[Vwdiesel] Burning water

[William J Toensing]

I heard a story while living in southern Calif. that I doubt is true, but fits this thread of "burning water". Seems this professor or inventor in the San Diego area invented an internal combustion engine that would run on water but was unable to figure how to throttle the engine. The separation of oxygen & hydrogen supposedly occurred by raising the temperature of the steam to an extremely high level. Another problem was he was unable to find a metal or ceramics that would hold up under these extreme temperatures.
There is also an old "urban legend" of a man pulling into a gas station & asking for "water" to fill up his gas tank, then dropping a "pill"  in the tank, then driving away. I remember as a kid, having a toy cannon, which I still have, in which you would put some water, a little amount of "bauxite", as I vaguely recall it being called, that would create a flammable gas which you would make go bang when you struck a flint inside the barrel which would then cause an explosion. Old cars from the "brass" era would have acetylene lighting in which something was mixed with water to make a flammable gas to burn in the lights. If you could make a flammable gas from water to burn for light, why couldn't you run a vehicle on this?