[3][4] The premature announcement of his cold fusion research with Stanley Pons,[5] regarding excess heat in heavy water, caused a media sensation and elicited skepticism and criticism from many in the scientific community.

[6] His father died of the complications of injuries received in a Nazi prison, after which Fleischmann lived for a period with his mother in a leased cottage in Rustington, Sussex.

[10] In 1973, together with Patrick J. Hendra and A. James McQuillan, he played an important role in the discovery of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering effect (SERS), for which the University of Southampton was awarded a National Chemical Landmark plaque by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2013,[5][11] and he developed the ultramicroelectrode in the 1980s.

[22] Those who failed to reproduce the claim attacked the pair for fraudulent,[22][23] sloppy,[22][24][25] and unethical work;[22] incomplete,[24] unreproducible,[1] and inaccurate[1] results; and erroneous interpretations.

[28][29] In 1992, Fleischmann moved to France with Pons to continue their work at the IMRA laboratory (part of Technova Corporation, a subsidiary of Toyota), but in 1995 he retired and returned to England.

In March 2006, "Solar Energy Limited" division "D2Fusion Inc" announced in a press release that Fleischmann, then 79, would be acting as their senior scientific advisor.

[7] He contributed to the fundamental theory of: The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project was started in 2012 in his honour to gather together research from around the world connected to LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions).