@ oldguy,
example: CETI (Clean energy Tech) was offered 30 M by Motorola but Patterson wanted to remain in control, F&P were given 30M for their set up in Nice, France.
As for CETI, I found this story:
Quote
http://www.wired.com/1998/11/coldfusion/
[…]By mid-1996," Reding recalls, "we had research relationships with the University of Illinois, the University of Missouri, and Kansas City Power & Light. They were supporting our research. Motorola even made a written offer to buy our company."
When I challenge him on that, he goes to a file cabinet and pulls out a letter from Gregory E. Korb at Motorola New Enterprises. Conditional on a series of tests, it proposes a buyout totaling $15 million.
(Subsequently, I track down Korb and ask him if the letter is genuine. "The Patterson cell was demonstrated in a Motorola facility, which was not the best environment to do calorimetry," Korb says, very carefully. "But Motorola did tell CETI that if they could prove the phenomenon, we would be willing to invest in it.")
So, the letter seems real. "You turned down a conditional offer that could have been worth $15 million," I say to Reding.
He hesitates – but only for a moment. "We're better off in the long run," he tells me.
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So the funding at stake were 15 M$, but above all it was tied to a properly conducted test. In any case collecting offers is not the same as collecting money.
The only suitable example is, therefore, the 30 M$ spent by Toyoda for F&P. Let us compare it with the funds raised by the Ecat. The company founded specifically to exploit its IP initially raised at least 11,5 M$, and subsequently obtained 50 M$ from an investing fund (5% of an estemated total value of 1 B$). After subtracting all the costs, there remains more than 30 M$ available for the LENR field. So, from the POV of the LENR community, the Ecat initiative was much more fruitful than the Nice initiative.
But the economic part doesn't adequately show the exceptionality of the Ecat venture, with respect to the F&P's one. We should better compare the circumstances of the two endeavors.
Let's start with F&P. In 1989, they were two esteemed academicians, unanimously recognized as true scientists. One of them had been the president of the International Society of Electrochemistry, the discipline concerning the functioning of his cell. They obtained the funding for the Nice lab in 1992, when there was still some credit that cold fusion could have been a real phenomenon, and many believed that the criticisms raised in the first months could have come by strong competitions between physicists and chemists. In addition, the two scientists claimed to have obtained only a few watts of excess heat, a range easily attributable to the instrumental errors, and their task was only to improve that gain and better explain the possible underlying phenomenon.
On the other side, Rossi had a degree in philosophy and was a complete outsider for nuclear physics or chemistry. When he joined the LENR field, his reputation was not at the highest level. Leaving aside the Italian troubles, the only research activity carried out in the US under a government contract, the TEG project, ended in failure. At the time he entered the LENR field, 20 years later of the Nice initiative, the related research was nearly dead, and its popularity was at the lowest level. The CF/LENR field was ignored by most people, the few others considered it as woodo science. Rossi made a miracle, literally resurrecting the field, and making millions of people believing that the LENR phenomena were real, and that his method was nearly ready for industrial applications. Despite having published on the web a lot of data, including the videos, of many dumb tests, he and the Ecat IP have finally attracted dozens of millions of funding for the development of his devices and for the financing of the entire LENR field.
In conclusion, there is no competition with the F&P achievements. The Rossi venture has been by large the most incredible and sensational success in the history of all the controversial sciences.
