I am going to print Shirakawa-san's list and add some items. I will
annotate them "SL" (Shirakawa List)
There are some repetitions and many questions Rossi refuses to answer.
Lots of interesting stuff too.
We could organize this info in a Wiki, with categories: Materials,
Operation method, Performance characteristics . . .
Rossi is dropping many crumbs. Someone may follow him into the woods.
Even if some of this is indirection there's gotta be a lotta direction, too.
His patent attorney must be tearing his hair out.
I have been re-reading accounts of Edison's invention of the
incandescent light, and looking at his notebook pictures and diagrams.
If Edison had kept a blog, it would have resembled Rossi's. It would be
filled with apparent mistakes, backtracking, dead ends,
seat-of-the-pants estimates and half-baked assumptions. Also assertions
that sound impossible because it turned out they were impossible, and
others that sounded impossible to Edison's contemporaries but turned out
to be true.
He fed his investors a steady stream of exaggerations, non-reassuring
reassurances that it was all but ready, on track at last, any day now,
don't pay any attention to those burning curtains; let's adjourn for
lunch shall we, gentlemen? -- and so on. The sort of thing anyone in R&D
says while showing top managers around the project. I imagine his
investors felt much the way Jones Beene does.
Edison was juggling dozens of problems simultaneously in a very tight
schedule. Not only did he invent the lights, he invented generators,
meters, controls, improved vacuum equipment and bunch of other vital
stuff. He might have left much of that for later and concentrated on the
bulbs only, but he wanted to roll out a complete system of related
technology -- which he did. Rossi has not only cracked the cold fusion
problem, he is trying to make a 1 MW reactor.
There are many interesting parallels. Incandescent electric lights had
been demonstrated for 20 years when Edison began serious R&D. No one
previously could make them into a practical product. Mainstream
scientists said that Edison was "a fraud" and what he was trying to
accomplish was impossible, based on their theories. They said this
despite the fact that he was one of the most famous inventors in the
world, with loads of credibility. I think this can be compared to
Ekstrom's assertion that Rossi is surely a fraud because his device does
not fit theory, despite the fact that Essen and Kullander are among the
world's top experts in energy, with loads of credibility.
Essen and Kullander are probably not happy with Ekstrom.
If Edison had blogged the experience, he would not have been granted a
patent. Others were working on the problem. They would have stolen his
ideas.
As I recall one of the generators Edison constructed during this period
is now on the first floor of Peter Hagelstein's building at MIT. It has
a slightly off-color name, "long-legged Mary-Ann" and you can see why.
- Jed
