David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: Now you have me worried. I suspect that what you say is true about the > talent required to perfect a design the first time, but the ECAT does not > appear to have many working parts.
The first telegraph had many moving parts. Too many. It was too complicated. They jettisoned most before it become practical. It recorded the dots and dashes on paper tape. It turned out that for the first practical design the operator had to learn to hear the dots and dashes, translate them into writing, and then write the message out. That was counterintuitive. It was the sort thing only experience could teach. I am sure the eCat will teach many similar lessons before it can be used in practical applications. It will have to be tested in thousands of different conditions, and it will produce problems no one can anticipate or imagine now. I have never heard of an industrial product that did not do this in the early stages. Most early implementations of new technology are too complicated, with too many features. You might suppose the early versions tend to be spare, but the opposite is true. The first proposed railroad locomotives had spikes in the wheels and holes in the rails, to prevent spinning. Early CPUs had useless op codes. The IBM 360 operating system was baroque and had features no one used. Rossi seems like a good hands on type of engineer which is what we need to > progress. Rudolph Diesel was a brilliant hands-on engineer, as were the Wrights, and as is Tadahiko Mizuno. What those four also have in common is that they almost killed themselves building machines that exploded, crashed, or burned them. Mizuno again last week. People who are good at making things the first time in history tend to be not so good at making things that work reliably. I mean, without exploding. Mizuno has what you might call a sanguine attitude toward danger, high temperatures and pressure in old embrittled steel cylinders, open test tubes of toxic boiling lithium electrolyte, and what looks to me like significant gamma radiation. This is not the attitude you want in someone making a machine to be certified by Underwriter's Laboratory. I can easily imagine a great deal of good design effort being applied > toward heat transfer and stability issues of the hot cats. > So can I. I can also imagine a great deal of wretched design being applied to them, in products that never make it out of the lab. For every good product there are dozens of bad ones stillborn. That is why we need many different groups working on the e-Cat, and why it is essential there be no coordination between them, no single funding authority, and no one in a position to approve or deny funding. Only decentralized free market competition will work. No single person can be smart enough to think of everything on his own. No single organization can do that either. - Jed
