Peter Gluck <[email protected]> wrote:
> It seems the fact that cold fusion (largo sensu) was discovered in > palladium was historical bad luck to the field. > It will be hugely ironic if that turns out to be case. I am trying to think of some similar event in this history of technology, in which people devoted several decades to a suboptimal method or material. Offhand, I cannot think of a good example. There are examples of somewhat-suboptimal branches of technology continuing for a while, such as germanium transistors being developed before silicon. But there were good reasons for using Ge for a while. They could not make Si pure enough. It wasn't a mistake so much as a limitation that was later overcome. You can't compare a laboratory phenomenon such as cold fusion to a practical technology such as Ge transistors in 1952. There may be some laboratory-scale phenomena that flailed around for decades because people were using the wrong approach. I guess a close example would be technology that stalled for a long time. It did not advance to the next logical step. Electromagnets being used in practical motors and generators, for example. Electromagnets were discovered by Oersted in 1819. The first practical one was made by Sturgeon in 1825, and greatly improved by Henry in 1830. That led to the first practical application: the telegraph. Henry deserves most of the credit but Morse got the cash. For some reason, unclear to me, it took a long time to make the first practical electric motors. I guess you could say researchers floundered around with unpromising or suboptimal approaches. See: http://www.sparkmuseum.com/MOTORS.HTM Incredibly smart people such as Faraday worked on this. They invented many other things that were practical and commercially successful. Yet as you see, even in the 1870s their electric motors were impractical. More like something from the 18th century "gentleman scientist" era. I think Edison was the first to make a commercially useful generator, as part of the incandescent electric light system. He brought out an entire system of lights, generators and meters, not just the bulbs. - Jed
