Mike Carrell wrote:
Jed was not paying close enough attention then or now. Mills abandoned electrolytic cells because he could not get a high enough energy density.
I realize that is what he said.
His target then was utility boilers.
That "target" is insanity squared. It reminds of the old Bob Newhart routine where a promoter is talking to the Wright brothers on December 18, 1903. He asks how many passengers can fly on the airplane, and "does it have a john?" He tells them he sees no commercial possibilities for it.
Columbus discovered America in 1492. By 1505 there was a huge trans-Atlantic trade. As one person put it "the great Atlantic has become a Spanish Lake." If Mills had been Columbus he would have kept it the discovery secret, and in 1505 he would still be negotiating the property rights to Hispaniola.
Jed has done quite well as an entrepreneur in the tidy world of programming, which was made tidy by the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who created that tidy world by doing battle with Nature in creating reliable electronic components, including microcircuits. I'm an engineer who has seen up close the pain to product development, the continuing agony of mass production of color picture tubes . . .
Oh come now Mike. Where were we 12 years after the invention of the transistor, in 1960? Where were integrated circuits in 1971, 12 years after Texas Instruments first developed them? Was the 1992 Mills device really that much harder to make then the first transistors? The first transistor and the first integrated circuit were no more practical than the 1992 cells. If he had done a proper demonstration and invited experts from all over, by now he would be the leader of the largest industry on earth.
- Jed
