Buying an emerging technology: A Due-Diligence Guide from the History of Cold Fusion
For as long as people have claimed to sell devices that produce more energy than they consume, the claims have shared a recognisable shape. A buyer does not need to adjudicate the underlying physics — a question the scientific community itself has not closed — to protect themselves. They need to ask the questions that skeptics and disappointed investigators have been asking since the [[Fleischmann-Pons announcement]] of March 1989. This guide distils those questions into a due-diligence framework drawn entirely from the historical record: how excess-energy *measurements* go wrong, what independent *reproduction* actually requires, what a hollow *demonstration* looks like, and what past *commercial* devices teach about the gap between a showroom and a working product.