GOLB: Is this Israel?

“Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others.” (Winston Churchill): Or is it?

The U.S of A prides itself not only as a bastion of democracy, and on its somewhat bizarre and repeatedly proven fallible conviction that its version thereof should be thrust on all and sundry (and boy, Iraq is about as sundry as one can get) – but also on the processes by which the peoples’ choice of guardians and implementers of said democracy get their jobs. Ha!

Let’s not even dwell on how the current El Supremo managed to steal his first election to that office, and let’s leave it to historians, current and future, to opine whether or not ‘he that must be obeyed’ (a little bit of mutated plagiarism) will be deemed to be the most disastrous holder ever of that office; let’s just take a look at what’s been going on – for how long is it now? – to determine which of the current aspirants to that office will end up with all the marbles.

The very basis of the democratic process is, of course, the one(old enough)-person, one-vote axiom, but with some de facto assumptions like sufficient literacy to cope with registration procedures and ballot forms that are frequently unnecessarily (and deliberately?) complicated. Interesting idea really, since about half of any group of people – especially large ones like electorates – are, by definition, of below average intelligence, and that lot are tacitly expected to make ‘informed decisions’, despite clear evidence that many of them – and, for that matter, no few of the above average group too – don’t have the appetite for becoming well-informed, as evidenced, for example, by the sensitivity of the polls to the latest most often basically irrelevant gaffes by each of the contenders for office. Those gaffes may prove decisive, however, but how can they be avoided during campaigns as long and tedious as that in which the current adversaries have been engaged?

OK, Sir Winston, your epigrammatic utterings do tend to be hammer-like in their treatment of nails, but isn’t even your attenuated faith in democracy based on assuming that the electorate can be depended upon to separate the wheat from the gaffe?

Technorati Tags: democracy, electorates, the primaries

You’ve got to have heart…

It’s not exactly what one would choose to hear when a cardiologist, reviewing the results of a routine ultrasound look at one’s heart, announces that m-a-j-o-r surgery is a mandatory requirement for survival. OK, so I knew that I was a freak in that my genetic inheritance included a thrift measure by equipping me with an aortic valve with just two rather than the normal three flaps, and that such an el cheapo valve invited consequences that typically include an ever-expanding aorta that, once it reaches the ‘pop point’ (‘ruptured aneurism’ to the medical cognoscenti) – RIP.

But having been totally asymptomatic, even though – or maybe because – I had been playing tennis 4 or 5 times a week, it required some mental gymnastics to come to terms with the process of preparing, in cold blood, as it were, for big-time open heart surgery planned about a month in advance.

Yes, I had ‘enjoyed(?)’ a few days in a hospital once before – bye bye tonsils – but that had been over 70 years ago. Pity I couldn’t have reached the point where 70 years had become, say, 85 or so.

One of the distinct advantages of living in tiny but oh so high-tech Israel is that one can not only quickly learn exactly which surgeon and which hospital must be considered as non-negotiable requirements for the required highly specialized heart surgery, but also that one can – with a little help from one’s ‘friends in the business’, as it were – arrange to be put into the right hands and at the right place. I got both.

The operation itself was, from my standpoint, a non-event: I went to (dreamless) sleep on a Saturday night, and awoke the following afternoon, to discover that I had been disassembled and reassembled in better order – it says here – all whilst languishing in the arms of Morpheus. Pity that the recovery process can hardly also go unnoticed….But the prospect of resumption of tennis in about 3 months from the date of the operation is a great incentive to a speedy and thorough recovery.

So what was the out-of-pocket cost to me of that hospital sojourn and the brilliantly executed events that occurred therein, including a pacemaker (accurately!) thrown in? Brace yourself! The answer is, as we used to say as kids in England: “4/5ths of 5/9ths of Sweet Fanny Adams” (encrypted version of ‘f- - k all’); translation; a big fat zero!!!! Great healthcare system here folks, from which no-one is excluded. (Are you listening, Uncle Sam?)

Technorati Tags: health, health insurance, cardiac surgery

Yes, John Doerr, your recent TED talk was scary and inspiring, but…

Did you do the arithmetic on the amount of arable land that would be needed for growing the raw material for biofuels vs. the amount needed for food production? A back-of-the-envelope calculation seems to indicate that biofuels cannot be a major long-term solution to the propulsion of those two-ton steel and glass contraptions – or even of appropriately sized versions thereof – to which you so eloquently refer.

By contrast, solar generated electricity, not least via photovoltaics based on silicon, the second most plentiful solid element in the earth’s crust, has essentially limitless and atmospherically benign capacity to fuel electric vehicles, pump and then purify water to be found not so far below the surface of, for example, the Sahal desert, produce hydrogen where and when the sun shines, and use that hydrogen to generate electricity wherever and whenever it’s needed.

Forgive me, please, for emphasizing photovoltaics, but as one of a lonely handful of energy alarmists and inventors back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I posited that solar cells, then used only for space satellite power supplies, could be brought down in cost to compete in electric power generation costs with those ghastly atmosphere-destroying power stations upon which we currently depend for our energy profligacy. Driven by a Billy-Graham-like ardor, I had the good fortune (chutzpa?) of attracting a $50+ million investment from Mobil Oil Corporation – later absorbed into Exxon – to develop low cost silicon solar cells based on a revolutionary technique for growing crystals of virtually any constant cross-section, e.g. ribbons. And $50 million back then, as an investment in an outside-the-box technology, translates, 35 years later, into a very large number, left as an exercise to the reader to calculate.

May I wish you, Mr. Doerr, and those of like mind, more power to your CO₂ antagonists elbow?  We all need you.

technorati tags: john doerr co2 biofuels photovoltaics

So how much oil and natural gas can there possibly be in this one and only Earth of ours?

I continue to be amused, bemused and generally incredulous about the stream of – if you’ll pardon the expression – “expert opinions” about the quantity of unexploited and as yet undiscovered reserves of oil and gas buried below the surface of Planet Earth. Add in the conspiracy theorists, whose estimates are far greater than those of the experts, who clearly (sic) are out to bamboozle us all as a means of keeping prices artificially high, and away goes all the panic about running out of the stuff which we burn so profligately.

OK, let’s try a look at the issue top-down instead of from the supposedly educated bottoms-up perspective. Simple really: assume that the earth is a hollow sphere completely full of high-grade petroleum and liquefied natural gas. Can even the oil barons and the conspiracy theorists assert that there could be more of the stuff than that? Hardly! So how long would that lot last? (Possibly longer than such life on earth, including homo-not-so-sapiens that can survive a death-dealing atmospheric crown of carbon dioxide.) At our current rate of usage, and the current rate of increase in that rate of usage, how long? Not very!

But we can agree, can’t we, that the earth is not a hollow sphere, but a molten core (too hot for organic fuels), a lot of rock, and zillions of gallons of water, mostly salty? In fact, our dear old sage, Sir Isaac the Newton, correctly ‘guessed’ that the average density of the earth would probably be “...between 5 and 6 times that of water”, and water is quite a bit denser than those desirable combustibles. 5-6 times? Not a bad guess, Sir Isaac: the currently accepted figure is 5.5 times (!!!). So the “Not very” above is not nearly as “very” as the brim-full hollow sphere would give us.

Let’s face it, fellow temporary occupants of this increasingly befouled planet of ours, we’ve got it backwards: what we now call “alternative energy” is actually “there-is-no-alternative energy”; it’s the stuff to which we’ve become habituated that is the alternative – to survival.

Technorati Tags: Planet Earth, energy survival

Solar Photovoltaics for Terrestrial Use - early days

(Now all the rage, but some of us in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, predicted that it would happen.)

This little vignette was triggered by seeing a re-run of On the Waterfront, starring the inimitable Marlon Brando.

Yes, we all know that it’s not what you know, but whom you know that counts: but what about the converse (sort of), namely who knows you?

Let’s set the scene, that actually began in a conversation conducted by two men, myself and a Dr. Roland Winston (of Argonne National Labs and the University of Chicago, I later discovered), engaged in the use of adjoining urinals. (Those of you in the process of leaping to conclusions can come to ground in a much duller reality.) The venue was a Solar Energy Conference, and the conversation started with me admiring a parabolic-shaped hunk of plastic that Roland had placed on the ceramic divider between us. I learned, a few minutes later, that it was a (truly) novel device, a ‘non-focusing collector’ for concentrating light, including sunlight. The more usual version of what came to be known as a “Winston Non Focusing Collector” was a sort of parabolic shell with an aperture at the rounded small end. I’ll spare you the technicalities, except to say that the elegant simplicity of the concept was matched by its amazingly effective performance.

Roland and I, both solar energy enthusiasts, soon became thoroughly engaged with each other, since our skills and interests in the field were complementary – his in optics, mine in solar cells. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before we had jointly invented a device that neatly used a two-stage version of his Collector to concentrate sunlight onto a solar cell. (Parenthetically, we found that we had created bureaucratic chaos as joint inventors, one from industry and the other from academia: the system had no rule book for such outré events.) Now back to Brando.

In the early days of Tyco (then literally) Labs, my secretary, by name Celia, was an extraordinarily demure, unruffleable and proper young(ish) woman. One otherwise quite normal day in the office, I heard a splutter followed by a clatter and a squeal, not noises one could expect to hear from Celia’s domain. It transpired that she had dropped the phone when the caller announced that he was Marlon Brando wanting to talk to Ed Mlavsky. When she had retrieved said phone and passed the call to me, I found that I was, indeed, talking to none other than the Brando. Wow! He even sounded likehimself.

The reason he was calling me was that he owned an island off  Tahiti, and being psychologically allergic, as it were, to fossil fuels, wanted to provide all the power and electricity for the island from solar energy. He’d read my name somewhere that described me as a solar-electricity expert. (In the Kingdom of the Blind....: actually I was pretty well known in the field, even appearing in the lead-off role in the three-minute solar photovoltaics opening puff piece to the BBC production of “Edward the King”, bought by Mobil Oil and shown on nationwide TV.)

As wonderful as it was talking to Brando, his questions reflected his understandable paucity of knowledge about the economic aspects of solar-generated electricity, in the early ‘70s  in its developmental infancy and hence still quite impractical for serious use. I found myself apologizing for the inchoate nature of the technology, and very gently tried to persuade him that his noble concept would, regrettably, remain unimplementable for many years to come. Nonetheless, we chatted on amiably for a while. He invited me to come visit him in Tahiti – mailing address: Brando, Tahiti – or in Beverly Hills, or both; he even gave me his unlisted phone number.

In a later conversation with Roland Winston, also a well-publicized solar personage, I learnt that he too had been approached by Brando, and had visited him at his home in California. Roland, an academe and basic researcher, recommended that, if Brando had in mind any practical solar-generated electricity applications, he should contact Ed Mlavsky.  Brando’s reaction? “I know Ed Mlavsky!”

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What Price Energy Security in the USA?

The usual way in which the cost per kilowatt-hour (KWh) of electric power produced by solar cells – devices that convert sunshine directly into electricity: no pollution; no nasty stuff to dispose; no harmful side-effects like global warming due to carbon dioxide, etc, etc, etc – is compared with that from conventional power stations, particularly those that burn oil or coal (ugh!), is to put the numbers side by side, and conclude that …the bigger, the worse. Well, my friends, if that’s deemed to be the whole answer, it would be challenging to find a way of being more myopic and remote from reality.

How so? For starters, do we really need to remind ourselves of where most of the oil comes from, and who, so to speak, has their greedy fingers on the tap? And how much does the U.S of A spend in an effort to protect itself from the constant threat of big-time blackmail (remember 1973?) from those – ironically mostly sun-drenched – tap-masters? In fact, of course, being armed to the teeth with every imaginable kind of weaponry is no protection at all: at the drop of a burnoose, the tap can slam shut.

Is there a remedy available? Well, how about this for a start? The cost of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was about $5 billion back in 1973, and to arm it, staff it, and keep it operational is, as a guess, probably about another $5 billion over 5 years, not including putting aside a few pennies for the eventual and inevitably necessary decommissioning of those 2 nuclear reactors aboard.

OK, folks: here we open the door for those more rigorous than me in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems arithmetic, but I’ve got some pretty good back-up data for what follows. Currently, large PV systems that deliver AC cost about $8,500/KW, and deliver up to 2,000 KWh/year/peak KW of the solar panels – in sunny Arizona, for example. To get a feel for the numbers, a 2KW peak power system in the sunnier parts of the USA will deliver the approximately 4,000KWh/year used by the average household. If made from crystalline silicon, the solar cells themselves simply do not wear out; they last about 20 years or so. And most of them are based on silicon, the second most plentiful solid element in the earth’s crust. So, unlike fossil fuels, the supply of silicon will never ever run out.

Assuming an attainable reduction in PV systems cost to, say, $2,500/KW due to increased efficiency solar cells and a huge increase in the production thereof, the cost of building, owning and operating a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for 5 years could, instead, enable the construction and operation of enough solar PV systems to supply electricity to some 2,000,000 homes for 20 years or so. Not a bad start! (It’s left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how much less oil would need to be burned to supply that much electricity.) Somehow that would make me, at least, feel more secure than knowing that there’s one more dinosauric naval vessel afloat, who’s most successful function would be never to be called upon to get used in anger.

Please note that the US Department of Defense budget for 2005 was over $400 billion – plus a few more tens of $billions since then to ‘democratize’ Iraq: but Defense against what? Certainly not against the USA’s ever-increasing dependence on imported oil, and the ever-decreasing prospects that your grandchildren and mine will be able to ‘enjoy’ the lavish squandering of irreplaceable fossil fuels, the burgeoning air pollution, and goodness only knows the extent of the hardly beneficial effects of global warming.

Technorati Tags : solar energy, silicon solar cells, US energy independence, how to reduce oil consumption

A Step Backwards in the Right Direction?

What if there were a universal moratorium on the creation and development of any and all new technology?

Surely I can’t be the only - pick one: nutcase, genius, troglodyte, visionary, reactionary, avant guarde-ian (and so on, but you get the general idea) who speculates, from time to time, about what all of us self-defined creative types, or batteners thereon, would do with ourselves, were such a universal moratorium to be not only declared, but actually acted upon. (I was about to write “implemented” but how does one implement inaction, even if there’s a fancy word for it?)

            Many of us, including VCs, who make a living (litotes!) from innovation – by others, of course – might bitch and moan at such an outrageous proposition but, to get at least semi-serious, wouldn’t it take approximately forever to cause the widespread diffusion of the technology we already have, without continuously widening the gap between the (technology) haves and have-nots? And would there not be boundless demands for every kind of creativity and innovation to spread the (technology) wealth around, not as an act of  altruism, but indeed as a highly self-serving but victimless equivalent of  relieving the social and cultural stresses – does one need to add ‘religious’ to the list? – that bedevil our society and limit the ‘Global GNP’, so to speak? And would not success in such a (bizarre?) undertaking produce opportunities for true wealth creation that would

            make “VC Homeruns” look like strikeouts?

            There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Be a Nike fan and ‘just do it’!

           

Techn   Tags : technologydiffusion, innovation, vchomeruns

 

 

 

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High Tech Investments - grow 'em rather than pick 'em

Some thoughts and speculations about VC Seed investments: does our common use of the term obscure rather than clarify the intent thereof?

 

A few days ago, I found myself giving free advice (worth what one pays for it?) to a pair of colleagues from one of the more conservative countries in Europe, on the subject on how to present seed and early stage high tech deals in palatable form to LPs whose digestive systems, as it were, equate such an arcane diet to, at best indigestible, and at worst, just plain poison.

 

And yet these same LPs, many of them Insurance companies, typically worship at the feet of the Gods of risk reduction. (Why else was the re-insurance industry born?) And how many of these metaphorically if not actually rotund burger/bankers would not leap, or at least waddle hastily, towards any financial equivalent of testing the waters with one finger before whole-body immersion in a costly investment, any and all varieties of which have inherent risk. (‘Come now, you surely exaggerate: a couple of years ago, how could one define an investment in Enron as risky?’ How indeed! The defense rests.)

 

So what is a seed investment in a high tech start-up if not a low $ cost way to test the waters? Of course, there’s lots of work involved, but us VCs are typically overpaid anyway, so we may as well try to earn our caviar-coated crusts of bread. And the eager beaver types amongst us simply do not subscribe to the VC gurus’ view that the return on any investment is inversely proportional to the time one needs to devote to it. True, I’d admit, of first investments in later stage companies – “C rounds” and beyond in VC parlance – but inapplicable to the process of growing companies from seeds, and being able to avoid putting in the big money until the seed has reached the seedling stage as a promising candidate for metamorphosis into a meaningfully large hunk of vegetation, metaphorically speaking, of course.  (Nonetheless, ‘lemon’ trees do not qualify…)

 

My free advice, then to you, dear risk-averse money men is: don’t eschew, but rather espouse experienced high tech ‘agronomists’ who grow your high returns by culling out the lemons before serious money is committed.

Deal-making: Part 2

The first time I used a model to swing a deal is blogged below. The next time this sneaky technique was employed was in my first patent license deal based on our shaped-crystal growth process: but first a bit of background.

 

I forget how it came about, but the New York Times picked up on our activities, the fruits of which were some amazingly long and intricate constant cross-section sapphire crystals, grown with great dexterity from molten alumina at over 2040 °C  (white heat!)  by my young colleague and protégé, Harold LaBelle. The NY Times reporter was intrigued, but also savvy enough to ask what applications there might be for such crystals. Not suffering from excess bashfulness, I reeled off, extemporaneously, of course, a list of ‘applications’ that somehow managed to include an everlasting razor blade. No surprise that the following Sunday, we featured prominently in the Times, the razor blade idea being accorded pride of place. (Actually, since sapphire has a low coefficient of friction, exceptional hardness and extraordinary wear resistance, maybe, just maybe….)

 

The article generated lots of interest, but not a whisper from Gillette. OK, so who, we asked ourselves, is an Avis to Gillette’s Hertz? (Remember when Avis used to try harder?) We decided to target Gem, a razor blade manufacturing subsidiary of Philip Morris (yes, the tobacco giant, but before smokers knew the severe hazards of their addiction) although we were, to any objective observer – not including ourselves, of course – far, far too early in the technology development to merit being taken seriously.

 

Off we traipsed to Richmond, Virginia, armed with hastily grown sapphire ribbon-like crystals roughly in the form of long single-edged razor blades, and a (grossly inaccurate) estimate of the time and cost to perfect the technique and to bring the price per blade down to what we imagined would be an acceptable level. (Ah, the refreshing naïveté of youth and inexperience: so much more stimulating than the somber face of jaded professionalism.)

 

Because the tech-stuff we described to the Gem engineers was leagues more exciting than their usual diet, we encountered not the NIH (not-invented-here) Syndrome of a Gillette, say, but rather an enthusiasm that transcended their habitual engineering torpor.In fact, everything seemed to be progressing smoothly, and uncharacteristically swiftly, until: enter the sharp-faced eyeshade wearers to discuss the financial details of a possible deal, most notably the matter of license royalties.

 

The concept that had emerged from the discussions with the techies and the marketeers was a one-piece razor comprising a fancy plastic handle bonded to a sapphire single-edge blade. It would be advertised as ‘everlasting’ – as older versions, at least, of the wedding ceremony also proclaimed.

 

OK then, we needed to agree on a royalty rate (1%? 3%? 5 %?), but as a percentage of what? We, of course, sought to make the royalty base the net selling price of the fancy ready-to-use razor; they, no surprise to learn, insisted that the royalty base be the cost of the sapphire part only. Reasonable? In a pig’s eye! Since they would be manufacturing the blades, even if we made the pre-sharpened ribbons, they could assign an arbitrary ‘cost’ to the blade, making it a very small fraction of the selling price of the sexy razor. Our royalty would then be a very small percentage of a very small percentage: phooey!.

 

My youthful chutzpah not having been seriously eroded, I insisted on talking to THE boss-man, a very senior Philip Morris executive, maybe even the President. This was neither a request for which they were prepared, nor one with which they could quickly comply – luckily for us, it turned out, since we needed some extra time.

 

For this crucial meeting, probably to be scheduled for no more than 15 minutes, a show-and-tell deal-unbreaker would be needed: no trenchant arguments, no how-can-a-giant-like-you-beat-up-on-a-small-company-like-us sort of thing, no verbal foreplay, just one swift knockout punch. Call in the model-maker!

 

The prop I decided on was a sapphire-bladed model of an old-fashioned ‘cut-throat’ razor with a teak handle, to nestle, of course, in a red velvet-lined teak box. (From the previous blog you now know what razors and thermoelectric generators can have in common.)

 

Wonderfully ingenious Harry LaBelle figured out how to grow a long sapphire crystal with the same cross-sectional geometry and dimensions as the blade of a classic ‘cut-throat’ razor, but with a rounded rather than a sharp ‘cutting edge’. (We couldn’t afford the risk of a slashed Philip Morris exec, and anyway, we were far from being able to put a seriously sharp edge on our crystals.) Notwithstanding its tenuous relationship to the goal of the actual project – but that was for said exec to fathom – the result was a thing of beauty.

 

Back, then, to Richmond with the precious prop, and to a room full of weasel-faced nay-sayers  arranged in an arc around the massive desk and presence of  ‘His Nibs’ the unmentionably senior Philip Morrisite. “OK gentlemen” he said, but in a tone that made ‘gentlemen’ sound more like an insult than an approbation, “what’s the issue?” He was addressing his cohorts, but focusing on the box that I was slowly unwrapping. The senior eye-shaded cohort ranted on about the unreasonableness, illegality even, of our demand that the royalty base on the to-be-developed ‘everlasting sapphire-bladed razor’ be the net selling price of the whole fancy razor, and not just the novel blade. But by then, the exec had the box in his hand, had opened it, had carefully taken out the ‘razor’, had run his manicured fingers along the shiny sapphire ‘blade’, had held it up admiringly to the light, and had acquired that visionary demeanor to which only the most overpaid execs are allowed to aspire. “Give them what they’re asking”, he proclaimed: exeunt the corporate plebes, spluttering and muttering, but to no avail.

 

Said I: “May I be allowed, sir, to request that you keep, as token of our appreciation, the …, the….”(What should I call it? Not ‘model’ surely.) No need to worry: his piercing stare defied me to request the return of whatever it was to be called.

 

At the negotiated royalty rate of 4%, we would have attained wealth beyond the dreams of avarice – if only the damn project had been successful. But then, us research types are, well let’s hear it from the thrice-married but still virginal Ms. Smith: “Married for the third time?” expostulated the incredulous gynecologist. “Well”, said demure Ms. Smith, “my first husband was killed in a car accident on the way to our honeymoon; my second husband may have had a stiff you-know-what, but his wrists were big-time limp; and my present husband is an R&D Director who keeps telling me how good it’s going to be when it happens.”

 

OK, a flippant account, this, but of actual events – and with a powerful message. Maybe professional intellectuals, philosophers and the like, can ‘buy’ an idea from words alone, but most men/boys (women are less likely to still be girls) often need a tangible something to open the clogged passage through their cynical ‘yea, tell me another’ attitude, the metaphorical Kevlar vest to protect them from idea salesmen. That ‘something’ will best be a physical model that can be played with, e.g. disassembled and reassembled, or at least a ‘toy’ that can be handled and admired. What it really is, in context, is a metaphorical drill to burrow through the veneer of adulthood into the spontaneous receptivity of the youthful mind.  (Wow! Did I say that?)

 

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Deal-making tip: We males get older, but do we ever grow up?

Maybe used car salesmen and other peddlers of tangible goods know it, but do many of us self-nominated sophisticates appreciate the value of physical props (toys) in selling ideas, deals and the like? I think not: when it comes to toys, not only will boys be boys, but often men will too. So use it!
 
A couple of examples, in this blog and the next one, may titillate you. Back in the late 1960s when the development of portable energy sources rose high on the list of US Government interests, priorities even, thermoelectric generators (T/Es for short) – namely devices that produce electricity from heat, with no moving parts – were being disinterred from their previous obscurity. The basis for their possible resurrection was two-fold: more efficient active materials – semiconductors, of course – and long-lived heat sources, like radioactive isotopes that emit only easily stopped alpha particles that heat what stops them, but don’t produce those nasty gamma-rays, the bodily absorption of which is cancer-causing, for a start.
 
On the basis of a crash course in thermoelectrics – not literally, I’m glad to report, since the expertise was acquired by reading the thankfully short classic text on the subject during a flight from Boston to Washington DC – I proudly presented to various funding agencies there a ‘novel idea’ (are there any other kind emanating from us techie hucksters?) for the development and construction of an efficient T/E generator. The reaction? Well, as a Royal might say to a plebe: “We are not amused.”
 
Back to the drawing board, from which emerged what we thought was a rather fetching design for a compact, efficient T/E generator that no serious evaluator could fail to recognize as such. Ha! Based on the frequency and consistency of rejections from those self-designated pundits in Washington, however, we might well have given up on thermoelectrics and sought a text on, say, fuel cells instead. But wait… I felt a rush of neurons that could signal an inspiration.  “Build a model”, spake the proverbial still small voice – which I interpreted literally, not being an economist or an academe.
 
Our in-house jack-of-all-trades built this beautiful model of the T/E generator, using various colors of transparent plastic, held together by brass screws, nuts and bolts. A red velvet-lined teak box housed the necessary tools to eviscerate and reviscerate it. (Apologies to Webster’s and the OED.) Gorgeous!
 
So off I went back to Washington DC to confront the severest critic of our previously paper-only proposal, but the man (boy?) with the license to dispense funds summarily for projects of his choice. He sneered at me, as his version of a welcome, but focused on the package that I peeled the way Gipsy Rose Lee used to peel herself.  Without a word, he reached over and captured the model and the teak box.
 
With something approaching animation – a quality not before exhibited by this guardian of US Government funds – he lovingly disassembled the model, reassembled it, and once again did both. In response to a signal he must of sent via an under-the-desk button – this was, after all, the US Atomic Energy Authority – a minion appeared, whom he instructed : “Write this man a contract”. To me: “You can go now”, his hands encircling the model and the tools in a manner that quite effectively discouraged me from requesting their return.
 
Not many weeks later, we received official approval for our proposal, in the full amount requested. (Of course, the project never achieved its goals, but the Final Report was masterly!)

 

 

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