CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 25 - In one of its current television commercials, the Hewlett-Packard Company describes itself as a leader in the science of nanotechnology. It invites consumers to imagine the exciting products of the future, like light bulbs that never burn out and "a cellphone so small an ant could use it."

The advertising team probably did not run that one by R. Stanley Williams, who works in the nanotechnology trenches as director for quantum science research at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. Not surprisingly, Mr. Williams chose not to elaborate on the telecommunications needs of insects when he spoke here this week at the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instead, he preached patience. Yes, it is possible to build a hand-held device that can outperform all the earth's present computers, he said, but it may take 50 years to figure out how to make it.

He warned that consumers will get fed up with innovations - including the wonders expected from nanotechnology, or the science of very tiny objects - that are oversold or underdelivered.

"They are a little bit jaded," Mr. Williams said. "They've heard too much of this wonderful future, and they wonder why it isn't here right now."

Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of the General Electric Company, also counseled patience, to engineers and investors. He has poured extra money into research and development at G.E. while loosening timelines on projects that may not pay off for 10 years or more. For established companies, he said, investing in emerging technologies is a matter of survival.

"I just see very clearly that unless you're out there pushing the envelope and driving innovation, you're not going to get the kind of margins and the kind of growth that we need for a company like G.E.," Mr. Immelt said. "I really see it as an economic imperative."

Some experts warn that even the best corporate research efforts may not be enough to ward off disruptions to their businesses that come from innovations out of left field. Inevitably, some of today's household names will falter in the face of newcomers with better ideas, just as several mainframe computer companies were left behind in the wake of minicomputers and minicomputer companies disappeared with the advent of PC's.

Nathan Myhrvold, a former top scientist at the Microsoft Corporation who runs Intellectual Ventures, an investment firm in Bellevue, Wash., surmised that in the not-too-distant future, the top 20 companies in pharmaceuticals, with the exception of one or two, would be unfamiliar names.

"If you look at the pipeline of drugs in clinical trials,'' he said, "way more of them were made by the little companies than the big guys."

The conference, organized by M.I.T.'s Technology Review magazine, drew about 1,000 attendees from established companies like Cisco Systems Inc., Kraft Foods Inc. and the Sprint Corporation, and even a few unknown start-ups.

They listened to colorful descriptions of nanotechnology as well as other innovations like developing hydrogen fuel sources and creating medicines based on genomics. Wireless technologies seemed among the ripest for products making their way onto the market, as demonstrated by four-year-old WideRay, a San Francisco company that was showing off the wireless capabilities of its proximity server, which allows a user to download information onto a personal digital assistant just by moving near it.

Despite the promise of these inventions, several speakers were fretful. Faced with a sluggish economy, many companies have reined in their research and development budgets.

David Tennenhouse, vice president of the Intel Corporation's technology group, more than once lamented the insufficiency of government financing for basic research at universities. And Edward B. Roberts, a professor of technology management at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, pointed out that two-thirds of all corporate research and development expenditures are for short-term projects, not the long-term ones that will be the ground-shaking breakthroughs.

At the General Motors Corporation, research spending has stayed about the same in recent years, but Lawrence F. Burns, vice president for research and development and planning, said he has achieved better results by working with knowledgeable (and less expensive) researchers in China, India, Israel and Russia. Sharing is also a virtue, as in the research lab G.M. owns with the Boeing Company and the Raytheon Company.

"Each company has specific directive research and then shared research," Mr. Burns said. "That's a highly leverage-able thing."

Lucien P. Hughes, research director for the technology labs at Accenture, the consulting company, agreed that alliances in research are now the norm.

"The days of the large-scale insular lab - not talking to the rest of the world - I think are over for now," he said.

Finding the technology - either through internal ingenuity, outsourcing or acquisition - is only the beginning. For a time-honored company, breakthrough technologies can be as disruptive inside the company as they are externally. Too many companies are not structurally prepared to handle them, said Professor Roberts of M.I.T.

"It's not all a question of a willingness to spend," he said. "It's a willingness to participate."

Moreover, while many companies are trying to tie their research efforts more closely to their actual marketing needs, some of the most successful companies have faltered along the way by listening too closely to what their current customers want, and not planning for unknown markets.

"I do a lot of customer interaction," Mr. Immelt of G.E. said, "but when it comes time to figure out nanotechnology, there's no customer view on nanotechnology."

As for whether old-school or upstart companies will dominate the innovation game in the coming years, Mr. Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures said it is anyone's guess.

"Really radical stuff," he said, "is going to come bubbling up from random sources, like it always does."

I attended the local event this weekend celebrating the Centennial of
Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower (1903 -2003)  Speakers included:

Paul Werbos, PhD., and Director of Electrical Communications at NSF gave a
presentation on energy issues facing the World from a United Nations
perspective and how space solar power is a possible long-term
sustainability solution.

James Corum, PhD., spoke of the complexities of wireless power transmission
and how the Earth must be part of a resonant system to achieve efficient
power transmission on a large scale.  He showed how Tesla had actually
patented the Earth as part of the Wardenclyffe project.

Konstantin Meyl, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of
Berlin gave a lesson on Scalar wave theory and a demonstration of wireless
transmission.  His theory is interesting and favors Faraday's findings over
some key assumptions made by Maxwell in ignoring magnetic and electric
potentials.  The theory reduces to Maxwell if the evidence of magnetic or
electric potentials are truly zero.  Professor Meyl  is quite popular in
Europe on the lecture circuit and has sold his demo to schools and
companies with some interesting findings.  Since the energy transfer
interacts with the Earth, there are reports of receiver gains of 2 to 3
times the transmitted power and it is felt that this is charge and ionic
energy entrained from the atmosphere.  He discussed this in detail and also
the instability as atmospheric potentials vary with weather.  None the
less, as the recent solar flares showed, the ionosphere is a powerhouse of
energy and if this is a method to interface with the ionosphere, it is a
powerful source of sustainable energy.  Good atmospheric coupling may
require large towers as Tesla attempted at Wardenclyffe and in Colorado.

Elizabeth Rauscher, PhD., Nuclear and Astrophysics, gave a presentation on
using the ionosphere for wireless power based on her experience with the
development the ELF for Earthquake [prediction] detection and triangulation.

William Terbo, Tesla's closest living survivor opened the Sunday sessions
with a talk from a family perspective and insight into Tesla's personality.

The remainder of Sunday covered a great many of the medical uses of Tesla
developments and patents that have led to uses in sports medicine for fast
healing of injuries and to aid poor healing in the elderly.

Although interesting on the whole and certainly leading to beneficial
developments, there were not any obvious transportation benefits except for
possibly rail based applications, but this critical need well understood by
all for Human sustainability.

Respectfully,


David B. Hamilton
w: 202-586-2314
PC: 202-491-7414