Timeline of hydrogen technologies

• c. 1520 – First recorded observation of hydrogen by Paracelsus through dissolution of metals (iron, zinc, and tin) in sulfuric acid.
• 1625 – First description of hydrogen by Johann Baptista van Helmont. First to use the word "gas".
• 1650 – Turquet de Mayerne obtained a gas or "inflammable air" by the action of dilute sulphuric acid on iron.
• 1662 – Boyle's law (gas law relating pressure and volume)
• 1670 – Robert Boyle produced hydrogen by reacting metals with acid.
• 1672 – "New Experiments touching the Relation between Flame and Air" by Robert Boyle.
• 1679 – Denis Papin – safety valve
• 1700 – Nicolas Lemery showed that the gas produced in the sulfuric acid/iron reaction was explosive in air
• 1755 – Joseph Black confirmed that different gases exist. / Latent heat
• 1766 – Henry Cavendish published in "On Factitious Airs" a description of "dephlogisticated air" by reacting zinc metal with hydrochloric acid and isolated a gas 7 to 11 times lighter than air.
• 1774 – Joseph Priestley isolated and categorized oxygen.
• 1780 – Felice Fontana discovers the water-gas shift reaction
• 1783 – Antoine Lavoisier gave hydrogen its name (Gk: hydro = water, genes = born of)
• 1783 – Jacques Charles made the first flight with his hydrogen balloon "La Charlière".
• 1783 – Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre Laplace measured the heat of combustion of hydrogen using an ice calorimeter.
• 1784 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard, attempted a dirigible hydrogen balloon, but it would not steer.
• 1784 – The invention of the Lavoisier Meusnier iron-steam process, generating hydrogen by passing water vapor over a bed of red-hot iron at 600 °C.
• 1785 – Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier built the hybrid Rozière balloon.
• 1787 – Charles's law (gas law, relating volume and temperature)
• 1789 – Jan Rudolph Deiman and Adriaan Paets van Troostwijk using an electrostatic machine and a Leyden jar for the first electrolysis of water.
• 1800 – William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle decomposed water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis with a voltaic pile.
• 1800 – Johann Wilhelm Ritter duplicated the experiment with a rearranged set of electrodes to collect the two gases separately.
• 1801 – Humphry Davy discovers the concept of the Fuel Cell.
• 1806 – François Isaac de Rivaz built the de Rivaz engine, the first internal combustion engine powered by a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.
• 1809 – Thomas Forster observed with a theodolite the drift of small free pilot balloons filled with "inflammable gas"
• 1809 – Gay-Lussac's law (gas law, relating temperature and pressure)
• 1811 – Amedeo Avogadro – Avogadro's law a gas law
• 1819 – Edward Daniel Clarke invented the hydrogen gas blowpipe.
• 1820 – W. Cecil wrote a letter "On the application of hydrogen gas to produce a moving power in machinery"
• 1823 – Goldsworthy Gurney demonstrated limelight.
• 1823 – Döbereiner's Lamp a lighter invented by Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner.
• 1823 – Goldsworthy Gurney devised an oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.
• 1824 – Michael Faraday invented the rubber balloon.
• 1826 – Thomas Drummond built the Drummond Light.
• 1826 – Samuel Brown tested his internal combustion engine by using it to propel a vehicle up Shooter's Hill
• 1834 – Michael Faraday published Faraday's laws of electrolysis.
• 1834 – Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron – Ideal gas law
• 1836 – John Frederic Daniell invented a primary cell in which hydrogen was eliminated in the generation of the electricity.
• 1839 – Christian Friedrich Schönbein published the principle of the fuel cell in the "Philosophical Magazine".
• 1839 – William Robert Grove developed the Grove cell.
• 1842 – William Robert Grove developed the first fuel cell (which he called the gas voltaic battery)
• 1849 – Eugène Bourdon – Bourdon gauge (manometer)
• 1863 – Etienne Lenoir made a test drive from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont with the 1-cylinder, 2-stroke Hippomobile.
• 1866 – August Wilhelm von Hofmann invents the Hofmann voltameter for the electrolysis of water.
• 1873 – Thaddeus S. C. Lowe – Water gas, the process used the water gas shift reaction.
• 1874 – Jules Verne – The Mysterious Island, "water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen of which it is constituted will be used"
• 1884 – Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs launch the airship La France.
• 1885 – Zygmunt Florenty Wróblewski published hydrogen's critical temperature as 33 K; critical pressure, 13.3 atmospheres; and boiling point, 23 K.
• 1889 – Ludwig Mond and Carl Langer coined the name fuel cell and tried to build one running on air and Mond gas.
• 1893 – Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald experimentally determined the interconnected roles of the various components of the fuel cell.
• 1895 – Hydrolysis
• 1896 – Jackson D.D. and Ellms J.W., hydrogen production by microalgae (Anabaena)
• 1896 – Leon Teisserenc de Bort carries out experiments with high flying instrumental weather balloons.
• 1897 – Paul Sabatier facilitated the use of hydrogenation with the discovery of the Sabatier reaction.
• 1898 – James Dewar liquefied hydrogen by using regenerative cooling and his invention, the vacuum flask at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.
• 1899 – James Dewar collected solid hydrogen for the first time.
• 1900 – Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched the first hydrogen-filled Zeppelin LZ1 airship.
• 1901 – Wilhelm Normann introduced the hydrogenation of fats.
• 1903 – Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskii published "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices"
• 1907 – Lane hydrogen producer
• 1909 – Count Ferdinand Adolf August von Zeppelin made the first long distance flight with the Zeppelin LZ5.
• 1909 – Linde–Frank–Caro process
• 1910 – The first Zeppelin passenger flight with the Zeppelin LZ7.
• 1910 – Fritz Haber patented the Haber process.
• 1912 – The first scheduled international Zeppelin passenger flights with the Zeppelin LZ13.
• 1913 – Niels Bohr explains the Rydberg formula for the spectrum of hydrogen by imposing a quantization condition on classical orbits of the electron in hydrogen
• 1919 – The first Atlantic crossing by airship with the Beardmore HMA R34.
• 1920 – Hydrocracking, a plant for the commercial hydrogenation of brown coal is commissioned at Leuna in Germany.
• 1923 – Steam reforming, the first synthetic methanol is produced by BASF in Leuna
• 1923 – J. B. S. Haldane envisioned in Daedalus; or, Science and the Future "great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen."
• 1926 – Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger show that the Rydberg formula for the spectrum of hydrogen follows from the new quantum mechanics
• 1926 – Partial oxidation, Vandeveer and Parr at the University of Illinois used oxygen in the place of air for the production of syngas.
• 1926 – Cyril Norman Hinshelwood described the phenomenon of chain reaction.
• 1926 – Umberto Nobile made the first flight over the north pole with the hydrogen airship Norge
• 1929 – Paul Harteck and Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer achieve the first synthesis of pure parahydrogen.
• 1930 – Rudolf Erren – Erren engine – GB patent GB364180 – Improvements in and relating to internal combustion engines using a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen as fuel
• 1935 – Eugene Wigner and H.B. Huntington predicted metallic hydrogen.
• 1937 – The Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg was destroyed by fire.
• 1937 – The Heinkel HeS 1 experimental gaseous hydrogen fueled centrifugal jet engine is tested at Hirth in March- the first working jet engine
• 1937 – The first hydrogen-cooled turbogenerator went into service at Dayton, Ohio.
• 1938 – The first 240 km hydrogen pipeline Rhine-Ruhr.
• 1938 – Igor Sikorsky from Sikorsky Aircraft proposed liquid hydrogen as a fuel.
• 1939 – Rudolf Erren – Erren engine – US patent 2,183,674 – Internal combustion engine using hydrogen as fuel
• 1939 – Hans Gaffron discovered that algae can switch between producing oxygen and hydrogen.
• 1941 – The first mass application of hydrogen in internal combustion engines: Russian lieutenant Boris Shelishch in the besieged Leningrad has converted some hundreds cars "GAZ-AA" which served posts of barrage balloons of air defense.
• 1943 – Liquid hydrogen is tested as rocket fuel at Ohio State University.
• 1943 – Arne Zetterström describes hydrox
• 1947 – Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford measure the small energy shift (the Lamb shift) between the 2s1/2 and 2p1/2 levels of hydrogen, providing a great stimulus to the development of quantum electrodynamics
• 1949 – Hydrodesulfurization (Catalytic reforming is commercialized under the name Platforming process)
• 1951 – Underground hydrogen storage
• 1952 – Ivy Mike, the first successful test of a nuclear explosive based on hydrogen (actually, deuterium) fusion
• 1952 – Non-Refrigerated transport Dewar
• 1955 – W. Thomas Grubb modified the fuel cell design by using a sulphonated polystyrene ion-exchange membrane as the electrolyte.
• 1957 – Pratt & Whitney's model 304 jet engine using liquid hydrogen as fuel tested for the first time as part of the Lockheed CL-400 Suntan project.
• 1957 – The specifications for the U-2 a double axle liquid hydrogen semi-trailer were issued.
• 1958 – Leonard Niedrach devised a way of depositing platinum onto the membrane, this became known as the Grubb-Niedrach fuel cell
• 1958 – Allis-Chalmers demonstrated the D 12, the first 15 kW fuel cell tractor.
• 1959 – Francis Thomas Bacon built the Bacon Cell, the first practical 5 kW hydrogen-air fuel cell to power a welding machine.
• 1960 – Allis-Chalmers builds the first fuel cell forklift
• 1961 – RL-10 liquid hydrogen fuelled rocket engine first flight
• 1964 – Allis-Chalmers built a 750-watt fuel cell to power a one-man underwater research vessel.
• 1965 – The first commercial use of a fuel cell in Project Gemini.
• 1965 – Allis-Chalmers builds the first fuel cell golf carts.
• 1966 – General Motors presents Electrovan, the world's first fuel cell automobile.
• 1966 – Slush hydrogen
• 1966 – J-2 (rocket engine) liquid hydrogen rocket engine flies
• 1967 – Akira Fujishima discovers the Honda-Fujishima effect which is used for photocatalysis in the photoelectrochemical cell.
• 1967 – Hydride compressor
• 1970 – Nickel hydrogen battery 
• 1970 – John Bockris or Lawrence W. Jones coined the term hydrogen economy 
• 1973 – The 30 km hydrogen pipeline in Isbergues
• 1973 – Linear compressor
• 1975 – John Bockris – Energy The Solar-Hydrogen Alternative – ISBN 0-470-08429-4
• 1979 – HM7B rocket engine
• 1981 – Space Shuttle Main Engine first flight
• 1990 – The first solar-powered hydrogen production plant Solar-Wasserstoff-Bayern became operational.
• 1996 – Vulcain rocket engine
• 1997 – Anastasios Melis discovered that the deprivation of sulfur will cause algae to switch from producing oxygen to producing hydrogen
• 1998 – Type 212 submarine
• 1999 – Hydrogen pinch
• 2000 – Peter Toennies demonstrates superfluidity of hydrogen at 0.15 K
• 2001 – The first type IV hydrogen tanks for compressed hydrogen at 700 bar (10000 PSI) were demonstrated.
• 2002 – Type 214 submarine
• 2002 – The first hydrail locomotive was demonstrated in Val-d'Or, Quebec.
• 2004 – DeepC is an autonomous underwater vehicle propelled by an electric motor powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.
• 2005 – Ionic liquid piston compressor
• 2013 – The first commercial 2 megawatt power to gas installation in Falkenhagen comes online for 360 cubic meters of hydrogen per hour hydrogen storage into the natural gas grid.
• 2014 – The Japanese fuel cell micro combined heat and power (mCHP) ENE FARM project passes 100,000 sold systems.
• 2016 – Toyota releases its first hydrogen fuel cell car, the Mirai
• 2017 – Hydrogen Council formed to expedite development and commercialization of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies