Mike Carrell wrote:
Pay attention: target "was". He did get investments from electric utilities.
He and others would have billions of dollars to work with if only he would take steps to convince the world the effect is real. He would have literally hundreds of thousands of times more manpower and money to devote to the problem, and this would increase the value of his patent by an unimaginable extent.
If Mills had been Columbus he would have kept it the > discovery secret, and in 1505 he would still be negotiating the property > rights to Hispaniola.
Jed continually underestimates the capital necessary to develop a technology like BLP.
On the contrary, it is Mills who is underestimating the capital & effort required. He thinks he can do it himself. I think it will take thousands of people, and without thousands of people in hundreds of different companies he will surely fail. If thousands of companies had not developed the transistor, AT&T alone would have failed. There is no question their development effort was running off the tracks by the mid-1950s, and by 1960 it was moribund.
Columbus could not have conquered or developed the New World on his own, in secret. Mills is trying to accomplish a task nearly as difficult as setting up European civilization in the Americas.
Where were integrated circuits in 1971, 12 years after > Texas Instruments first developed them?
As I recall, the first integrated circuits did not cause much of a stir, because the computer market at the time had accomodated to the idea of cards with a few gates or flip-flops on it.
By 1971 integrated circuits were already one of the largest industries on earth.
The entrepreneural drive of applications came **after** the devices were available. you did not and do hot have people making ICs their basement.
That is completely incorrect. That is exactly where people made the first ICs -- in basements and "secret" labs where conservative upper management could not find them, and prevent the research. (At Bell Labs, they were found out, and the research was quashed.) Furthermore, tons of entrepreneurial money and talent poured into the development within weeks of the announcements of both transistors and ICs. See Riorden and Hoddeson, or any history of transistors and integrated circuits.
That was also the case with telegraphs, railroads, aircraft, computers and every other major technology I am familiar with. In every case, entrepreneurs began working frantically on the technology *years* before it became practical. They were a half-million people working on a airplanes in 1911, for goodness sake! Airplanes did not became a practical, cost-effective means of transportation until the introduction of the DC-3 in 1935, 24 years later. All previous airplanes lost money and most of them killed a large fraction of the pilots and passengers.
What Mills is trying to do is comparable to the Wright brothers trying to build a Douglas DC-3 starting in 1904, in secret, with $50,000 in capital. The Wrights were incomparable geniuses, but the notion that one or two geniuses can do something like that alone is utterly absurd. It took the skills of hundreds of thousands of people working for a full generation to reach that level of development. Conceptually, a DC-3 is quite similar to the 1903 Wright Flyer. The design is instantly recognizable, and I doubt anyone would dispute that the DC-3 would have been covered by the Wright patent if that patent had still been in force. But in practical terms the DC-3 incorporates tens of thousands of ideas, improvements, and devices such as retractable landing gear that the Wrights never dreamed of. No one could have imagined such things in 1903. I have no doubt whatever that if the Mills device works and it is eventually incorporated into our economy, it will require as much innovation as the DC-3 did. Actually, it will take that plus the computer, plus the telephone system and the Internet and transistors combined. Ultimately, *every single machine* will have to be redesigned to take advantage of it. The sooner that task begins, the greater the patent revenue will be. If that task is only done by a handful of people, no matter what else happens, the patent revenue will be thousands or perhaps millions times smaller than it should be. I mean that literally; I am not exaggerating. Consider the automobile business before Henry Ford, and after. Or the computer business before the PC when 40,000 units were sold every year, or today, when 20,000 are sold *every hour*.
Nope, the technology was not ready then. Why have the leaders not come to LENR demos?
There have been no LENR demos! Demos may not even be possible. I do not know a single researcher in the world who could do one on demand the way Mills reportedly did at Thermacore in 1992. Furthermore, and in some important ways the 1992 Mills devices were more impressive than any CF device ever made: they turned on quickly and they were reliable. The fact that they did not produce commercial levels of heat was totally irrelevant. Even if it could be shown that these devices could never produce temperatures above 80 deg C, with an input output ratio no larger than 1:1.3, they still would have swept all the world and convinced everyone everywhere within a matter of months if they had been handled correctly. The only similar device in CF that was ever developed was the Patterson cell, which was deliberately hidden the same way Mills hid his devices.
Other researchers, such as Mizuno have very impressive cells, but they are not as convincing. Someone watching a glow discharge experiment who understands what he sees will be properly impressed. Mizuno is one of the few people on earth who will show his work to any qualified person. The others all play hide and seek.
- Jed
