Gold From Mats Lewan’s Impossible Invention Book (Engineer48)

    • Official Post

    Do not want to be too negative, because you just never know, but this comes across as a little strange. Strained maybe, and a little too much hype. It is like we were softened up for this...or at least the remaining Rossi believers were, by E48's coming to Rossi's defense about the "GPT". Like a "confidence game" builder, and then bam...now that you can trust my motives, do I have a deal for you! :)


    He does say:


    I have personally seen what unrestrained greed does to the best of people and it is not nice.


    If I sell 1,000 kits at $1,000 each, well I’ll be very happy that I made a good return and that LENR will never be suppressed.

    Which is a little contradictory if you ask me. He has seen greed, but wants to make his own million $? And telling someone that he is doing it for Rossi?...like I said, something does not come across right to me. Like I said, I could be wrong, and if E48 would like to say something here in response, I am all ears. And if sincere, and he has something, just like me356, I hope he makes $1 billion.

    Quote from Alan Smith

    I sincerely doubt it, there are amazingly few active experimenters. You might sell 50/100 at best.


    That is crazy Alan, once a couple trusted names in the field bought kits and posted videos and reviews, they would absolutely sell like hot cakes. If we could have access to a peek into the technology of the century for $1000, myself along with many others here would be throwing money at Engineer48. No question they would all sell out easily and quickly.

    Quote from JedRothwell


    Assuming it works, I think you could sell more. Word would get out that it works and people who are not involved in the field would buy one. I think you could soon sell tens of thousands.


    It worked that way with the early microcomputers, such as the MITS Altair. People who had no idea they get a computer for themselves heard about it, and ordered it. Later, people who did not even know they wanted a computer got one. The Altair had not practical purpose at first. It was an expensive toy.


    I got to work on an Altair as a kid...I would give my left arm for one now. I have quite an extensive computer collection going back to the late 70s, but the Altair is one I am still drooling over!

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Mary Yugo wrote:
    Not as long as we are beyond P&F who, I remind folks, were amply funded and supported for going past 20 years!


    No, they were not amply funded or supported for long. Politics and greed destroyed their project, alas.


    Mary, you might retract the statement. Pons and Fleischmann did their original work, pre-1989, in their own dime. When they realized they needed more money, and asked for it, the proposal went in front of Stephen Jones, who saw similarity (incorrectly) to his own work. The resulting mess and legal ramificactions forced Pons and Fleischmann to announce when they were not ready. The did receive substantial funding, moving to France for the Technova project, which was gone by the mid-1990s, if I'm correct. Jed would know better. They might have had six or so years of funding. And were, to some extent, running down a blind alley, though they did some useful work in France. Most of it, apparently, has never been published.


    After the rush in 1989, when a lot of money was wasted on poorly-formed studies, funding for cold fusion research became very difficult. While there were points where funding was substantial, such as the effort in Japan, about which Jed could say much more, there were also serious, ah, stupidities involved. Again, Jed correct me, but the Japanese insisted on using the purest possible palladium, which didn't work, wasting millions of dollars. But, hey, isn't purer better?


    Yeah, for some controls, maybe. Not for the main show until it's known to work. Use material from "Uncle Martin," it was said.


    Pure is not necessarily better if the effect is happening on the surface and the nanostructure of the material matters a great deal. This is all still not clearly understood, though ENEA, in particular, seems to know how to make material that works.

    I just realized the DEEP irony in Engineer48 presenting a "black box" for demonstration of the Rossi Effect, which is exactly what Steorn did with its black box cell that Frank was testing over on E-Scat World! Is today April 1st or is this just a day of awesome comedy?


    EDIT: I attached todays screenshot of the amazing demonstration of the Steorn Orbo....DEAD!

    Quote from stephenrenzz

    I got to work on an Altair as a kid...I would give my left arm for one now. I have quite an extensive computer collection going back to the late 70s, but the Altair is one I am still drooling over!


    Yeah. I sold mine in the 1990s to a good home for $1. The I/O ribbon cables were breaking, it was kind of a mess. I had expanded it with an 8 MB memory card, as I recall. Cost a fortune. I had an IO card, and a video interface, that was about it. I had written a program to use an ordinary cassette recorder to store and retrieve data. Wrote an article about it for Byte magazine, 1977. I think it's still available on-line. I was using the name "Daniel" then.


    Quote

    Is it an impossible dream? Is it conceivable to make an audio cassette 10 port with only a single bit line in each direction? Well, if you ignore the need for connecting wires, clipping diodes and isolation capacitors, then you can use a "hardwareless" software technique such as that described in Daniel Lomax's The Impossible Dream Cassette Interface.


    The hardware was, for the output, more or less wiring the interrupt enable line to the cassette mike input. Reading was done by clipping the interrupt line to the power rails and feeding the signal through an isolation capacitor. The modulation was variable pulse length.(So the time it took to transmit a byte depended on the data). It all ran in very little memory, I built this when I only had 256 bytes.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax


    Yeah. I sold mine in the 1990s to a good home for $1. The I/O ribbon cables were breaking, it was kind of a mess. I had expanded it with an 8 MB memory card, as I recall. Cost a fortune. I had an IO card, and a video interface, that was about it. I had written a program to use an ordinary cassette recorder to store and retrieve data. Wrote an article about it for Byte magazine, 1977. I think it's still available on-line. I was using the name "Daniel" then.



    The hardware was, for the output, more or less wiring the interrupt enable line to the cassette mike input. Reading was done by clipping the interrupt line to the power rails and feeding the signal through an isolation capacitor. The modulation was variable pulse length.(So the time it took to transmit a byte depended on the data). It all ran in very little memory, I built this when I only had 256 bytes.


    I am quite jealous that you owned one, I don't think I could have parted with it! lol I will see if I can track down your article...I may even have that issue in print! I fired up one of my TRS-80s a few months ago with the massive 5 MEGABYTE harddrive cabinet with the keylock start lol...it actually still works! The funny part is that I never filled up the 5Mb drive, amazing how far things have come.

    Quote from Mary Yugo

    Not that it matters, Jed, but my remarks were directed at Abd who made the remarkable assertion that a working and reliable LENR reactor would currently be worth about $1000! Gee Abd, I'd happily give you $100K for one on the spot. Provided I did the testing, of course.


    Same offer I made to Jeff Otto when he claimed on PESN that he had constructed an HHO ("Brown's gas") boosted Honda Accord which made 100 mpg. Never did get to try out that car despite my generous offer (they wanted money for "research"). I wonder why. I bet I don't get to try out a high power LENR reactor any time soon either. For much the same reasons.

    If it was being sold to the public for $1000, you would be completely dumb to pay $100K.


    Honestly, Mary, develop some sense of how to model possibilities with words. You would give $100K without personally testing it first?


    This was about a "black box" offered for sale, apparently as an energy amplifier, for heating water. If the price were $1000, there might be a few who would try it. If they validated it, sales would skyrocket, even if it was more or less a piece of junk, but ... an actual demonstration of excess heat. Yes. If it worked, it could be worth millions or even billions, but E48's idea was to sell it to the masses.


    I must say that Shane's suspicion doesn't seem ridiculous to me. Look, if you are going to do this great service for the world, do it first. Then you get to crow about it.


    Watch as E48 says that he needs a few thousand dollars to build it. Just a few, mind you. Next month,


    "we realized we need more, so we are asking our generous donors, the ones supporting the energy future of humanity, to kick in a bit more. We promise the reactors will be ready in three months."


    Wait! Has a prototype been built? Does it work? Who has tested it?

    Indeed. And Abd didn't read what I wrote, again. I said I'd have to test it, of course. Point is, nobody is selling a working LENR reactor at any price. Least of all Rossi.

    I was wrong about the duration but the result is the same:


    Quote

    On 1 January 1991 Pons left the University of Utah and went to Europe.[69][70] In 1992, Pons and Fleischman resumed research with Toyota Motor Corporation's IMRA lab in France.[69] Fleischmann left for England in 1995, and the contract with Pons was not renewed in 1998 after spending $40 million with no tangible results.[71] The IMRA laboratory stopped cold fusion research in 1998 after spending £12 million.[3] Pons has made no public declarations since, and only Fleischmann continued giving talks and publishing papers.[71]


    (Wikipedia)


    So $52M was not enough? 1989 to 1998 was not enough? And Pons stopped working with Fleischmann because nothing they did was enough? Enough to provide adequate evidence so that ANY scientific organization, university, test lab or private wealthy individual would take a chance on developing it further? And that was ill will and politics? Yah shoore. Spin me another tale. How about it was that no demonstration or experiment they could come up with would convince any investors?

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Mary Yugo wrote:


    I find this very convincing:


    lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf


    Mary Yugo's comment is same-old, same-old, a message she has seen and repeated maybe a hundred times. If cold fusion was real, investors would be falling all over themselves to throw money at the scientists. If it was real, 25 years of research would have produced practical devices, generating reliable and massive heat.


    "Reality" is a scientific issue which Mary never really addresses. Lots of things are real but without -- yet-- practical import. Muon-catalyzed fusion (truly "cold fusion") is real but without any practical import, so far, except for being quite interesting.


    The report by the Roulettes and Pons, who did keep working at IMRA Europe after Fleischmann left, for a while, was scientifically interesting, but by this time it was apparent that commercializing cold fusion was not going to be a slam-dunk, and that work has about zero short-term commercial implications. Cold fusion was (and still is, my opinion) a laboratory curiosity. Fleischmann thought that to commercialize it would take a Manhattan-scale project. At least a billion dollars, and I'd say that may not be enough.


    However, there is investment that is socially and scientifically oriented, it fades into scientific philanthropy. As long as I've been involved in the field, some scientists have had supporters. Sometimes there is proprietary information, a sign of investment.


    Darden of Industrial Heat looked at the field in around 2012 and concluded there was long-term possibility, and began investing, with the most public effort being with Rossi, and I've explained many times that this did not mean that they believed the Rossi work was real, but that it was necessary to find out. And they did find out. Nobody else had been so bold.


    Woodford was looking for some years, and decided to toss $50 million into the research pot, managed by Darden.


    This is not enough money to reliably generate commercial applications. However, by fostering basic research, the path is being cleared for commercial possibilities. First step is to overcome the silly rejection cascade. This is largely an educational effort, but it includes doing definitive, nail-it-down experimental work. Measuring the heat/helium ratio for PdD electrolytic work was an already-known, already-confirmed reproducible experiment that would be likely to produce results of interest, eminently publishable. So I suggested this as a first project, and it's happening. I also suggested another and I think that one is happening, too, but I'm not so sure. (that one wasn't widely confirmed, but simple and very interesting.)


    Breaking the rejection logjam would then begin to foster much wider experimental and theoretical consideration of cold fusion, and public funding of research will expand. My view is that it is important that this be focused, at first, on cleaning up the mess. There are a lot of reported results. Some may be artifact. What's real, i.e., what can be confirmed?


    There will be projects to explore the parameter space, as McKubre put it, I think. Some of this will create or suggest paths to commercial projects, and a company like Industrial Heat will be monitoring the field closely.


    The "trade secret" path is probably inadequate. Cold fusion will require a massive collective effort. Along the way, there will be commercial opportunities, and investors who are familiar with the field -- and the pitfalls -- will be well-placed to recognize and profit from them.


    There is no mystery about why funding dried up for Pons. The philanthropist died and the project returned to more hard-nosed, what's-in-this-for-us investment, and IMRA France simply was not working on that path.

    Engineer48 on E-catworld:


    "I actually convinced Gates to use a "Soft Bios" that my company had developed ..."


    Oh, good! Not only he cracked the secret of the Rossi Effect (aka LENR) from a BOOK, but he saved Microsoft's ass.


    I draw the line at him taking credit for discovering penicillin...


    Edit: Bill should show some appreciation through funding his discovery.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    There is no mystery about why funding dried up for Pons. The philanthropist died and the project returned to more hard-nosed, what's-in-this-for-us investment,


    That is part of the story, but there is more. Mainly: Toyota and Johnson Matthey began fighting over IP. And some of those hard-nosed decision makers were dumber than dirt, in my opinion. History is full of colossally stupid mistakes made by stupid people, such as World War I.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    Cold fusion was (and still is, my opinion) a laboratory curiosity. Fleischmann thought that to commercialize it would take a Manhattan-scale project. At least a billion dollars, and I'd say that may not be enough.


    Here:
    http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com…of-the-manhattan-project/


    and elsewhere, one can see that the total cost of the Manhattan Project was (in today's US dollars) some $26 billion to 30 billion, mostly in construction expenses over about 3 years total. The cost at the time is widely accepted to be about $2 billion. Many of the basic research components may well have been largely already paid for during the 1930s in academic and industrial settings, so that important and relevant basic research component for comparative purposes to the required work to realize and harness CF may not be accurately reflected in such a comparison. In any case a huge effort is now justified at the basic research level-- if only to define the nature of the phenomena and possibly if only to deny its utility. A program of at least billion dollars per year (todays dollars) could easily be justified if the decision were taken today that the effort at confirmation and understanding were of planetary import. A few years could accomplish that end. Assuming substantial confirmation, a further decade or more would be required to perfect usable aspects of such technology.

    Quote

    Darden of Industrial Heat looked at the field in around 2012 and concluded there was long-term possibility, and began investing, with the most public effort being with Rossi, and I've explained many times that this did not mean that they believed the Rossi work was real, but that it was necessary to find out. And they did find out. Nobody else had been so bold.


    If Darden had done his homework, he could have tested Rossi's honesty and competence in less than a month at a cost of less than $100K. Instead, he let the debacle continue until he had lost $11.5M of the fund's money, was being sued, and would require legal talent in the millions more. Nice job. And yeah, he found out. Costly lesson... for his shareholders. His CEO salary and executive perks won't change.


    Quote

    Have Steorn officially capitulated? Or are they just quiet about the Orbo at this point?

    Capitulated? Probably not. But they were dead meat in 2007 after the "Kinetica" demonstration and covert video from private sessions after the official ones, confirmed that they had nothing and never had anything except lies, false claims and a sociopathic con man for a president. That sound familiar at all?

    Quote from Mary Yugo

    If Darden had done his homework, he could have tested Rossi's honesty and competence in less than a month at a cost of less than $100K. Instead, he let the debacle continue until he had lost $11.5M of the fund's money, was being sued, and would require legal talent in the millions more. Nice job. And yeah, he found out. Costly lesson... for his shareholders. His CEO salary and executive perks won't change.


    The trouble is that the information was much more positive at the time. There were some, such as you, crowing that he was scamming. However, there were a number of scientists saying they believed it worked. It was not so clear. AR has always been able to dance his way through the criticisms. Maybe that will happen again, but it sure doesn't seem like it. IH have learned an expensive lesson. They seem like the types to learn from their mistakes. We'll see.

    Quote

    The trouble is that the information was much more positive at the time. There were some, such as you, crowing that he was scamming. However, there were a number of scientists saying they believed it worked. It was not so clear. AR has always been able to dance his way through the criticisms. Maybe that will happen again, but it sure doesn't seem like it. IH have learned an expensive lesson. They seem like the types to learn from their mistakes. We'll see.


    I agree.


    As a natural skeptic I look at the flaky demos and think it 90% likely Rossi has nothing. The Lugano report was the only independent well-documented test and that has the known error. Unlike most I'm in a position to evaluate for myself the technical evidence, and can be sure of that. Again, as a natural skeptic aware of companies like BLP well funded over a long period, I don't see Rossi attracting serious funding as adding much credibility. IH have been properly open and made it clear (before Rossi blew the top off things) that they needed rigorous testing and Rossi's tests did not provide this. Other funders would just have kept quiet.


    But, I can see this from the other side. For many, the technical evidence is one set of experts against another. For Lugano the Swedish profs must surely trump any set of uncredentialed internet types. And without independent and skeptical analysis the tests would seem, overall, good enough to be interesting, the IH involvement surely adding massive credibility.


    I think there is another issue particular to LENR. If you think LENR is real you must buy into the fact that mainstream scientists have got it wrong, and probably done that (and still do it) through prejudice. Therefore if you are going on authority, the authorities who say Rossi's stuff does not work may well be prejudiced. I suspect this affected Mats and others.


    Then the call is for skeptics to prove that Rossi's stuff does not work. Even though Rossi himself behaves in the ways we've discussed like an obvious scammer (but with such apparent conviction that it is weird) proving that his device does not work is intrinsically impossible.


    If there is an external test that fails (Hydrofusion) Rossi can claim as he did to Darden that he made it fail on purpose. He is unashamed of saying anything that fits the needed "dramatic effect". From the outside, if you allow such things, it is possible to explain any level of weirdness.


    Finally I don't think the internet comment much helps people form a wise judgement. To notice the cracks in Rossi's experiments you need to be looking for them - and people looking for them are - well - likely to be people who are naturally skeptical. Anyone not like that would detect the natural skepticism and reckon that such people must be biased, as often they are.

Subscribe to our newsletter

It's sent once a month, you can unsubscribe at anytime!

View archive of previous newsletters

* indicates required

Your email address will be used to send you email newsletters only. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our Partners

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.