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"Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Flying Wire | ||
| Barbed wire that seeks to expand to its remembered size and extent. |
| …see them coming now, uptown there, the choppers, and the police have mentioned flying wire.
A moan followed the last words and the crowd shuddered, the brownian movement reversed and they slowly began drifting uptown, out of Union Square, away from Fourteenth Street. The old people in this crowd knew all about flying wire... The copters came low and the bales of wire fell from their bottoms. Rusty iron bales of barbed wire that thudded and clanked down hard enough to burst their sealed wrapping. This was not ordinary barbed wire. It had a tempered-steel core of memory wire, metal that no matter how it was twisted or coiled would return to its original shape when the restraints were removed. Where ordinary wire would have lain in a heaped tangle this fought to regain its remembered form, moving haltingly like a blind beast as the strains and stresses were relieved, uncoiling and stretching along the street. Policemen wearing heavy gloves grabbed the ends and guided it in the right direction to form a barrier down the middle of the road. Two expanding coils met and fought a mindless battle, locking together and climbing into the air only to fall and struggle again and ‘squirm on in a writhing union. When the last strand stopped scratching across the pavement the street was blocked by a yard high and a yard wide wall of spiked wire. |
| Technovelgy from Make Room! Make Room!,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Impulse in 1966 Additional resources -
|
The basic idea for "memory wire", the active core of flying wire, is probably Nitinol. This material was created in 1959 and subsequently patented in 1965. Nitinol was accidentally discovered by Dr. William J. Buehler, who was working at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL). He coined the name Ni-Ti-NOL by combining the chemical symbols for Nickel and Titanium and the laboratory's acronym.
My earlier story Biomimetic Robot Animals - Not All Are Cute shows a practical use for Nitinol.
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