A bout 175 years have passed since the invention of the fuel cell (FC) by Schoenbein und Grove, 1 but up until now, only limited market penetration has occurred despite the potentially high energy conversion efficiency of FC technology. The very successful development of electrical generators and internal combustion engines (ICE) for cars and the challenges related to material selection and electrode kinetics led the promise of the fuel cell to almost sink into oblivion in the initial century or so since its invention.In the first half of the 20 th century, there were isolated attempts to develop FCs, such as by Francis T. Bacon, who started his alkaline fuel cell (AFC) development in 1932 and presented a practical 5 kW system in 1959. In the same year, Harry K. Ihrig (Allis-Chalmers) demonstrated the first FC vehicle, a 15 kW AFC powered tractor (Fig. 1).