The hydrogen economy can feel like a recent invention: green molecules, electrolyser gigafactories, RFNBO certificates, e-fuels mandates. The vocabulary is new. The underlying ideas are not. Two of the founding milestones of the entire hydrogen-based energy story were achieved on Swiss soil, by men with Swiss roots, more than two centuries ago. This is a short history piece for anyone who likes to know where a technology actually comes from before discussing where it is going.

1807: the first internal combustion engine ran on hydrogen – and was Swiss

François Isaac de Rivaz (1752–1828) was a Franco-Swiss inventor and politician from the Valais. After a career working with cannons in the artillery, he started experimenting in 1804 with internal combustion in a piston – a radically different idea from the steam engines that defined his era. By 1806 he had built a working stationary engine. In 1807 he received a French patent for a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine with electric spark ignition. In 1808 he fitted it into a primitive wheeled vehicle. It was, by most accounts, the first internal combustion engine ever installed in an automobile.

The fuel was a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, ignited by an electric spark from a Volta battery – itself a recent invention. In 1813, de Rivaz built a much larger machine, the grand char mécanique: six metres long, two-metre wheels, just under a tonne. In Vevey, on the shore of Lake Geneva, this vehicle was loaded with around 300 kilograms of stone and wood plus four men, and driven up a 9 percent slope for 26 metres at 3 km/h. Every piston stroke moved the machine four to six metres forward.

The French Academy of Sciences was unimpressed. Their verdict at the time: internal combustion would never rival the performance of the steam engine. They were right for several decades and spectacularly wrong over the next two centuries. De Rivaz died in 1828 without seeing his idea become an industry.

1838: the fuel cell effect, discovered in Basel

Thirty years later, in 1838, the German-born chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein (1799–1868), then professor at the University of Basel, made a different but equally consequential discovery. While experimenting with electrolysis – splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity – Schönbein realised that the reaction also worked in reverse. By dipping two platinum wires into dilute sulphuric acid, with one wire exposed to hydrogen and the other to oxygen, he detected a voltage between them.

This was the fuel cell effect: the principle that hydrogen and oxygen can be recombined into water in a controlled way that produces electricity directly, without combustion. Schönbein published the result in 1839. The Welsh scientist William Grove built the first practical “gas battery” based on the same principle shortly afterwards – the two men corresponded as friends – and Grove is often credited as the father of the fuel cell, but the underlying physics was demonstrated first in Basel.

Schönbein went on to discover ozone (also in 1839, while doing the same electrolysis experiments), coined the term geochemistry, and invented guncotton. Basel granted him honorary citizenship in 1840.

Two technologies, two paths, both Swiss-rooted

It is worth pausing on what these two milestones represent together. De Rivaz demonstrated that hydrogen could power a vehicle through combustion in a piston engine – the architecture that, with petrol substituted for hydrogen, came to dominate the twentieth century. Schönbein demonstrated that hydrogen could power a vehicle through electrochemistry in a fuel cell – the architecture that has now returned as one of the main contenders for heavy duty road transport, aviation auxiliary power, and stationary backup applications. Both pathways exist today. Both were first shown to work, in their primitive forms, on Swiss territory.

What followed in the nineteenth century was not a hydrogen economy. Cheap petroleum and the maturing steam engine pushed both technologies into the margins. The internal combustion engine was eventually rebuilt around gasoline, not hydrogen. Fuel cells slept for nearly a century until NASA dusted them off for the Gemini and Apollo programmes in the 1960s.

From history to the present

Switzerland’s contemporary role in the hydrogen and Power-to-X story has many threads, but the historical continuity is striking. Today, SPIN member Synhelion, an ETH Zurich spin-off, runs the world’s first industrial-scale plant for synthetic fuels produced from solar heat. The Empa, the federal research institute that started life as a materials testing laboratory in the nineteenth century and also a member of SPIN, operates one of Europe’s leading research programmes on hydrogen and synthetic fuels. SPIN members Paul Scherrer Institute, the EPFL and the ETH all run substantial work on electrolysis, catalysis and CO₂ conversion. Swiss companies are active across the value chain, from electrolyser components to compression technology to fuel cell vehicles and refuelling infrastructure.

This is not a coincidence. Switzerland’s combination of a strong precision-engineering tradition, dense research universities, and an established industrial chemistry sector makes it a natural place for the science of hydrogen to be advanced – just as it was in 1807 and again in 1838.

SPIN Perspective

We tell this history not to claim a national monopoly on a technology that has of course been advanced by many countries and many people. Hydrogen is, and always has been, a global story. But understanding where the ideas came from has a sober value when the public conversation can swing between hype and dismissal. The internal combustion engine and the fuel cell were both demonstrated on Swiss soil more than two centuries ago. Both were ignored for a long time. Both eventually became technologies that change how the world works.

Anyone working on Power-to-X today is, in a small way, continuing a line of work that runs through Vevey in 1813 and Basel in 1838. That is a useful thing to remember when the technology feels too new to trust.

Sources: François Isaac de Rivaz (Wikipedia), De Rivaz engine (Wikipedia), ChemistryViews: Schönbein, Electrochemical Science Advances (2022).