Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"When you're making a revolution in cyberspace, things look rather different from the way the 1980s cyberpunks wrote it."
- Charles Stross
 |
| Soft Speaker | ||
| A device that sends a tightly-controlled beam of sound. |
Just another one of Dr. Methuen's prankster inventions. Here's how it went down:
"Beware, John Duggan! Your sins will find you out!" ...there was nobody within fifty feet of him.
In this case, "pixillation" refers to "pixie" + "lation." And how was it done?
The next man to suspect that the Yale campus was undergoing a severe pixillation was John Duggan, the tall thin one of the two campus cops. He was passing Christ Church ... a still small voice spoke in his ear.
| ".. There's the soft-speaker, for instance --"
"What's that?" "It's like a loud-speaker, only it doesn't speak loudly. It throws a supersonic beam, modulated by the human voice to give the effect of audible sound frequencies when it hits the human ear. Since you can throw a supersonic beam almost as accurately as you can throw a light beam, you can turn the soft speaker on a person, who will then hear a still small voice in his ear apparently coming from nowhere." |
| From The Exalted,
by L. Sprague de Camp. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Dr. Methuen has additional uses in mind, with some modifications to the original device.
Original quote contributed by Harold Miller - thanks!
Compare to the green bullet from Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 or the raisin from Bart Kosko's 1987 novel Noontime.
I knocked together an improved sound speaker. This one'll work through masonry walls. I'm going to put all the undergraduates to sleep and tell'em they're monkeys... They're practically monkeys to begin with, so it shouldn't be difficult."
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Exalted
More Ideas
and Technology by L. Sprague de Camp
Tech news articles related to The Exalted
Tech news articles related to works by L. Sprague de Camp
| Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) Workshop |
| Burner Generates Temporary Phone Numbers |
| HushMe Bluetooth Device Reinvents The Hush-A-Phone |
| Ubiquiti FrontRow Camera Records Your Life |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
Negligible increase in weight increased material strength by hundreds of times.
'All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.'
The number of different ways to span a thread between a larger number of hooks is astronomical.
'This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into your deck, of course.'
What's it like for autonomous trams when they're turned off at night?
'Merton... placed the electrodes of the sleep-inducer on his forehead.'
'... we can descend and live down there at one of those year-round aquatic resorts.'
'...she would have to be coaxed by another series of pats into a circular orbit.'
'The sleek, tapered space shuttle lay immobile upon the private landing field...'
