David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote: Jed, Rossi might still be working out the remaining bugs in his design. > That is reason enough to keep his cards close.
I expect he is. Based on the history of similar ground-breaking, radically new technology such as telegraphs, railroads, Diesel engines and aircraft, I doubt he is capable of working out the remaining bugs. If the Wright brothers had tried to do this themselves, at the pace they were working, the first practical airplane would have appeared sometime around 1930 I suppose. And they were incredibly fast workers! They made several prototypes a year, some of them with radical improvements, especially in 1905. Airplanes began making rapid progress after 1908 because many people began working on them. Most of those people were far less skilled than the Wrights. A few, such as Sikorsky and Sopwith, were more skilled, especially with regard to practical applications and manufacturing. That is why progress suddenly leaped forward. It takes a lot of people to make progress, because most of them are wrong, and they work on dead-end approaches. In 1911, three years after the world learned that airplanes are real, the Scientific American reported there were roughly 500,000 people working frantically on aviation. Yet airplanes were by no means practical in 1911. In 1955, three years after the transistor was revealed, dozens of companies and thousands of people were working frantically on transistors, but for most applications they were still not practical. Various smart people such as Henry, Wheatstone and Morse invented the telegraph from 1809 to 1835, but it went nowhere until a large group of smart, skilled and determined people such as Ezra Cornell spent large sums of money and made many mistakes building a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington. They finally got that work in 1844. Morse could never have solved all the problems himself. No single person working in isolation in a laboratory could have. You had to be out in the field. I mean an actual field, floundering around in the mud. They tried putting cables underground, an interesting approach but a hundred years ahead of its time. Then they tried erecting telegraph polls for the first time in history. Imagine doing that when no one has ever thought of what a telegraph poll is, how it might hold a wire, what it should look like, what it should be made from, or how it should be guyed up. You learn that sort of thing by doing, not by theory. Go look at a telephone poll and ponder this. You will see it is a lot more complicated than you might think. That is just one of many problems they had to solve. I do not think that Rossi alone can make cold fusion practical. I think it will take thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, just as it did with every other breakthrough of this nature. - Jed
