[Someone here found Mr. Cage's e-mail address, and suggested I contact
him about the memo. I just sent him this message.]
Subject: Do you recall the intent of this memo?
Dear Mr. Cage,
I run an online library of scientific papers about cold fusion. We have
a bibliography of 3000 papers and 1200 full text papers. Our sources
include:
* Roughly 1300 peer-reviewed journal papers copied from the library at
Los Alamos
* 2000 other papers from conference proceedings, and various
organizations such as EPRI, the NSF, the Indian Atomic Energy
Commission, the U.S. Navy and so on.
Most of the documents in the bibliography are scientific papers, but we
also list a few dozen newspaper articles, some memos from the Department
of Energy, and one memo written by you. I recently uploaded it here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CageKmemorandum.pdf
This memo is a little mystifying. You instruct Patent Office employees
to gather together applications relating to cold fusion. You do not say
what they were supposed to do with these applications. It has been a
long time since you wrote this, but do you recall your intent?
Since 1989, the /de facto/ policy of the patent office has been to
reject all applications related cold fusion without review. I know many
researchers who have applied for patents, including Fleischmann and
Pons. They have all been sent a form letter claiming that cold fusion
does not exist, citing the New York Times articles from 1989 and other
mass media sources to back up this claim. So I assume the purpose of
this memo was to gather the applications in one place so they could be
conveniently rejected. However, I do not know this. As far as I know the
Patent Office has never publicly stated it is their policy to reject
cold fusion applications. On the other hand, they only accepted one,
from Patterson. That was apparently accepted by accident, because
Patterson did not mention cold fusion.
If you have any comments about this memo or you would like to explain
something to our readers about it, please feel free to send me some
text. I will add this text to the document verbatim.
This website attracts many serious readers. Since we began, people have
visited 2.6 million times and have downloaded just over 2 million
papers. Lately, people have been downloading 6,000 to 8,000 papers a
week. Most of our readers are professional scientist. The papers are
technical and members of the general public have no interest in them.
Readers communicate with me from time to time asking for additional
information and sending corrections and additional material, so I know
that our readers come from universities and national laboratories
worldwide. I expect there will be lively interest in your memo. So if
you would like to clarify things or set the record straight please feel
free to send me some additional text for the file.
Sincerely,
Jed Rothwell
