With Rossi's secret in the hands not only of his US partner but a competitor, it seems likely that development will not much longer be constrained by Rossi's limitations.
On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > >
