NEW YORK — British chemist Martin Fleischmann, who stunned the world by announcing that he had created a nuclear fusion device in a glass bottle, has died after a long illness. He was 85.
His son Nicholas says he died Friday at his home in Tisbury, England. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years.
Fleischmann was one of the world’s leading electrochemists when he and partner Stanley Pons proclaimed in 1989 that they had achieved fusion, the nuclear process that heats the sun, in an experiment at the University of Utah.
Other scientists rushed to replicate the achievement, but most failed, and “cold fusion” was quickly labeled junk science. However, work on similar experiments has continued on the fringes of the scientific world.
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