In a press conference on the 23rd of March, 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two scientists working in relative isolation with comparatively simple equipment, announced the discovery of the holy grail of energy researchers: an apparently limitless, pollution free source of power. This was the beginning of the most recent and spectacular controversy over the possible existence of cold fusion, though it was by no means the first (Close, 1991).. Initially, it looked like a classic Campbellian hero's tale, a paradigm-busting experiment that signaled a new scientific revolution.
The reigning paradigm in fusion research involved multi-million dollar technologies like tokamaks, or toroidal magnetic chambers, that achieve temperatures higher than the center of the sun in an effort to fuse hydrogen into helium. The problem is that more energy is used in creating these conditions than results from the fusion. Pons and Fleischmann's experiments at the University of Utah gave hope that fusion could be created and sustained with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. Basically, their 'cold fusion tokamak' was an electrolysis cell, used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a palladium rod down the center.
The two researchers knew that palladium has a natural affinity for hydrogen and that the hydrogen would therefore migrate into the palladium. They theorized that inside the crystal lattice of the palladium, the hydrogen would be under very high pressure--perhaps enough pressure to produce fusion. There initial experiments suggested that this palladium cell produced an excess of heat--in one case, enough to cause the cell to explode, fortunately when no one was nearby. Here was a triumph of little science over the big science.
Pons and Fleischmann weren't the only researchers to discover cold fusion. Stephen Jones, at rival Brigham Young University, had also conducted experiments that seemed to show a similar effect. It was the pressure of this competion that drove Pons and Fleischmann to announce their discovery at exactly the wrong forum for scientists--a press conference. Jones was about to present his results at a scientific conference, and Pons and Fleischmann felt sure he would be given priority as the discoverer if they did not pre-empt him. Jones, meanwhile, thought he had an agreement with the University of Utah researchers that both teams would submit simultaneous papers to Nature. These disagreements about priority were complicated by the fact that cold fusion was more than a scientific discovery--it might be a patentable process that could make the researchers and the universities they worked for wealthy.
There were important differences between Jones and Pons and Fleischmann on this issue. Jones had detected neutron levels slightly above the background with his cell, suggesting that fusion might be causing the neutron emissions, but at a level too low to be a significant course of power. Indeed, he detected no rise in temperature. Pons and Fleischmann, on the other hand, had detected a significant rise in temperature, but not the concomitant excess of neutrons one would have expected. Indeed, nuclear physicists who saw pictures of the researchers standing next to their palladium cell while it was operating said they should have been killed by the radiation. As one scientist noted after seeing a Cable Network News report, "the man explaining the experiment to the reporters was apparently touching the glass bulb containing the active elements and yet none of his bodily parts fell off" (Close, 1991, p. 163).
Scientific teams all ower the world set out to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's experiments, but critical details of the procedure were hard to come by, partly because the University was submitting patent applications for the process (Huizenga, 1992). Before Congress, Ronald Ballinger of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center testified that, "The level of detail concerning the experimental procedures, condtiions and results necessary for verification of the Fleischmann and Ponse results have not been forthcoming. At the same time, almost daily articles in the press, often in conflict with the facts, have raised the public expcectations, possibly for naught, that our energy problem has been "solved'. We have heard the phrase "too cheap to meter" applied to other forms of electric enery production before. And so the scientific community has been left to attemt to reproduce and verify a potentially majore scientific breakthrough while getting the experimental details from The Wall Street Journal and other news publications" (Close, 1991, p. 189). James Brophy of the University of Utah lamented that, "The scientists want us to tell everything but the patent attorneys tell us to say absolutely nothing" (Close, 1991, p. 191). Similarly, Fleischmann argued that "we had written a number of patents by that stage and the view of the university was that we should announce this by a press conference. It was really the patents that were driving this" (Close, 1991, p. 329).
Withholding information prior to obtaining a patent is standard practice for inventors. Secretiveness prior to annoncement of a discovery is also acceptable for scientists, but once the word is out in a pubic forum, then the details necessary for replication are supposed to be accessible. It is not clear whether Pons and Fleischmann were withholding information, or simply had to announce their results earlier than they would have liked to, and were sure replication would follow. Promoting 'vaporware' is an acceptable strategy for inventor/entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison or Bill Gates, who make extravagant promises they expect they will be able to fulfill eventually. Perhaps Pons and Fleischmann were doing the scientific equivalent of vaporware.
Of course, the amount of detail required for replication is often the subject of intense negotiation (Collins, 1985; Collins & Pinch, 1993) and this controversy was no exception. Laboratories all over the world tried to get details; in some cases, they ran experiments based on photographs from newspapers and television reports. At first, results from Georgia Tech, Texas A&M and the University of Washington appeared to support cold fusion, but as these researchers searched for alternate exlanations, they found serious problems that led them to retract their initial positive findings and other laboratories at MIT, Caltech and other locations weighed in with negative results. Furthermore, Pons and Fleischmann's reluctance to collaborate with other scientists and share data led to attacks on their integrity. Had Pons and Fleischmann stuck with a scientific goal, rather than an inventor's, their reputations might have fared better because they could then have supplied the details the scientific community wanted. However, this kind of openness would have made it harder for them to profit from this revolutionary new energy source, if it panned out. To put it in simple terms, failure to replicate a discovery is bad; failure to replicate an invention simply means that the original inventor and her partners have a competitive edge--the longer it takes others to replicate, the better. Pons and Fleischmann' lawyers even threatened to sue over a critical article that appeared in Nature; again, the courts are an appropriate forum for sorting out inventors' disputes, but not scientists'.
Edison made a similar mistake with his first announcement of the 'etheric force' (Gorman, 1989). In 1875, while conducting experiments on multiple telegraphy, Edison noticed that when the current to an electromagnet was interrupted, sparks could be drawn off a variety of metal objects in the laboratory. Not only did these sparks emerge at a greater distance than any he had seen before, they appeared to have neither a positive nor a negative charge. He thought he had discovered a new physical force, which he labeled etheric because it seemed to travel through the invisible ether that was supposed to carry light waves. Edison was used to announcing his new inventions to the newspapers, often long in advance of their reduction to practice. He did the same with his new discovery, and a sympathetic New York Herald reporter announced that:
The cumbersome appliances transmitting ordinary electricity, such as telegraph poles, insulating knobs, cable-sheathings may be left out...and a great saving of time and labor accomplished. Ocean cables [may be] operated by "etheric force"...The existing methods or mechanisms may be completely revolutionized (Josephson, 1959, p. 129).
Note that Edison emphasized the potential inventions to the reporter, not the theoretical implications. The scientific community greeted this new force with skepticism, and the future inventor Elihu Thomson played a crucial role in disconfirming Edison's force when he and Edwin Houston showed that it did carry a charge. Edison dropped his pursuit of the etheric force, and left it to Marconi, Tesla and others to explore the phenomenon of radio waves.
Both Pons & Fleischmann and Edison were more concerned about patent priority than scientific credit, so they risked early announcements of discoveries before doing disconfirmatory tests. The point in a patent is to be revolutionary, as different as possible from whatever went before (Myers, 1995). Had Pons & Fleischmann and Edison tried to announce their results in scientific journals, the referee process might have forced them to conduct potentially disconfirmatory tests of their phenomena and the outcomes of these controversies might have been different. In Pons & Fleischmann's case, even if the phenomenon were disproved, its initial advocates might have sustained less damage to their scientific careers. In Edison's case, even if he found he was not detecting a new force, he might have continued experiments that would have led him to wireless telegraphy. 2