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 method, but it can be tricky to do correctly, as I discovered first hand.

It was a wild idea and the scientists had been conducting their investigation in secret, at a residence.  It was only after they had developed it to the point where repeatable performance was expected that they moved it to the university and began to slowly let people know about it.  Unfortunately, the university's drive toward acquisition of intellectual property rights put them into a position where they were expected to soon have this press conference, to gain priority over any possible competitors.  So, they were not ready for the publicity.  They did not have a journal published paper to reference, which was highly improper.  In fact, they had nothing written to present.  Scientists were attempting to design replication experiments based on copies of a VHS tape of the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.  If it were not for the fact that Fleischmann and Pons were both well established scientists, and particularly because of Fleischmann's fame as an electrochemist and membership in the Royal Society, the event would have been laughed off like the not infrequent announcements of some new perpetual motion device.  This mishandling of the early claims generated a lot of anger and resentment.

They had to be taken seriously and they were, but they were ill prepared for what would hit them.

I maintained an interest in unfolding related events, like the attempts at replications that were very numerous at first.  The experiment appeared so easy, and I had enjoyed building electrolytic apparatuses when I was younger, but the measurement of heat (calorimetry) could be easily confounded by environmental effects.  I was itching to try an experiment.  At the time, I was living in an RV, traveling from job site to job site, installing RADAR mostly.  I had much spare time and began to study the design of calorimeters.  There was some discussion of cold fusion research online, and it was mostly very angry people condemning the cold fusion work as incompetence or worse, from the standpoint of what was claimed to be complete knowledge about what was possible in nuclear physics.  I found some articles in the Journal of Electrolytic Chemistry and traced some interesting references to other journal articles.  This was enjoyable for the scientific ethos and dispassionate intelligence in those pages.

So, maybe it was all just a mistake.  That was the conclusion gaining consensus across the media.  I thought it was a mistake, but maybe it was not because a mistake has an explanation and some measurements were very hard to reject out of hand.  Explaining some errors as mistakes was hard, so implications of fraud were increasingly common.  

I did not mention my strong interest to almost anyone for a long time.  It was when an article appeared in Popular Science, written by retired Los Alamos National Lab scientist Edmund Storms that the big excitement started for me.  Storms wrote with great confidence about experiments that he had been officially assigned to perform to investigate cold fusion effects at LANL.  This was not exact replication of the work of F & P, but it was cold fusion at a national lab, with positive results!  Not only that, there were two other labs that I learned of at LANL, making claims of confirmation. 

That did it.  I started on my first attempt at building a calorimeter, which was not a complete waste of time, because I learned that it was more difficult than I had anticipated.  Getting the sort of accuracy required to detect the small amount of excess heat that I hoped to find would be hard.  It turned out that most people were finding no excess heat or getting it rarely, so it was easy to blame it on instrument or operator error.

My choice for my first experiment was based on a 1991 paper by Dr. Randell Mills.  In that paper, he explains the origin for the excess heat, and it was not a nuclear reaction, that is, the excess heat was not caused by any kind of nuclear reaction, by his theory.  Mills' supposed reaction was chemical.  The product of the reaction was a form of hydrogen that had gone undetected until now.  I thought that odd, but it explained that the means of detection are usually spectroscopic, and this form of hydrogen neither absorbed nor emitted light, so it was dark, producing no spectroscopic signal.  Well, I thought, this is intriguing, if it can be proved to exist.  How could it be disproved?

The reason I chose the Mills experiment was because it did not require palladium and platinum and from what I was reading, replication was reliable.  Electrodes were nickel only.

Around this time, I became aware of a new magazine that was published by an MIT professor who had resigned from MIT specifically to launch the magazine and who become a spokesman for the nascent field of cold fusion.  Dr. Eugene Mallove would eventually become my friend and employer, but right then, I was excited to start reading his magazine.  I discovered a network of researchers who were taking this very seriously, and they were highly credentialed.  How might a mere electrical engineer find work in such an exciting field?  I began by reading Mallove's recent book, Fire from Ice, the story of the controversy of cold fusion from his perspective.

I wrote to Dr. Mallove and it was pretty obvious I was excited about what appeared to be solid confirmation of something that was not yet defined.  I decided to offer my services, despite a paucity of scientific credentials, at no charge to him, just to get a chance to see for myself the results of some of these experiments.  He invited me to come and visit.  I did.

That first day, Gene and I drove to the airport to pick up a visiting scientist, Dr. Srinivasan ("Chino"), who worked at India's national lab, Bhabba Research Institute.  I had no idea who he was as we worked on a cell which came to be known as "boiled lightning", using tungsten welding rods as electrodes in a salt water electrolyte, dubbed the Ohmari Cell.  It ran at potentially hazardous voltages, and was obviously generating a lot of explosive gas.  Fortunately, the lab had a hood that drew the vapors outside.  The violent boiling in those cells was quite a spectacle.

An ordinary thermometer was mounted in the cell.  We noticed what we thought was a very rapid rate of increase of temperature in the cell from what had been a fairly steady temperature.  I ran over to tell Gene and he really got excited.  It was not long before we discovered that the violence in the cell had broken the bulb at the bottom of the thermometer, so the apparent temperature surge was meaningless.  By the time I told Gene, he had emailed the exciting news and it spread like wildfire.  This was the first of many lessons about managing information.  Years later, I was still seeing posts from people who were taking this initial report as some kind of evidence of cold fusion.  The analogy of gathering the feathers from a pillow ripped open in a strong wind comes to mind.

I proved my utility by making a suitable high voltage supply and employed one of my digital logging oscilloscopes to try and measure input power on the Ohmari cell.  It turned out to be quite difficult to make progress with this, and I was diverted to other work.  Mizuno eventually succeeded with some interesting calorimetry working with Ohmari, but he suffered a cell explosion that was extreme and damaged his hearing.  I shied away from boiled lightning.  Explosions of electrolytic cells had happened several times, even killing a lab worker, Andrew Riley, at SRI in Michael McKubre's lab.  I had seen hydrogen explosions several times, intentional and otherwise.  It is a very sharp explosion (high brisance) without a lot of energy, hard for me to see how it could be so destructive.  Fleischmann and Pons described an explosion that blew a crater into concrete under a laboratory bench.

My initial expectation that I would see a working experiment remained strong for at least a year.  I became a full time employee and resigned from FAA.  Another engineer and two physicists were hired to improve our efforts, but we still had no real successes.

Some other labs were reporting strong and reliable results, such as what was published by the Bhabba Research Institute or Dr. Thomas Claytor at LANL.  Gene invited me to accompany him to a meeting of the International Conference for Cold Fusion, which was in Italy.  It was a wonderful experience for me, mostly because I was able to meet many of the scientists whose papers I had been reading and confirm some astonishing anecdotes.  These were impressive scientists.

I was skeptical initially, which is why I wanted to work there, and because of my own failure to witness anything successful I was growing increasingly doubtful, but I kept this to myself.  Who was I to doubt the work of people who were obviously much more able and educated in the relevant specialties?  Dr. Michael McKubre of the Stanford Research Institute, a former student of Fleischmann, had commented that without a PhD in electrochemistry, people were wasting their time.  Perhaps he was right.  Perhaps I was wasting my time and Gene's resources.

Gene Mallove was generous with his time and friendship.  He paid for me to accompany him to the cold fusion conference in Italy and for a course in patent law.  I remember him fondly, although we did not part on good terms.  I returned to FAA in 2000.

Mallove was murdered in 2004, but enough belief in his vision remained to keep his magazine going until today.