Fleischmann confided to Stanley Pons that he might have found what he believed to be a way to create nuclear fusion at room temperatures. From 1983 to 1989, he and Pons spent $100,000 in self-funded experiments at the University of Utah. Fleischmann wanted to publish it first in an obscure journal, and had already spoken with a team that was doing similar work in a different university for a joint publication. The details have not surfaced, but it seems that the University of Utah wanted to establish priority over the discovery and its patents by making a public announcement before the publication. In an interview with 60 Minutes on 19 April 2009, Fleischmann said that the public announcement was the university's idea, and that he regretted doing it. This decision, perceived as short-circuiting the way science is usually communicated to other scientists, later caused heavy criticism against Fleischmann and Pons.
On 23 March 1989 the work was announced at a press conference as "a sustained nuclear fusion reaction," which was quickly labelled by the press as cold fusion – a result previously thought to be unattainable. On 26 March Fleischmann warned on the Wall Street Journal Report not to try replications until a published paper was available two weeks later in Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, but that did not stop hundreds of scientists who had already started work at their laboratories the moment they heard the news on 23 March, and more often than not they failed to reproduce the effects. Those who failed to reproduce the claim attacked the pair for fraudulent, sloppy, and unethical work;
incomplete, unreproducible, and inaccurate results; and erroneous interpretations. When the paper was finally published, both electrochemists and physicists called it "sloppy" and "uninformative", and it was said that, had Fleischmann and Pons waited for the publication of their paper, most of the trouble would have been avoided because scientists would not have gone so far in trying to test their work.
Fleischmann and Pons sued an Italian journalist who had published very harsh criticisms against them, but the judge rejected the case saying that criticisms were appropriate given the scientists behaviour, the lack of evidence since the first announcement, and the lack of interest shown by the scientific community, and that they were an expression of the journalists "right of reporting".