Giovanni Santostasi <[email protected]> wrote: It is unprofessional. > When you put it together with all the other things is telling something > about Rossi 's conduct. >
Everything about Rossi's conduct is a problem. Rossi's words and actions do not merely "tell you" something. They shout out something. They scream at the top of their lungs that this guy is strange, and he must be up to no good. I mean, for goodness sake, who would invite a reporter from the AP to a major demonstration and then refused to show him any instrument readings?!? Who does that??? By ordinary standards that is an insane thing to do. If we are going to judge these events based on Rossi's personality and his quirky behavior we can only conclude that he has nothing. I think it is better to judge the issue based on the laws of physics, and by similar research by Piantelli and others whose behavior and background is impeccable. Mind you, people such as Arata, Edison and Jobs make Rossi look reasonable in comparison. I have been rereading R. Conot's biography of Edison, "A Streak of Luck." Edison's personal circumstances, his behavior, announcements, manipulations and double-talk make Rossi look like Mr. Responsible Businessman. People who accomplish things like this tend to have extreme personalities. Reading about the day to day events in Edison's lab, you can see why. By ordinary standards of business, you have to be crazy to try to do what he did. And he did it over and over again! He would go in to a project without anywhere near enough time or capital. Although he and his staff understood the problem better than anyone else in the world, they had nowhere near enough knowledge going in. They took great physical risks and financial risks. He would do demonstrations of products sold to customers that would work one day, fail the next, and blow up the day after. His demonstrations of telephone equipment that was already sold to the British government were far worse than Rossi's demonstrations. He was engaged in that telephone fiasco -- which by modern standards would get him arrested for fraud -- *at the same time* he was risking huge sums of his own money and other people's money trying to invent the incandescent light. In the midst of this brouhaha, Edison was trying to deal with his 19-years-old nephew, Charlie, who was his employee. Charlie was supposed to be fixing the telephone problems in England. Instead, he ran away to Paris, ran up $5,000 in debt (a tremendous sum back then), had a scandalous homosexual affair, got sick, and dropped dead. In a way, Rossi is a throwback to the 19th century. - Jed
