Hawkeye: Looking forward to reading the Wired article, which was pre-announced here a few weeks ago. I am surprised it mentioned ERC at all, since I thought it was supposed to be just about Ballard. Two self styled futurists from Wired were interviewed in Barron's a few weeks ago, and gave their incoherent pitch on why Ballard was going to be the Intel of fuel cells, among other authoritative predictions about life 20 to 30 years from now.
Ballard has always been superb at getting puffery in the general press. This thing feeds on itself. I know a number of free lance writers and, while they are not plagiarists, they often read articles in one magazine and sell the idea to another. About a year ago, for example, there was a very positive article about Ballard in the Price-Costco Shopper. Probably the author(s) of the Wired article read it while waiting in the checkout line, and the rest is history.
It the trade press, however, it is a different story. Power Engineering, for example, and Chemical Engineering have all had articles about fuel cells in the last few years, where ERC got all the attention and Ballard was relegated to a few lines at the end. But that is because those magazines are aimed at a knowledgeable audience.
The only one I can find here at my summer place is a stray one from Chemical Engineering Progress (September 1996) entitled "Fuel Cells Poised to Provide Power". It devotes pages to ERC, and doesn't get around to mentioning Ballard's efforts until after it has covered at greater length the work of such major companies as Ztek Corp of Waltham, MA and Sulzer Innotec, of Winterthur, Switzerland.
So thank you for asking. And anytime you want to post that long list of all my factual errors, please go ahead so I can correct them. |
