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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
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| Steel Tentacle | ||
| Flexible robotic steel limbs that can both support a vehicle and grasp objects. |
In the novel, the great Tripods, or war machines, of the Martians were supported by great steel tentacles, or "articulated ropes of steel."
| And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand...
Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman's basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone. |
| Technovelgy from The War of the Worlds,
by H.G. Wells. Published by Harper and Bros. in 1898 Additional resources -
|
The machinery of the late nineteenth century was quite obviously artificial, in its appearance and in its movement. Wells uses the idea of steel tentacles to both differentiate the Martian engineering accomplishments from human accomplishments (making them look more alien) and to take advantage of the slightly queasy feeling the people have when they look at octopi and squids.
Here's another quote to give some sense of its flexibility:
Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter. The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this. People who have never seen these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go upon, scarcely realise that living quality.
Here's a more detailed description of how the flexible steel tentacles actually work:
Compare to the description of the tentacles belonging to the supervision robot from Paradise and Iron (1930) by Miles Breuer.
As it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.
Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine...
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The War of the Worlds
More Ideas
and Technology by H.G. Wells
Tech news articles related to The War of the Worlds
Tech news articles related to works by H.G. Wells
Steel Tentacle-related
news articles:
- Octarms - Robotic Tentacle Bot From Mars!
- Snake-Arm Robots From OCRobotics Reach Out
- Snake-Arm Robot In A Plane
- DIY Snake Arm Robot Prototype
- Still Dreaming Of Tentacle Arms
- Festo Biomimetic Bionic Handling Systems
- Robotic Tentacle Manipulator
- Festo Bionic Handling Assistant Video
- Marvin Minsky's Tentacle Arm Video
- Pneumatic Micro-Tentacles Kidnapping Ants
- Nifty 3D Printed Flexible Robotic Finger
- X125 Snake-Arm Inspection Robot Video
- Writhing Robotic Tentacle Uses Laser To Chop Nuke Hardware
- 3D Printed Robotic Tentacles
- SpiRobs Soft Spiral Robotic Arm
| When Colds Threaten You Can't Do This - Or Can You? |
| MAI-Voice-2 Microsoft Text-To-Speech |
| Prufrock-MB2 Ready In Nashville |
| US Army IBEX Exoskeleton Walks Troops Out Of Danger |
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
