James Bowery has it wrong. I am not actually making fun of Caproni and his Ca-60 Transaereo. This was tragic case. Caproni was a gifted aircraft designer. During WWI he made over 400 heavy bombers; the largest aircraft outside of Russia. The biggest one was the Ca-43 triplane, 7 tons, 100 foot wingspan. The thing is, with the Ca-60 he overreached. He did not know his own limitations, or the limitations of the technology in 1918. As Bill Yenne wrote: "It was a true case of an airplane company that clearly should have known better . . ."
There is a lesson here, and in other grandiose projects such as IBM's ill-fated "Future Systems" initiative in the 1970s. Don't overreach! Andre Blum <[email protected]> wrote: > Where you say: "equally close to commercialization", this of course is not > true. The 1 MW reactor is for sale now and has industrial certification. > I did not know it has industrial certification. I regard this as gross negligence on the part of the authorities who issued the certificate. I would not *think* of certifying that machine without 10,000 hours of intense testing in several different independent safety labs. I think it is lunacy to start using a nuclear fusion reactor that works by unknown principles without first testing it extensively. Anyway, the fact that it is for sale does not mean much, because evidently no one has bought it. (unless -- the usual caveat -- it is all a lie. Even if it is the truth, I regard this product as a useless white elephant that no sane customer would buy except to reverse engineer. > The comparision with the Caproni Ca-60 Transaereo is unfair. That was an > early attempt to scale up a working product. It was an inept attempt. Totally hopeless. It contributed nothing to progress in aviation. If it had been done by amateurs it would be forgivable, but Caproni and his colleagues at the company had a track record of success. They were experts. They built 400 successful airplanes! Aviation was advanced enough by 1918 that any expert should have been able to look at that design and see it would not work. Rossi's attempt to scale up did not fail, too. It is a pretty sound, safe > and useful idea to scale up energy devices by running my of them in > parallel. I disagree! > This idea helped him to (1) lend more credibility to his invention; . . . How can that be?!? No one has any idea whether the thing actually worked or not! He did not allow anyone to make independent measurements. For all we know it was a lot of noise and hot water from the generator. > (2) come up with a useful product for the market which can be tapped > soonest, because of lighter certification requirements. This is about as far from a "useful product" as the Ca-60 Transaereo was. Lighter certification for any cold fusion device would 9,800 hours of intense testing in 50 laboratories, instead of 10,000 hours in 60 laboratories. In my opinion we should not even consider using cold fusion for commercial or practical purposes before we are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN it can be fully controlled, and it does not produce dangerous radiation. Not at start up, not in an accident, not ever. Until that has been PROVED by hundreds of experts it would be crazy to sell reactors. What will happen if a reactor blows up, or irradiates someone? It could set back the field for years. An accident might even lead overzealous regulators and people opposed to technology to ban the use of cold fusion. And for what?!? What possible benefit could there be to selling the thing now? If Rossi needs money, I am sure I could raise a hundred million dollars for him practically overnight. All he has to do is start acting like a sane businessman. - Jed
