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"...in fifty years, do you believe that people will be recognizably human?"
- Greg Bear
 |
| Flexible Metal Arms (Tentacles) | ||
| An interesting description of how mechanical tentacles might function. |
| ...after months of weary trials, he had been able to furnish the brain with arms or members, two small, hollow limbs of flexible metal that projected from each end of the brain-case, being actuated by a chain of electro-magnets inside, so that the brain, by sending the correct electrical current through these magnets, could twist the arms about at its pleasure. |
| Technovelgy from The Metal Giants,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Weird Tales in 1926 Additional resources -
|
He continues:
Compare to the steel tentacles from The War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells.
He wrote that as he watched the flexible, snakelike metal arms flashing about with beaker and test-tube and burner, unerringly, swiftly, he realized that he had constructed an intelligence that was more than human.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Metal Giants
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Tech news articles related to The Metal Giants
Tech news articles related to works by Edmond Hamilton
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
