text: Until recent decades it was common to assume that the release of hydrogen and oxygen gas during electrolysis of water always has a Faraday efficiency of 100%. Pons and Fleischmann, and other investigators who reported the finding of anomalous excess heat in electrolytic cells, all relied on this popular assumption. No one bothered to measure the Faraday efficiency in their cells during the experiments. Many publications reporting the finding of excess heat included an explicit statement like: "The Faraday efficiency is assumed to be unity." Even if not explicitly stated so, these publications included this implicit assumption in the formulas used to calculate the cells' energy balance.