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"My father was a master mechanic; I grew up with a screwdriver in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Vibra-Transmitter (Teleportation) | ||
| An early use of the notion of matter transmission. |
| He stood, still in the pajamas he had worn in the prosaic safety of his Chicago bedroom, upon a circular plate of smooth, hard metal, flanked on either side by the banked tubes and massed dials of some strange apparatus, his position directly under the steady glare of a great blue-flaming dome light. Amazement struck him again, and overwhelming curiosity. He stared again at the man in the acid-spotted smock, his eyes taking in the curious costume, half that of the confined sedentary scientist, half that of an outdoor huntsman.
"Where am I?" Girand demanded at last, after a moment of mutual appraisal... He found himself standing on the cool metal floor of a huge room, whose distant roof lost itself in shadowy vagueness high above. The room was crowded, filled almost to capacity by endless rows of apparatus of complexity and uses unguessable. "My laboratory," [Granton] said simply. "I suppose you're wondering how you got here. That plate from which you just stepped is the receiving instrument of my vibra-transmitter; I've just finished reintegrating the matter of your body. The beam into which you walked in your bedroom simply reduced your body to vibration which is carried on a returning wave-channel to the plate here... And you came." |
| Technovelgy from Into the Meteorite Orbit,
by Frank K. Kelly. Published by Teck Publications in 1933 Additional resources -
|
This is an early example of this technovelgy; note that effort made to explain how it works. By the time you get to Larry Niven's stepping discs from his 1970 novel Ringworld, you not only have less apparatus, but less explanation as well.
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
