News about Woodford and Industrial Heat

Quote from Alan Smith

Not true at all- there were many who were close all over the world. But they were the most successful.

I disagree. I think kevmolenr is right, there was no else even close. A few were beginning to catch up by 1908. Santos flew 222 meters, but it was essentially an uncontrolled hop, not much better than the late 19th century flights. The French were the most advanced. After Wilbur Wright flew in front of the leading French aviators on August 8, they all agreed the Wrights were far ahead. That is what they told newspaper reporters. They had large egos, but they said things such as: "We are beaten" "We are as nothing." "We are as children compared to the Wrights." (Gasnier) "For us in France and everywhere, a new era in mechanical flight has commenced . . . It is marvellous" (Bleriot). "Mr. Wright has us all in his hands. What he does not know is not worth knowing" (Zens) "Today they are hallowed in France . . ." (Archdeacon). The demonstrations "proved over and over again . . . the Wrights have long mastered the art of artificial flying." (Times) "THE MOST WONDERFUL FLYING-MACHINE THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE" (London Daily Mirror).

See Crouch, The Bishop's Boys, chapter 26, and Combs, chapter 27

Quote from Alan Smith

You have far too a US-centric view of this.. But never mind,

I suggest you read more of the history of early aviation, from 1890 to 1908. You will see that the Wrights were far ahead of everyone else. In the history of technology, it is rare that one inventor or one group has such a large lead over others, but it happened in this case. The only other example I can think of offhand was transistors at Bell Labs in 1948, and nuclear weapons in the U.S. during WWII. The latter was obviously a special case. Most of the European experts came to Los Alamos, so it was actually an international collaboration. It was also secret, for obvious reasons. If it had happened in peacetime other countries, especially the Soviet Union and Germany, would have kept up, I suppose.

After 1908, the French and other Europeans quickly caught up with the Wrights, and then surpassed them. European aviation hardly existed before 1908, but by 1914 a German pilot had flown 1900 km in 22 hours, and Sikorsky in Russia flew an airplane with 6 passengers in a comfortable cabin for 6 hours 33 minutes. Such performance was inconceivable with a 1908 Wright machine. Unthinkable. The Wrights continued to work after 1908 but they made little progress. They could never have rivaled Sikorsky. They did not have the kind of imagination that would rapidly improve the technology. As I recall, they did not even use seat belts, which was suicidal with airplanes of that era. Their control systems with levers were terrible, killing off several pilots, and they were too stubborn to admit it or improve it. They resembled some of the pioneering cold fusion researchers I know of, who shall remain nameless. See:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf

You have to realize, the first 3 years of aviation were from 1908 to 1910. The technology effectively did not exist before that. Also, those years were a bloodbath. From 1908 to 1910, 33 pilots were killed, which is a significant fraction of all the pilots there were. Wright machines were especially dangerous. In 1910, 90 pilots were killed. Anthony Fokker wrote: "Every flying field I have known is soaked with the blood of my friends and brother pilots . . . My memory is one long obituary list." (Villard, p. 240). That was before WWI.

People were willing to take far more risks to develop technology a century ago than they are today. If 90 people were killed developing self-driving cars, they would never see the light of day. If even 5 or 10 are killed developing cold fusion, I expect the research would be banned worldwide. After Mizuno experienced an explosion, the University did not allow him to do any more research. See: https://lenr-canr.org/?page_id=187#PhotosAccidents

In my opinion, today's extreme caution is going too far. If we do not take risks, we take a far greater risk of global warming, and we kill far more people with pollution.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

If you're waiting for Woodford to make money from IH in a legitimate manner,

Are you suggesting IH will make money in an illegitimate manner? If so, what manner would that be?

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Inflating share prices... like, if I understand it right, they have already done.

How do you know they inflated the prices? Maybe other people have priced it at levels they consider reasonable. And how do you know these prices are inflated? Have you evaluated the technology in detail? Can you tell us with any certainty whether their cold fusion research will succeed, or fail? If you can, you are a superlative genius capable of seeing through time and knowing what experiments will reveal even before those experiments are planned and executed. As I said, people do experiments because that is the only way to learn from nature. If you know already, we don't need to do the experiments. Just tell us how cold fusion works. We can then price out the shares and also make billions selling cold fusion.

If you know for a fact that the experiments IH is funding will not work, then of course these prices are inflated. But you cannot blame IH for that. Unlike you, they are not clairvoyant. On the other hand, if you don't know how the research will turn out, and if it does work after all, then these shares may be severely undervalued.