Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (79 page)

Some sections of the national press were also quick to ridicule Fleischmann and Pons and wrote pieces that have now come back to haunt their consciences. Steve Connor, writing in the Daily Telegraph, said that "the now notorious breakthrough in 'cold fusion' only two months ago astonished scientists worldwide, promising a source of limitless energy from a simple reaction in a test tube. Mounting evidence suggests the whole notion is a damp squib." Connor went on to ask "how two respected chemists could apparently make such a blunder?" He provides an answer with the suggestion that Fleischmann and Pons were the victims of "pathological science"—cases where otherwise honest scientists fool themselves with false results.

It is, of course, always fun to read about a good scandal, especially when the detractors who are so free with scorn get their come-uppance so poetically. But the aspect of the cold fusion affair that interests me most is why—exactly why—some scientists felt an overwhelming need to suppress it, even to the extent of behaving in an unscientific way and fudging their results. Money is the most obvious answer, but somehow unsatisfying; they may well have wanted the big research funds to continue to roll in year after year, but that cannot be the whole story. By enthusiastically embracing this possible new field, any of the world's fusion research organizations could have increased their research funds, rather than lost anything.

Injured pride is also plausible—men and women are often driven to extremes of behavior by such feelings, even including murder and suicide. But it is hard to see exactly how and why the feelings of hot fusionists should be so hurt by a simple scientific discovery.

Some interesting clues to this extraordinary behavior come from examining the reasons that several of the institutions themselves gave publicly for wanting to suppress such research during the development of the affair.

The first sounds perhaps the most reasonable. John Maple, a spokesman for the Joint European Torus project at Culham, Oxfordshire, the world's biggest fusion research centre, told the Daily Telegraph that a discredited cold fusion might produce a backlash that would damage the funding prospects of hot fusion.

People in the street often don't know the difference. They confuse cold fusion, which we think will never produce any useful energy, with the experimental work we are doing at Culham, involving temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees, which is making spectacular progress.

These sound [like] very understandable fears, but look a little closer at the logic underlying them. The people in the street (that's you and me) "can't tell the difference." The difference between what? The difference between hot fusion (which is real) and cold fusion (which John Maple and his colleagues say is not real). But surely, the issue is not whether we, the public, can tell the difference between a nuclear process that is real and

Cold Fusion—Investigations Continue Despite Ridicule From Skeptics

Cold fusion work continues. Technology Forecasts & Technology Surveys reports that,
to the observations,
in spite of allegations that there is nothing

a number of labs continue to be intrigued by the unexplained parts of the phenomenon. They report that 50 U.S. labs and 100 labs in other countries are running tests, 60 groups in ten countries have reported results, some of the groups have claimed observation of more than one of the three generally accepted requirements for nuclear fusion, and some tests have produced as much as 600 times more heat than would be accounted for by the input of electrical power.

—Technology Forecasts & Technological Surveys, Vol. 22, No. 9, page 11

one that is not, but whether we, the public, should be asked to entrust millions of pounds of research funds to people who appear resistant to accepting the reality of a process such as cold fusion, for which there is substantial evidence and which may in the long term produce energy far more cheaply than the hot fusion process.

At quite an early stage in the affair, Harwell nuclear research laboratory began to worry about fusion becoming the province of every man. Members of the public were apparently telephoning Harwell and asking for advice on how to perform cold fusion experiments. "I have had many odd calls from people," a spokesman told the Daily Telegraph in April, "saying they are going to set it up at home to make it work. One housewife claimed that she already had supplies of heavy water and was asking me for details of how to set up the experiment. I had to tell her it would be extremely unwise." The paper then costed the experiment at £28 [$44.80] for some platinum, £31 [$49.60] for the palladium, £6 [$9.60] for some lithium chloride and £18 [$28.80] for the heavy water. With a few pounds for batteries, test-tubes and the like, the total could come to as little as £90, leading the paper to suggest that concern was mounting for the "retired professors, cranks and housewives" who they thought might be joining the race to produce fusion on their kitchen tables.
It is, of course, touching for Harwell to be so concerned about the safety of the man and woman in the street, but I see another worrying part of the explanation in this amusing reaction. Anyone who interests themselves in cold fusion is immediately labeled as belonging to a group that has either lost its marbles or never had any in the first place—"retired professors, cranks and housewives." Since we, the people in the street, pay many millions each year to fund Harwell, it seems not unreasonable that members of the public should be able to telephone to enquire on scientific matters without being ridiculed, patronized or told, in effect, to mind their own business.

It was not long before Europe's most senior fusion scientist, Dr. Paul Henri Rebut, director of the JET laboratory at Culham (cost, £76 million [$121 million] a year) was offering a word of advice to the man and woman in the street while also, curiously, disclaiming any supernatural powers. "I am not God, and I don't claim to know everything in the universe. But one thing I am absolutely certain of is that you cannot get a fusion reaction from the methods described by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons."

Dr. Rebut clinched his argument with a single decisive stroke. "To accept their claims one would have to unlearn all the physics we have learnt in the last century." Well, we certainly wouldn't want one to have to do that, would we?

Equally illuminating were the remarks of Professor John Huizenga, who was co-chairman of the US Department of Energy's panel on cold fusion and who came down against the reality of the process. In a recent book on the subject, Professor Huizenga observed that "the world's scientific institutions have probably now squandered between $50 and $100 million on an idea that was absurd to begin with."

The question is, what were his principal reasons for rejecting cold fusion? Professor Huizenga tells us: "It is seldom, if ever, true that it is advantageous in science to move into a new discipline without a thorough foundation in the basics of that field."

When you consider that his committee's sole function was to advise whether or not research funds should be spent to investigate an entirely new area of physics/electrochemistry, and that this statement is one of his principal reasons for deciding not to invest such research funds, his remarks take on an almost Kafkaesque quality. It is unwise to invest research funds in any new area, unless we already have a thorough foundation in the basics of that new area? How could anyone ever get any money for research out of Professor Huizenga's committee? By proving that they already know everything there is to know?

Cold fusion is the perfect exemplar of the taboo reaction in science. It runs entirely counter to intuitive expectation produced by the received wisdom of physics; it is a discovery by "outsiders" with no experience or credentials in fusion research; its very existence is vehemently denied, even though Fleischmann and Pons have demonstrated a jar of water at boiling point to the world's press and television; and it is inexplicable by present theory: it means tearing up part of the road-map of science and starting again—"unlearning the physics we have learnt."

Archie Blue

Years ago, long before the advent of magnetic tape, Archie Blue devised a way of recording on steel wire.

He applied for patents in America, Britain and New Zealand. "Got them okay," he says, turning a screw which tightens a wire on his latest invention.

"I went to the States and tried to get the Victor Talking Machine

Company (later RCA Victor and then HMV Victor in England) interested. "But it wasn't a commercial proposition. You could only record the one
wire at a time, whereas with discs they could make as many as they wanted off the one die.
"So I left it. If I'd worked on it further, I would have come up with the
tape," he says with a laugh.
There's a fair bit of humour deep down inside Archie Blue, an inventor
since he was about nineteen. An electrician by trade, he's applied for
dozens of patents, including one which was granted him and his friend
Ross Wood in 1939 for "improvements in or relating to TV or like apparatus."
Another, which has been used a fair bit, was for a round corrugated disc
to keep speaker cones in shape. He sold the design for an automatic switch
to an American company, years ago.
There were other things, too. So long ago it's hard to remember them
all without getting all the papers. "I've made hardly anything from my
inventions," he says.
But he hopes to make something from his latest, a device originally
intended to be a source of cheap fuel. . . He's applied for separate patents
for that.
"When I started work on it, four or five years ago, I was investigating
the use of hydrogen as fuel for a heater. And then I thought "I might as
well try to drive a car with it.'"

From The Sunday Times. May 14, 1978

472

All the evidence says Archie Blue's theories are correct. He says he's proved they are. He came back to Christchurch from Guernsey just before Christmas. There, helped by three retired millionaire friends, he had fitted his device to a small van and driven it around, using only water for fuel. The sceptics had a field day. Scientists admitted it was possible to get the hydrogen from water and use it as a fuel but the cost and equipment needed made it completely impractical. Newspaper reproters, as is their wont, made Archie headlines.

Several, though, took his claims seriously. The motoring man for the Daily Mail, Michael Kemp, made two trips to Guernsey to satisfy his curiosity. He didn't get far the first time. But his second visit of three or four days dispelled initial scepticism.

He reported on the paper's motoring page on August 19 last year that he drove the van himself, in normal traffic, at speeds up to 35 miles an hour.
Until the air blower burned out, the engine was "lively and powerful," he wrote.
The Royal Automobile Club man on the island, one David Hooper has taken a keen interest in all the proceeding and is convinced of its success.
Since his return Archie has worked steadily away in the cramped shed which is his workshop to make a similar device to show New Zealand.
Amid boxes of tangled wires, innards of old radios, bits of television sets, gramophones, Archie has soldered and welded. He's cut copper piping, fitted it to a large jar, set it up with the aircleaner and pump on a base. That little red pump will, say Archie, eventually blow hydrogen through what was once a conventional carburettor [sic]—now cut down, float removed, new controls affixed. Hydrogen is produced in the jar by electrolysis. "It takes very little juice, about l!/2 amps," he says, stopping to point out the virtues of his modern multi-function lathe.
It reminds him of the time he lived and worked in New York. In the late fifties, he says, taking off his fur cap to scratch a smooth head, he went to America with one of his inventions. He was working with a German who offered to get him a job so he could stay on and work on the thing. ("It never came to much.")
"It was a machine shop job, turning out one small aeroplane part only.
"The factory was going broke, but the bank kept it going until the contract was over. Then they sold the lot, lathes and machinery went for next to nothing."
With what money he had saved, he rented a general store on 8th street, "just down the road from 14th Avenue." The rent was too high, though, and he barely made a living. After three or four years, he came home.
Home to Christchurch, where Archie Blue was born nearly 74 years ago.
Educated at Sydenham Primary, later Christchurch Tech. After working 474 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries

for a while for the Post Office, he took up an apprenticeship with the M.E.D. where he had all the wries he wanted to work with. "You do the lot, switchboards, meters, wiring before you get your ticket."

Later he would move on to State Hydro and the Railways as an electrician in the signals division.
Never had a day's serious illness in his life, he says. Still he was turned down for overseas service with the Army during the war. He served with the Home Guard and later, when he was with the Railways, he did territorial service, going into camp for a fortnight or so each year.
He was attached to a battery as a signaller. More wires as he set up communications between the guns and observation posts and the ike. He says the worst part of all was being called out in the middle of the night to run out some wires.
"Most of the time, I'd get up when called and then head straight back into the tent." He says he wouldn't have liked the job in a real war . . . "right out there, under fire from both sides."
The life story momentarily forgotten as Archie spies an old film projector poking out from under the rubble. He's fixed it with an amplifier so it can take "talking" films. Then an explanation of the secrets of an even older magic lantern.
Strong hands rub a bewhiskered face, lift the glasses over the forehead. Just about time to get the tea on. Archie lives alone in his conventional weather-board home in a typical Spreydon street. Hid wife died about two years ago, just before they were to set off for Guernsey where Archie could work with his "retired millionaires."
In we go through the cluttered porch, resting place for the moulds from which Archie Blue makes plaster figures and ornaments ... witches, dog's heads, reclining ladies, classic heads, wall hanging-type things, clowns, Snow White, even. It's a hobby he took up while in America. Now the painted models—and a lot as yet untouched by the brush—take up space in every room of the house.
He finds making the pieces and then painting them restful. "Even when I'm taking a break, I've got to do something. I'm not an idle person."
Amongst all the models in the lounge, a huge silver trophy is proof of the young A. H. Blue's athletic prowess. He won it at a long-gone South Island championship meet at which he won the 100 yards, the 220 and the 440 yards. ("They don't have them now, do they?")
Stuffed inside with a lot of other clippings there's a faded piece cut from the Sun (or was it the Star?). Browned and fragile now, the paper suggests that with a coach, Archie Blue had a great future in the sport.
"But I had too much on my plate to take it up seriously," he says. Inventing.
Any money he might eventually get won't mean all that much to him. He says he could take another trip (he's off to Guernsey again soon anyway) but he'll always come back to Christchurch. That's where his family is. A daughter lives just along the road. He has four grandchildren.
He reckons Guernsey is a dead place most of the year; New York is far too cold in the winter.
After a couple of postponements, Archie Blue hoped to have his device ready for its New Zealand debut some time this week. He's not too fussed by all the publicity, but says that because TV and the papers have asked him to, he cooperates. "But I'll take my car out here without an audience first. Just to make sure all's well," he says.
And when it's all over, he'll be off again.
Could the device be manufactured here?
It could, but "we're not bothering to," he says. "I can't sell the rights here, or market it without my partners. And they don't want to mess about with small concerns. It's too big for that."
What about using his partners' resources to start a factory themselves?
"That would cause far too many headaches. For a start, look at what strikes have done to the big motor firms like Leyland.
"Young men can take these things. It would be pretty hard for us at our age."