From the 'out on a thin limb' department...
Curiosity almost got the better of me this morning. If it can kill a cat
with nine lives, then maybe Dorothy Parker was not aware of the ultimate
cure - web surfing onto the jagged rocks of cyberland.
For the benefit of the Beeb (BBC) and James Burke - in a future episode
of the TV science classic: "Connections"... Yup... you may have guessed
it, this will be the episode that traces LENR all the way from dog poop
to German blimps, to fracto-fusion, to P&F, Mills, CETI and finally --
to technological-savior of the free world ;-)
Of course, this is jumping the gun by several orders of magnitude and
assumes many things for which there is only a faint odor of truth... and
a probability of truth lower than ... well ... lower than the
aforementioned dog excrement.
It all started in the Mutterland with a German company founded by Dr.
Otto Röhm and Otto Haas around the turn of the century. Haas moved to
Philadelphia and began the American side of the business in 1909...
since the USA at that time was woefully ignorant of applied chemistry
and Germany was the acknowledged leader in everything scientific.
Had it not been for arrogant Aryan leadership fanning racial hatred (the
best German scientists were Jewish, soon to become German-Americans) and
ultra-right politics, Germany would probably today be in the USA's
position as the leader of the Western world.
This is where dog scat and war-mongering enters the LENR picture.
[err... the hypothetical historical picture]
The Rohm and Hass company grew rapidly as World War I approached because
the initial invention was very popular - it was a synthetic [and
odorless] substitute for fermented dog dung, which was widely used for
tanning leather. This is no joke. The brand name "Oropon" has a curious
linguistic derivation: "gold poop".
Leather (pre-plastic) was needed for the that war in large quantities
for belts and saddles. Yup WWI was largely a calvary war - where "one
horsepower" meant what is says.
The R&H company again grew rapidly as World War II approached, but it
was "expatriated" from all German contact, as it alone manufactured
Plexiglas acrylic, the clear plastic which was needed for "periscope
glass" in subs, and aircraft canopies.
In 1999 Rohm and Haas acquired the Morton Salt company and is so
Americanized, Mormonized and then re-internationalized today -- that the
CEO is one Raj Gupta, an expatriated Indian. That is the one big
advantage of our system.
That could never happen in the old Germany and maybe nor even in the new
Germany. But had the process for making artificial helium from fused
deuterium, due to the [zeppelin] helium embargo, been perfected back
then ... and there are a few hints that helium had been seen eighty
years ago - then who knows ?
Enough of this 'alternative history' nonsense... let James Burke do his
own pooper-scooping when the time comes....
Jones
