You're a little behind, Cheshire. I'll give you a brief history lesson on the American side.
* Warren Mickley, since at least 2006, took every opportunity to talk about the superiority of the double iron. We thought he was a troll. Todd Hughes, a blacksmith also told us we were in the weeds if we didn't think it was superior. Todd was a straight up troll sometimes, though (for real), and he didn't actually use planes. he just suggested that the cap iron must be awfully effective to go to the trouble of smithing it and paying for it in an evironment where money is very tight (he was right).
* Sometime around there, Steve Elliot and others got some data and stills from kato and kawai's study, it was mentioned on a few blogs and disappeared for reasons I don't know
* Early in 2012, after being goaded by warren over and over, I decided not to plane with anything other than a stanley plane until I figured out how to use the cap iron. I posted publicly to warren that he was right after I figured out how to use the double iron (took maybe a week or two weeks), and posted that I was ashamed to find out that the stanley plane was more capable at removing tearout than a 55 degree infill with a 3-4 thousandth mouth that I'd made not long before (thinking that such a plane was the most practical design for a do-it-all smoother). I told warren that he was right, I was wrong, and a few strings of posts ensued. Most of the people, including a few current plane makers told me that I was ridiculous and trolling with warren, and that they had only ever met one person other than warren who regularly used the double iron to control tearout.
* Bill Tindall saw my post on wood central (and I was trolling people on sawmill creek telling them to set the cap iron close at that time, too - with little success). He said he was interested in what I was saying because at the same time, he and Steve Elliot were trying to get access to videos related to the earlier mid 2000s discussion that fell flat. They were not available yet - to anyone. They weren't posted on any public server and Bill and Steve were working with non-English speaking folks about first, getting the videos and second, having permission to share them (given that they were originally made for marunaka to design a super surfacer that would plane without tearout - they influenced the design of the double iron on the marunaka)
* Bill and I talked back and forth a fair amount and relatively soon after, those videos were posted to a japanese server
* Bill enlisted the help of Mia Iwasaki to translate the captions and documentation that came with them. Mark Hennebury (who sells supersurfacers) posted the videos over here on his site
* Wilbur took a copy of the video and Mia's translations and put captions in the video, and posted it on his site
* Bill at the time wanted to pitch the cap iron thing to magazines, and shortly thereafter (this is in 2012), he forwarded an email from Bob Lang asking if I would write an article for Popular Woodworking. i said I didn't want to because I'm not a professional and I thought that such an article should be written by someone like Warren (who has been using the double iron in daily work for 35 years or so and doing most of his finish work with planes). I also wanted complete control of what would go in an article, so in april of 2012, I posted an article that was edited (and pictures provided by) by Ellis Wallentine, and i think STeve Elliot may have read some of it - he provided one of the pictures in it, too, ellis provided the other.
* I wrote an article because once the video came out, every Tom, **** and Harry was an expert on using the cap iron and they were blindly following the video suggesting an 80 degree bevel on a cap iron (which is suboptimal in hand tools) and coming up with all kinds of ridiculous foolishness about measuring the distance the cap iron was set or making some contraption or shims to do it (it's very easily just done by hand and eye - kentucky windage, if you will).
* Fast forward a couple of years, Bill still was pushing around behind the scenes to get an article and Kees had written one and I believe Wilbur was added on to help push it through. Kees will never admit it, but the article content comes from Kees, not Wilbur. Wilbur's contributions (like annotating) have been ancillary, and not of the fundamental type in actually describing how to use the cap iron.
Wilbur was not included in the discussions between Steve, Bill and I (and Wiley Horne and Mia) until well later - the actual discussions predated the video. Video is powerful, though, and people won't believe what you say to even try it, but they'll believe a video.
Stateside, there were only three people that I can remember experimenting with cap irons before the video ever came out. At least in an educated successful way. Bob Strawn, me and Kees. Kees isn't stateside, but he participates in our forums. I don't know why nobody paid attention to Bob Strawn. He experimented with all kinds of stuff (sharpening on thin strips of steel, other metals, and cap irons, etc).
There was no mention of planecraft or any of these other texts over in the states until after we published an article. Bill Tindall and I joked that as soon as we put it on wood central, every armchair expert would probably be able to go find it in older texts and say they knew about it all along. That said, nobody ever agreed with Warren publicly.
I believe that there were plenty of people using a cap iron in England, but none of them ever came over to the states to say anything, and the English posters on our sites in the US didn't, either. Why Warren would repeat himself over and over when nobody believed him, I don't know.
So that's pretty much a summary of it up to this point.
* Credit Bill Tindall and Steve Elliot for finding and getting access to the video. They spent a lot of time doing it.
* Credit Kees for looking at this stuff in a vacuum (and Bob Strawn, too) before anyone else.
* Credit Mia Iwasaki for doing translation work that was technical (and something that was probably a significant amount of work)
* You don't have to give me credit for anything, but recognize that I figured it out and was discussing it on forums before there was any video available to be distributed and before I knew of any of it. It's funny how much trolling I got at the outset for even suggesting it, and most of that evaporated when a video showed up. That shows a lot about peoples' rationality - refusing to try something that can be explained in a few bullet points on a forum post.
The editor of the wood central article wanted me to credit Wilbur. Nothing against Wilbur (I have had some back and forth with Wilbur selling tools, etc, and he's a fine person), but he was not a part of the core effort, just a tag-along, and I would've left the credit with Mia, Steve and Bill as far as the video goes.
I'd have never figured out how to use a double iron without Warren's goading, but Kees, Bob Strawn and I didn't need a video to figure it out despite never being taught anything about it. If you're wondering why we didn't figure it out from Warren, it's because warren's instructions on how to set the cap iron were usually something like "it's hard to explain, it's subtle. a craftsman's skill".
I am so ardent about it not because of the above, but because when you actually put it in practice, it works a treat - better than anything else, and its at the fingertips of everyone. It makes every part of a stanley or old wooden plane work better, reduces the reliance on constant sharpness in trouble areas, and eliminates the need for precision stuff like tiny mouths and perfectly flat soles. And of those two types (old wooden planes and stanley planes), it 100% of the time makes those planes something that will stop you in your tracks before they will chatter.
