"Fusioneer" Story in The Epoch Times

[Paul_Schatzkin]

This looks like a pretty good write up:

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/48127/

[Carl Willis]

The publicity is good, but I have to fault this article for getting Richard Hull and his fusor mis-attributed to Tim Koeth! (The photos may be Tim's.) It's also strictly a mistake to write that "there are about 40 people throughout the world who have created fusion," since our Neutron Club is not exhaustive and explicitly does not include commercial, industrial, or major academic fusion activities.

-Carl

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Carl, I've already informed Joshua that that photo misidentifies Richard as Tim, hopefully they can correct that since it's not in "print."

Your point re: the number of people who have created fusion, that's gonna be harder to fix...

--PS

[Richard Hull]

Of course, Paul and I know the real story. It is somewhat less dramatic and vastly more sad. The Farnsworth effort was never halted due to Farnsworth's just stopping due to any altruistic thought or decision he made. Farnsworth had no say in or decision making power for the last year or two of the project.

The real story has been told by people who were actually there and integral parts of the project. These folks were innvolved in the day-to-day work and functioning in the nuts and bolts of the effort right up to the bitter end of the ITT effort. Farnsworth was just not involved at all.

There is absolutely no romance or heroicism to be had in the telling of the tale.

Where Farnsworth is concerned, it is more of a tragedy, but that is almost totally disconnected from the ending of the effort which he was never there to see.

For ITT, this was not the "Farnsworth fusor project", but instead, this was an ITT project looking into fusion possibilities using ICEF. Farnsworth was the initiator and titular head of the project on site in Fort Wayne while the overall head of its fusion effort was Fredrick R . Furth (The Admiral).

When Farnsworth was forcibly, medically retired in early 1967, the project went on for more than another year. Farnsworth was effectively out of the loop and not on site from early /mid 1966 on medical leave. The last persons shut the project lights off in July of 1968. At this time, Farnsworth had been living in Utah for more than a year.

Re-iterating what Carl notes...............

There about 40 AMATEUR scientists in the world who have done fusion using the IECF concept in a FUSOR type device. The capitalized qualifiers needed to be there.

There are certainly any number of amateur scientists who have done fusion in the past, long before the fusor effort, using simple accelerators of any number of "beam-target" systems, perhaps long before the internet.

Richard Hull