How this started for me
I was a young engineer, working for FAA in Albuquerque on March 23, 1989. A news item caught the interest of myself and co-workers. Some scientists claimed to have discovered a new source of energy, which had been a focus of my interest since I was a boy. It was also a prime interest of my father, an electrical engineering professor. The news was of a press conference . Two professors at the U of Utah, Fleischmann and Pons were telling the world about something that would unfortunately become labeled as "cold fusion". This was the beginning of confusion that has persisted. They really had no good reason to assume that it was a nuclear fusion reaction, and they were careful to admit that it was an hypothesis. Their evidence was from an electrolytic apparatus. The analysis was primarily from calorimetry, the measurement of heat, one of the first tools developed for chemistry. In the modern era, this tool is credited to Lavoisier, so it is a very well established meth