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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Artificial Coral | ||
| Coral grown under special conditions. |
| Scully’s fat, sweaty face puckered disdainfully. “Seems to me nature’s got coral pretty well in hand herself,” he snorted. “You trying to develop some new species or something?” His thick lips were contemptuous; he had his opinion about the half-crazed naturalists he had run across wasting their lives in the study of polyps or rotifers that weren’t worth a tinker’s dam.
The pretty brunette who was the young naturalist’s wife came to his defense. “Cort can show you things in his laboratory that couldn’t be produced naturally in two hundred years!” she said enthusiastically. “Why, he can grow a foot of coral in ten minutes!”
 (Artificial coral from 'The City That Walked' by Ed Earl Repp) “There’re fifteen years of growth lying there!” he nodded emphatically. “It can’t be told from ordinary coral. It’s just as hard, just as durable.” Scully was rushing forward to examine the artificially-grown coral. For a moment his breathing was loud in the room. His face shone under the bright light, drawn into weird lines by his intensity. Suddenly he whirled on the man of science. “You don’t know what you’d do with it!” he cried. “You don’t know. . . . My God, Hardin — can’t you see farther than the end of your nose? It’d be the best road-surfacing material we’ve ever known! It’d be a beautiful, permanent material to construct houses. It could replace nine-tenths Of the industrial plastics. We might even use it for dental fillings!" |
| Technovelgy from The City That Walked,
by Ed Earl Repp. Published by Amazing Stories in 1939 Additional resources -
|
After some development hiccups, the artificial coral was ready:
He tried it — and it worked. A translucent pink material as fine as marble and even harder was the result.
Crowds followed the curious, streetcleaner-like paving machines that rolled down the highways, laying a lumpy, pinkish mass that a polishing machine would grind to glass-like hardness and skid-proof smoothness.
From the monstrous cauldrons within the walls of the factory came enormous masses of multi-colored coral that were cut to the size of slabs of marble. Skyscrapers raised themselves into the sky; not ugly, gray-white structures, but slender fingers of opalescent coral — pink, white, green, a dozen other tints.
It seems like nothing could stop the use of this ideal building material! However, the inventor cautions:
Compare to architectural coral from A Gift From Earth (1968) by Larry Niven.
Their skeletons were made to withstand it. Why not, then, triple, quadruple, the normal pressure and crush their internal cavities down to a fraction of their normal size?
"Science is based on unending research. A thing isn’t perfected until it’s been investigated. Every invention is guilty until proved innocent!”
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The City That Walked
More Ideas
and Technology by Ed Earl Repp
Tech news articles related to The City That Walked
Tech news articles related to works by Ed Earl Repp
Artificial Coral-related
news articles:
- Engineered Living Building Materials
| 'Mooncrete' Lunar Regolith Concrete (LRC) |
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
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