifest the vision that energy can be produced cleanly, simply and economically through technologies modeled on systems in nature. Toward this goal, ERD pushes the limits of science and engineering in the process of conceiving new energy-related technologies and products with the potential to generate both great changes and great profits."

In 1995, he took entrepreneurial leave of absence from the Los Alamos lab to devote himself fully to ERD. And even some of his colleagues at the lab invested in his work.

Hockaday wanted to leave the esoteric realm of nuclear-weapons diagnostics to pursue solutions to some of the world's biggest problems, such as energy. Now 50, he has patents and trademarks to his name, but no products -- a common predicament of many scientists who venture out on their own, said Todd Hanson, a spokesman for the lab who had invested in Hockaday's company.

"With a few exceptions, fuel cells as a business sector are still in an early stage," adds Gerry Runte, president of Santa Fe-based Mountain States Hydrogen Business Council. "Bob's focused on one of the few areas where, in the case of fuel cells, there's a business opportunity for people making money."

Hockaday says he holds eight fuel-cell patents in the U.S., the first dating back to 1987. But despite the attention fuel-cell technology has received in recent years, none of his work has been snatched up by manufacturers. "They're a little too advanced," he said of his patents.

Since, in theory, anything electric can run off fuel cells, Hockaday said, he focused on battery replacements and stationary backup power.

But Hockaday said invading the battery market is tricky because fuel cells have different needs than batteries. "A fuel cell has to breathe air," he said. "It's a living, breathing power supply that has to have access to air. And it also produces moisture."

Hockaday has had some promising leads, though.

In December 2005, he traveled to Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies in Shanghai to discuss methanol fuel cells and hydrogen systems described in his patents. He hoped that his work might be put to use in the

H-racer, a sleek toy car scientists at Horizon were developing then.

Though he wanted to help with the design of the fueling system for the H-cell, he said Horizon scientists stuck with their own approach in the end. "It does not use my patents," he conceded.

Hockaday, who demonstrated the H-racer in White Rock this month, said, "It's cute; it's fun. We have to show kids how fuel cells work and what they are."

To that end, he's writing a book of hands-on experiments to accompany another fuel-cell car built by Horizon for educational purposes; it's translucent and designed to be taken apart by students. Under a $44,000 contract with New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Hockaday is assembling 200 teaching kits, which will contain the car, the manual and other pieces to be used in experiments, for distribution in every middle school in the state. He hopes to have the project done by spring.

"The program that we are developing with (Energy Related Devices) is an integral part of a hydrogen initiative being driven by the governor's statewide program to advance sustainable energy technology within the state," Don Weinkauf, chairman of chemical engineering at New Mexico Tech, wrote via e-mail.

Meanwhile, Hockaday is waiting for the right application for his inventions to come along.

WHAT HE’S WORKING ON
Fuel cells, which provide an efficient way to convert alcohol or hydrogen into electricity, are lightweight and produce five to 10 times the power of lithium­ion batteries.

I want to read and/or post comments on this story