Transistors, replication, and PAGD

[Mike Carrell]

Jed favors us with excellent snippets of the history of technology to illustrate contemporary situations. In that spirit, some comments.   Transistors have their roots in very early radio detectors, the 'cats whisker' and a lump of lead oxide, or galena ore. The 'cats whisker' was a sharpened wire on a pivoting mount, enabling the user to fish around on the surface of the galena crystal to find a 'hot spot' that was a useful rectifier.   Some 20 years later, the early solid state physics gave insight into what was going on. With the early development of radar, a pressing need was the receive/transmit switch. The same antenna was used for transmitting a multi-kilowatt burst and receiving the faint reflections from aircraft. An instant switch was needed to protect the teceiver from the transmitter burst. It was found in a point contact germanium diode, a refined version of the earler 'cats whisker' detector. Wartime necessity paid for methods of refining ot get pure germanium, and mass production of mechanically stable diodes. It also paid for studies in solid state physics to understand the operation of the diode.   Bell Lab's search for an electronic switch started with that diode and in essence added another sharpenend wire close to the first one, and found that current injected by that second wire could control current in the other, with amplification. It was analogus to the well know triode vacuum tube, but with important differences that had to be understood to be controlled. Mass production was essential, which depended on understanding the transistor effect well enough to know what was truly essential and what was irrelevant. I won't recap the many clever ideas that were tried to stabilize the transistor characteristics and extend life.   It was many years later that the concept of the planar transistor slowly emerged in two people and converged in integrated circuits which are made by a sophisticated printing process. It also took time to mature the use of silicon instead of germanium as a substrate. Germanium transistors are still made for specific applications, and used by circuit designers who understand how to handle gremanium's characteristics.   The road from the point contact transistor to integrated circuits cost untold billions and tens of thousands of man hours of work in diverse technologies.   Jed has given us useful illustrations  fromthe history of aviation. I recall that even after the Wright brother's flight, even after the patents were issued, even after their successful demonstration in Washington, people were still building failing airplanes after 'their own ideas'. People who followed the Wright brothers patents built airplanes that flew. There were rapid refinements in the control system used, but these were based on the essentials revealed in the Wright brother's work.   In the current discussion about PAGD, Jeff cites aerospace experience. I could suggest that his deviations from the Correa's patents are equivalent to deciding that it is too much trouble to make those curved wing and propellor surfaces, that flat wings and paddle-like propellors are good enough, following common sense. This ignores the extensive wind tunnel tests that the Wrights made of different wing and propellor shapes, long before there was any computer simulation of the airflow over these complex surfaces.   In the current LENR scene, it could be said that in those few episodes of sudden extreme heat release, of 'heat after death', something "right" was done and in everything else people are unwittingly and sincerely repeating mistakes. After all, if those "right" events were repeated every day in labs around the world, we would not be fretting about the DoE reports or what Scientific American has to say.   It may not be true that the specific construction described in the Correa patents is of the essence, or that disclosure overcomes barriers to commercial uitlization, but nobody can say that their work is mysterious or obscure until they with competence have duplicated what is in the patents. And I do mean "duplicated", not "imitated". After long contemplation of the phenomenon, there are aspects which seem strange indeed. Why not use wall-powered supplies to provide the setup conditions instead of batteries? Years ago Paulo said such supplies were destroyed when the PAGD pulse let go. Why? I don't know. Why not make LENR cells with cathodes cut from soup cans? It's cheaper.   The same can be said of the Mills work. There is one paper in the Journal of Applied Physics which purportedly duplicated a Mills experiment, without significant results. One significant parameter was different, which meant that the paper reported on an expeiment which Mills had already made with null results, not on his successful experiment. Others have found the phenomena Mills reports with apparatus that is different is some respects, but with an understanding of what is *essential*.    And so it goes.   Mike Carrell