Told by Franco Scaramuzzi (From Foreword to Proceedings of ICCF8)
“----I think that it is worthwhile, at this time of the CF history, to review them, thus producing a concise outline of the main events in the field.
The first Conference was sponsored by the “National Cold Fusion Institute” (NCFI), founded by the University of Utah, and was held in Salt Lake City at the end of March 1990. It was called “The first annual Conference on Cold Fusion”. There were already major difficulties the official scientific community had already pronounced its verdict against CF; the NCFI would close shortly afterwards, within the CF community there were two diverging schools, those who believed only the nuclear evidence (mainly neutrons), barely accepted by the scientific community, and those who believed in excess heat, spurned by the scientific community. I must confess that I belonged to the first school, being quite skeptical about heat production, and I participated in the organization of a “dissident” Conference, called “Anomalous nuclear effects in deuterium/solid systems”, sponsored by “The Electric Power Research Institute” (EPRI), by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and by the Brigham Young University at Provo (BYU): the Conference was held in Provo, Utah, in October 1990.
At this point two parallel initiatives were proposed. I was asked by the “neutron” people to organize the next Conference in Italy and Giuliano Preparata was asked to perform the same task by the “excess heat” people. There were discussions and correspondence was exchanged between the representatives of the two schools, but eventually wisdom prevailed and it was decided that there would be only one Conference, in Italy, covering all aspects of CF. This was the “Second Annual Conference on Cold Fusion”. Tullio Bressani, Emilio Del Giudice, and Giuliano Preparata were the Chairmen, and for the first time and International Advisory Committee (IAC) appeared. The Conference was sponsored by Italian universities, research agencies and industries, and was held in Como at the end of June and beginning of July 1991.
I think that the Como Conference was very important in the development of CF. There were at least two results that have influenced future research; the statement that heat excess in electrolytic cells with heavy water and palladium cathode could be obtained only if the amount of deuterium absorbed in the palladium lattice (the D/Pd ratio) exceeded a threshold value (McKubre), and the correlation between that excess and the presence of 4He, understood to be a nuclear ash of the fusion process (Miles). Both these features were consistent with the theory presented by Preparata, Bressani and Del Giudice in April 1989. The many confirmations of the production of heat excess also had an important effect on me and on the ENEA Frascati Group; we decide to move from neutron and tritium detection to calorimetry, and eventually we obtained very convincing evidence of the existence of excess heat.
Next Conference was organized in Japan, with the strong encouragement of IMRA, the research enterprise that owed its existence to the determination of Minoru Toyota, an influent member of the Toyota “dynasty”. It was sponsored by many Japanese scientific institutions, was held in Nagoya in October 1992, and was chaired by Prof. Hideo Ikegami. This was the first for which the present name and acronym were used: “3rd International Conference on Cold Fusion” (ICCF3). The IAC was also active in this Conference, and a general rule was informally accepted about the frequency and location of the subsequent conferences; there would be a rotation among the three most active continents; Asia, America, and Europe, with roughly one and a half years between successive conferences. Thus we had ICCF4 in December 1993 in Maui, Hawaii, USA, sponsored by EPRI and by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), chaired by Drs. Tom Passell and Michel McKubre, followed by ICCF5, in April 1995, in Monte Carlo, (almost) France, Europe, organized again by the IMRA laboratories, chaired by Prof. Stanley Pons. Then came ICCF6, in Toya, Japan, in October 1996, organized by the Japanese government enterprise, “The Institute of Applied Energy” of the “New Energy Technology Development Organization” of MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and Industry); it was chaired by Prof. Makoto Okamoto. Finally ICCF7 was held in Vancouver, Canada, in April 1998, and was organized by Eneco, a private company that has always followed attentively the development of CF. Fred Jaeger was its Chairman.
After Asia and America, it was once again the turn of Europe. In Vancouver I was appointed by the IAC to be Chairman of ICFF8, to be held in Italy. The period envisaged was October 1999, but a number of management problems that I had to face in Frascati forced me to propose to the members of the IAC to postpone ICCF8 to the Spring of 2000. They accepted and it seemed advisable, in order to avoid the congestion to be expected in the Rome area during the Holy Year, to have it in a different site. Antonella De Ninno proposed Villa Marigola, a beautiful 18th century villa upon a hill in a delightful park in Lerici, which is a small town on the Tirrenian Sea not far from Genoa In retrospect it seems to me that this choice was appreciated by the participants in the Conference.”