Hey Tom, you know, that wouldn't surprise me.
Any real company licensing technology is going to read the patents and determine their legal status. They'd find out quickly the Cyclone patents don't cover anything of value. The patents that haven't already lapsed, that is.
They may consider the $225K initial license fee a fair price to find out all the things Harry has done wrong in 12 years so they can avoid duplicating his mistakes. That would be the job of the two engineers they sent to Cyclone.
A license agreement would not allow them to use Harry's technology without continuing payments, but how much of anything he has developed is worth copying? The license agreement wouldn't prevent them from avoiding the things Cyclone proved don't work.
Remember the WHE at Ohio State University. The first thing they did was throw away the Harry Schoell 'ingenious' design and start over. Ohio State went to a rotary valve before Harry, so if that piece works he can hardly claim it as his invention. They also threw away the 'spider' bearing and half the cylinders.
That Frankenstein boiler is not going to be copied. Condensing needs to be redesigned anyway. Is there any control system on any of the Cyclone prototypes? The Mark 5 certainly had nothing in the way of a governor, other than a guy standing beside it working a lever.
I'm now thinking this company wants to investigate small steam engines, maybe for military or maybe for heating and power for buildings, and want to jumpstart their R&D. Harry may not have made all the possible mistakes in designing a steam engine, but he's got to have made more than anyone alive...
