Edison announced he had an electric light before he hit on the idea of a high resistance carbon filament in a vacuum. He produced hundreds of bulbs with platinum filaments in atmospheric air that did the same thing other similar efforts did: melted in a short period of time.
Meanwhile, he was assuring his backers that he had already succeeded. Again, Edison’s Electric Light makes his deceit clear using lab notebooks and archival correspondence.
Edison was lucky his backers didn’t learn the truth. If they had realized his deception and pulled his funding, his reputation would have been shattered. I doubt he would have recovered.
Edison later squandered a fortune on magnetic ore separation. He never got it to work.
Raising silkworms and manufacturing silk are different propositions. Suppose that KBLB can only produce silk from a few generations of silkworms before the quality deteriorates. By the time they have performed the genetic implants and bred to homozygosticity, perhaps the genes will only survive for a generation or two. By the time you have enough silkworms to produce silk, it is no longer DS or MS but something more resembling mundane silk.
KBLB had a long time to breed silkworms for Prodigy. They knew in late 2019 that Prodigy had lost all silkworms. A replacement shipment was made in October of 2020. This shipment was so small that it took almost two years before KBLB had enough eggs for a commercial crop at the silkworm farm. After their first ramp-up crop, the second crop was a partial failure and production was halted after that point.
Why not ship over enough eggs to start commercial scale quantities of silk at Prodigy in 2020? Because KBLB couldn’t raise that many eggs in 10 months in the US.
Thus: it takes years to produce sufficient eggs for commercial silk production but, after one low-yield generation, the silkworms are no longer producing silk of sufficient quantity and quality to continue production.
Whatever the problem is, we can’t claim it is due to a lack of acclimation (the process or result of becoming accustomed to a new climate or environment). Silkworms that die before cocooning didn’t fail to acclimate. They were not compatible with the environment and died. Those that survived did not acclimate. They were compatible with the environment or lucky or both. Breeding those lucky survivors does not seem to help much, as Prodigy and the silkworm farm have enjoyed the opportunity to breed survivors for the past 19 months and they still don’t have a sufficient population to produce silk.
