Was the Cold Fusion fiasco actually a repeat of an old idea? A physics friend of mine says he was working at the National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST - aka: Bureau of Standards) when the story broke circa 1990. He says the idea came from an old paper on file with NIST.
Does anyone know anything more about this?
Sorry I don’t know the specific answer to your question, just wanted to point out there have been some interesting experiments in “cold fusion” (most of the scientists involved nowadays recoil in horror from that term, for obvious reasons) recently. NPR’s Science Friday had an intersting segment on this a few weeks ago. Maybe Pons and Fleischman were on to something after all?
I don’t know whether this explains what your friend remembers, but, yes, there were earlier very similar claims, dating back to the 1920s. Specifically, in 1926 two Germans, Paneth and Peters, claimed that palladium could catalyse the transformation of hydrogen into helium. They weren’t intending this as a power source; the interest was in a cheap source of helium for Zeppelins. They pretty quickly retracted the claim once they realised that the helium was actually being released from the glassware in their apparatus. Then in 1927, influenced by their work, Tandberg in Sweden added the idea of using electrolysis in the set-up as a source of the hydrogen. His experiments were apparently very similar to Pons and Fleischmann’s and he was similarly claiming useful energy release. However, his research seems to have just, well, fizzled out.
These and a few other, less striking, precursors are discussed in the early chapters of both Close’s Too Hot To Handle (W.H.Allen, 1991) and Huizenga’s Cold Fusion (Oxford, 1993).
Sorry, I wanted to believe, I really, really wanted it to be true. But they’ve been saying they’re eighteen months away from proving it true for the past ten years or so. Someone said something like “I’ll believe it when they use it to power a car to New Jersey”. It ain’t happened yet.
Thanks everyone for their input. I believe “Bonzer”'s findings may be closest to that which my friend must have referring.