In 1916 a con man ran a car on water and fleeced Henry Ford

According to Boing Boing, in nineteen sixteen, a Long Island con artist named Louis Enricht gathered reporters to witness his invention: a gasoline substitute costing just a penny a gallon. With Europe's battlefields facing fuel shortages during wartime, his timing was shrewd. He showed them an empty car tank, had them fill a bucket with water from a garden hose, and added two ounces of a greenish, almond-smelling fluid. The car ran on this mixture, he claimed. Somehow, Enricht managed to convince industrialist Henry Ford to invest — a con so effective it became part of history.

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