Remember cold fusion? Back in 1989, two scientists specializing in electrochemistry announced — not in a scientific journal, but in a press conference — that they’d created a “sustained nuclear fusion reaction” at room temperature without the vast technical apparatus traditional “hot” fusion experiments required. The leading scientist on the team was Martin Fleischmann, who was born March 29, 1927. At the time he was one of the top electrochemists in the world.
Fleischmann was born in Czechoslovakia into an upper-middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a prominent civil official. But it was 1927 and the Nazi party was in ascendance, and his father was imprisoned, where he received injuries he never fully recovered from. The family’s heritage was Jewish, so they moved to the Netherlands to avoid the Nazis. They subsequently moved to England, where Fleischmann grew up. When World War II began, he returned to Czechoslovakia to serve in the Czech Air Force. Afterward he returned to England and completed his education at Imperial College London, earning degrees in chemistry.
He served as a professor of chemistry and electrochemistry at a number of colleges in England, and between 1964 and 1986 won lots of awards and accolades for his work, including the “Electrochemistry and Thermodynamics Medal” (awarded by the Royal Society) and the Olin Palladium Medal (awarded by the Electrochemical Society). One of his colleagues was Stanley Pons, an American electrochemist. They had initially met at the University of Southampton, where Pons completed his PhD.
Around 1983, Fleischmann confided in Pons, telling him he might have found a way to create room-temperature nuclear fusion. The two worked on the project for six years, funding it themselves and working in secret. They worked at the University of Utah, in the US, where Pons chaired the chemistry department. Then in 1989 they revealed their results — or what they believed to be the results. And they did so in an unusual way, for scientists. Instead of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, they held a public press conference.
It’s not entirely clear why they chose the press conference rather than publishing. Fleischmann, for one, had planned to publish the results traditionally, probably as a joint article with at least one other research team working on the same thing independently. It’s been reported that the University of Utah, which knew about the project, wanted to establish ownership over any patents that might result and pushed (or insisted on) a solo announcement. But the real story has never emerged. Using a press conference instead of a formal publication brought a great deal of criticism to the scientists.
In any case, in a press conference you can’t communicate enough details to enable other research teams to replicate your results. Fleischmann tried to warn other scientists not to try replication until their paper was published in a couple of weeks, but it was no use. Hundreds of cold fusion experiments were set up around the world. Some of them seemed to see similar results, but most did not. Fleischmann and Pons were called “fraudulent” and “unethical,” and their work — even when the publication appeared — was labeled “sloppy” and “uninformative.”
Fleischmann and Pons moved to France in 1992 to continue their work, but their reputations never recovered. The scientific consensus is that cold fusion doesn’t work — although there are still a few research programs investigating it. Because of the stigma now attached to the idea, those teams find it very hard to publish in refereed journals, so their work gets little or no attention. An additional problem is that there isn’t a single explanatory theory detailed exactly what’s supposed to be happening, even if some form of cold fusion does exist. For the most part, it’s become a literary and marketing trope, appearing in The Simpsons and as a product name (Adobe ColdFusion).
Martin Fleischmann lived to be 85, but in spite of publishing nearly 300 scientific papers and contributing enormously to the field of electrochemistry, his reputation is still overshadowed by the cold fusion announcement. Was it really a case of aggressive executives insisting on their uninformed, greedy plan? We still don’t, and may never, know.
