I think this is the right place to post this, because it adds a fresh perspective to all that Richard Hull has posted in this forum based on his interviews with the people who worked in the Farnsworth fusion lab in Fort Wayne in the 1950s and 60s.
I am going to attach a transcript of the conversation I had with Bob Hisch back in 2002.
It is pertinent because I have in the past couple of days spoken with both Richard and Frank Sanns about the Fusion X / Global Invest Conference in Palo Alto next month where all the money and brains interested in fusion will be gathering – and whether it makes any sense to try to have a presence at that conference.
When I am talking about these things, what keeps ringing in my mind's ear is what Bob Hirsch said to me when I spoke with him back in 2002, as I was finalizing the first edition of The Boy Who Invented Television. I wanted to see if I correctly remembered what Hirsch said when I asked him directly why the original fusor effort was abandoned with so many unanswered questions.
Yesterday I converted the original recording of that interview into a digital file that I could upload to Otter.ai to transcribe and, sure enough, I remembered that part of the conversation correctly:
Hirsch had some other choice things to say about the malign neglect that befell Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (IECF), by the interests that controlled that research in the 1960s and beyond:Paul Schatzkin 19:07
The the goal of this work, obviously, is a sustained, beyond-break-even, fusion process, right? Can you say what it was that kept the work that you were doing, the process that Phil was exploring, from reaching that goal?
Bob Hirsch 19:29
Not enough money and not large enough experiments. It was just that simple.
Granted, this conversation was more than 20 years ago. And, in light of all that is going on now, it would be interesting to speak with Bob again and see if he still holds to those sentiments.Bob Hirsch 29:35
The scandal in the whole thing, and the thing I still do not understand at this date, though, is it's, first of all, it's complicated physics. I ran the fusion program,[1] which means I ran the main line activity, and I understand those people and their strengths and weaknesses. In many respects, I do not understand, and maybe never will understand, how those people would not open up to the possibility of a Farnsworth like idea.
I do not understand that. I simply do not understand that, because maybe I'm a simple person, but you know, good physics and good research should be done with a relatively open mind. And yes, sure, you're gonna pursue things that you like, but when you're dealing with a complicated problem, you should not over constrain yourself, and you should look in a lot of different corners to understand what the possibilities are, and the people in the program were almost paranoid when it came to this particular subject.
Paul Schatzkin 30:51
And do you have any insight on why that was?
Bob Hirsch 30:55
Nope.
I have elements of the reasons, and part of it is they were trained differently, and they were trained in what's called equilibrium plasma physics. And what Phil was doing was non-equilibrium plasma physics, and that is a respectable area plasma physics, but not not applying it to fusion. They just won't allow that for reasons that I don't understand.
So I think they were uncomfortable with something they didn't understand. I think they were also probably uncomfortable with Farnsworth, in the sense that here was an inventor, a farm boy with just dribs and drabs of of education, who in fact, conceived and developed one of the most significant technological advances of the 20th century, and here he was coming along in fusion? And I don't know whether it was ego or or what, but I think that there's something strange there.
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[1] Robert L. Hirsch ran the DOE Fusion department from 1972-1977. During that time the budget for fusion research expanded from ~32-milliion to more than $112-million. Despite Hirsch's first hand experience in the 1960s, nary a dime of that money was spent on IECF.
But I think this sheds a different - and far more favorable – light on the testimony reported elsewhere in this forum from the crew that worked on the ITT/Farnsworth fusion team in the 1960s.
Coming from one of the most knowledgeable and experienced voices in the field, I think Hirsch's remarks make a strong case that while countless public-and-private billions are being spent on a variety of fusion projects, it now makes more sense than ever to devote some nominal form of actual funding to revisit a promising approach that was abandoned nearly sixty years ago.
Whether or not it makes any sense to go to that conference in Silicon Valley is debatable. As Frank pointed it, "Do we really want to show our hand in that particular shark tank?"
But, really, enough already.
We have to start somewhere.
--PS
Here is the transcript of my conversation with Hirsch, edited only to remove all the "you know"s and "I mean"s and a few other cosmetic fixes.
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edit: I had some issues posting this. There may well be some typos that need fixing. Later for all that.