Harper Whitehouse: The Cold Fusion Challenge

Harper Whitehouse, who boasts over 50 patents in several fields of scientific study, started his solid-state fusion journey in 2009 with his colleague Frank Gordon. Ever since, he has used his diverse expertise to make significant contributions to the field and inspire interdisciplinary perspectives on this scientific challenge. With a passion for finding solutions, he has become an essential asset to solid-state fusion experimentation and inquiry.

Harper Whitehouse, a brilliant scientist and researcher in several fields of study, such as sonar, radar, and digital signal processing, is motivated by the challenges of these fields. He has been interested in science since high school and enjoyed learning about astronomy at first, so he decided to go to a more science-focused college. During his undergraduate years, Harper took a position at a Navy laboratory working on torpedoes, which was the catalyst for his interest in acoustics. At the laboratory, he recalls his first challenge: they handed him a transistor, technology he’d never used before nor was taught about in his undergraduate electronics class. He went right into the deep end, which is the story of his many endeavors to come. After college, he stayed at the Navy lab for 42 years, facing various challenges and finding solutions along the way.

After his work in acoustics for the Navy, he moved into a position where he made acoustic sensors, which lent more to his interests in electrical engineering and mathematics. There, he was able to use his expertise in acoustics and apply them to new concepts and challenges. During this project (what Harper referred to as a “retirement” of sorts), Frank Gordon, who remains his colleague to this day, approached him with a challenge he couldn’t resist: cold fusion.

“Let’s go ahead and find out if this cold fusion thing really is real.”

Harper was the chief scientist in Frank’s department and was always the person he’d go to when problems needed to be solved. Frank recalled one time when he got a call from someone in the intelligence community who had a situation they were working on, with lots of time and money involved, and they weren’t getting any answers. He and Harper looked into the issue, and within three months, Harper had an end-to-end solution with thorough analytics and physics behind it. Frank says, “That’s the person you want working with you on a job like cold fusion. He’s made some contributions that are significant to our progress here.”

To introduce him to the cold fusion challenge, Frank showed Harper a presentation with a video of thermal imaging of a transducer as it was running. The video showed hot spots appearing all over the transducer, flashing on, and with their density increasing as well. This was one of the moments where Harper recalls thinking, “There might be something really going on here.” Further, he remembers somebody suggesting that they use a piezoelectric transducer to see if they could hear the effect. With his background in acoustics, he knew there was more to it.

“What they had done was they had used a transducer that had been used for sonar, which was actually not a piezoelectric device. It was a ferroelectric ceramic that had been poled so that it would behave as if it was piezoelectric. But because it was not a piezoelectric material, it had another property: it was pyroelectric — it responded to heat. Now, guess what we have here in cold fusion. Cold fusion produces heat. So, I thought, boy, here's the challenge. I can apply my acoustics experience to doing cold fusion measurements where we will measure the heat response, not the pressure response of the mini explosions.”

Clearly, Harper’s varied background and expertise would become an asset to the solid-state fusion field. It was this realization and this challenge presented to him, why Harper decided to join Frank and work on solid-state fusion. He says, “Let’s go ahead and find out if this cold fusion thing really is real.” Now, they have been working together for over a decade.

Harper [was shown] a presentation with a video of thermal imaging of a transducer as it was running. The video showed hot spots appearing all over the transducer, flashing on, and with their density increasing as well. This was one of the moments where Harper recalls thinking, “There might be something really going on here.”

One of the problems Harper saw when he first entered the field was how people measured heat. He points to his varied background, ranging from mathematics to electrical engineering to physics. He says that something he’s learned from all of this experience is that it is hard to optimize something that you can’t measure. The popular method for measuring heat in this field is a calorimeter, which seemed to be an issue in Harper’s view because of sensitivity and time constants.

He describes his process of thinking through the calorimeter challenge: “And so, why not, if we're going to deal with ions in a gas, why don't we simply measure them with electrical instruments? And if you do that, surprisingly, you can increase the sensitivity by about six orders of magnitude. And so, by doing this, we were able to see phenomena occurring on a time scale, measured in milliseconds, rather than measured in seconds or minutes, and at sensitivity levels many orders of magnitude less than that of calorimeters. That was one of the exciting challenges that led us to what we did.”

[Whitehouse] says that something he’s learned... is that it is hard to optimize something that you can’t measure.

“And so, why not, if we're going to deal with ions in a gas, why don't we simply measure them with electrical instruments? And if you do that, surprisingly, you can increase the sensitivity by about six orders of magnitude.

And so, by doing this, we were able to see phenomena occurring on a time scale many orders of magnitude less than that of calorimeters. That was one of the exciting challenges that led us to what we did.”

After meeting this challenge, Harper told us stories about the excitement of doing experiments and trying new things. He recalls conducting an experiment where they wanted to measure the performance of one of their devices as a function of the voltage applied to it. The device was two pieces of plumbing parts they got from the local hardware store, where one was plated with electrodeposited palladium and filled with deuterium gas. They made the measurements and stepped down the voltage applied to the device, using a theory that experts developed on the conduction of electricity through gases. They ran the experiment, and “lo and behold, the gas we measured didn’t saturate.” Even when they put hundreds of volts across it, no saturation was observed at all. After decreasing the voltage, the current suddenly went to zero while still having voltage on the cell.

They examined the mathematics behind it in more detail, as what was happening in the experiment was quite unusual. Eventually, after seeing that the curve was neither logarithmic or polynomial, they took the current’s cubic root as a function of the voltage. With this, they got a straight line. It meant the cell was still conducting a current when there was no voltage, as the extrapolated voltage did not go to zero. This ruled out the potential that the finding could have been an instrumentation problem, so they decided to use a voltmeter and disconnected the instrumentation from the cell. After putting on the voltmeter, they saw continuous spontaneous conduction. This story of this discovery of the Lattice Energy Converter (LEC), told fondly and with such attention to detail, demonstrates Harper’s passion for this field — its potential, its challenges, and his lifelong quest to find solutions.

It is evident that the history and documentation of ... scientists’ work not only inspired [Whitehouse] to do science but also continues to inspire new ideas and experimentation in the solid-state fusion field today.

As for where he sees this field heading, Harper is looking at a slight shift in approach. One of his interests, which he believes should be a major thrust in this field, is direct energy conversion. He and Frank currently have three patents on a device based on direct energy conversion, and they are looking to find people interested in this approach. While he believes there is room in the field for both approaches (heat versus other areas), he doesn’t see heat as the solution for all products.

Coming from this, one of Harper’s visions for the future of solid-state fusion technologies is to see direct generation of electrical energy. From simple lighting to powering home appliances off-grid, it is a positive thing to not be tied to a network of wires. He points to the massive wildfires in Maui and California for the dangers of relying on the grid network for electricity and power. He says, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be off the grid and simply be able to have your facility operating on a standalone basis?”

Throughout our interview with Harper and Frank, their passion for solid-state fusion and their work was palpable. Harper continuously pointed to scientists before him who inspired his work and whose work he builds from in their experiments, such as J.J. Thompson’s theory and experimentation on the conduction of electricity through gases, and Volta, the person which the ‘volt’ is named after. It is evident that the history and documentation of these scientists’ work not only inspired him to do science but also continues to inspire new ideas and experimentation in the solid-state fusion field today. This sentiment speaks to the work that ICCF, solid-state fusion research archives, and our interviews seek to do — collaborate and create a body of knowledge and work that the next generation of solid-state fusion researchers can work from and be inspired by. Harper’s lifetime of work in science, which boasts over 50 patents (including the foundational patent for the JPEG), is undoubtedly one that will be looked at and referenced for generations of scientists to come. We are honored to be able to share his story.