ICCF History

A Brief History and Introduction to the International Conference Series by Michael McKubre This is a six-part history of the ICCF conferences. It was originally uploaded to the ICCF-19 website, in 2015. Contents Part One - From ICCF1 to ICCF3................................................................................................... 2 Part Two - From ICCF4 to ICCF6 ................................................................................................ 24 Part Three - From ICCF7 to ICCF9 .............................................................................................. 54 Part Four - From ICCF10 to ICCF12 ............................................................................................ 84 Part Five - From ICCF13 to ICCF15 .......................................................................................... 120 Part Six - From ICCF16 to ICCF18 ............................................................................................ 164 1 A Brief History and Introduction to the International Conference Series Part One - From ICCF1 to ICCF3 by Michael McKubre Organization of this document. This history is being written in sections. The first “episode” covers the foundational years, ICCF1 through ICCF3. In perusing the rich photographic library that documents all of the eighteen ICCF conferences to date, I decided to choose content based upon those images which necessarily skews the story towards what Gene Mallove, Dave Nagel and I observed. For the first three conferences the photographic record is slight but informational content is high. This historical document is intended to be faithful and somewhat inclusive. Part of my intent is to feature the cold fusion warriors that are no longer with us. It is important to document how we came to today, to ICCF19 — what forces were put in play to make the seemingly impossible transition from one conference to nineteen. In doing this the role of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) and the roles of the chairmen throughout the years are critical. In their introduction to the ICCF14 (2008, Washington, DC) Proceedings volumes, Dave Nagel, teacher and researcher at The George Washington University, and Mike Melich, research professor with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California (Co-Chairs), provided a short summary and table of the locations and attendance for the first fourteen conferences in the ICCF series. This is lightly adapted and extended below to include the full 18 conferences to date. That we got this far is remarkable, the stories on the following pages all the more so. Certainly many predicted that we would not proceed beyond one or two and each passing conference further secures our place in history and continues to annoy, defy and diminish the case made by a decreasing band of skeptics. We are confining our discussion to how this accomplishment was achieved and the significance of this achievement for the broader cold fusion community. Much credit should be given to every participant of every conference. Personal credit is given to the subjects of the photos below – and to the photographers who made this possible, particularly: Gene Mallove, Dave Nagel, Barbara Dello Russo, Duy Tran. Finally I would like to express my gratitude for the inspiration and support in this, my first, historical exercise to the following people: Tony La Gatta, who provided the stimulus; Pietro Spatola who painstakingly uploaded the Histories to the website and combatted the technical glitches; and Christy Frazier, Marianne Macy and Alison Godfrey who patiently waded through my words and grammar. Thanks is given also to Jed Rothwell and Ruby Caret who have taken my text and transformed into what hopefully is its ultimate web destination. Now let’s dive back into history… 2 Table of Conferences ICCF1-18 3 ICCF1 The first conference was created with the name First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF1), by Fritz Will and his staff at the National Cold Fusion Institute (NCFI) in Salt Lake City, Utah. (For the purpose of this history and continuity, I will refer to all conferences in this series as ICCF.) Fritz Will (seen below) is a famous electrochemist who had been employed by General Electric at their corporate central research laboratory in Schenectady, New York from 1960 until 1990 when he took on leadership of the NCFI. The electrochemistry community in 1990 regarded Fritz as thorough and reliable, and about that time he was appointed to be President of the Electrochemical Society, the principal electrochemical society in the U.S., and perhaps the world. It was an interesting and significant choice to see him selected as the director of NCFI, for him to leave GE, and take a senior role in this emerging and turbulent field. Perhaps part of the reason can be found in this remarkable quote published in 1991 by 21st Century Science and Technology1: “One has to pose the question, what are the motivations of groups of scientists out there that are lashing out against scientists that have decided to work in this area? It makes it very unfairly difficult for those that are courageously making a commitment to this field to work in this field.” Photo: Fritz Will, ICCF1 Chairman (photo courtesy: Gene Mallove). 1 http://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1991/eirv18n15-19910419/eirv18n15-19910419_024-fritz_g_will.pdf 4 Obviously NCFI was intending an annual event focused on cold fusion, but not necessarily international. The first conference was located very close to the NCFI in Salt Lake City from March 26-31, 1990. The naming of the Institute and the conference tells us a lot. Clearly NCFI intended to assert leadership in this area, at least in the U.S., and hopefully continue to host the annual conferences. This was not to be. The NCFI was a solid producer of some very high quality and important results but had self-identified as the leader in a field that influential forces intended to suppress. Unfortunately they also fell victim to some poor pre-planning in respect to the roles that Fleischmann and Pons were expected to play. To the chagrin of many Utah residents, and to the detriment of the field, the NCFI closed its doors in June 1991. The time from March 23, 1989 until March 26, 1990 (the first conference) was the most transitional, challenging, and exciting time of my research career. The group at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, about six people at that time, literally worked days, nights, and weekends to make progress in what was becoming an increasingly interesting, but also externally hostile, environment. It is worth recalling that the immediate response from the physics community was not antagonistic. A great number of physicists, in an attempt to be amongst “the first”, went into their laboratories to replicate, or pounded the keys of their computers to explain Fleischmann and Pons’ observations. The beginnings of public polarization can most likely be traced to the May 1989 Baltimore meeting of the American Physical Society (APS). It was there, 40 days and 40 nights after the March 23rd announcement, that the very strange George Bush type of attitude “you’re with us or you’re against us” began. It was in this milieu that the first major conference was held. I attended ICCF1 with a half a dozen members of my group and an almost equal number of our sponsors from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The mood was more like a rock concert than a scientific conference, with champions and villains on display. Some of my old heroes were prominent, John Bockris, Texas A&M University, and of course Martin Fleischmann, and some new heroes: theorists Julian Schwinger, Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1965, professor in the Physics Department at UCLA; Giuliano Preparata, Department of Physics, University of Milan, Italy; Peter Hagelstein, principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and the irrepressible Scott Chubb, research physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. There I met for the first time with Gene Mallove, who worked for technology engineering firms such as Hughes Research Laboratories, the Analytic Science Corporation, and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, and later became publisher of Infinite Energy magazine. Peter and Gene can be seen below in different poses with with Martin. 5 Photo: Gene Mallove and Martin Fleischmann (photo courtesy: Dave Nagel). Photo: Peter Hagelstein and Martin Fleischmann (photo courtesy: Dave Nagel). 6 I also met Andy Riley, who at the time was project manager of the engineering group at the University of Utah’s National Cold Fusion Institute. He later became one of the early members of the SRI research team and the first of our fallen warriors (seen below with a young Dave Nagel). Photo: Andy Riley and Dave Nagel at NCFI (photo courtesy: Gene Mallove). On the experimental side I was very impressed with Ed Storms, a nuclear scientist then with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and Carol Talcott, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and with their thorough, no-nonsense solidity. Their evidence of tritium seemed compelling along with the near-simultaneous results of Bockris and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, (BARC, Trombay, India), but the issue of “theoretical impossibility” had already emerged. I remember sitting on a panel and seeing the puzzled expression on the faces of a number of prominent critics in response to a question arguing the primacy of experiment.

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