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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Culture Tank | ||
| Germs that eat garbage and produce oil. |
In the novel, the main character, Bob Kinnaird, lives on an island that supplies it's own oil through a series of "culture tanks" that create fuel oil from waste.
| "They call 'em culture tanks. They have bugs -- germs -- growing in them; germs that eat pretty near anything, and produce oil as a waste product. That's the purpose of the whole business. We dump everything that's waste into the tanks, pump the oil off the top, and every so often clean the sludge out of the bottom -- that's a nasty job." |
| Technovelgy from Needle,
by Hal Clement. Published by Not known in 1950 Additional resources -
|
Bio-diesel and other fuels from organic waste have been around for a long time but almost 60 years ago, Clement had an island relying on it and creating a surplus for sale. The original impetus to research occurred in 1942, when two chemists (Harder and Von Witsch) were the first to propose that microalgae be grown as a source of lipids for food or fuel.
Thanks to Mike for writing in with the reference and the quote for this one.
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Timeline
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
