Here is a strange bit of history which seems to have been somehow
overlooked and misplaced. It almost reads like "alternate facts"....
The Fleischmann/ Pons announcement of cold fusion happened on March 23,
1989. Ostensibly this date was forced on them by concerns about the
competing work from Steven Jones at BYU, but there was another more
specific threat. Perhaps their rush was not BYU but concern over a
competing line of research which Fleischmann had participated in, going
all the way back to the 1970s. These were palladium metal lattice
experiments described by B. Dandapani (and Fleischmann as coauthor) in
the Journal of Electronal. Chemistry, 39, in 1972 and later.
On March 31, 1989 - 8 days after the hurried Utah announcement the
following patent was actually filed by Gupta and Jacobs in the USA, and
it was soon GRANTED ! And then it was almost completely ignored today,
even though it undercuts the IP claims of others and actually mentions
"dense hydrogen" as the operative mechanism. Yet, the IP was not
commercially useful, probably due to the high cost of palladium. It is
now in the public domain.
"Process and apparatus for generating high density hydrogen in a matrix"
US 4986887
https://www.google.com/patents/US4986887
That's right - the first LENR filing was actually granted by the Patent
Office - so there is no wonder why later filings did not succeed.
There was and still is - a lot of whining going on - but no evidence of
a "grand conspiracy" by insiders in Hot Fusion, although they did not
agree there was a breakthrough. Plus, there is no way Gupta could have
based his IP on "stealing the P&F work" since it normally takes months
to draft a decent patent filing and several days to get it to USPTO by
mail, and Gupta had published on the subject before 1989.
We now understand why almost everyone else's patent application was
denied or languished, and it has nothing to do with violating the Laws
of Physics or Thermodynamics, nor to a hostile hot fusion establishment.
There was, in fact, a valid patent granted for LENR.
