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Very reasonable

"Thomas A. Edison never headed a lab? Who knew!"

Edison did not do a good job running a laboratory. He was able to run the small lab at Menlo Park, but not the expanded one at West Orange. Quoting the Conot biography:

Edison's laboratory staff had mushroomed to 120 employees -- a veritable cuckoo's nest of learned men, cranks, enthusiasts, ambitious youth, plain muckers, and quite insane people. If Edison believed in a project, he would never let go of it: Patrick Kenny, who had started on the autographic telegraph ten years before in Menlo Park, was still plugging away. One man was working on closed tubes that had a habit of exploding -- Edison told him to try his experiments on suicide in a separate room. (There he promptly blew a hole through the ceiling.) . . .

Edison had thought that by creating a bigger and better Menlo Park he would be able to develop more and better products more rapidly. Matters did not turn out that way. For while at Menlo Park the operation had been small enough for Edison to be the axle around which the experimental spokes revolved, West Orange was too large, impersonal, and diversified to lend itself to a re-creation.

Edison assigned projects to people, and tried to make the rounds of the experimental rooms like a hospital physician. But often he became interested in what was happening in one room, and spent the whole week there. Since he disliked employing people with the intelligence and initiative to pursue experiments independently, he left the men in other rooms, who were deprived of his direction, floundering about.

He continued to measure employees more by their salaries than by their output. He dismissed chemists, but hired hordes of boys with little education on the premise that it was cheaper to train his own workers.

"Our present staff of juveniles are excessively stupid," one of the supervisors complained to Tate. "All of them combined have not as much common sense as would be required to keep a ton of pig iron from floating out to sea in a calm."

Quote from JedRothwell

Edison did not do a good job running a laboratory. He was able to run the small lab at Menlo Park, but not the expanded one at West Orange. Quoting the Conot biography:

Edison's laboratory staff had mushroomed to 120 employees -- a veritable cuckoo's nest of learned men, cranks, enthusiasts, ambitious youth, plain muckers, and quite insane people. If Edison believed in a project, he would never let go of it: Patrick Kenny, who had started on the autographic telegraph ten years before in Menlo Park, was still plugging away. One man was working on closed tubes that had a habit of exploding -- Edison told him to try his experiments on suicide in a separate room. (There he promptly blew a hole through the ceiling.) . . .

Edison had thought that by creating a bigger and better Menlo Park he would be able to develop more and better products more rapidly. Matters did not turn out that way. For while at Menlo Park the operation had been small enough for Edison to be the axle around which the experimental spokes revolved, West Orange was too large, impersonal, and diversified to lend itself to a re-creation.

Edison assigned projects to people, and tried to make the rounds of the experimental rooms like a hospital physician. But often he became interested in what was happening in one room, and spent the whole week there. Since he disliked employing people with the intelligence and initiative to pursue experiments independently, he left the men in other rooms, who were deprived of his direction, floundering about.

He continued to measure employees more by their salaries than by their output. He dismissed chemists, but hired hordes of boys with little education on the premise that it was cheaper to train his own workers.

"Our present staff of juveniles are excessively stupid," one of the supervisors complained to Tate. "All of them combined have not as much common sense as would be required to keep a ton of pig iron from floating out to sea in a calm."

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Jed,

If you have not already consumed,

May I suggest “Empires of Light”

by Jill Jonnes

Quote from Roseland67

If you have not already consumed,

May I suggest “Empires of Light”

Read it! Good book.

Quote from JedRothwell

Read it! Good book.

Dad read it and passed it along to all of the boys with his margin comments, he was kinda funny like that.

I had no idea what a scumbag JP Morgan was, but Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse

we’re what I expected.

As you long as you are here, Dr. McKubre, can you say something about Brillouin's current progress toward LENR high power boilers that have been claimed in some press releases as a "fait accompli?" How far off do these look now? Are you still personally involved with their work?

Quote from Alan Smith

We have yet to replicate anything, this was our first test with a fuel mix Russ based on his considerable experience over many years. Even he admits it was pretty lucky though.

This is a big warning sign. Russ George comes into your lab and his first preparation yields just what you have been looking for? This is unusual in any lab and I don't see how it is all that much different from what JohnyFive is claiming.

I had assumed that Russ George had been perfecting his preparation elsewhere and simply transferred it to your lab (is this what he told you?), but McKubre's post earlier on this thread seems to indicate that George is not to be trusted when he makes claims about earlier work.

Quote from JohnyFive

UPDATE: After several hours when the paper was out of the cell and the cell was not powered anymore I re-measured radiation level with pancake detector.

And what do you think? Nothing. Radiation level is back at background everywhere.

That's what I said: At most one tritium event per second. But next you should either identify the source of the breaking radiation or use a higher resolution to find some discrete peaks hiding behind the large bulk. An other task is to measure the ramp down of the radiation => halve live! Then we have one useful input.

Quote from JohnyFive

By very rough estimation I found the half-life is between 1/2 - 1 hour.

Then you should make a new spectrum after one (1/2) hour!

Quote from JohnyFive

In any way it is very exciting and at the same time quite dangerous as I really have no idea what I am measuring yet.

The paper is most likely acting as a filter of the radiation source. This implies that the size of the agent is between 1 and 10 microns. This agent cannot be a hydrogen isotope or molecule because that size is too small to be filtered by the paper. Such a small molecule would escape the paper is short order. if the paper even captured that small an agent at all.

If the molecule is meta-stable, the radiation should not demonstrate a half life. The radiation level might respond to the level of light that hits the paper.

Place a sheet of clear flat hard plastic(CD) or polyethylene on the top of the plastic to check for tracks or place self developing dental x-ray film on the paper: both LION and MFMP have used this method to detect strange radiation.

Quote from JohnyFive

Right now I am doing test that will verify if replacing Anode for a new one will still yield the same results.

This assumption of the same results most likely will not be true. There is an element of chance involved. For example, based on the idea put forth by Ed Storms, a particular sized and shaped crack or cavity has forms on the active anode that produces the LENR active agent. A new crack free Anode will not produce any LENR active material because a LENR active producing crack has not developed on the pristine Anode.

Quote from JohnyFive

By very rough estimation I found the half-life is between 1/2 - 1 hour.

@JohnyFive : I did a quick lockup for a possible candidate for your reaction: As you use Ti sponge Ni anode Deuterium and Lithium.

What you most likely see is the following: ⁴⁷Ti + D → ⁴⁹Cr halve live 42.3 minutes Beta 969.1keV. ⁴⁹Cr --> ⁴⁹V --> 49Ti + e⁺ (330 days) magnetic decay!

In fact your histogram shows a broader elevation around 969keV.

Wyttenbach

The energy scale in the provided histogram is way off. After adjusting, it shows peaks from a typical background spectrum.