Jed wrote: > Mike Carrell wrote: > > > >Pay attention: target "was". He did get investments from electric utilities. > > He and others would have billions of dollars to work with if only he would > take steps to convince the world the effect is real. He would have > literally hundreds of thousands of times more manpower and money to devote > to the problem, and this would increase the value of his patent by an > unimaginable extent.
Let's see: Mills has published his book and updated it periodically. He has sponsored experimental work at universities and reputable laboratories before acquiring the present property. He has posted detailed reports on a long series of experiemts on his website. He has published critical papers in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of Applied Physics, and IEEE journals. Key effects have been duplicated by others (Conrads, Phillips). These are all the steps expected by the scientific and industrail establishment to build credibility. What Jed apparently wants is the equivalent of Morrison's hot cup of tea. Well, it hasn't happened in the CfFworld either, despite Jed's urging. > > > >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. Oh, please. Mills has kept nothing secret. There is no secret to anyone who has been paying close attention and who understands the the physics involved. There is only ***one*** key discovery, well published, and that is the existence of the sub-quantum state and the catalytic reactions that produce it. It is the systematic denial of critics that make it appear that there is some 'secret'. There is none. There is hard work in optimizing the working parameters of the cells. > > > >Jed continually underestimates the capital necessary to develop a technology > >like BLP. > > On the contrary, it is Mills who is underestimating the capital & effort > required. He thinks he can do it himself. Jed's caricature. Why do you think that Mills has not trotted out a tea warmer or a house heater like some in the manner some in peanut gallery have been calling for? Why do you think he has positioned BLP as a license laboratory to establish technology and a patent base and attract major corporations with deep pockets to carry applications forward? He is doing exactly that. I think it will take thousands of > people, and without thousands of people in hundreds of different companies > he will surely fail. If thousands of companies had not developed the > transistor, AT&T alone would have failed. No. Bell Labs went after the transistor deliberately because AT&T foresaw the rising demand for telecommunications and realized that mechanical switching, refined over decades, would not cope with the future needs. Bell Labs had unmatched resources to pull together the essential elements and could have proceeded to make all the transistor swithes they needed. They also relaized the broad potential and so licensed and educated everyone else, including some Japanese engineers who had the odd idea of making a transistor radio. AT&T could not alone have created the industries based on semiconductors alone, that is true. But they would not have "failed". They could have made transistor switches for the Bell systems. <snip>. > > > >Where were integrated circuits in 1971, 12 years > >after > > > Texas Instruments first developed them? > > > >As I recall, the first integrated circuits did not cause much of a stir, > >because the computer market at the time had accomodated to the idea of cards > >with a few gates or flip-flops on it. > > By 1971 integrated circuits were already one of the largest industries on > earth. That is some 30 years after transistors were first built and after the USAF poured enormous funds into developing the technology. > > > >The entrepreneural drive of applications came **after** the devices were > >available. You did not and do hot have people making ICs their basement. > > That is completely incorrect. That is exactly where people made the first > ICs -- in basements and "secret" labs where conservative upper management > could not find them, and prevent the research. (At Bell Labs, they were > found out, and the research was quashed.) Furthermore, tons of > entrepreneurial money and talent poured into the development within weeks > of the announcements of both transistors and ICs. See Riorden and Hoddeson, > or any history of transistors and integrated circuits. By well established corporations with the resources necessary to carry it forward. I still don't think Jed gets it. He is castigating Mills for following the path he is holding up as an illustration above. I may be mistaken about Bell's sponsorship of transistor research, but I'm relying on memory of the time, and not some later book. Having seen at first hand some of RCA's nre product development efforts, and then summaries of them in books, such authors often do not really 'get it'. I hear that the hard disk technology had to be developed covertly at IBM because management did not understand its importance although the programmers did. Transistor technology rested on decades of research into solid state physics, and the development of reliable junction germanium diodes for radar receive-transmit switches. Transistors would have gone nowhere without zone refining, developed independantly at Bell Labs. Once done, you can buy such furnaces off the shelf. Today you can set up a small wafer facility in your basement -- after decades of development of these specialized units. But you don't start with a handful of sand to do this. > > That was also the case with telegraphs, railroads, aircraft, computers and > every other major technology I am familiar with. In every case, > entrepreneurs began working frantically on the technology *years* before it > became practical. They were a half-million people working on a airplanes in > 1911, for goodness sake! Where does this number come from? Airplanes did not became a practical, > cost-effective means of transportation until the introduction of the DC-3 > in 1935, 24 years later. All previous airplanes lost money and most of them > killed a large fraction of the pilots and passengers. True, birds gave everyday examples of the possibility. > > What Mills is trying to do is comparable to the Wright brothers trying to > build a Douglas DC-3 starting in 1904, in secret, with $50,000 in capital. Not quite. he is doing what the Wright brothers did, studying the technology, building wind tunnels, testing wings, etc. He is ***not*** trying to build a DC-3. Jed, what gives you this idea? > The Wrights were incomparable geniuses, but the notion that one or two > geniuses can do something like that alone is utterly absurd. Mills is not working alone, he has a board, investors and professional staff. It took the > skills of hundreds of thousands of people working for a full generation to > reach that level of development. And so it will with BLP technology. Nobody denies this, including Mills. Conceptually, a DC-3 is quite similar to > the 1903 Wright Flyer. The design is instantly recognizable, and I doubt > anyone would dispute that the DC-3 would have been covered by the Wright > patent if that patent had still been in force. But in practical terms the > DC-3 incorporates tens of thousands of ideas, improvements, and devices > such as retractable landing gear that the Wrights never dreamed of. No one > could have imagined such things in 1903. I have no doubt whatever that if > the Mills device works and it is eventually incorporated into our economy, > it will require as much innovation as the DC-3 did. Actually, it will take > that plus the computer, plus the telephone system and the Internet and > transistors combined. Ultimately, *every single machine* will have to be > redesigned to take advantage of it. Yes, its effect will be pervasive, but perhaps not to the appliance level. It took tens of thaousands of man-years of work before transistors pervaded everywhere. Few dared dream of millions of gates on a chip, or what could be done. I don't know how small or how large a BLP reactor can be made. That is a discovery for the future. The sooner that task begins, the > greater the patent revenue will be. Nobody disputes that, including Mills. If that task is only done by a handful > of people, no matter what else happens, the patent revenue will be > thousands or perhaps millions times smaller than it should be. I mean that > literally; I am not exaggerating. Consider the automobile business before > Henry Ford, and after. Or the computer business before the PC when 40,000 > units were sold every year, or today, when 20,000 are sold *every hour*. > > > >Nope, the technology was not ready then. Why have the leaders not come to > >LENR demos? > > There have been no LENR demos! Demos may not even be possible. I do not > know a single researcher in the world who could do one on demand the way > Mills reportedly did at Thermacore in 1992. Furthermore, and in some > important ways the 1992 Mills devices were more impressive than any CF > device ever made: they turned on quickly and they were reliable. The fact > that they did not produce commercial levels of heat was totally irrelevant. > Even if it could be shown that these devices could never produce > temperatures above 80 deg C, with an input output ratio no larger than > 1:1.3, they still would have swept all the world and convinced everyone > everywhere within a matter of months if they had been handled correctly. > The only similar device in CF that was ever developed was the Patterson > cell, which was deliberately hidden the same way Mills hid his devices. There is nothing hidden, only a failure to preceive. > > Other researchers, such as Mizuno have very impressive cells, but they are > not as convincing. Someone watching a glow discharge experiment who > understands what he sees will be properly impressed. Mizuno is one of the > few people on earth who will show his work to any qualified person. The > others all play hide and seek. So, Jed, why are not people standing in line to buy Muzino cells? Mike Carrell
